Dorothy Rowe

Sunday Express

4 June 2000

DUNKIRK

Dorothy Rowe

Dunkirk is remembered now as a national triumph of hope and courage, but that was not how it was seen in the dark days of 1940. I was a child of nine in Australia, but I remember it well because I saw my father, who had been a soldier in France in the First World War, angry with what he saw as a the betrayal of the British troops by the French. Not long after Singapore fell and nothing stood between us and the advancing Japanese army. I saw that Dad was afraid. Only the stupidity of the Japanese generals who attacked Pearl Harbour and brought the USA into the war saved us.

People in Britain and in Australia, as they stood defenceless before their enemy's advancing army, were afraid, not just because they were in danger of dying but because all of them had grown up believing that Britain and the British Empire were absolute, impregnable fixtures in a dangerous, unstable world. Now those ideas which had informed us who we were were crumbling.

What wins wars is not troops and equipment but ideas. Propaganda is vital, but for it to work it must put out ideas which are seen to be believable and attractive. British government's propaganda did this. British people were told that, as ordinary people working together, they would win because they were strong, brave, honest, decent people. The process of turning the defeat at Dunkirk into a victory had begun.

We Australians were well aware of how to turn a defeat into a victory. Although in the First World War Australian troops had fought with distinction in France, it was their defeat at Gallipoli that became the event which marked Australia as a nation. Anzac Day became our national day. At school I was told to be proud of being an Australian because our nation was built upon the sacrifices made by our soldiers.

Those defeats which are turned into victories have at their centre the idea of sacrifice. When in 1389 Prince Lazar led his troops against the Ottoman army he told himself, 'Because I am virtuous I must die,' and die he did along with his troops. This sacrifice and defeat at Kosova became the idea which is central to Serbian nationalism. As the story of Dunkirk was told and retold what was stressed was the sacrifices made by ordinary people - those who gave up their small boats and those who gave up their lives to save the troops.

This way of telling the story of Dunkirk fed straight back into what the British government was telling the British people about themselves - that they were brave and virtuous and that they were prepared to make sacrifices, perhaps sacrificing their aluminium pots and pans to make guns, perhaps sacrificing their lives.

History is always a matter of who tells the story. It is always a matter of interpretation. To understand ourselves we need to understand that this is what we do every minute of our lives - interpreting, creating meaning. Neurophysiologists used to talk about how our brain enabled us to see the world, but now they talk about how our brain creates what we see. As babies we have to learn to see, and indeed have to learn to use all our senses. Just what we learn depends on our own individual experience, and, since no two people ever have exactly the same experience, no two people see themselves and their world in exactly the same way.

Babies actually start creating interpretations while they are still in the womb. Some interpretations are lost but others grow and collect new interpretations so that a whole structure of interpretations is created. It is this structure of interpretations or meanings which is what you call 'I', 'me', 'myself'. It is your sense of being a person.

If I said to you, 'Who are you?' you could describe your gender, age, nationality, work, family relationships and so on. If I then asked, 'What matters to you?' you could tell me about your interests, passions, beliefs and so on. Your answers to these questions are made up of some of the ideas which constitute your sense of being a person.

Central to your sense of being a person is how you feel about yourself. The jargon word for this is 'self-esteem' but that hides a complex set of ideas about how you care for yourself, how you value yourself and how you judge yourself. We are always trying to keep our meaning structure together and to feel good about ourselves. Whenever we feel that we have failed, done something wrong or stupid we start to feel shaky, as if we are falling apart, which is very frightening. We can try to hold ourselves together by re-interpreting what has happened to us.

We have little control over what happens to us, but we always have total control over how we interpret what happens to us. It is our interpretations which determine what we do. If British people had interpreted Dunkirk as a total defeat they would have surrendered to the Germans and all our lives would have been different. Instead, they interpreted Dunkirk as a victory of the British spirit, and from that went on to real victory.

This interpretation strengthened the idea held by many people, that it was good to be British. It also enabled people to feel good about themselves as individuals. They could think, 'I mightn't be much of a person but at least I'm British, the greatest nation in the world.'

We all need to be able to interpret some of our failures as victories. Failure can leave us with a painful sense of waste, so being able to see our failures as something we can learn from is very comforting. However, we need to be modest and realistic in our re-interpretations. If you regard everything you do as a brilliant success you will soon lose touch with reality and disaster will follow. Similarly a nation needs to be circumspect in its re-interpretation of the past. Prince Lazar's defeat at Kosova became the excuse for Milosovic to launch his war on the rest of Yugoslavia. Thanks goodness the British know how to be circumspect in celebrating their defeats.

Dorothy Rowe The Real Meaning of Money(HarperCollins).

The Express

The advantage of having an enemy

Dorothy Rowe

Everyone wants to have friends because good friends make life worth living. However, many people need to have enemies because having an enemy can give them lots of advantages.

Perkins and Co was a small firm employing 35 people. When Janice went to work there she found her fellow employees pleasant but no one was particularly friendly. They all just seemed to arrive in the morning, do their work and go home. Occasionally they chatted about the weather or last night's television but they were impossible to get to know. Janice felt lonely, but at least she went home to her husband. Mrs Fraser in accounts went home only to her cat.

Then Mr Perkins, the owner of the firm, sent around a memo. He was going to retire and his son Oliver would take over the running of the firm. Oliver had been working for some top organisation in the USA. Now he was going to make Perkins and Co a firm for the 21^st century.

Or so he said. That was in his first memo. Others followed with hints of possible redundancies but with no mention of compensation. Again by memo Oliver changed the staff's methods of working without once asking their advice. When he did venture out of his office he spoke to people in a very jolly, condescending way which put everyone's back up. He offended Mrs Fraser by calling her Gladys without first asking her permission. He even ended the firm's practice of buying tea and coffee for the staff and ordered them to provide their own.

All this in the first week, and by the end of the week the whole atmosphere of the place had changed. People had begun to talk to one another, keeping each other up-to-date with the latest of Oliver's moves. When two juniors were sacked rumours of major redundancies and a possible take-over swept the place. As the weeks passed there were more and more whispered conversations over coffee and people started having lunch together. People who had never socialised together began phoning one another at home just for a chat. It was all very scary but in some way delicious. They had all come together because now they had a common enemy.

The great advantage of a group of people having an enemy is that it strengthens the bonds between people. Friendships blossom. The threat of Hitler brought the British together in a way that nothing else ever had, and left many people looking back at the war with great nostalgia.

An enemy gives us other advantages. People who feel inadequate and unacceptable and/or believe that it is wrong to praise yourself feel a surge of confidence in their own virtues as they criticise the sins of their enemy. Before Oliver there were always grumbles about who was responsible for what. Who should have seen that the copy paper was about to run out or that a window needed repairing? Now everyone knew who was responsible. It was Oliver. They could blame him for everything.

Even better, they could put on to Oliver all the anger and resentment which they ordinarily carried around inside them. Janice was surprised at the vehemence in her voice when she talked about how inconsiderate Oliver was. She realised that she was expressing the anger she felt for her mother-in-law who was also inconsiderate and condescending to her but about whom she could not complain to her husband. Many of the women in the group saw Oliver as the representative of all the men who had treated them badly, while many of the men saw Oliver as the embodiment of their father and all the teachers who had punishing them unfairly. Mrs Fraser started to develop the belief that Oliver had selected her for special persecution. She had no family and few friends, and often felt horrendously lonely when she thought of how there was no one in the world who ever thought about her. With Oliver as her enemy she knew that at last someone somewhere was always thinking of her.

There was a deeper reason for the chorus of complaint against Oliver and this came from the belief in the Just World that many of the staff held.

Most of us are brought up to believe that we live in a Just World where, ultimately, good people are rewarded and bad people punished. All religions teach that we live in a Just World, and differ only in how they each define good and bad, rewards and punishments. Many people who would say that they are not religious feel that the Just World must be true, otherwise they would find life unendurable. Many people believe that, if they do their job properly, look after their family and friends, pay their taxes, and behave in a socially correct way, they will get their just rewards of a comfortable life, with their loved ones safe and their future assured.

Whenever a disaster occurs we ask ourselves, 'Why, in the whole scheme of things did this happen?' There are only three answers to this question - it was my fault, it was someone else's fault, it happened by chance. However, in a Just World nothing happens by chance. Believers in the Just World have to choose between, 'It was my fault' and 'It was someone else's fault.' Choosing 'It was my fault' leads to depression. Most people choose 'It was someone else's fault', and immediately look for someone to blame. One great advantage of having an enemy is that the enemy can be blamed for the failure of the Just World to deliver its deserved rewards.

Thus, in the eyes of many of the staff Oliver ceased to be a stupid man who did not know how to manage people and became the nemesis which was going to rob them of everything they had worked all their lives to achieve. The more frightened they became of Oliver the less they could see him as an ordinary man and the more as a Darth Varda figure hidden behind a mask. No one spoke to Oliver unless they absolutely had to.

Now the staff began to experience the disadvantages of having an enemy. Having an enemy is like smoking or drinking. The advantages are immediate and very pleasant, the disadvantages come later and are horrendous. The staff started to feel trapped. The only way out seemed to be to leave their jobs, but that meant losing a great deal. So they stayed trapped.

There was another way out but that required much courage and thought. They could talk to Oliver and get him to talk to them. They would then have to decide whether Oliver was really trying to harm them or was, however ineptly, trying to help them by improving the business. If it was the second they would have to agree compromises with Oliver. To do all this they would have to take responsibility for themselves.

Taking responsibility for ourselves means being able to size up a situation in terms of advantages and disadvantages and to decide what is best for us in the term. I worked in the NHS through the turbulent years when the Thatcher government tried to turn a service into a business, and so I've been through many situations like the staff at Perkins and Co were experiencing. Some of my closest friends now were colleagues who shared those turbulent times with me and I value their friendship, but I've decided that the delights of having an enemy are just not worth the trouble.

Dorothy Rowe

Dorothy Rowe's latest book Friends and Enemies will be published by HarperCollins on September 11.

The Age of Melancholy, Dan G. Blazer, Routledge,

2005, 251pp,  

Anyone interested in the history of ideas would find this book very interesting. Currently the medical model of mental illness is so all-pervasive and powerful that people born after 1950 could be led to think that this has always been the accepted explanation for mental distress. The subtitle of Dan Blazer's book is "'Major Depression' and Its Social Origins" but the book is essentially a history of the ideas in psychiatry in the twentieth century. 

Psychiatry did not come into its own until after the First World War and in time for American psychiatrists to be greatly influenced by psychoanalysis. This was the point where psychiatry began to be associated with the image of the couch, an image which bears no relationship to present day psychiatry in the USA where psychiatrists do not sit beside a couch and probe their patient's unconscious. Rather, they sit at a desk, question their patient, make a diagnosis, and write a prescription. An efficient psychiatrist can complete this in 10 to 15 minutes. 

Freud saw neurosis as the conflict between the individual and society. Blazer wrote, 'For Freud . . .a neurosis, such as melancholia, arose because of anger originally directed outward towards a lost object of social support; for example, a dead spouse. Expressed anger towards a lost object is not tolerated by society (and the internalized representation of society - the superego). Anger is thus directed inward, leading to melancholia. The conflict between the innate drives and society is inevitable, for civilization requires the sublimation, suppression, or repression of fundamental human drives.' (p.61) In a similar way the social epidemiologist Durkheim saw suicide as reflecting 'the relationship between individual and society.' (p.62) 

Social psychiatry grew out of psychoanalysis and social epidemiology. It flourished in the 1950s and 1960s. Dan Blazer describes himself as being old enough to remember 'the heyday of social psychiatry'.(p.4) He deeply regrets its passing. I would guess that Blazer wrote this book both as the expression of his regret and as a warning to his younger colleagues who believe that 'There is no primary prevention of major depression', as one of his colleagues stated.(p.4) 

Social psychiatry was concerned with prevention, and thus was involved in social activism. Blazer writes, 'Social activism rode the wave of Johnson's Great Society, which stimulated an extraordinary growth in federal social programmes. In rapid succession Congress enacted laws intended to diminish economic inequalities, stop racial discrimination, and ensure that all Americans would have access to medical care (e.g., Medicare). Mental health rhetoric and ideology paralleled the rhetoric of the Great Society and emerged from the belief that social programs could improve a deficient environment. The emphasis on community mental health services responded to that belief by stressing the empowerment of individuals and small groups at the local level. Their involvement in all decisions that affected the lives of the mentally ill should greatly improve their condition. The demand for social justice was coupled with a demand to destroy any and all barriers to individuals reaching their full potential.' (p.70) 

How very different all of this is from George Bush's America! Richard Nixon followed Lyndon Johnson as President, the ideas involved in the Great society vanished, and the anti-psychotic and antidepressant drugs created in the 1960s became the treatment of choice by psychiatrists. Blazer has little time for the medical model. He writes, 'The depressed seek to be understood, yet modern psychiatry reinterprets the emotional suffering of the depressed into its own symptomatic language, a language which must fit the procrustean bed of the DSM-IV. The psychiatrist hears what he or she wants to hear. . . . Descriptions of depression as a chemical imbalance, emphasis on depression as a disease (apart from the real you), and the focus on treating the depression without attention to the person treated (such as the 15-minute medication check) separate depression from the self who is experiencing the depression.' (pp.154, 155) 

Blazer speaks of social psychiatry as retreating rather than as being defeated by the advocates of the medical model and the use of drugs. He writes, 'Some have questioned if the investigation of the social origins of depression and other psychiatric conditions is discouraged at the federal level.' (p.86) He goes on to suggest that such discouragement comes from the problems inherent in studying social risk factors and social therapies. He does not suggest that there might be political reasons for such discouragement. 

Recently I met the American linguist Deborah Tannen at the BBC where we were to discuss her new book about the conversations between mothers and daughters. During our discussion the question of guilt arose and I said, 'The Church and mothers keep me in business.' When we were off air I discovered that Deborah was somewhat shaken by my comment. She explained, 'In America we never criticise the Church.' If this is so then it might go some way in explaining why Blazer does not bring politics into his history of American psychiatry. 

The USA is one country occupying a huge land mass and populated by many diverse groups of people. In contrast, a similarly sized land mass populated by many diverse groups - Europe - is divided into different countries with different languages. How can a President and a federal government hold the USA together? It is ideas that hold people together, and the ideas which hold America together can be summarized as 'America' and 'God'. George Bush reiterates these ideas in every speech. 'America' and 'the American people' and 'God' feature many times. The American people can be happy and successful simply by having a dream (the American Dream) and working hard to make it come true, as it certainly will. God is on America's side, and He will make sure that the American Dream always comes true. The fact that many Americans become melancholy, despairing, and depressed throws all these ideas into doubt. The way to remove this doubt is to say that Americans who are melancholy, despairing, depressed are either mad or bad. If they are bad, put them in jail, and if they are mad, give them drugs. Anyone who disagrees with this is un-American, and must be punished for this crime. Those American psychiatrists like Peter Breggin who dare to disagree are reviled. Perhaps this is why Dan Blazer has written a history of social psychiatry and left out the politics. But, if you're writing about ideas, the politics are there like the proverbial elephant in the living room. Power is the ability to get other people to accept your ideas. Politics is about power. Ideas and politics are indivisible.

Deborah Tannen You're Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation Virago Press, London, 2006.

Peter Breggin Toxic Psychiatry St Martin's Press, New York, 1991.

Dorothy Rowe 

June 29, 2006

Dorothy Rowe is a clinical psychologist and writer, best known for her work in depression, and especially for her book Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison third edition, Routledge.

Making and Breaking Children's Lives

Edited by Craig Newnes and Nick Radcliffe

This book represents a critical look at current issues in the field of child psychology. It examines current debates around mental health's reaction to societal shortcomings in bringing up children.

Among many other issues, the book investigates the concept of individualism, exploring how this allows society to see mental health problems as residing in the child. Psychiatrists are seen as agents to manage guilt and anxiety and not to explore the roots of problems. The effects of psychiatric labelling and drugging are discussed and there are four whole chapters on the issue of ADHD. These chapters question the dominance of the biomedical model and the subsequent validity and utility of ADHD as a diagnosis.

The book is split into three parts; constructing childhood, problematising children and appreciating children. Some chapters make an easier and more enjoyable read than others, my personal favourite being that of Dorothy Rowe's which explores 'ADHD: Adults fear of frightened children'. Also interesting is a chapter on empowering children and their families, whilst chapter eight makes use of a clinical vignette which really draws the reader in.

This book is both informative and thought provoking, and would interest those wishing to access critical viewpoints.

Laura Goble

Royal Shakespeare Company
Programme Notes for As You Like It
September 2005

Dorothy Rowe

Jaques, Melancholia, and the Just World  

Melancholy has always been in fashion, and not just in Elizabethan times. It might not be called melancholy, but the way it manifests itself remains much the same. The melancholic person presents himself to others as someone who is alone and weighed down by the sorrows of the world. He has seen and suffered much, and, although he professes a preference for being alone, he requires an audience to hear and to be moved by his stark vision of the world, and to sense his hidden depths and profound suffering. This way of presenting oneself is currently much favoured by advertisers of men's apparel who produce a stream of photographs of young men looking profound and melancholic, all trying to pretend that they are unaware of their own beauty and that they are the cynosure of admiring eyes. Men who are uncertain of their acceptance by others try to imitate this melancholic stance. Young women who know that they can never be the 'bubbly personality' much favoured by the media try to engage the interest of others by using a melancholic presentation of themselves which consists of smoking in an edgy, tense manner to imply that they have some serious troubles in their lives, unlike those happy, bubbly girls who don't know what sorrow is. Some young women add to this presentation the frequent and profound sigh of martyrdom, which is the price and the pride of being a melancholic. 

When we construct a stance towards the world with which we can defend ourselves from the slights and hurts that other people can inflict on us we draw on aspects of ourselves that are based on real, lived experience. No doubt the young people who affect a melancholic pose have suffered at the hands of others in ways which dealt their self-confidence a serious blow. For many people the melancholic pose is a passing fad, but for others it becomes a life-long way of being. Shakespeare tells us nothing of Jaques' early life but, whatever it was, it led him to become a man profoundly dissatisfied and disappointed with the world. 

To be disappointed we have to have had expectations, and so we can suppose that Jaques when young had high expectations of the world. This is not unusual because most children are taught that they live in a Just World where good people are rewarded and bad people punished. All religions teach this, though they differ on their definitions of good and bad, rewards and punishments. Most parents teach this in the hope that looking for a reward and fearing punishment will civilise their children. Children want to believe in the Just World because it gives them the security of living in a predictable world and the hope that, if they are good, they will be rewarded. Jaques must have been such a child, accepting his punishments and dreaming of the day when he would receive his rewards. Most of our fairy stories are about children who suffer much but then are rewarded greatly. Boys win fame and fortune and the admiration of others, while girls are rescued and loved by Prince Charming. In his book The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion the American psychologist Melvin Lerner argued that, in learning to be good, children make a contract with the world which states that, in return for giving up much of themselves in order to become good, in the future they will be rewarded for their sacrifice. For their contract to be fulfilled the world must be a Just World. Thus many children grow up believing in the Just World and that if you're good nothing bad can happen to you. 

The discovery that no amount of goodness prevents disaster has plunged many people into depression because, rather than recognise that there is no Just World, they blame themselves for the disaster they have suffered. Depression can be seen as the refusal to mourn something precious which has been lost by chance. Jaques is not depressed. He does not blame himself for the undeserved disasters that have befallen him, but he is angry that the world has not lived up to his expectations. He is good and he has not been given his just rewards. Like a plaintive child whose mother has failed to live up to his expectations Jaques invites Orlando, 'Will you sit with me and we two will rail against our mistress the world, and all our misery?'

Determined to preserve his belief in the Just World Jaques aims to 'Cleanse the foul body of th' infected world.' To do this he must have

liberty

Withal, as large a charter as the wind

To blow on whom I please.

Believing that he is good, Jaques feels that he has the right to criticise those who do not live up to his high standards. His companions refuse to take him as seriously as he takes himself. They laugh at him. Some laugh because at some point in their lives they have realised that justice is a concept created by human beings and not an inherent guiding principle of the natural world which is, in fact, indifferent to our existence. Such people know that within human society justice is fallible, and with luck they can escape the punishments they deserve and reap some undeserved rewards. Other people laugh at him because they still believe in the Just World and do not want to give it up. They want to avoid having to take account of Jaques' stark vision of the world and the futility of a life that leads to 'mere oblivion'. Many people will believe in anything, however lacking in logic or reason, in order to preserve their belief in the Just World. Duke Senior, rather than lose his belief in the Just World, insists that 'sweet are the uses of adversity' and finds 'good in everything'. His dispute with Jaques is not over whether the Just World exists but whether any imbalance in the Just World is tilted more to the bad than the good. 

The stories which we find satisfactory are those which assure us of the existence of the Just World. If, as in tragedies, the good suffer and die, then, somehow, their deaths ensure that the living are rewarded in some way and the balance of the Just World is restored. Comedies end happily with the justice of the Just World being properly applied. In As You Like It the champion of the Just World himself, Jaques sums up its working. The wicked Duke Frederick sees his wickedness and repents, while Duke Senior, Orlando, Oliver, Silvius and Touchstone all receive their just rewards. 

For Jaques himself the reward of a loving wife would not be large enough to match his own estimation of his virtue. He needs a greater reward, that of martyrdom - the lone figure etched against the sky. In Western movies the lone hero rides off into the sunset: in Elizabethan dramas he seeks an 'abandoned cave'. Whichever, the martyr knows that he is held in our astounded, admiring eyes because he has restored the justice of the Just World and all is well.

ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY: THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE 

Autumn 2006 Pericles and The Winter's Tale 

Programme Notes 

A Kind of Fear 

In his book A Grief Observed C.S.Lewis wrote, 'No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning.' Grief is indeed a kind of fear. We have lost, not just someone dear to us, but part of the structure of meaning which gives us our sense of being a person, that which we call I, me, myself. Events have shown us that where once there was a presence there is now an absence, and so a significant part of the meanings we have about ourselves and our life no longer fit what is happening. Whenever we make such a discovery we feel very afraid because what we experience is a feeling that our very self is crumbling and disappearing. Time goes by and the process of grieving allows us to construct other ideas about ourselves and our life, but, just as the healing processes of our body leave a scar, so the healing processes of our meaning structure create a scar in the form of a lifelong sadness which no amount of happiness can ever eradicate completely.  

Grief is never simple. In grief we question the actions of ourselves and of others, and we ask the world, 'Why me?', that is, 'Why in the whole scheme of things has this happened?' To this question there are only three possible answers, 'It was my fault', 'It was someone else's fault', 'It happened by chance'. It takes courage to accept the third answer, for it means that we are helpless to prevent other chance disasters. Most people prefer some form of the belief in the Just World where nothing happens by chance, bad people are inevitably punished, and good people inevitably rewarded. With this belief we can comfort ourselves with, 'If I'm good nothing bad can happen to me.'  

But bad things do happen to good people. Pericles is a good man and, despite the disasters he suffers, he has the hope that his reward will come when he reclaims his daughter Marina. When told of her death he can no longer believe that he is a man deserving his rewards. He puts on the sackcloth of self-blame and so creates a kind of explanation for the disasters he has suffered that will give some coherence to his meaning structure. However, the idea that he deserves the punishment of his daughter's death means that he turns against himself, hates himself, and thus become depressed. In the same way children who strive hard to be good are likely to blame themselves for any disaster that strikes their family. They become depressed, and sometimes die. The boy Mamillius

'Fastened and fixed the shame on't himself;

 

Threw off his spirit, his appetite, his sleep,

And downright languished.'

In asking the question, 'Why me?' a person can choose the alternative, 'It was someone else's fault'. In some disasters it clearly is someone else's fault. Hermione has no doubt about this. She does not let her desire to be good override her sense of justice. At first she is confused by Leontes' betrayal, 'You speak a language I understand not', but she goes on to insist that 

'The crown and comfort of my life, your favour,

I do give lost, for I do feel it gone,

But know not how it went.' 

Interpreting a disaster in this realistic way leads not to depression but to anger. Anger will often keep us alive in the direst of circumstances for it gives us strength and the hope of revenge.  

Many people prefer to choose the interpretation, 'It was someone else's fault', despite the complete lack of evidence that this is so. Such a choice leads to paranoia. Leontes' belief that he has lost Hermione is a fantasy grown out of his long friendship with Polixenes. A friendship between two men is rarely uncompetitive. It seems that when Leontes compares himself with Polixenes he sees himself as the lesser of the two, and from that he assumes that Hermione will inevitably prefer Polixenes to him. He sees her lost to him, and blames Polixenes and Hermione for the disaster which he thinks has befallen him. Paranoia, like depression, is a defence against the fear of being wiped out, annihilated, as a person. While the depressed person can turn everything that happens into evidence of his own wickedness, so the paranoid person can turn everything that happens into evidence of the persecution he is suffering. Hermione is helpless to persuade Leontes otherwise. 

Only when she faints does his pity overwhelm his paranoia and he sees that, 'I have too much believed my own suspicion.' But it is too late. Hermione dies. Commentators on The Winter's Tale often remark on the abruptness of the change from tragedy from comedy, but it could be argued that what binds the two halves together is the presence in the plot of one of our favourite fantasies, that of, 'They'll be sorry when I've gone.' Most of us as children have salved our pride (ie, mended our dented meaning structure) by telling ourselves the story of how our family and friends who have belittled and humiliated us will be racked with guilt and grief after our noble and courageous death. The only problem with this fantasy is that we want to be there to see them suffer in just the way Tom Sawyer saw his relatives and friends suffer after his supposed death. Did Paulina spirit the live Hermione away and together they planned the appropriate revenge? Whether Shakespeare had this fantasy in mind or not, it would certainly be an association which many in the audience would make. 

We all know that we can suffer losses for which there can be no recompense and over which we will grieve for the rest of our lives. We know that grief means pain and fear. Pericles, Thaisa and Marina will always mourn the time they lost when they could have been together. Not only will Leontes and Hermione always mourn Mamillius, they will always mourn the unquestioned certainty of the love which they had for each other before Leontes betrayed Hermione. To live with the knowledge of endless grief we need to be told that at least sometimes goodness is rewarded and people live happily ever after. Such stories give us the hope that, even though we mightn't deserve it, we could be lucky. 

The third edition of Dorothy Rowe's book Beyond Fear will be published by HarperCollins in March 2007.

Psychologies April issue 2007

THE SIBLING BOND

My sister and I have never really got on. I was born on her sixth birthday, which, I can say with great feeling, was not a good career move for me. She has never forgiven me, and there is nothing I have ever possessed about which she cannot be jealous. A few years ago she was staying with me and discovered that my post arrived at 7.30 in the morning. 'I have to wait till the afternoon for mine!' she cried in that familiar tone of "It's not fair!" and I had the equally familiar feeling of anxiety and helplessness. As ever she expected me to make amends. What could I do? Tell the postman not to call?

Having to share whatever is on offer, siblings learn to compete. Many say this competition made them stronger. But we tend to overlook just how far it can shape our character. We probably spend more time with our sibling in the first years of life than with almost anyone else. And while our parents may have nurtured and looked after us, it was our sibling who we played with, joked with and argued with - the one who knew our secrets and could either protect us or turn against us in a moment's notice. No other relationship is quite like it.
While psychologists know a lot about how our parents influence our personalities, they have largely ignored sibling relationships, which can be hard to categorise. Sibling attachments may be warm and loving, but often they're made up of equal parts of affection and irritation, even anger, and sometimes rivalry. Sometimes we feel nothing but hatred, or cold resentment. Yet they have an enormous influence on whom we become.

This is true wherever we come in the birth order. Older children may feel displaced by a younger sister or brother, but a younger child can spend a lifetime feeling overshadowed by their older sibling. Despite this, we still find our siblings endlessly fascinating. I've seen May, the youngest of four, on a chill morning and dressed only in a nappy, crawl across a freezing patio to reach her playing siblings. Sometimes they played with her and made a fuss of her, at others they ignored her or yelled at her if she touched their toys. At 18 months May had already formed a strong attachment to her siblings. Like an inveterate gambler, she lived in hope that her siblings would reward her. Their mixture of rewards and punishments led May to form the strongest kind of attachment, what psychologists call anxious attachment; a varying mixture of love and fear. Older siblings who want their younger siblings to love and admire them can also form anxious attachment. Edith, at 48, told me how upset she was because her younger sister refused to talk to her. 'My sister is the most important person in my life,' says Edith. 'But I don't know if that's how she feels about me.' She is still experiencing the anxious attachment that most siblings have with one another.

This combination of love and fear explains the complex feelings we have about our siblings. We may love them and feel close to them, yet we can also experience intense hatred and envy, sometimes culminating in violent behaviour. My friend Ruth told me how, when she was born, her four-year-old sister, jealous of this infant usurper, put her on the fire. Fortunately her mother saw what was going on and rescued her. Most siblings have comparable, if less extreme, examples.

Where causes this ambivalence? The common explanation is sibling rivalry, yet what we really fear, and are trying to protect ourselves from, is annihilation as a person. We all know what this feels like. It's the sick, panicked feeling we experience when we discover that we've made a mess of things, or someone rejects us, or we been used or ignored or humiliated or betrayed. We feel we're shattering, crumbling, even disappearing.

All of us, every moment of our lives, are engaged in defending our sense of identity. As small children our sense of being a person is constantly under threat because we know so little of the world. A child feels this threat most acutely from a sibling - whether it's a new baby or an older sister or brother. And it's heightened by the knowledge that our sibling knows us well enough to know what will annihilate us as a person. Children will cruelly tease, criticise, scorn, humiliate, trick and betray the sibling who has frustrated them or has something they want, whether it's a toy or the biggest share of their parents' love. Having your big brother steal and destroy the little shells you were treasuring can be more devastating than failing an exam or knowing you've let down a work colleague. Yet it's often difficult to talk about incidents with siblings that we found distressing because they can sound so trivial.
Threatened with being annihilated as a person, we defend ourselves. We may deflect the attack, perhaps by forming an alliance with another sibling. We might use our position in the family to our advantage. As the oldest child we can claim to be in charge. As the youngest we can demand to be looked after.

We also learn ways of gaining attention or affection or admiration. We might become the drama queen, or the one who cossets the others, or the one with the greatest daring-do. When a ploy works, we use it again, and again, until it becomes part of us, something we do without thinking. It's these habits and skills that we carry into adult life and use unthinkingly in our relationships with people who remind us of our siblings, until we're made to realise what we're doing.

Not all siblings defend themselves by carving out a separate role for themselves. Instead, some siblings become extremely close, almost inseparable, forming an impenetrable bond. When siblings discover that their parents are so absorbed in themselves that they have little interest in the children, the siblings cling to one another. Even if they marry or have children of their own, they may still feel that their sibling remains the most important person in their life. While this may be effective when we are growing up, the danger is that we may not experience a sense of ourselves as an individual. And our closeness may prevent us from forming other strong relationships. Nancy, 38, describes her brother Pete, 36, as her 'soul mate', but acknowledges that 'we know and 'get' each other so well that other people seem difficult or shallow.' They are both single, with no significant love affairs in their past. 'It's hard for anyone to live up to Pete - if I can have this closeness with him, why settle for anything less?'

Alternatively, children may adapt to the roles their parents give them. A hard-pressed mother may reward her oldest child for taking responsibility in looking after the younger children, or the last-born can find himself treated as the baby of the family. These roles can continue to bring benefits as well as burdens later in life - if you are the responsible one, for example, you get to be in control, but you have to work very hard. If you're the baby, you're excused responsibility but may feel patronised or not taken seriously. We don't always spot the downsides because we have so much vested in our existing experience.

If you have grown up identifying completely with your sibling, or playing a certain role, it may also affect your adult relationships with others. You might dislike this, but if you haven't tried to change it, it's likely that you find some rewards in the situation. You may still feel that childhood fear that, if you upset your family, they'll turn you out of the house. Perhaps you prefer to keep up a pretence that everything is fine rather than speak truthfully and provoke a terrible scene. Or perhaps you haven't given these things much thought, because the prospect of change is frightening.

Identify what it is that is encouraging you to follow the habitual patterns and ask yourself if you are missing out more than you are gaining. If the answer is yes, you may need to step away from your old roles and relationships, and re-evaluate how helpful they are to you now. Nancy and Pete have discussed 'seeing less of each other. It's lazy in a way - while we have this easy relationship it stops us making an effort with anyone else.'

As adults, we can learn to recognise when we're reacting to others the way we respond to our siblings, and can adjust that behaviour. But when we're with our siblings we can still find ourselves behaving just as we did when we were children. This is partly because of siblings memories differ. Memory isn't a filing cabinet. It's a construction. We try to construct the kind of memories with which we can live. At family reunions Philip, a 34-year-old barrister, makes jokes about his younger sister Kitty being 'the bad one'. He refuses to recognise that she is a responsible, hard-working single mum. Their strict parents had labelled Kitty 'the bad one' because she was lively and outgoing while Philip was 'the good one'. All of Philip's childhood memories are in these terms. He can't afford to see how unfairly Kitty was treated by their parents because then he might remember how he'd always feared that his parents didn't love him, and depending on being good or 'better than' Kitty to win their favour. That's why he was so good. Yet his division of himself and Kitty as 'good' and 'bad' has caused a lifelong rift between them.

There's no simple recipe for how to bridge a gap between yourself and your sibling. If your sibling needs to see the past differently from you it's best if you accept that there's almost nothing you can do.

Yet sometimes a family trauma can create an opportunity to renew our relationship, as such events may bring us closer together. Or some siblings are able to put aside their differences and become friends by talking. But you need to start the conversation by telling your siblings about your affection for them. You need to make clear from the outset that you want to have a conversation different from all those you've had in the past. No recriminations and none of the usual teasing which is a defence against revealing tender feelings. Have the courage to put yourself in a vulnerable position, and, if you fail, comfort yourself with the thought that at least you've tried. However, the chances are that you'll find that your siblings, like you, want to know the joy of sharing a long history with a dearest friend.

Dorothy Rowe My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend: The Making and Breaking of Sibling Bonds Routledge, April 18, 2007.




 FAMILY HISTORY
Are you still reacting to others the way you behaved with your siblings? Dr Dorothy Rowe suggests asking yourself the following questions to find out if you're still playing your childhood role:

1. Do you feel you have to be in charge because you're more responsible than the others, or see yourself as the baby, needing to be looked after?

3. Do you compete with colleagues to win the approval of your boss/parent?

4. In your family were you 'the good one' or 'the bad one'? Do you feel that others still see you this way? Are you still trying to fill your role because that's what people expect of you?

5. Do you see your relationships with contemporaries as power struggles that you must win, else people will despise you? Or do you expect that in a power struggle you'll always lose, just as you always lost to your siblings?

6. Do you measure everyone you meet against your siblings and find others lacking?

Whenever we persist in doing something that doesn't benefit us, there is something in what we're doing which gives us a reward, even if we don't acknowledge it. To change you have to ask yourself, 'What advantages do I get from doing this?' For instance, measuring every stranger against your family has the advantage of being able to feel that you belong to the best family in the world. Then you can comfort yourself with, 'I know I'm inadequate but I belong to a fantastic family.' Staying so close to siblings may feel stifling, but it means we don't have to make the same effort to find other friends.

When you've identified the advantages you must ask, 'Am I prepared to give up these advantages?' If your answer is 'yes', you then have to accept that change means uncertainty and that can be scary. Yet without facing this fear you can never change.

Psychologies Magazine February 2007

Happiness

Feeling happy is wonderful. We can be busy doing something, often something quite mundane, and suddenly we feel happy. If we ask ourselves, 'Why do I feel happy right now?' the answer is that what we're doing gives us a sense of being part of everything that exists, and that our existence has significance. Ask a gardener or a bird watcher why they do what they do and they are likely to say that these activities give them a sense of general well being and brings them into harmony with nature.

It is pointless making happiness our goal in life. It's not a thing which we can achieve but an emotion which may or may not arise in a particular situation. All our emotions are our interpretations of our situation in terms of whether we see ourselves as a person as being safe (the positive emotions such as feeling happy, contented, satisfied) or whether we see ourselves as being in danger (the negative emotions such as feeling angry, anxious, afraid, guilty, envious). We feel safe when we see our situation as being much as we predicted it would be and one which confirms us as being valuable and significant: we feel in danger when we see our situation as being significantly different from what we expected and showing us that we are worthless and insignificant. Thus we can feel immensely happy just having a drink and a laugh with close friends while winning a competition for a prestigious job can leave us feeling miserable and anxious.

Emotions are by-products of what we do. We can say to ourselves that we want to be happy, and we can do all the things that we think will make us happy, but, if these things don't lead to us feeling secure and validated as a person, the feeling of happiness doesn't arise. We cannot will any emotion into being. We can act as if we are happy, as a great many people do, but pretending to be happy doesn't lead to being happy any more than pretending to be in love leads to being in love. Our emotions are our own personal truths concerning how secure or insecure in ourselves we feel. We can lie to ourselves and tell ourselves that we're happy, but lying to yourself always leads to disaster. Counting your blessings can make you aware of how fortunate you are, but, if you have lost something of enormous significance to you, then a multitude of blessings won't fill the hole you have inside you. Sooner or later your sadness will break through and overwhelm you. This can be devastating, especially if you believe that to be a worthwhile person you have to be happy all the time

We can construct a way of living whereby we are happy for much of the time, but we can't do this if we don't know what matters to us most. Everyone says they want to be happy, but for many people being happy isn't their top priority. You might prefer to be good than happy. Do you say to yourself, 'I'd love to go to that party but, if I don't visit my parents that weekend I'll be unbearably guilty'? You might prefer to be right than happy. Do you say to yourself, 'I know I'm right and I'll show other people that I am'? You might prefer to aim for things that other people seem to value rather than at the things that you value. Do you strive to impress people with your important job, or how attractive and popular you are, and then feel a failure because you aren't happy all the time?

 We all want to have good relationships with other people and to achieve, but for each of us one of those two is the more important to us. If relationships is your top priority (you're a People Person) then to be happy you must have a large number of satisfactory friendships always present in your life, and if achievement is your top priority (you're a What Have I Achieved Today Person) then to be happy you must be able to achieve many of your goals. Alas, relationships always involve loss, and striving for goals always involves failures, so it is foolish to think that you can be happy all the time.

 In life most things happen by chance. We can't be happy all the time. But in those moments when we feel secure and significant we know that supreme happiness - joy.

February 2006

When Someone Close to You Has Depression

'I can't get through to you!'  

This is the desperate cry of someone who's trying to care for a person who's depressed - a lover, a child, a parent, a friend. The one who's caring reaches out to hold and comfort the person who's suffering the torments of depression, and what she finds is the wall, invisible but unyielding and impenetrable, that surrounds the person she loves. Psychiatrists say that depression is an illness, but why should an ill person resist all help and exclude all love? 

When we're physically ill we try to get better. Some people might want to stay ill to get compensation for an injury or to avoid doing something they don't want to do, but usually we seek help and act on the advice we are given. But try to help a depressed person and you walk straight into a wall. You suggest they see a doctor, and they refuse. You suggest a walk in the sunshine, a nice meal, something to cheer them up, and the person is mute or else proceeds to show you what an idiot you are for suggesting such a stupid thing. If you press them, they turn on you and say horrible things and you can't help feeling hurt. You try to give them a hug, but they go rigid or else, worse, push you away. Then some visitors arrive and the depressed person either races into his room and slams the door, or suddenly becomes his usual social self, but only until the visitors leave and he sinks back into silence and doesn't answer when you speak. 

Alice found it hard to contain her anger when Julian would chat to visitors but not to her. However, one day she noticed his face just when the doorbell rang. He looked stricken, but then his effort to compose his features into a welcoming smile was clearly visible. Depressed people often put on a face to face the day. 

You know that the person is suffering and you want to help, but you find yourself becoming increasingly frustrated. Naturally your frustration turns to anger. You push the thought, 'Pull yourself together!' from your mind, but now you feel guilty for being so unkind. Guilt is fear of punishment, but along with that comes another kind of fear, the fear that you aren't the person you thought yourself to be. You always thought of yourself as being helpful and competent but now the depressed person is showing you that you're useless. When he does talk, he talks about how terrible the world is, how hurtful and untrustworthy people are. You find yourself agreeing, and with that comes the fear that you too are sinking into a mire of despair.

Tessa always prided herself on her capacity for being sympathetic and helpful. She was sure that she could help her friend Carol over her depression, but somehow everything she suggested to Carol seemed to get thrown back in her face. Tessa alternated between feeling annoyed with Carol and feeling useless. She started to worry that that Carol was dragging her down. 

This is what most people feel when they're with a depressed person. I've run workshops on depression in countries around the world and with all kinds of different people. I always ask them, 'How do you feel when you're with a depressed person?' and even the ones who are trained therapists describe the reaction I've described here. This process is quite different from what we feel when we're with someone with a physical illness, and it shows that we all know that depression isn't a physical illness. 

To understand just what depression is we need to understand something important about ourselves. 

­The Sense of Being a Person 

What you call 'I', 'me', 'myself' is your sense of being a person. It's made up of your ideas about who you are, what you life was, is, and will be, and what the world is. For you to feel secure all these ideas have to be a fairly good reflection of what is actually going on. Alas, sometimes we encounter a terrible disaster and discover that we've made a major error. Can you bear to remember how you felt that moment when you discovered that your life wasn't what you thought it was? Perhaps you found that the most important person in your life had died, or had betrayed you. Perhaps the career where you were so confident you'd achieve was no longer open to you. Perhaps you'd grown up believing that if you're good nothing bad can happen to you, and one day something bad happened to you. Can you bear to remember how you started to feel yourself falling apart, crumbling, even disappearing? Of course what was falling apart were your ideas, but it felt like it was your very self which was shattering. You were utterly terrified.  

If you value yourself and have lots of self-confidence, in this situation you can say to yourself, 'This is terrible but I've got through bad experiences in the past and I'll get through this one.' But if you don't value yourself and feel completely helpless you find yourself in danger of being annihilated as a person. It will be that you don't exist, have never existed. You're utterly terrified. You cast around for something that will save you, for some explanation that will put you and everything back together again. If you've been brought up to be a good person, that is, to believe that as you are you're not good enough and you have to work hard to be good, you know that to be good you must blame yourself for everything that goes wrong. So you say to yourself, 'It's my fault this disaster happened.' Everything falls back into place. You're safe. Safe in the prison of depression. 

When you blame yourself for the disaster that has befallen you, you turn against yourself and hate yourself. Immediately you become frightened of other people who will see how bad you are and punish you. So you cut yourself off from other people. You look to your past and all you see there is evidence of how bad you've always been. There's no comfort there, so you cut yourself off from your past. You look to your future and all that lies there is punishment for your wickedness. You have to cut yourself off from society and from nature because you are too wicked to be part of them. You've cut yourself off from every aspect of your life. This is what depression is, being alone in a prison. You've created your prison unconsciously and swiftly. 

Every depressed person has their own image of the prison. It may be a deep pit, an endless black tunnel, a dungeon without a key, an infinite desert, many images but all with the same meaning, the person is alone in a prison whose walls exclude all love and comfort. 

Jim had no time for 'soul searching'. He believed that if you were decent, kind and honest and did a good job you'd have a successful life. Then the firm he worked for went bust and there was no money for redundancy payments. All his friends assured him he'd find another job, but Jim couldn't get himself together. His world had fallen apart. He couldn't help believing that it was all his fault. If he'd worked harder, seen what was happening, he could have prevented what had happened. Then he started to think that he'd gone mad. There was a glass wall all around him, not clear glass but all smeary. He could see vague figures outside the glass. They were waving, trying to talk to him, but their voices came through as a murmur. It was horrible, yet somehow it was safe. 

Depressed people will admit that, terrible though their prison is, they don't want to leave it because they feel safe there. The prison is a defence which holds the person together until he can feel strong enough to face the turmoil that lies outside. This is why it's a waste of your time to offer help other than loving support until the person is ready to change and find their way out of their prison. In her wonderful book Sunbathing in the Rain the poet Gwyneth Lewis told the story of how she became depressed and how she discovered that depression is a defence which can heal, if only we are wise enough to let it. Gwyneth wrote, 'My mind and body had delivered me a breathing space which I would never consciously have permitted myself. They had given me a chance to relinquish old ideas and experiences which had been exhausting me and time to adjust to the new facts about my life.' She went on, 'Depression is a very kind disorder, and will return only if you refuse to learn the lessons it has to teach you.' Long term research shows that people treated only with antidepressants are very likely to continue to have periods of depression but people who are able to work out, perhaps with the aid of a counsellor, how their ideas had led them, as Jim's did, into the prison of depression they are able to change their ideas and not get depressed again.  

When Jim managed to give up his cherished belief that if you're good nothing bad can happen to you and he accepted that we live in a world where things happen by chance, he left the prison of depression forever. He decided to be good because it pleased him to be good and not because he expected the mythical reward of being safe. 

Every depressed person has suffered a loss. It may be a loss which others can see, or it may be a very private loss. The lesson which depression teaches is that you have to acknowledge and accept your loss. 

How to Help 

Don't say, 'Pull yourself together' or 'snap out of it.' If the depressed person could, he would. Don't use 'tough love' or challenge the person's thoughts and actions. He's busy punishing himself. He doesn't need you to join in. 

Don't try to take the person's depression away. The depression is a defence which the person will hang on to until he feels he's strong enough to face the chaos outside the prison. Accept that being depressed is what the person needs to do.  

Be there ready to talk if the person wants to talk, be silent when he wants to be silent. Giving advice is a waste of time, but you can ask, 'Would you like to go for a walk?' If he does accept don't say, 'Why couldn't you do this yesterday?' 

Depression prevents the immune system from working properly and as a result depressed people often become physically ill. Make sure that the person has access to a healthy, ordinary diet but don't kid yourself that some special diet will make him better. The person has to start to care about himself before he can seek the benefits of good food and exercise.

A depressed person will not seek help until he reaches a point where he cannot bear to be depressed any longer. One person told me, 'I got so low the only way was up.' Another said, 'I couldn't stand the pain any longer,' and another, 'I just got so bored I had to change.' 

Accept that if the person does learn from his depression and not get depressed again he'll no longer be the same person he was before. If he changes are you prepared to change in ways which you can't predict? Loved ones can keep a depressed person depressed because they aren't prepared to let him change. 

When the depressed person wants to talk, be prepared to talk things over, even if you find the things he wants to talk about challenge your way of thinking. It may be your relationship which you need to discuss. If it's a sibling or a parent who is depressed the person may not want to raise certain matters which he feels would worry you. Talking to a stranger is often better than talking to a loved one. 

A cognitive therapist can help a person to look critically at the way he habitually thinks, but often the person needs explore his childhood with a therapist and consider the conclusions he drew as a child but has never reassessed. For instance, small children often blame themselves when a parent dies or an adult sexually or physically abuses them.

Looking After Yourself 

You can feel very lonely when you're looking after someone who's depressed. At times you'll feel drained and tired. Don't spend all your time with the depressed person. Go out, enjoy yourself, rest and recuperate. 

Gwyneth Lewis advised, 'No one has the right to tell another human being how they should feel. However, if that person is taking it out on you, being critical, vicious, blaming you for what isn't your fault, they should be called to account.' 'Tough love' doesn't help, but do say firmly to the person, 'I can accept your feelings but I can't accept being spoken to in that way. You must not take your bad feelings out on me.' When Julian Clary was talking to Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs he told her how he at first couldn't handle his success because he believed he didn't deserve to be successful. He became depressed and behaved very badly. He said that when he told his agent that he wouldn't travel in a maroon limo his agent should have said to him, 'Don't be silly,' but, alas, the agent didn't.  

Don't feel that you are responsible for making the person better. To leave the prison of depression the person has to go on a journey of self-discovery. All you need to do is be a good companion on the journey.  

Dorothy Rowe Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison Routledge, third edition.

How to Help Someone Who Is Depressed.

Accept that the person is depressed and know that eventually this will come to an end.

1. Don't give advice but sometimes say, 'Would you like to . . . ?'
2. Try to show through your actions as well as your words that you value the person.
3. Accept the person's feelings but be firm if he behaves badly.
4. Accept that to end this depression the person has to change, and so you'll also have to change.  

How to Help Yourself When Someone Close to You Is Depressed.

1. Remember that your job is not to cure the person but to give support in the hope that the person will decide to change.
2. Try not to take it personally when the person
   1. Shuts you out
   2. Pulls away from your embrace
   3. Is rude and angry with you
   4. When visitors come the person either hides in his room or seemingly cheers up, chats to the visitors, and sinks back into silence when they leave
3. Accept help from others so you can have time to yourself and mix with cheerful people.
4. Remember that if you don't look after yourself you won't be able to look after anyone else.

www.psychologies.co.uk

May 2006

How Do You Build Self-Confidence?

1. What is self-confidence? What do we mean by it, and why are some people more confident than others?

When we say that we have confidence in someone we mean that we trust that person. Self-confidence means being able to trust yourself. Being able to trust yourself means that you can rely upon yourself because you know yourself. Self-confidence is based on self-knowledge. If we know ourselves we have a realistic idea of who we are and what we can achieve. Self-confidence isn't vanity, because when we are vain we over-value our talents and ignore our weaknesses. When we are self-confident we recognize without false modesty what our strengths are, and we recognize our weaknesses without feeling ashamed and guilty. We accept our limitations without feeling that we have to apologize to others about them. Many women have great difficulty in doing this because they have been told that to be acceptable to others they must always be very modest about their achievements and must apologize for whatever they do. Thus many women prefer to lack self-confidence rather than risk being rejected.  
 
2. Is self-confidence the same as self-esteem?

Self-esteem is a jargon word which lumps together the very complex ideas involved in how we feel about ourselves. These complex ideas concern how much affection we have for ourselves, how much we look after ourselves, how much we value ourselves, on what measures we judge ourselves, and how harshly we judge ourselves. Thus you might take very good physical care of yourself, and value yourself for doing an important job well, but you see being attractive of prime importance and judge yourself harshly on this.

How we feel about ourselves plays a very important part in every decision we make. Thus if you take good care of yourself you're likely to decide to spend a significant amount of money on healthy food and a subscription to a gym, but, because you judge all women in terms of how attractive they are, you always feel inferior when you're with women you see as being very attractive. The only way to get out of this trap is to decide that being attractive isn't the most important attribute that women can have.

3. If your parents or teachers have been over-critical, can you develop self-confidence as an adult?

Like all babies we come into the world full of unself-conscious self-confidence but parents and teachers take that away from us because they tell us that, as we are, we are not acceptable, and that we have to work hard in order to be good in the way that our parents and teachers define good. Because teaching a child to be good starts so early in a child's life that we can grow up feeling that we actually are intrinsically unacceptable, and that there's nothing we can do about it except to work endlessly to try to be acceptable. What we all have to learn is that feeling unacceptable is no more than an idea which we created early in our life, and, as we created it, we are free to change it. If you're too frightened ever to think critically about the way you were brought up you stop yourself from being able to do this.

4. Is it mostly other people (parents, colleagues, partners) who undermine one's self-confidence? Or are we most likely to undermine our own self-confidence?

When we are little we take what our parents and teachers say to us and make it our own. Thus, if you have parents and teachers who define a 'good girl' as someone who is always obedient, respectful, unselfish and non-competitive, you have a choice of taking or not taking these ideas inside yourself and making them your own. If you fear that if you're rebellious your parents won't love you, you accept your parents' ideas and monitor your own behaviour even when your parents aren't there to see what you do. Thus you undermine your own self-confidence just in the way your parents undermined it when you were little.

5. It has been said that self-confidence is impossible if you don't accept yourself. What does that mean? How can we change?

When we believe that we are intrinsically unacceptable and have to work hard to be good we cannot accept ourselves simply because we see ourselves as being intrinsically and unchangeably flawed. This is a terrible way to live because we can never have the peace of living in the present, enjoying what is going on around us. Because we see ourselves as unacceptable we live in the past, feeling guilty about our many failures to be good, and in the future, worrying about the punishment which will come for our failures. We undermine ourselves and thus ensure that we never achieve all that we have the ability to achieve. We become experts in guilt and shame. We can change all this by understanding that the way our brain and body work means that all we can ever know are the ideas which our brain/mind creates as we interact with the world around us. This means that believing that we're unacceptable is just an idea, and we are free to change that idea. We all need to understand that we are not intrinsically bad and unacceptable any more than we are intrinsically perfect. We are all ordinary, with talents and strengths, limitations and weaknesses.