something less, or have given up any hope of getting anything better.1
Those of us who have a chronic illness have settled for less. We lie almost every time we are asked, ‘How are you?’ ‘Fine’ we say, knowing that it is not true. If we were asked why we lied, or if those who hide an unhappy marriage behind ‘fine’, or those who lie when they tell a friend, ‘You look lovely in that dress’ were asked why they lie, all of us would give the same answer. We don’t want to upset people.
That is our surface reason. If our questioner went deeper and asked, ‘Why is it important to you not to upset people?’ our answers would fall into two groups.
Many people would reply, ‘Because people wouldn’t like me if I told them the truth.’ If then asked, ‘Why is it important to you to be liked by other people?’ some people resist answering and parry the question with, ‘No one wants to be disliked’, or, ‘That’s me, I guess. I don’t know why.’ Others would try to put into words what they know is their own profound truth. They say, ‘That’s what my life is about, being with other people and being liked by them. Without them I wouldn’t exist.’
Those people who do not answer, ‘Because people wouldn’t like me’, might find it hard to describe precisely how another person’s upset feelings disturbs them most profoundly. For these people any disturbance can threaten chaos, and chaos is what they fear the most. They know that the world is a chaotic place, and for them to survive in it they are impelled to create their own personal island of clarity, order and control.
All of us belong to one or other of these groups. For some of us, having relationships with other people is our most important need, and our greatest fear is being abandoned and rejected. If we are in the second group, maintaining clarity, order and control is our most important need, and our greatest fear is being overwhelmed by chaos. What scientific evidence there is points to this difference in how we experience our sense of existence being genetic, but how each of us expresses our most important need and fear depends on how we interpret the environment in which we find ourselves. Most of us know which group we belong to and do not need a psychologist to tell us, but, if you do not, you will be creating a great many problems for yourself.2
When we talk of surviving in this way, either by keeping people around us or by maintaining clarity, order and control, we are not talking about physical survival but surviving as a person, what we call ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘myself’. What is this sense of being a person? The more neuroscience can tell us, the stranger it all becomes. Yet, if we accept this strangeness and know it to be our very self, we are able to live our life much more wisely and creatively.
‘I’ and ‘my mind’ seem to be aspects of the same thing. We talk about our mind as something we can change, make up and lose. Yet, according to Antonio Damasio, the mind is a process. He wrote, ‘What we know as mind, with the help of consciousness, is a continuous flow of mental patterns, many of which turn out to be logically interrelated.’3 We all like to think that ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘myself’, my sense of being a person, is solid and real, but it is not. As Chris Frith wrote, ‘Another of the illusions that my brain creates is my sense of self. I experience myself as an island of stability in an ever-changing world.’4
Our active brain creates a torrent of thoughts, ideas, images, feelings, and out of this torrent comes a sense of there being this island of stability surrounded by the great universe of movement – ‘me’ and the world. However, ‘me’ is not the equivalent of an island, something solid and real, but the equivalent of a whirlpool in a flowing stream. A whirlpool is a pattern in a torrent, but part of the torrent, and not something that can exist separately from the torrent. The philosopher Patricia Churchland wrote, ‘The brain constructs a range of make-sense-of-the-world neurotools; one is the future, one is the past and one is self. Does this mean that my self is not real? On the contrary. It is every bit as real as the three-dimensional world we see, or the future we prepare for, or the past we remember. It is a tool tuned, in varying degrees, to the reality of brain and world.’5
However, the three-dimensional world we see is composed of guesses that can be shown to be wrong. Our sense of being a person is composed of guesses about who we are, what our world is like, what our past was and what our future will be. All of these guesses are interconnected. Our reason for telling a white lie is connected directly to how we experience our sense of being a person. If our decision to tell a white lie is shown to be a mistake, the ideas that are an essential part of our sense of being a person tumble down like a row of dominoes.
For instance, you might decide to say to a friend who is showing off a new dress, ‘You look lovely in that dress.’ You predict that your friend will respond with a happy smile and a thank you, but she does not. She senses that you do not like the dress, and says, ‘You’re lying. You don’t like it at all.’
You might protest and try to reassure her, but inside you feel the dangerous instability of mounting anxiety. If your existence as person depends on good relationships, the fear of rejection begins to loom large. If your existence depends on clarity, order and control, the fear of chaos comes upon you. To save yourself, you might resort to further lies, and perhaps with these you manage to extricate yourself from a difficult situation. Your anxiety subsides. You are safe – provided, of course, you remember what were the lies you told. Successful lying requires a good memory.
All this from a simple social interaction. What happens when you discover that you have made a serious error of judgement?
Suppose, for instance, that you have mapped out your future, which will be with one special person. Then you discover that you had got it all wrong. Your loved one had tragically died, or run off with someone else, or simply had a change of heart. In this situation we all feel that we are literally falling apart. It is a very strange experience. Our body is not falling apart but inside where ‘I’ resides crumbles like a wooden house caught in a hurricane. What is actually falling apart is some of the ideas which make up your sense of ‘I’. These are the guesses that you created about your life, your loved one and your future. If you understand that, you know that these terrible feelings will pass, and that after a period of uncertainty you will become whole again. If you do not understand this, you are overwhelmed by the greatest terror.
The original cover of Bob Dylan’s perhaps most famous album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan shows twenty-three-year-old Dylan and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend Suze Rotolo walking down a snow-covered street in New York. It was nearly fifty years before Suze could bring herself to write her account of her three-year romance with Dylan and her breakdown that followed. She told her interviewer Richard Williams that, ‘It was the hardest thing to write about. I was young and vulnerable and insecure. There were pressures from all around and I couldn’t find my place any more. I didn’t feel I had anybody I could turn to. That makes you really fall apart. And that’s how I felt.’6
Describing the events that led to their break-up was difficult, but what she put into that six-word sentence ‘That makes you really fall apart’ can go beyond the capacity of language to describe. What Suze said sounds like a cliché but it is not. It refers to a life-changing and self-changing experience. Her sense of being a person fell apart, and then had to rebuild itself in a way different from what it had been before.
Had she been older, better defended and secure in herself, a romance, or rather an affair with Dylan would not have been such a profound experience. Ending it might have been unpleasant and sad, but she would have been able to tell herself that she had survived similar events in the past, and she would survive this one. However, she was very young and inexperienced. The ‘pressures from all around’ included the attitudes of Dylan’s friends who condemned her for trying to maintain her career as an artist instead of devoting herself fully to Dylan. If her career was floundering and she was no longer loved by Dylan, she no longer fitted into any part