Dorothy Rowe’s Guide to Life

Some children are brought up by parents who police their every act and forbid the children to have their own truths. Such children cease to recognize what their own truth is.

Some of these children, as adults, know only what they ought to think and feel and not what they do think and feel.

Others sense their own truth as a void inside themselves. They say, ‘I don’t know what I feel,’ and ‘I don’t know who I am.’

To be born deaf and blind to the world around us is an immense handicap to living a full life, but to become deaf and blind to yourself is a far greater handicap – it means losing most of the unique ability we have as human beings to reflect upon our thoughts and actions and the world around us.

It means too losing the only reliable sense of certainty in an uncertain world, the certainty of knowing what you think and feel. If you have this you have a benchmark against which you can measure every event you encounter.

However, to know what you think and feel you need to be able to accept what you think and feel. This isn’t always easy.

Parts of our own truth might cause us pain and fear, and so we try to hide them from ourselves. A friend told me how her parents had always seen her as the good daughter while her sister was the bad daughter. She had accepted this role because she thought that by being good she could stop her parents fighting one another and punishing her sister for her supposed wickedness. Now in her forties, she says, ‘I’m just starting to recognize the anger I felt because I had to be the one that kept the family together.’

Parts of our own truth can cause us shame and guilt. If you’ve been brought up to believe that anger is wicked and that you have no right to be angry, no matter what is done to you, you have to shut away in your dark cellar all your angry thoughts and feelings. Then you can say to yourself, ‘I never get angry.’

This, of course, is a lie.

Telling yourself that you don’t get angry, indeed that you have no need for anger, is as realistic as telling yourself you don’t breathe and have no need to breathe.

Here is one of those relative truths for which I have yet to encounter an exception:

Provided you’ve got a good memory you can lie to other people and get away with it, but you can never get away with lying to yourself. Lying to yourself always leads to disaster.

People who deceive themselves deceive themselves about deceiving themselves.

I’ve met many people who have led long lives of self-deception. They do not enjoy close relationships, for how can someone know you if you are always pretending to be someone else? Some of these people have a history of failed relationships. Others have managed to acquire a long-suffering spouse (usually a wife) who believes that to be a good, acceptable person she must protect her husband from the consequences of his folly.

If you want to have a sense of security in an insecure world, and to have good relationships with the people who matter to you, you must know and accept your own truth.

CHAPTER 4 You and What ‘You’ Is

‘YOUR OWN TRUTH’ might sound like some solid mass of gold at the centre of your being, but actually it is your whole being.

Your whole being is your evolving, changing structure of meaning which came into existence in the womb and ever since has been growing and changing. It is the sum total of all the conclusions you have drawn and are always drawing from your experience, all your ideas, attitudes, expectations, opinions and belief.

Whenever I try to describe our structure of meaning I often use a sentence like, ‘You created your structure of meaning.’

This sentence has the same form as the sentence, ‘You wrote a book.’

We all know that this second sentence is about two things, you and the book. But the first sentence isn’t about two things. You and your structure of meaning are one and the same thing. To be accurate I should say, ‘Your structure of meaning created your structure of meaning.’

There is no little person, no soul, spirit, self, person or identity inside you busily constructing your structure of meaning. Your structure of meaning is you, your soul, spirit, self, person, identity.

If a structure of meaning can survive the death of the body, when you die and go to heaven you/your structure of meaning will be busily making sense of heaven just as you/your structure of meaning is busy making sense of the world.

If you understand that you are your structure of meaning you will know what is happening to you when you make a serious error of judgement.

To feel secure you/your structure of meaning has to feel that your structure is an accurate representation of reality. Then you can say to yourself, ‘This is me, this is my life, the world is such and such and my future will be so and so.’

Perhaps as part o f this secure structure of meaning you are saying to yourself,

‘I have my career mapped out and it’s all going to plan’

or

‘My partner and I love one another and we’ll be together for the rest of our lives’

or

‘If I’m good nothing bad can happen to me.’

Then one day you discover that your judgement is wrong.

You lose your job, your partner leaves you, you are struck by some terrible disaster.

If something like this has happened to you, you’ll know what it feels like when you discover that you’ve made a major error of judgement.

You feel yourself falling apart.

You feel yourself shattering, crumbling, even disappearing.

If you know that you are your structure of meaning, you’ll know that what you are feeling is your structure of meaning falling apart, and necessarily so because it has to break apart in order to re-form into a structure which is a more accurate representation of reality. You have to re-plan your future, or build a life without your partner, or modify your religious or philosophical beliefs. This process is unpleasant and scary, but if you understand about your structure of meaning you’ll be able to look after yourself while you go through it.

However, if you don’t know that you are your structure of meaning you’ll become terribly, terribly frightened.

If you don’t understand that you are your structure of meaning you might resort to desperate defences to try to hold yourself together and to ward off the fear.

You might become too scared to go outside because you fear that if you do the terror will kill you, or that everyone who encounters you will reject you because you’ve done something completely unacceptable like vomiting or fainting.

You might get frantically busy, hoping that by being very active and pretending that everything is all right you can run away from the terror.

You might start tidying and cleaning everything, checking and rechecking that everything is safe, all in the hope that if you get everything under control you’ll be all right.

You might become convinced that certain things have special meanings and that you are the object of special attention from certain powers, all in the attempt to make an unpredictable world predictable.

You might decide that you alone are responsible for the disasters that have befallen you and that you are too wicked a person to be close to others and be part of the world.

If you don’t understand that you are your structure of meaning when you feel yourself falling apart you think that you are going mad.

If you then resort to one of those desperate defences, other people who share your lack of understanding will also think that you are mad.

Psychiatrists will tell you that you have a mental illness. They’ll say you’re agoraphobic or manic or compulsive-obsessive or schizophrenic or depressed. If you become a psychiatric patient, over the years you’ll be given all these diagnoses – and many more fancy ones besides.

Yet all that happened was that your meaning structure hadn’t in some respects reflected reality accurately enough.

Whenever we discover that we have made a major error of judgement we question every other judgement we have made. Such doubt loosens the other parts of our structure of meaning and so it all feels like it is falling apart.

Even when we understand that this is what is happening, the shock of the discovery of our error is followed by pain, anxiety, disappointment, disillusionment and varying amounts of anger and resentment. (At the same time there can be a sense of exhilaration and freedom. The day after I discovered I had misjudged the degree of my husband’s faithfulness I went into a state of shock AND I bought myself a complete new set of make-up. Part of me was saying, ‘Whoopee!’ because the freedom I longed for was now mine.)

Just as our body following illness or accident will strive to heal itself, so our meaning structure will strive to re-organize itself and align itself with reality in such a way that we can go on living with a sense of security and hope.

But, just as when ill or injured we have to assist our body to heal itself by taking care of ourselves, so when our meaning structure has to reform itself we have to assist it by recognizing that, ‘By changing I’ll survive,’ or even, ‘By changing I can improve my life.’ We need to be prepared to let go of some cherished ideas and to modify others. Unfortunately our vanity often prevents us from doing this.

If your meaning structure still contains ideas like

‘The only job I can have is one which commands a top salary’

or

‘I can never be happy without my partner’

or

‘The world has to be the way I want it to be’

your meaning structure is prevented from re-forming itself in such a way that you can feel at peace with yourself and find new ways of creating happiness and security.

Whether you want to change or not, a large part of your meaning structure is changing all the time. Every experience is a new experience, even if it is like a past experience. I’m sure you’ve met someone at work who’s had one year’s experience twenty times over, but even non-learners change. They just don’t recognize that they’ve changed.

However, some parts of your meaning structure stay relatively stable over time.

For instance, the meanings you created when you were a baby so as to be able to tell whether an object was close to you or far away remain fairly stable, though as you get older you might need glasses to let you see the world as being crisp and clear.

Most of us form a meaning about what gender we are and stick with that throughout our lives, though a few people become increasingly convinced that their family have assigned to them an inappropriate gender and they do what they can to bring society’s assessment of their gender into line with what they now experience.

Some of us hold for all of our lives a belief in, say, the existence of God or the natural supremacy of our nation, while others change their beliefs over time. A person might believe in God for the entirety of his life but his image of God might change from an old man on a cloud to an unknowable power.

Every part of our meaning structure is connected to every other part. The part we are conscious of at any one time is really quite small, but the unconscious parts, whether buried in our cellar or just a part we haven’t had any cause to use for a long time, are linked to our conscious part and to one another.

Many people like to delude themselves that they can split their meaning structure into parts which have absolutely no connection with one another.

One extremely popular delusion, especially prevalent in the sciences and the professions, is that you can isolate your personal views and feelings and not allow them to play any part when you make an objective judgement. In psychoanalytic circles this is known as the defence of intellectualization.

Of course, when you are considering a subject which is far removed from your personal life it is possible to take a multitude of factors into consideration and weigh the evidence carefully. However, the more the subject affects you directly the less you can do this. In following the fortunes of the England Football Team I am quite dispassionate about who should be manager, but whenever I was driving from Huddersfield to my home in Sheffield late on a Saturday afternoon and there was an important match being played at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground at Hillsborough my views about football and its fans would become distinctly emotional as I battled through the traffic. Nevertheless, even when a subject doesn’t affect me personally, the only way I can make any sense of it is in terms of my past experience, that is, my meaning structure. I have nothing else on which to draw.

The delusion of objectivity allows many of those who regard themselves as the intelligentsia to believe that they are entitled by their education and intelligence to pontificate on all and sundry. Their education and intelligence have failed to make them aware that they cannot perceive reality directly, that all they have are the interpretations which they have acquired, as we all have, from their personal experience.

If people do not know this they cannot identify just which part of their structure of meaning is influencing their judgement. They then offer spurious reasons for the opinions they hold. They angrily reject any suggestion that there is a connection between their childhood experience and their current opinions or, as a member of that most privileged group, the White, Middle-class Male, they claim that they and they alone have the education and intelligence to know what is best for everyone else.

Such a way of thinking requires little mental effort. In contrast it took me some time and effort to work out that I held approving views about football because my dad approved of football, but, if a particular football match prevented me from doing what I wanted, which was to get home quickly, I wanted to banish football from the face of the earth.

One version of the delusion of objectivity is the belief that politics is totally separate from our personal lives. The feminists who created the slogan ‘The political is the personal’ were derided by their male critics for being weak-minded and emotional. Yet you can’t even draw breath without being affected by politics. Even the quality of the air you breathe has been affected by the decisions made by politicians about pollution.

Psychologists have contributed to our lack of understanding of ourselves by the way they have traditionally separated individual psychology from social psychology, as if you as an individual are separate from the society in which you live. Yet you are a social animal and could not survive without being able to interact with other people.

Intellectualization isn’t the only delusion about the supposed divisions in our meaning structure.

Where the next delusion is concerned we fall into two groups.

We have all been taught one basic delusion, namely that we can separate our experiences from our emotions. Having acquired this delusion, some of us believe that we can dispose of our emotions and just have our experiences. Psychoanalysts call this the defence of isolation and often call such people obsessive-compulsives or introverts. These are the people who can suffer a disaster but still say, ‘I wasn’t upset.’

Others of us believe that we can dispose of our experiences and just have our emotions. Psychoanalysts call this the defence of repression and often call such people hysterics or extroverts. These are the people who will say, ‘Do people really remember their childhood? I don’t,’ and then ‘I don’t know why I get so upset.’

Of course there are often situations where it’s a good idea to keep your emotions in check or to banish certain thoughts from your consciousness, but if you kid yourself that you have disposed of these inconvenient aspects of your structure of meaning once and for all you will soon be in trouble. If, at some later stage, you don’t recognize and deal with these aspects they will come back to haunt you and disrupt your life.

You will have noticed that when a death occurs in a family some family members are very calm and sensible and able to attend the deathbed, agree to an autopsy and arrange the funeral, all without showing many signs of grief. Other family members become distraught with grief, so much so that they cannot contemplate, much less discharge, those difficult tasks which arise from the harsh reality of death.

If you are one of those people who in a crisis become very calm and sensible you need at some later time to allow those unacknowledged feelings of rage and fear to surface and express themselves without any sense of shame or guilt on your part. The people around you need to be able to accept your feelings without criticizing you or rushing to ‘make it better’. If your loved ones lack such wisdom, you need to find a private place where your feelings can come in the full flood which brings its natural conclusion.

If you are one of those people who reacts to a crisis with great emotion and a refusal to acknowledge those aspects of the situation which terrify you most, you need at a later time to confront those aspects of the situation which you so wish to deny. These aspects are not simply part of the harsh reality of life but aspects which carry a personal threat to you: the threat of loss, of being abandoned, of being utterly alone. Such a confrontation is easiest done in the company of people who do not criticize you or rush to ‘make it better’, but developing the skill of quiet and solitary contemplation will stand you in great stead.

Emotions which have not been recognized and dealt with come back in unbidden rage or ‘irrational’ tears or in unpleasant dreams. They will interrupt the efficient functioning of the autoimmune system, thus making the way clear for the development of disease and disability.

A less popular delusion but one which has caught the imagination of the media is that of believing that you can divide your meaning structure into different people. Psychiatrists call this Multiple Personality Disorder. It is an extension of the second delusion where you bury your experiences and invent another role to play.

Women who, as children, have been repeatedly sexually assaulted often report how they tried to split themselves in two, in effect becoming two people, a sexual being and an ordinary girl. While enacting one role they tried to forget that the other role existed. Acquiring the skill necessary to use this desperate defence against annihilation can lead a person to create more and more separate ‘selves’.

If a person does this without reflection upon what she is doing it is not difficult for her to claim that it all ‘just happened’. The professionals and others who become involved with these multiple selves can be so caught up in the drama that they might never try to discover the gross cruelty the person suffered which made such a defence necessary or, equally foolishly, they might decide that sexual abuse is the one and only cause of the person’s behaviour.

Whatever you might like to tell yourself, your meaning structure is all of one piece and each part is connected to every other part. Each part can influence every other part. It is the sum total of all the conclusions you have drawn and are always drawing from your experience, all your ideas, attitudes, expectations, opinions and beliefs. You and your meaning structure are one.

CHAPTER 5 You and How You Feel About Yourself

SOME PARTS of your meaning structure don’t have much influence on the rest of your meaning structure. You mightn’t be greatly concerned about what kind of biscuits you have for morning tea or whether your aunt sent you a Christmas card, although if pressed you would admit that you prefer a crisp biscuit to a gooey chocolate mess or that you do think it important that family members keep in touch.

However, there are two structures in your meaning structure which are central to it and influence every other part.

They are:

1. How you feel about yourself

2. What the top priority is in your life.

I have talked about how we are all born full of unselfconscious self-confidence and how we lose this. We become self-conscious and so acquire a vital part of our meaning structure, namely, ‘How I feel about myself.’

Having a visual image of an idea, even if it bears no relation to reality, can help in understanding that idea. Suppose you imagined your meaning structure to be not you-shaped, coterminous with your skin, but egg-shaped. If you stood it on end and pushed a skewer from top to bottom the passage of the skewer through the egg would mark the central position of the particular meaning structure, ‘How I feel about myself.’ Every other part of your meaning structure is attached to and revolves around this structure.

Now let’s think of this central meaning structure as being a straight line or dimension which measures just how you feel about yourself.

At the top is that blissful state of feeling at home with yourself, not criticizing yourself, feeling that you’ve got everything right and that everyone who matters to you loves you.

At the other end is that most unpleasant state of feeling yourself to be alien and hateful, criticizing yourself for everything you have ever done and ever been, feeling that you have made a mess of everything and that everyone who knows you hates and rejects you.

Daily, how you feel about yourself moves up and down this dimension.

Most days there mightn’t be much movement.

If you’ve retained or recovered some of the self-acceptance with which you were born you stay above the mid-point, but if your cellar is jam-packed full of the darkness which you see as bad, you hover between the mid-point and the depths of self-rejection.

In both cases, there might sometimes be a wild swing to the heights when something has gone extraordinarily right for you, or to the depths when something has gone devastatingly wrong.

Whenever you have to make a decision on any matter, however trivial or important, and whenever you create an interpretation about any matter, how you feel about yourself will play an essential part in that process.

A simple example.

You wake up in the morning and you think, ‘I feel sick.’

What are you going to do about this?

If your feeling about yourself is in the top half of the dimension your thinking will go along the lines of, ‘I’ll take care of myself,’ ‘I’ll stay in bed,’ ‘I won’t go to work today,’ ‘I’ll get the doctor to come and see me.’

If your feeling about yourself is in the bottom half of the dimension your thinking will go along the lines of, ‘I can’t stay in bed. I’ve got work to do,’ ‘I’ve got to go to work or they’ll think I’m slacking,’ ‘I can’t trouble the doctor.’

While you’re lying there making up your mind what to do you switch on the radio and listen to the news. There is the usual litany of tragedies, deaths, destruction and infamy. How you interpret all of this depends on where you are positioned on your ‘How I feel about myself’ dimension.

If your feeling about yourself is in the top half of the dimension you don’t feel threatened personally by such events although you might deplore the stupidity, immorality and greed of the people who brought such events into being. You might even heighten your resolve to improve the world in some way.

If your feeling about yourself is in the bottom half of the dimension you do feel threatened personally by such events. You deplore the stupidity, immorality and greed of the persons who brought these events into being, but all this only supports more strongly your conclusion that the world is a wicked, evil place and that all the future holds for you is despair, doom and disaster.