cruelty to yourself means that you are no longer shocked at the cruelty inflicted on others, and that you might now be as cruel to others as others were to you. He could not possibly see, as a child, that in not allowing himself to grieve for himself he would, in later life, not allow his wife to show her grief for the child she had lost, and that this would cause great hurt to the person he loved and needed so much.
Deciding as a child not to allow yourself to grieve over the cruelty that has been done to you may mean that in adult life you cannot assess or appreciate the sufferings of others. Or you may become the kind of person who sees nothing wrong with persecuting the people whom you dislike. Quentin Crisp, himself no stranger to persecution, was asked on Irish television, ‘Are you accepted more now you are successful?’ He replied:
I think people misunderstand the principle of persecuting homosexuals, or, indeed, of persecution in general. It is not directed at a person, it is directed at anybody who is not likely to find defenders. During the course of your life you pile up a great deal of bitterness - your wife does not love you, there are your children who do not obey you, there is your boss who does not give you any preferment - and one day you see someone whom no one will blame you for attacking, and then all your bitterness pours out. And it doesn’t matter who it is, as long as you can lash out at somebody without anyone reproaching you later. This is why people attack the weak, homosexuals, but especially effeminate homosexuals.46
Or you may become the kind of person who is plagued by depression. You have no sympathy for the child that you once were. It is very striking in therapy how depressed people will talk with great sympathy about, say, the starving children of Africa, but when they speak of the child they once were there is not a trace of sympathy or concern for that little frightened person. ‘I was a very bad child,’ they will say, ‘and deserved to be punished by my parents.’
Among those people who devote their lives to helping others are many who show enormous sympathy for other people’s suffering but are remarkably tough and unpitying towards themselves. They can recognize that as a child they had a difficult time, and can acknowledge that they suffered a great deal, but they refuse to give to themselves in adult life what, as a child, they lacked. Instead, they lavish this love and concern on others, and draw satisfaction from that. This is the defence mechanism of projective identification, the means by which we can identify with another person, and then give to that person what we would like to be given to us. Many of the people who are devoted to animals, even to the point of giving up their own lives to save animals from slaughter or of murdering those who appear not to care for animals, are engaged in this kind of identification. This is a kind of second-hand self-love, and it is the equivalent of eating thin gruel rather than a decent meal. However, those people who have never been loved properly as children can find it very difficult to love themselves to the degree which their humanness requires in adulthood.
Children try to rebel against adults who treat them badly, but the adults can punish them by regarding them as being mad and/or bad. To avoid this fate children learn to conform, and they endure the pains and humiliations of childhood because they know that as well as the threat there is a promise. If you are disobedient as a child bad things will happen to you, but if you are good you will be rewarded, and the reward is that when you grow up you will have the power and privileges that adults have. One of the privileges of adulthood is that you can not only take your bad feelings out on the children in your charge, but you can feel virtuous while doing it. ‘I’m only beating you for your own good, darling.’ Some parents do not indulge in such hypocrisy, but what we all do as we grow up and encounter life’s difficulties is try to feel good about ourselves. We need to think well of ourselves so as to find the courage to face life. If we suspect that we may have been damaged during our upbringing we shall think less well of ourselves, and our courage may fail.
In order not to feel sad and uncertain some adults say, ‘I had a good childhood and my parents were wonderful,’ and maintain this view by remembering very little of their childhood. Other people, less successful in forgetting the painful events of their childhood, insist that what happens to us in childhood has little effect in adult life. Despite the intense interest in recent years in therapy and counselling, there are still many people who maintain this view. Yet such people will work hard as parents, worrying about their children’s education, teaching them good manners and healthy eating habits, all the things which they believe will help the child in adult life. If I comment, as I often do, that if what parents do has no effect on their children then a lot of parents have wasted an awful lot of time, they look pained and confused. They had been demonstrating the wonderful ability we all have of holding two opposing beliefs at one and the same time.
By denying that bad things happened to us in childhood, or by denying that what happens to us in childhood has any significance in our later life, we create disjunctions, gaps in what should be the coherent story of our life. This has many serious consequences; one is that because we cannot see the connections between the events of our childhood and our adult life we continue to do to our children what was done to us. Thus do the sins of the fathers continue to be visited upon the children. To recognize that what was done to us in childhood has damaged us and prevented us from fulfilling our potential requires great bravery and an endurance of pain.
To recognize that what was done to you in childhood has profoundly affected you means that you have not only suffered in childhood but that you cannot enjoy the power and privileges of being an adult in charge of children. The privileges of parenthood are considerable. I remember how my mother and my sister, six years older than me, used to urge me to obedience as a child by telling me not to be selfish. They would, for instance, tell me to carry out some task and save them the trouble of doing it themselves. I would observe that by my acting unselfishly they were enabled to do what they wanted to do - that is, to be selfish. If I pointed this out they would say that I was a difficult, ungrateful child. I found this very unpleasant, but fortunately I did not decide to tell myself that these things did not happen.
If we learn to deny our experiences we fail to become the person we know we could have been. Some of us understand this very clearly, but most of us do not. We are all haunted by a sense of loss because all of us have denied something of ourselves, but only some of us can name this sense of loss. Sarah Kane in her last play before she killed herself, named her sense of loss. The play is a monologue in which she often speaks of searching for someone she has never met. The penultimate line of the play is ‘It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind.’47
For most of us, all that we know of the myself we have never met is an ache and a longing. Because we cannot name it we find it frightening. We try to ignore this pain, or obliterate it with indulgences of food or drugs or alcohol, or gifts to ourselves, or by prodigious feats of self-denial, or we try to run away from it by immersing ourselves in continuous hard work, or frantic, competitive play, or we try to expel it in our works of art, or bury it in depression, or belittle it in contempt for another’s weakness, or destroy it in violent, murderous rage. However, it remains a painful vacancy, there to trouble and frighten us just when we thought we were safe.
To be safe in any situation we need to know just what the dangers are. To keep ourselves safe from disease we need to assess the factors in each disease which could harm us and how able we are to ward off each threat. In so doing we have to take into account how physically strong we are and what practical measures we can take to avoid infection.
Just as we are surrounded by threats to our physical safety, so we are surrounded by threats to our sense of being a person. We need to assess the dangers realistically, and not run away from them or tell ourselves that they do not exist. We need, too, to assess how able we are to counter the dangers and to deal with the effects. The more we value and accept ourselves the better able we are to deal with threats to our meaning structure. However, every act of lying to ourselves - for that is what denial is - undermines our sense of being valuable and acceptable, and having the right to exist as the person we are. The less we value and accept ourselves the greater every threat to our meaning structure becomes, and the more and more desperate the defences we devise to hold ourselves together as a person.
That