Dorothy Rowe

Saga June 2006

Trying to Forget

'So easy to remember and so hard to forget' might be the words of an old romantic song but, alas, we all have memories that we'd prefer to forget. These are the memories that wake us from a deep sleep and fill us with an unnamed dread, or intrude upon the banal thoughts accompanying a simple task, or chill our hearts even when we are at our happiest. The events which we are remembering may have occurred decades ago but for our memory they are as yesterday. We can tell ourselves that we shouldn't be so silly to waste time thinking of such things, and we can try to turn our minds to happier matters, but the memory will not let us go. Where do these memories come from, and how can we banish them from our minds?

When we talk about ourselves we use the words 'I', 'me', 'myself', and feel that somehow inside ourselves is that 'I', a person who thinks and acts. Yet this is a fiction, something our brain creates. When the Buddha became enlightened what he had discovered was that there was no little Buddha sitting inside him and that the self is simply a collection of thoughts, feelings, perceptions and actions. Many years later neuroscientists have shown that the Buddha was right. In his wonderful book Into the Silent Land the neuropsychologist Paul Broks wrote, 'The brain has evolved systems dedicated to social cognition and action. It constructs a model of the organism of which it is a part and, beyond this, a representation of that organism's place to other, similar, similar organisms: people. As part of the process it assembles a "self", which can be thought of as the device we humans employ as a means of negotiating the social environment.'

In the assembly of our self there are the ideas about who we are and who we want to think of ourselves as being. All living things want to survive, but we want to survive not just physically but as a self. To do this we need to see ourselves as being what we want ourselves to be. We want to be acceptable to ourselves: we want other people to accept us: and we want to feel reasonably secure in the world we live in. Consequently our 'self' contains many ideas about how we can fulfil our three main aims.

What holds all these ideas together is our life story. Our self is constantly telling itself a story about itself. Like all stories, our life story is comprised of a beginning, a middle and an end, that is, a past, a present and a future (what we think our life is going to be). Our memories tell us about our past and thus define who we are now and what we shall become. Most importantly, our memories need to fit in with our aims to be acceptable to ourselves and others and to feel secure. The things we can't forget are memories which do not fit in to our aims.

When we encounter a new situation (and every situation is a new situation because, even if you're doing something you've done many times before, you haven't done it on this particular day before), we make some kind of sense of it. Out of the sense we make of the situation we decide how to act. When the situation comes to an end we draw some conclusion about it, and that conclusion becomes one of the ideas which informs your self about itself. If the conclusion is one which fits in with the aims of your self then your memory of the situation and the conclusion you drew from it slide smoothly into the past in your life story. But if the conclusion does not coincide with your aims then the event and the conclusion you drew from the event will stay around, challenging your ideas about who you are and what the world is, until you can come to some way of understanding the event which does fit with your aims. Finding such an understanding can often involve having to change your ideas about who you are and what the world is.

Suppose you want to think of yourself as being a competent, helpful person who looks after those who cannot look after themselves. One day you are walking along the footpath beside a very busy road and you see a toddler break away from his mother and head straight for the road. You lunge forward to grab the child. If you are successful you hand the child to a grateful mother and proceed on your way feeling the glow of virtuous success. If you are not successful and the child goes under the wheels of a bus then every one of your aims has been thwarted. You are not the good person you thought yourself to be: you are a failure in the eyes of others: and how can you live securely in a world when a moment's inattention by a devoted mother can lead to such a tragedy?

You feel despair and anguish, but, more than this, you feel your self shattering and falling apart. As indeed it must, because your self is made up of ideas, and this event has revealed that some of those ideas are not a reasonably accurate representation of what is actually going on. These ideas have to fall apart (which is why you feel that you are falling apart) and new ideas constructed which are a better representation of what is going on. Until you construct these new ideas this event cannot slide into your past and be forgotten. Every time your memory of this event comes into your mind it is demanding that you work on the business of constructing new ideas.

What stops you from completing this task can be your personal pride. You don't want to accept that you no longer move as fast as you once did, or that you can't save everybody who needs saving: you can't bear that other people see you as a failure: you can't summon up the courage to accept that the world is a chancy, dangerous place. According to the mediaeval Church pride is the deadliest of the seven deadly sins because it stops us from changing. When certain memories haunt us we need to ask ourselves, 'What is it in this memory that offends my pride?', and, when we find the answer and accept it, we can let the memory go.

Paul Broks Into the Silent Land Atlantic Books.

Saga May 2006

Things to Remember about Memory

As they get older many people complain that they have two problems with their memory. They can't always remember what they want to remember, and they can't forget the things that they want to forget. I'll deal with not remembering here and the problem of not forgetting next month.

Nowadays we get lots of advice about how we can keep our memories functioning well for the whole of our life. There can be no doubt that following a programme of daily exercise of the brain with crossword puzzles, Suduko and the like, regular physical exercise, and a well-balanced diet is enormously beneficial, but this will be so only if, as you get older, you do not acquire three interlocked bad habits which will certainly ruin your memory. This is what I've found in my many decades long observation of friends, family, and various acquaintances. These bad habits are:

• giving up taking responsibility for yourself
• reducing your interests to a small circle of family and friends
• lying to yourself.

Psychologists distinguish four different kinds of memory:

episodic memory, ie, memory of personal experiences

• semantic memory, ie, memory for facts
• working memory, ie, memory that holds on to small amounts of information for a limited time as in looking up a phone number and then dialling it.
• prospective memory, ie, memory about the future as in 'I've got a doctor's appointment on Friday.

When we are taking responsibility for ourselves we are constantly using all four kinds of memory. We have to remember events in the past in order to know who we are and what our life is. We need to remember practical facts in order to survive and make our way in the world, and we need to remember abstract ideas in order to make sense of our life and the world around us. We have to be able to hold certain information in our mind in order to carry out our tasks ('I'll set the table while the potatoes are cooking'), and we have to remember our plans for the future. However, as I have often seen, some people relinquish responsibility for themselves quite early in middle age. They are tempted to do so because they have reliable adults close to them who will readily accept such responsibility. However, handing over responsibility for yourself means handing over parts of your memory. There's the husband who expects his wife to remember all the details of their social life ('When are we supposed to go to this party?'), and the wife who expects her husband not only to remember when she's to take her pills but actually hand them to her. There's the parent who finds it all too much trouble to remember what work his children do, or who expects her children to check regularly that she is safe and well. Moreover, why should you trouble your head with learning how to use emails or shop on the internet when you've got an obliging grandson who'll do that for you, and, when he becomes less obliging, you can take to laughing at the ridiculousness of learning all this computer stuff and as for mobiles! You wouldn't dream of wasting your time with all that nonsense.

An important part of taking responsibility for yourself is to keep an up-to-date working knowledge of what's going on in the world. Saying, 'All politicians are the same so I never bother to vote' does not protect you from the effects of what politicians do when they are elected. You mightn't expect to live to see the effects of climate change in the year 2100 but not being interested in climate change shows younger people that you don't really care about what's going to happen to them and their children. Deciding not to read a newspaper or to watch the news means that you gradually lose the ability to make sense of the world around you, and so you can find yourself beset by fears which are quite irrational.

Nobody gets physically fit lying on a couch all day. Handing responsibility for yourself over to someone else is the equivalent of lying on a couch all day and every day. Just as muscles won't get strong if they are not used and pushed to their limit, so our memory won't be strong if we don't use it to remember unpleasant as well as pleasant things. Tragically, there are many people who, often quite early in life, decide never to face up to anything unpleasant. When something unpleasant happens, rather than remember it and think about it, they tell themselves it didn't happen. Some years ago I was visiting an acquaintance who insisted that I give my honest opinion about how she had brought up her child because the child, now a young man, was in difficulties. I had direct knowledge of her son and so I gave my opinion which, though truthful, was not flattering to her. She said nothing but got up and went to the bathroom. Her husband of many years said to me, 'When she gets back she'll have forgotten what you said.' He was right. When she returned it was as if I had never spoken. She was not angry or distressed but talked instead about her forthcoming holiday. This woman, and others like her who constantly lie to themselves, now have memories which don't function very well. This is hardly surprising. Neuroscientists are now quite sure that when we lay down a memory certain neurones in our brain form connections. How then does a brain deal with holding two conflicting memories, one that says, 'This happened', and another which says, 'No it didn't'? It's something like the brain equivalent of driving a car with the handbrake on, something that does the car no good at all.

Don't kid yourself that I'm just talking about older generations and none of this applies to fifty-year-olds like you. Whatever our generation, we feel comfortable with the technology we grew up with and we have to work hard to understand the technology that comes along when we're adults. It's a temptation for all of us to repress memories which do not enhance our image of ourselves, and an even greater temptation to be lazy and give up responsibility for ourselves when the opportunity arises. However, if you don't want to be bossed around, patronised and ignored when you're old, keep working your brain hard even when your body doesn't follow along as well as it used to do.

Saga Magazine

April 2006

Find the Courage to Go On

Amongst the presents for my seventieth-fifth birthday that my son gave me was an actual copy of the Sydney Morning Herald for Wednesday, December 17, 1930, the day I was born. It made very interesting reading because, for all the changes that have taken place over my life, it showed that some things remain the same.

In the classified advertisements there were plenty of horses for sale, while at Vaucluse Heights there was a five-roomed cottage with harbour views for £1295. To buy a similar property in Vaucluse today you'd need to add three noughts to that figure and then some. However, the forecast was for hot weather and Athol Bell, aged thirty, was charged with drunk driving. So nothing's changed there then. On the same page where Don Bradman reported on the thousand runs he'd made in England in May ('We had the honour of being received by the King and Queen. They made us feel entirely at home.') is a short report which reads

WOMAN AND BABY Drowned in a Dam

Finley, Tuesday

Mrs Thomas Masters, aged 34, drowned her three-month-old baby and herself in a dam on Casey's farm, 19 miles from Finley, on Monday afternoon. At the time her husband was in Finley attending the funeral of Miss Maude Stubbs, who was killed in a motor accident on Sunday. A daughter, aged 12, returning home from school, found a note in which her mother stated her intention to drown herself. Returning home, the father found the body of the baby floating in the dam. The mother's body was recovered some hours later.

Finley is a small country town in south central New South Wales, west of the Great Dividing Range and far from any town of significant size. Casey's farm would have been nothing but brown paddocks, empty but for a few cattle, some scrub and a few scattered eucalypts, in December all dry and hot.

On that Monday afternoon Mrs Thomas Masters would have walked across a dusty paddock to the dam. There might have been a hot, searing wind, or perhaps everything was still with shimmers of heat rising in the distance. In the heat the birds with their raucous cries are silent. The water in the dam is muddy, warm at the top but cold and dark in the depths. She wades into the dam at the spot where the cattle come to drink, her feet sinking in the mud. Perhaps she knelt down and cast her baby into the water. Little babies drown in seconds, but she would have to go further into the depths of the water and, not struggling, let herself go down. Perhaps she carried some stones in her pockets.

I can imagine all this, but the one thing I don't know is her name. Married women then didn't have public names. All they had was their husband's name with a 'Mrs' in front of it. Perhaps, before she was married, Thomas Masters called her by her Christian name but, once she was married and a mother, he probably called her Mum, as would her daughter. If you don't have a name, how can you feel that you are a person? Since 1930 women have reclaimed their names, but many women, and many men, still make the equivalent of Mrs Masters' lonely walk to the dam.

Ordinarily we all try to keep ourselves alive. We're careful crossing the road and we consult the doctor when we're ill. But there are two situations in which we are prepared to let ourselves die. These situations call forth acts of heroism or acts of suicide. If you read an account of people who risked their life to save others and who survived, they all give much the same answer when someone congratulates them on their bravery. In effect, they all say, 'If I hadn't done that I wouldn't be able to live with myself.' What they are saying is that they want to think of themselves as being someone who is courageous and who looks after other people. If they had not carried their heroic act they would not be the person whom they knew themselves to be.

Living a life where we cannot be the person we know ourselves to be soon becomes intolerable. If we value ourselves and we see an opportunity to escape we take it, but, when we don't value ourselves and we feel that no escape is possible, we contemplate suicide. Mrs Masters, without a name to call her own and no doubt diminished by that, knew that, if she abandoned her husband and children, society would condemn her as a bad woman. She wanted to see herself as being a good woman, and so to her the only possible escape was suicide. She did have an alternative. She could have seen herself as a not-that-good a person who valued herself too much to throw her life away and who would do something to make her life more enjoyable, even if that was only doing less housework and taking more naps.

People who kill themselves delude themselves that they have no alternative. We always have alternatives in how we interpret the situation in which we find ourselves. Even if we're dying of an incurable illness we still have a choice of dying bravely without complaint, or of making life as difficult as possible for those around us, or all the variations in between these interpretations. Many people who kill themselves say they are doing it for the sake of their families, but this too is a delusion. Family and friends never recover fully from such a death. They remain angry, sad, and often guilty because they feel that they failed the person they loved.

The children of suicides are especially harmed. Research shows that the suicide of a parent increases the chances of that the children too will commit suicide. This has nothing to do with genes and everything to do with learning from their parent that, 'When life's tough, give up.' Even if there is nothing else you can do for your children, even if they're grown up and able to look after themselves, you can give them the example of living courageously. If you can do it, so can they. I've discovered the name of Mrs Masters. It's on her gravestone in Finley cemetery where she's buried with her unnamed baby and her husband Thomas. She was Jesse Ellen, recorded not only on her gravestone but on the Finley cemetery website. Her baby would have celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday three months before mine.

October 2005

A Significant Life

Dorothy Rowe

Before the suicide bombers were even identified the question was being asked, 'Why did they do it?' Most of the answers from the experts and the people in the street came in only two versions, 'They were evil' or 'They'd been brain washed.' Such answers may relieve anger and frustration but they don't explain why. To find the answer we have to ask ourselves, 'What is the absolute top priority in my life?'

As we get older and find ourselves reviewing our life we can see clearly that what matters most is that our life should have significance, that our existence has been acknowledged by others and in some way has made a difference. To die and disappear, seemingly never to have existed, makes just the thought of death utterly unbearable. In old age we can articulate this clearly but when we were younger we may have striven for significance without understanding exactly why. As small children we did what we could to get the adults' attention, and then, to achieve this even more effectively, we learned to be good in the way our parents and teachers defined 'good'. If, as we got older, we felt that our life had no significance we became greatly distressed. Women who feel that they are seen only as wife, mother, daughter, employee, and never as themselves can easily become depressed. Middle-aged men who feel that they have played all the cards in their hand, achieved nothing, and now face a dreary trudge though the rest of their life, are likely to abandon their partner for someone much younger, or take to drink or drugs, or become depressed, or kill themselves.

We all differ in how we define 'significance'. Some people feel that they will be significant only if they become the greatest sportsperson, or the most famous artist, or the richest or the most powerful person in the world. Others ask only that they will always enjoy the love and attention of their family and friends. We will do the most outrageous, stupid things to gain and keep the significance we strive for. We will cheat, lie, steal, betray, become a slave to work or to our appearance, or undertake foolhardy adventures in order to feel significant. Even those who ask only for love and attention will devote themselves totally to the needs and wishes of family and friends while ignoring their own.

But all our efforts can easily come to naught because no one is taking any notice of us. Ian Cobain, writing in the Guardian, said of Hasib Hussain, who blew up the Number 30 bus, 'When he moved to Matthew Murray high school it was apparent that he was never going to stand out as a scholar or a sportsman.' All four bombers were described by their family and friends as good young men. However, goodness alone will not ensure significance, and the trouble with being good is that you're never good enough. How can you become the 'goodest' person in the world? Every religion tells us how to be good, but each religion stretches across a spectrum from a fundamentalist interpretation of the religious doctrine as absolute truth with 'good' and 'bad' unambiguously defined, through a middling, less absolute but still conventional set of beliefs and practices, to a mystical interpretation which is unspecific in the extreme. All fundamentalist interpretations, whether Muslim, Christian, Sikh or Hindu, claim to show how a person can become the 'goodest' of all. Follow the fundamentalist religion's teaching in every respect and punish those who do not, then your life will have the greatest significance of all. The British bombers may not be heroes in their home towns but they will attain the glory of martyr heroes on internet sites across the Muslim world.

Many adolescents who have failed in their efforts to be good and thus get loving attention from adults give up trying to be good and seek significance by trying to make sure that other people are aware of their existence and are afraid of them. Donal MacIntyre, writing in the Guardian, told how he had interviewed Ryan and Wayne, aged 19 and 16 respectively, who work as drug dealers. Older members of the gangland fraternity and the police each described these young men as dangerous. MacIntyre asked them both, 'What do you want to be?' Ryan said, 'I just want plenty of dough, happy life.' Wayne said, 'I want to be remembered, me. I want someone to say, "Ah, remember him? Hard little bastard, that cunt."'

The four bombers and Ryan and Wayne represent the two extremes of efforts to gain the greatest significance but there are many people in between these two extremes who try to feel that their life has significance by claiming that they are significant while other people are not. This way of thinking forms the basis of racism, religious hatred, nationalism, and snobbery in all its forms. It is the basis of the hierarchies that we form where those at the top lead lives which are seen to be far more significant than the lives of those lower down the hierarchy.

Fighting terrorism and fighting crime are wars that can never be won while we continue to trample over one another in the effort to make our own life significant while ignoring other people's need to feel significant. Thus the American and British forces in Iraq count the numbers of their dead and mourn them but they don't bother to count how many Iraqis are killed, not even the number of children. In Britain we exclude children from all hope of education because we don't approve of the way they behave, and we don't try to give them the attention which might teach them to seek significance in more socially acceptable ways. Many teachers do try to do this but they aren't given the resources needed for such work. We grade children according to their scholastic ability and thus create a hierarchy where those at the top - teachers, parents and politicians - despise the children at the bottom. We pay great attention to 'celebrities' with very limited talents and ignore or, in the aftermath of a disaster, sentimentalise the people who make our daily lives comfortable and secure. We laud the successful entrepreneur and ignore or patronise the woman who cares for children or cleans up our mess. We sentimentalise or demonise children and ignore or patronise the old. In short, we deny to others what we want others to give to us. We forget that we all have significance simply because we exist.

SAGA Magazine, October 2005

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The Way to Wisdom

Dorothy Rowe

Calling ourselves homo sapiens, the intelligent people, is an act of extreme vanity. Certainly our language skills, our science and technology attest to our high intelligence, but our destruction of our planet does not. This destruction, the suffering we've inflicted on other species and on ourselves, and the general unhappiness and dissatisfaction which many people feel all result from a lack of understanding of ourselves so great that we should really call ourselves homo stupidus, the stupid people.

As a psychologist and writer all my work has always been concerned with explaining why we behave as we do. There are many people who have a good understanding of why we behave as we do, but even more people, many of whom would regard themselves as well-educated, find what I have to say incomprehensible. Some of these people don't want to learn about themselves because they are frightened of what they might discover if they looked inside themselves, but others lack the skills needed to examine the motives and actions of people, themselves included.

Everyone can be a scientist. All you need are the skills of mathematics and scientific method. Everyone can create technology. All you need are the skills of mathematics and chemistry. (The technology of baking a cake requires some knowledge of maths and chemistry.) Everyone can be a psychologist. All you need are the skills of analysing the logic we all use when we think. (Regrettably, there are many university-qualified psychologists who lack this skill.)

The logic used in all sciences and mathematics is Aristotelian logic, the logic of the real world. In Aristotelian logic a thing cannot simultaneously be itself and not itself. A cannot be not-A. In the logic of our private thought A and not-A can exist simultaneously. You can know that, 'The people I love are the people I hate.' (These A and not-A people are usually your nearest and dearest.) In Aristotelian logic things can be said to be similar, as in 'The shape of the moon is similar to that of a ball', but in the logic of our thinking we can say that one thing is another thing, as in, 'My grandchild is the sunshine of my life.' We give many different meanings to everything we encounter, and these meanings are often metaphors.

However, whether you're using Aristotelian logic in doing science or the logic of private thought, there's one serious error you can make. It's called a Category Error.

To make sense of the world we put things that are similar in some way in boxes called categories. We say, 'All those things are apples and all those other things are rocks.' In mathematics we are taught that different categories cannot be added together. You can't add apples to rocks. Also, we are taught that we must be very careful not to put things in the wrong category. Don't call a rock an apple or an apple a rock.

Yet this kind of error is very common in the way we think about ourselves, especially when we want to have everything and find that we have missed out on so much. 'I don't want to get old,' we say. 'I worked hard all my life and now all I've got is a lonely old age. It's not fair.' Here we are confusing two very distinct kinds of events, two distinct categories. I'll call these Category 1 and Category 2.

Category 1 is those things which we could have but which are withheld from us by the way we choose to define ourselves and our world. Consider loneliness. The world is full of lonely people. Why don't they all get together? Because they have defined what they do in terms of some rules which they have created, rules such as, 'I don't mix with people of a different class/ race/ religion/ nationality/ gender from me,' or, 'I'm not interested in people', or, 'I pride myself on keeping myself to myself'. Consider 'It's not fair'. Is there a law of nature which says that if you're good you'll get rewarded? There isn't, but, if there were, it would fall into...

Category 2, those things which are the nature of human life. One of these things is that if you don't die young you get old and then die. Another is that you can't be in two different places at the same time. You can't have a holiday abroad at the same time as being at home. You can't go back in time and change the past, but you can change how you interpret the past because the past, like the future, is simply an idea. All we ever actually experience is a series of present moments. In a family argument it's all very well to state, 'I've said my piece and that's the end of it,' but in fact everything we do has many consequences, some good, some bad. We have no control over what these consequences will be.

Many people make themselves unhappy because they constantly complain about those aspects of life which fall into Category 2 and complacently insist that they cannot change those aspects of their life which fall into Category 1. If we want to lead at least reasonably contented lives we need always to distinguish carefully between Category 1 and Category 2 aspects of life. If we do this, we can then determine where we might usefully fight for our rights and our ambitions, and where it would be better to resign ourselves to life's course. Making this distinction allows us to make more informed choices and decide what matters most to us. Distinguishing between the two categories allows us to live in the present enjoying what we have instead of living in the future and the past and being forever dissatisfied. If we all were able to do this then we would indeed be entitled to call ourselves homo sapiens, but this would be sapiens as the ancient Romans knew it. Sapiens for them meant wisdom.

Dorothy Rowe Wanting Everything: The Art of Happiness HarperCollins.

SAGA Magazine, July 2005

May 2005

Two Kinds of Change

Dorothy Rowe

When I was doing my Diploma of Clinical Psychology at Sydney University in 1966 my lecturer Jack Lyle was wont to remark, 'The older people get the more like themselves they become.' At the time I thought that this was just one of Jack's many endearing idiosyncrasies but as the years have gone by I've realised how right he was. The people I've known for many decades have become more like themselves. When they were young they were trying out different ideas and activities but, following what they learned from this, they discarded some ideas and activities and kept others. Their personal style of dealing with events remained the same. Some continued to deal with a new situation by looking at it as a whole and responding carefully: others in their usual manner responded immediately and with great passion. Their particular kind of sense of humour didn't change. The ironists still enjoyed the ironic: the lovers of the homely joke still collected them: those who'd taken everything totally seriously still asked, 'What are you laughing at?'

Over time these particular approaches and skills have been honed fine by each person's experiences. Every experience changes us because we learn from every experience, but this learning may bring only a slight modification of who we are, or it may bring such great change that we are never the same again.

Our sense of being a person, what we call 'I', 'me', 'myself', is made up of a structure of all our meanings, that is, our ideas, beliefs, attitudes, opinions, memories and images. There's no little you sitting inside you creating all these meanings. These meanings are you, and they relate together in a structure which is always changing because you/your meaning structure are always encountering something new. Every moment you are encountering something new because you have never encountered that particular situation at that particular time and date before. You draw a conclusion about that new situation, and this conclusion has somehow to be absorbed into your meaning structure. If the conclusion is very similar to conclusions you have drawn in the past, your meaning structure can accommodate it easily, but, if the conclusion is one that you've never drawn before, you'll have to think about it, talk about it, even dream about it while your meaning structure struggles to find some way of assimilating it.

Suppose you're sitting on the beach enjoying the sunshine and you glance up and see a huge black cloud on the horizon. You draw the conclusion, 'It's going to rain.' The situation you're in is very similar to certain situations you've been in in the past and you've learned to associate large black clouds with rain, so your new 'It's going to rain' slips easily into your meaning structure. On the other hand, suppose you're sitting on the beach enjoying the sunshine and you glance up and see that the sea has retreated leaving many fish stranded on the sand and not far away a 20 metre high wall of water is coming swiftly towards you. Your conclusion to the new event is, 'I'd better get out of here', and it is rapidly followed by many new conclusions the like of which you have never drawn before. You survive the tsunami, but you go on thinking about it for a very long while after. There's much to be sorted out in your mind, not least the question we all ask after a disaster, 'Why has this disaster happened to me?'

Finding an answer to this question which we can live with (that is, which will be assimilated by our meaning structure) can be very difficult. Those people who see the world as a place where things happen by chance can see themselves as simply being lucky, but some may worry that, if they've been allocated a certain amount of luck in their life, they may have used it all up in the one event. Some people are greatly disturbed by discovering that they're not the person they took themselves to be. If you've always prided yourself on how physically strong you are, being caught up in a tsunami can show you just how puny you are. If you've grown up believing that you live in a Just World where good people are rewarded and bad people punished, the aftermath of the tsunami can leave you wondering why so many innocent people died, or whether you'd been spared by mistake and something terrible will soon happen to you to so that the scales of justice will be balanced, or whether the people who had taught you to believe in the Just World hadn't told you the truth.

Any event about which we cannot draw a conclusion which will fit easily into our meaning structure changes us profoundly because to absorb such a conclusion we have to change some ideas which are central to our meaning structure. If we cannot manage to do this we find ourselves in a terrifying limbo which psychiatrists call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. If we change our central ideas to reflect our new vision of the world as an extremely dangerous place from which we must hide, then our life becomes dominated by our timidity. If we decide to acknowledge and accept that death can come upon us at any time, we know that we must henceforth discard the dross in our life and concentrate on the gold.

We've many choices about how we should change the ideas central to us in order to assimilate a most singular experience, but perhaps what we choose is determined by other ideas which we've held unchanged from childhood. If we've always resisted changing our ideas, or if we've always seen ourselves as a weakling, or if we've always seen a crisis as a challenge we can master, then when we're faced with a situation which threatens to overwhelm us we interpret it in the way we've always interpreted new situation. So even in the second kind of change we may show that the older we get, the more like ourselves we become.

April 2005

Happiness Is Now Compulsory

Dorothy Rowe

The American magazine Time recently ran an issue on 'The Science of Happiness', or positive psychology, the study of how many of us are happy and why. The popularity of this kind of psychology in the media can be measured by the fact that Time devoted 45 pages to it. Time also commissioned a poll of 1009 American adults of whom 78 per cent assessed themselves as being happy all or most of the time. Only 16 per cent said that they were happy some of the time, and 5 per cent said that they were rarely happy. More rich people claimed to be happy than people with incomes less than $35,000 p.a., but the difference was only 88 per cent as against 68 per cent. How these results square with the steep rise in the incidence of depression over recent years Time did not explain.

I would suggest that the difference is a matter of appearances, not a matter of accurate statistics. The society we live in always contains messages about what sort of people we should be, and these messages relate not so much to morality as to the benefit certain powerful people get from us obeying the messages. At present we are being told that we can be in one of two states: we can be depressed and in need of medication: or we can be happy, and grateful for being so. No one can admit to being sad because 'sad' is now a pejorative word as in, 'You're a sad guy. Why don't you get a life?'

Amongst those who are diagnosed as being depressed are many people who are sad, and quite rightly so because they have suffered a loss for which there is no recompense or reward, and also many anxious people whose anxiety has deep roots which tranquillisers don't reach. By diagnosing all of these people as being depressed and prescribing them antidepressants doctors appear to be doing something helpful, and the pharmaceutical industry makes big profits. But who benefits from us being happy except ourselves? Aren't social scientists like these positive psychologists pursuing disinterested research?

Whenever you read a report about research concerning what we do and why we do it always ask, 'Who benefits from this?' During the Second World War children were deemed able to be looked after by people other than their mothers while their mothers did the work of men away at the war. But, once the war ended and the men returned, women had to be forced back into the home. Suddenly social scientists were telling us about 'latch key children' whose mothers worked and who left the children to fend for themselves after school. These children, we were informed, would grow up to be wastrels, neurotic misfits and/or criminals. Many of you who read Saga were such children. Are you a lost generation?

American positive psychologists claim that they get little financial help from their government, which is mean of their government because every government benefits from a happy population. Happy people aren't likely to criticise their government and try to change it. Positive psychologists tell us that we can make happiness a goal which we can achieve through savouring life's joys, learning to forgive, investing time and energy in friends and family, taking care of our body, developing strategies for coping with stress and hardship, and practising acts of kindness. (Time illustrates the last item with a cartoon of a man holding an elderly woman by the elbow and pushing her in a direction she is clearly surprised to go.) Positive psychologists also advocate gratitude as a key to happiness. Professor Martin Segilman recommends that at the end of every day you should write down 'three blessings' which you have received during the day. You could write down, 'My train was only 20 minutes late instead of the usual 40' and feel grateful to our dear leaders.

At present these dear leaders urge us to be not alarmed but alert and healthy. They leave the message 'Be happy' to the media who promote happiness for their own ends. Bad news that has no happy ending, dramas and documentaries which show the reality of our situation and ask us to think don't get big audiences and thus fail to attract advertisers or fail to be seen to earn their licence fees. So the message from the media has become 'Successful people are happy'. If you're not happy it shows you're not successful. What the Time poll showed was that many Americans want to appear to be happy. Cynically, the media tell us that happiness is achievable and that success can be ours because everything will turn out all right in the end. This message from the media attracts the largest audiences and makes the people who own the media very rich.

Unfortunately, the media's message and the simplistic advice given by many positive psychologists about how to be happy obscure the important findings from very sound research on the relationship between our attitudes and our physical health. It is now clear that anxiety, stress, and depression affect the operation of our immune system, leaving us vulnerable to noxious factors around us and potential weaknesses in our bodies. Anxious and stressed people usually get colds and flu: some depressed people go on to develop cancer or heart disease. Thinking angry or miserable thoughts doesn't cause illness: it just reduces our physical defences against the potential causes of illness. However, being hopeful, being able to live in the present and enjoy a sight, a sound, a taste, a scent, a feeling as they occur, going with the flow of life and not raging against it, not dwelling on the past with bitterness and regret won't cure severe illnesses and grant eternal life but together this way of living does produce something that we can never achieve as a goal but can stumble upon as a by-product of what we're doing. That by-product is happiness.

March 2005

Sorry Is the Hardest Word to Say

Dorothy Rowe

Apologies are frequently in the news with politicians showing a remarkable ability to apologise for events about which they had no direct responsibility while at the same time steadfastly refusing to apologise for something for which they were directly responsible. Of course with the first kind of apology come no painful feelings, no guilt and none of the ache of being unable to put right what you have caused to go wrong, that is, the feelings which come with the second kind of apology. No wonder we all try to avoid this kind of apology.

However, if you're a therapist or if you seek therapy you cannot avoid having to confront in one way or other the second kind of apology.

People come into therapy when they're profoundly dissatisfied with themselves. They enter therapy asking, 'Why am I such a bad person?' but, as the conversation with the therapist proceeds over weeks and months, they gradually discover that they were not born intrinsically bad but rather this was the conclusion that they as children had drawn from their experiences. They then start to feel angry about what had been done to them by the adults who should have been looking after them.

By the time people reach this stage in therapy they've begun to see the therapist as someone very important to them. This gives the therapist real power. Some unscrupulous therapists use their power to bind their client to them. They keep their clients at the stage where the client, angry with his parents, keeps producing memories of when he was badly treated. If the deep well of such memories threatens to run dry old memories can be reworked to produce new anger and resentment. In this way a client can remain in therapy for years, providing the therapist with a regular income and never moving on to a greater understanding of himself.

Of course many of the people who go into therapy have suffered much more than most children do. Remembering acts of physical, emotional and sexual abuse can be extremely painful, and it can be very hard for the therapist and the client to work out what is best to do with all that pain and anger. When we're full of the pain and anger that follows an injury inflicted on us we can feel that an act of revenge will restore us to ourselves. Ten or so years ago a number of therapists whose clients had been sexually abused by their parents began advising their clients to confront their parents with their crime. It seemed to me that the therapists were so much on the side of their clients that they couldn't envisage what would happen when an avenging child, now adult, descended on an elderly couple and confronted them with what they may or may not have done many years before. Forgiveness and reconciliation may have followed in some families but not without a great deal of pain, remorse and regret. I saw this happen in one family I knew well, and, with their permission, I wrote about it in my book Beyond Fear. Forgiveness and reconciliation should play a part in all families, especially when the children are adults and the parents and children need to find a way to move from the parent-child relationship to that of a friendship between equals, but accusation and confrontation isn't the way to achieve this.

We all need to come to see the connections between our childhood experiences and ourselves as adults so that we can understand ourselves, but we need to do more than just uncover the hurts and injustices in our childhood and feel anger and resentment towards our parents. We can rail against our fate and cry, 'Why me?' but then we need to discover that the answer to that question is, 'Why not?' Life is painful as well as joyous. No one escapes the pain. As long as we demand that we should be spared any suffering, we suffer. It isn't necessary to forgive those who have harmed us, but, if we want to ease our own suffering, we should try to discover why they did what they did.

Many of my clients who'd reached the stage of understanding why they had learned to hate themselves and who were now learning to love themselves told me that they would like to talk to their parents just to confirm that the terrible memories they had were memories of real events and not nightmares spawned by even worse events. It is better to know that your mother hit you because that was how she dealt with her anger with your father than to know that she hit you because she hated you. One man said to me, 'All I want my mother to do is to say, "Yes, that happened. I'm sorry."'

Some parents were quite unable to accept such inquiries. One client told me that when he ventured to ask a question about whether he was breast-fed his mother, arms akimbo, warned him off with a glare. Another man, reminding his mother of how his father used to thrash him at her behest, was told, 'You were a bad child and you deserved it.' Other clients found that their mother welcomed such an approach and out of their discussions a different and better bond between them was forged.

No parent parents perfectly. If parents were perfect, anticipating and meeting their child's every need, children would have no incentive to cease to be babies and grow up. For many parents the child-rearing years are, for reasons other than their children, the most traumatic years of the parent's life. Yet, by the time we've learned to be wise in the ways of the world and of children we've lost much of the physical energy that being the parent of young children needs. But at least as we get older we can learn how to bear and value the pain of saying sorry.

February 2005

The Purpose of Paranoia

Dorothy Rowe

Last November I was speaker at the Anarchist Book Fair in London. Three nights before I had been speaking at the Royal Society for the Arts. These were two very different audiences, but with both, as ever, there was a queue of people wanting to speak to me after my talk. Some of these people simply wanted to tell me that they had found my books helpful which, as you can imagine, is enormously heartening, but there were also several people who wanted to ask me something quite personal about themselves. This is always difficult for me as we are never in a private situation. The person usually introduces the subject haltingly, often in a way which takes me a while to understand. It slowly dawns on me that I am being asked something huge, something which, if I were presented with it in the privacy of my study, would cause me to pause, consider, and answer slowly and carefully. Yet here I am presented with one of life's greatest problems in a totally personal form and in a public space. I stumble through some kind of answer, and afterwards ponder, worry, and work out what I ought to have said.

The people in the RSA queue who asked me difficult questions talked about the kinds of trauma which I have encountered, either personally or through my clients, and so I was able to make some reasonably sensible suggestions about what might be done, but a man at the Anarchist Book Fair asked me something which at first seemed to be right outside my experience and expertise.

English was not his first language, and I had to concentrate hard to understand what he was saying. He was asking me about a friend. Often, when a questioner asks me about a friend I suspect that the person is actually asking about himself, but here the man's friend was a woman. Like him she was a refugee from Saddam's Iraq. She had been given refugee status, so I assumed that terrible things had happened to her. He spoke of her intense suffering as a refugee and of her passionate concern about her country, and then of her success in completing a university degree after coming to England. What troubled him was that at the point in her life when she was at last free from political persecution, when she had right of residence in a safe, stable country, and she had achieved academic success she began to slip into a state of paranoia. She had always discussed political matters with her friends in a very intelligent and knowledgeable way, but now she brought to such discussions her conviction that she was under constant CIA supervision and her every deed and thought was being recorded by them.

I know about paranoia but I don't know directly about living in a police state and about being tortured. I spoke to him about the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and about those psychiatrists and psychologists who have specialised in working with refugees, but I knew that paranoid people are likely to see such professionals as agents of the persecuting power. The man's mention of the CIA aroused the interest of those waiting to speak to me and they pressed closer to listen. We decided to end our conversation, but not before I said something about how paranoia was a defence which we can use to hold ourselves together when we feel ourselves falling apart. A young woman who had been listening to our conversation now asked me to explain what I meant by this.

I tried to explain briefly that whenever we discover that something which had given meaning, purpose and structure to our life has suddenly disappeared we feel our very sense of being a person shattering, crumbling, even disappearing. It is utterly terrifying. This can happen when a person loses the job on which he had built his identity, or lost the family which defined his life's purpose. It is common for people in such situations to blame themselves for the disaster that has befallen them, and thus become depressed. However, when a person has grown up in a situation where his family are the victims of political persecution, where his every action and thought have to take into account the constant danger he is in, then his ideas about persecution and the defences against persecution can become central to his understanding of himself. If he escapes from this persecution to a place of safety but loses family and friends along the way he can find himself falling apart in a world where he feels himself to be completely alone. To hold himself together he can reconstitute the ideas of persecution and defence in a way which is part fantasy, part reality. These ideas will give a structure and purpose to his life and will also assure him that he is not entirely alone. The great benefit of paranoia is that someone, somewhere is thinking of you.

I don't know whether any of this applies to the woman from Iraq. I could know that only by talking to her. But I have met many paranoid people and have seen how these people actually valued their paranoia. They might not be happy but they are sure that their life has significance.

When the crowd around me had dispersed I moved to another part of the room to record an interview for an anarchist internet radio station (number of listeners: 10). As I waited for the recording equipment to be set up the man from Iraq approached me and asked how best he could help his friend. 'Just continue to do what you're doing,' I replied. 'Be her friend. Don't tell her her ideas are wrong but help her keep them in some kind of proportion so that she doesn't get too frightened.' Afterwards I thought, 'That's really the answer for all our problems. Make sure that you've got a good friend!'

Dorothy Rowe Beyond Fear second edition, HarperCollins

To visit the web site for
the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture
click this link http://www.torturecare.org.uk

December 2004

Our Need for Hatred

Dorothy Rowe

In October 2003 the government announced that much tougher sentences would be imposed on offenders convicted of assaults motivated by a hatred of homosexual men. A year on and there has been no significant reduction in these crimes. Perhaps if the government published an account of why people commit such crimes the offenders would become very reluctant to commit further assaults because they would know that through these assaults they were revealing something about themselves which they wished to keep hidden. Indeed, we should all be careful about revealing whom we hate because in doing so we disclose what we see as our own despicable weakness.

When someone attacks us either physically or psychologically by denigrating and humiliating us our first response is fear, the emotion which says, 'I am in danger.' If the attack is repeated again and again and we can find no defence which makes us feel safe we say to ourselves, 'I shall destroy this person because he is trying to destroy me.' Actually we don't have to say these words to ourselves because we feel them, and we call this feeling hatred. The source of our hatred is our own weakness, our inability to make ourselves safe. Men who hate gays are not always physically weak, indeed they are often physically very strong, but they are sure they have a despicable weakness inside of them which they must hide from others. This weakness is their own homoerotic feelings. The way our society socialises boys means that for most boys their closest relationships are with other boys with the result that as they are growing up they have many different experiences which could be called homoerotic. Men who accept themselves and are able to live comfortably with themselves accept that, while their sexual feelings are largely heterosexual, they also contain an element of homosexual understanding and interest. Men who cannot live comfortably with themselves cannot accept the homosexual component in their sexual feelings. They hate this in themselves and they deal with this hatred by projecting it on to homosexual men and attacking them, perhaps just verbally, but sometimes physically. The solution to the problem of homophobic crime may not be longer prison sentences but prison sentences where the offender is required to confront what he sees as his secret weakness and come to see it not as a weakness but an acceptable part of the complexity of what it is to be a human being.

But what of those people whose hatred cannot come to an end until there is a political solution to the situation in which they find themselves? Whenever I see pictures of young Palestinian boys hurling stones at Israeli troops I see the next generation of men who are prepared to lay down their lives for their cause of fighting those whom they see as their enemy. These boys feel weak, necessarily so because they are just boys. Ordinarily a boy can look to his father to protect him, and he can deal with his weakness by telling himself that he will soon be a big and strong as his father. However, in Palestine the fathers are unable to protect their sons. The boys see their fathers as weak and their enemy as very strong. They see themselves as having to do the job their father is incapable of doing. They want to be as strong as the Israeli troops, and so the boys create a hatred which says, 'I will destroy my enemy in the way my enemy is trying to destroy me.'

Even if tomorrow there was a political solution on which both sides could agree and immediately teams of experienced child therapists descended on Gaza and the West Bank it would take many years for these boys to feel strong enough in themselves to give up their hatred. My son's half-brother Nick Rowe, formerly a dancer with the Australian National Ballet, and his wife Maysoon, a dancer whose family live in Ramalah, have been in the West Bank for the last five years working with children using games and dance in order to teach them how to play. The lives of these children have been so taken up with the conflict between Palestine and Israel that they have never learned how to play. Yet it is through play that children learn how to cooperate with one another and to resolve differences without feeling the need to destroy the person who threatens you in some way. Nick and Maysoon found that the children had not learned through play how to take turns and operate as a team. Unless these children, and the children of their enemy, learn the skills of cooperation and sharing, and understand how hatred is a defence against one's sense of inadequacy and weakness they can never as adults agree on a political solution to end the conflict. The same applies to all those places in the world where conflict rages.

Many people, and not just those who live where conflict rages, use hatred as a way of trying to convince themselves that they are strong. If you feel weak then you see other people as dangerous. This is why so many people hate strangers, anyone who isn't the same race, nationality or religion or, sometimes, anyone who isn't family. We don't like to acknowledge our own weakness and, even more, we don't want other people to know that we see ourselves as being weak.

The solution isn't to keep your hatred secret. Unexpressed hatred makes you physically ill because it creates a stress which prevents your immune system which protects you from illness from operating efficiently. The solution is to give up despising yourself for being weak. Recognise you're ordinary just as everyone is. Don't waste time and energy on hating. Instead deplore and criticise the stupidities and cruelties that people commit and do what you can, however small, to help people live without the need for hatred.

Dorothy Rowe Friends and Enemies HarperCollins