Dorothy Rowe

Life - colour supplement

December 10, 2000

Happiness

Am I happy? Why can't I be happy? Shouldn't I be happier than I am? These are the questions which nowadays plague us. In past centuries people worried about dying or whether they would go to heaven, but now being happy is all that most people want. Until the therapists came along and told us to talk about our feelings people rarely talked about being happy or unhappy. In most of the years I have been alive - I was born in 1930 - most people were unhappy and many depressed, but they kept their feelings to themselves. Nowadays we talk about happiness, and our lack of it, all the time.

To me this is a particular feature of the baby boomers who are now reaching their fifties and those younger than them. Every generation reaches adulthood holding three ideas -

• They are the first generation to discover sex.
• They are more intelligent and more modern than previous generations.
• All previous generations had a much easier life than they do.

These ideas are delusions. Sex has never been lost, so no one has to discover it. Despite universal education people are not getting any brighter and each generation in its own time is modern. All generations suffer. Generations just differ in the kind of suffering they have to endure.

We like to think that suffering ennobles us and gives us distinction, and so we like to think that previous generations had happier lives than we do. When Oliver James said in his Britain on the Couch that in the 1950s people were happier than they are today he was talking sentimental nonsense. The fifties were very tough and for many of us just plain horrible. I know because I was there. I would much rather be in my twenties now than, as I was, in my twenties in the fifties.

In those years women's magazines were devoted to instructing women how to make their husbands happy. There was no advice about how a woman could make herself happy except by being an devoted wife and mother. Now magazines overflow with advice about how we can spend every moment of our lives achieving happiness. Unhappiness has become unacceptable. We can feel so overwhelmed by the endless bad news the media bring us that we turn away from any mention of misery. People have always striven to lead decent lives and to bear their own suffering well, but in past centuries they looked for their rewards for their decency and suffering in heaven. In our irreligious times many people expect their reward for their decency and suffering to be happiness here and now. Moreover, they believe that if they are happy they will be seen as successful. Thus the word 'sad', which refers to the appropriate emotion to follow loss or disappointment, is used derogatively. 'He's a sad guy. He ought to get a life' is a major condemnation. Depression, once a state of mind of which to be ashamed, is less stigmatised, but it is discussed endlessly and described as a vast epidemic sweeping the planet, while the words 'depressed' and 'depression' are applied to any dysphoric feeling such as unhappiness, disappointment, lack of enthusiasm, even irritability.

Over the years that happiness and unhappiness emerged from the shadows and became the major topics of discussion and anxiety I had to deal with happiness and unhappiness in my personal life and in my professional life as a clinical psychologist. I became an expert in my own personal happiness, and, while I cannot tell in concrete detail how you can become happy, I can certainly tell you how to stop yourself from being happy. If you can practise not stopping yourself from being happy there is a good chance that you will be happy.

I spent the first forty years of my life being unhappy. There were bursts of happiness, usually associated with my son or with places I visited, but there was a leaden quality to my life, as if it were a permanent rainy day. I became happy very slowly and did not realise that this was happening until one summer day in 1975 when I was walking across an ordinary stretch of grass I looked down and saw little white daisies rising up from the grass as if they were floating and dancing. I had been so busy establishing and then heading a new department of clinical psychology in Lincolnshire I had not noticed that I was changing. The 1970s were what I now call the golden age of clinical psychology in the UK. Then we were not yet ground down by managers who cared about money but not about people, and when there was money available for us to study the new therapeutic techniques which were being developed and which changed us as much as they changed our clients.

My unhappiness must have started not long after I was born to a depressed mother. From recent detailed research on the interaction between depressed mothers and their newborn babies we know that the baby is keenly aware that the mother does not respond to the baby in the way that the baby wants and needs. The baby tries to get the mother's attention but either she does not respond or she responds briefly but cannot maintain looking at and talking to the baby who finally looks away from the mother and becomes distressed. After repeated failures to attract the mother's attention the baby gives up trying.

This was the pattern not just of my babyhood but my childhood. I loved my mother and wanted to gain her loving attention but I could never please her. In no uncertain terms she let me know that I was fat, ugly and lazy and that I irritated her with my cough. The fact that I had a lung disease, now diagnosed as bronchiectasis, which required me to cough in order to breathe and which caused periods of intense physical weakness passed her by. Unfortunately, there are many people like my mother who are so wrapped up in themselves that they are quite unable to give their children the unconditional love which all children need in order to keep that sense of being valuable and acceptable with which they are born. Like all small children deprived of unconditional love, I could explain my situation in only one way - there was something about me which was wrong, bad, unacceptable. The fault was in my essence and could not be eradicated.

My friend Jack as a child had decided, as many children do, that the disappointments, losses and betrayals he had suffered at the hands of adults were his own fault because he was not good enough. As an adult he presented himself as cool and self-confident, but inside was the worm of self-doubt. However, he made life much harder for himself because he habitually thought in particular ways. He could never admit that he was wrong in anything because doing that made him feel weak and vulnerable, yet at the same time he criticised himself harshly and endlessly. He was sure that he did not deserve to be successful and therefore happy. Like many people Jack was a confirmed pessimist, believing that it is better to expect little and avoid the pain of disappointment. Moreover, he believed that worrying about something prevented it happening. He would complain to me that, with his success in his chosen field, he ought to be happy, but, as I would point out to him, thinking as he did, how could he be happy?

The turning point in my life came when the intellectual knowledge I had as a psychologist, that I actually could eradicate the worm of self-doubt and instead value and accept myself, became knowledge of the heart and not just the head. A frequent theme in my books concerns why people refuse to let such knowledge into their hearts. If you have built you whole life on doubting your self-worth, then changing to valuing and accepting yourself means that everything in your life will change - how you think, how you get on with people, how you make every decision. Change creates uncertainty, and uncertainty creates fear. Frightened of change, many people choose to stay with the devil they know, and so they remain unhappy.

If you do decide to change you have to set out on a journey which only you can make. There are no maps. Gurus like me can only tell you about their journey, and perhaps you might be helped by that. We can always learn from other people's stories. As a psychologist I had the great privilege of listening to many different stories, and, as I did, I learned a great deal about my clients but I learned even more about myself. The question which fascinated me was not why my client had become depressed, or obsessional, or psychotic - as their story unfolded that was easy to see - but why I had not fallen into any of those dread states.

Many of my clients had had childhood far worse than mine but equally many had had childhoods little different from mine. My mother was by no means unique. In my first job in England as I listened to my clients I became aware that they had life-long ideas which were profoundly different from mine. I wanted to research this. Fortunately for me, a major change in the way research in psychology was done was underway in the 1960s. Instead of having to study large groups of people it was now becoming scientifically respectable to study individuals, which was what I wanted to do. One of my colleagues, Don Bannister, had just brought back from the USA a new psychological theory and research method - George Kelly's Personal Construct Theory and repertory grids - which I could use. For ten years I did academic research and wrote academic papers, but burying my results in academic journals helped no one. I began to write books which everyone could read.

George Kelly had not discovered something new but had simply re-packaged what the ancient Greek philosopher Epictatus had said, 'It is not things in themselves which trouble us but our opinion of things.' It is not what happens to you which leads you to be happy or unhappy but how you interpret what happens to you. It was my interpretations of what had happened to me which had led to me being a psychologist and not to being a patient in a psychiatric clinic. As a small child I realised that, if I were to survive, I had to discover why my mother behaved as she did. I did not hear the word 'psychologist' until I was fifteen, but I had been one all those years.

I certainly had not heard of Epictatus but I did know what Epictatus knew. I could easily see that whatever happened my mother would interpret it pessimistically, my father would interpret it optimistically, while I had my own interpretation and my sister had hers. How we interpreted this event determined what each of us next did. I was very fortunate in that I was not being taught by my parents that there was only one right way to interpret everything. If we grow up believing that the world is exactly as we see it and that we are fixed as the person we are we soon get into difficulties because events keep disconfirming our expectations. If you want to be very unhappy spend your life insisting that you are right and everyone else is wrong.

Many of us are forced by circumstances to live and work in ways which bring us little joy. We need to protect ourselves against a sense of unending misery by putting into every day some little activity which we enjoy. If we can concentrate on carrying out that activity and not think about matters outside what we are doing we create the circumstances where happiness can arise. As a child I would go for a swim, and I knew that if I concentrated on the shape of the next wave and how I would catch if and if I forgot about the miseries of home and school while I was swimming I would feel happy. Later, as a psychologist I came to see that happiness is an emotion like all other emotions. We cannot will an emotion into being. You can be angry only when you are angry. You can be happy only when you are happy.

Of course, you can lie to yourself about what you are feeling. You can tell yourself that you are not angry when you are, or that you are happy when you are not, but unfortunately lying to yourself always leads to disaster. The adrenaline of unrecognised anger leads to a physical shakiness which can feel like fear, and long-term repressed anger can play a significant part in physical illnesses such as severe headaches and digestive disorders. Telling yourself you are happy when you are not leaves you feeling empty inside and feeling that you are a fraud.

Whenever we get angry or get frightened or hate someone or feel shame or guilt it is extremely important to ask ourselves whether the strength of the emotion we feel is an appropriate response to what has happened. Getting wildly angry over something you would ordinarily find mildly irritating shows that there is something amiss in your life. Happiness comes in different strengths from mild contentment to ecstatic joy. Instead of enjoying whatever strength of happiness they feel some people destroy this feeling with the worry that they ought to be happier. They forget that we cannot physically sustain any strong emotion for any length of time, and that a lasting sense of mild contentment makes life so much easier.

Similarly many people are confused about what degree of unhappiness they ought to feel and for how long they should be unhappy. Unhappiness, like happiness, is an emotion, and it arises from how we interpret an event. Often people will seek to shame us for being insufficiently distressed, as my cat-loving friend often seek to do to me when a moggy dies. At the same time people will criticise us for not getting over some disaster quickly enough. Fearing unhappiness, many people fail to recognise that there are losses which we can never get completely over, even though the pain might lessen with time. There are losses for which there can be no replacement or recompense. We can replace a television set or even a flooded house, but we cannot replace someone we love who had died.

I have heard a professor of psychiatry declare that the appropriate length of time to mourn one's parents is two years. Any longer mourning is the symptom of depression known as 'irrational grief'. So much nonsense is talked about depression that it is no wonder that people get confused about what is unhappiness and what is depression. Yet the two states are very distinct. In our society it is easy to become depressed because our culture teaches us that to be good we have to accept responsibility for whatever goes wrong. Someone bumps into in the street and you say, 'Sorry.' Through the incompetence of the managers your firm goes bust, and you, a worker, feel that you are to blame. If you want to turn your unhappiness into depression all that you have to do is to blame yourself for the disaster that has befallen you. You will know when you are depressed because you will feel that you are utterly alone, locked in some kind of prison. When you are unhappy, no matter how great your suffering, other people can comfort you and you can comfort yourself, but when you are depressed you feel nothing of the comfort other people give you and you treat yourself as your own worst enemy.

Depression, unhappiness and happiness can be understood and dealt with by understanding how we each interpret ourselves and our world. People can be much happier now than they were when I was young because we can know so much more now about ourselves and because we can be prepared to discuss these matter amongst ourselves, sharing and changing our ideas. I was lucky enough to be able to do this, and slowly I found that the accompanying feeling to my life was changing from unhappiness to happiness. I wish I could do this for every unhappy person, but it is something we each have to do for ourselves. If we want to, we can.

Dorothy Rowe

Dorothy Rowe's latest book Friends and Enemies is published by HarperCollins.

24th October 1997

Love in the Line of Fire

If you're following the Sondra Locke story do not be distracted by the term "to floss". It is not, as I thought, a new form of sexual titillation but merely a form of dental hygiene. Her story of her life with Clint Eastwood is more important than that. It's the story of revenge, and every story of revenge tells us something about ourselves.

Clint, a man of few words, used to indicate his state of sexual desire by asking Sondra as she prepared for bed, "Sweetie, did you floss?" How romantic! Sondra, like all women who fall in love with silent men, thought Clint's silences indicated that he was thinking profound thoughts. She was wrong. Silent men are silent because they have nothing to say. If they do think, it's not about the great love they have for the woman at their side nor is it about the meaning of life. They are merely thinking about themselves.

A woman in love with such a man projects on to his wall of silence all her own hopes and wishes. She wants a warm, loving relationship and she hopes that he does too. She creates a picture of herself and him, their life together, their future and their world, and believes that this picture is real. Everything he does she tries to fit into this picture, but his actions don't always make a good fit. So she has to make allowances. For instance, Clint was faddy about his food and used to make his own concoctions of vitamins and amino acids. When these concoctions didn't turn out the way he wanted he flew into a rage. She wrote, "Slowly, I was getting more familiar with Clint's temper which seemed at first harmless and funny."

That's what women do when their man's behaviour doesn't fit their picture. They call his behaviour quaint and funny, but such behaviour can easily go beyond anything which could be called joke.

Clint, of course, had his picture of himself and his world, and whenever reality refused to conform to his picture Clint got very angry. That's the big problem for rich, powerful men. They seem to be able to make a great deal of reality conform to their picture, and so they come to expect that every bit of reality will do so, even sliding doors and television remote controls. Clint, it seems, has never grasped the truth that reality never conforms to our wishes. When things go as we want we're merely being lucky.

Clint's picture of his world and Sondra's picture of hers had little in common. However, Clint and Sondra could get along together for as long as there were parts of the two pictures which complemented each other. Clint's picture included a sexually attractive woman who did what she was told, and Sondra's picture included herself as a sexually attractive woman devoted solely to Clint's welfare. But this couldn't last. Sondra was having increasing difficulty in fitting his behaviour into her picture, while Clint's picture couldn't encompass Sondra's desire to direct her own films rather than co-star in his.

Clint's method of maintaining his picture was to dump the non-compliant woman and get another. But for Sondra there was no simple way she could save her picture. Too many of her assumptions had been disconfirmed. Her picture fell apart.

This is perhaps the worst experience anyone can have, when you discover that there is a serious discrepancy between what you thought your life was and what it actually is. I would guess that anyone old enough to read this article has gone through this experience at least once.

When you discover that you have made a serious error of judgement in one area of your life you immediately question every judgement you have ever made. Everything becomes uncertain. You feel yourself falling apart, shattering, crumbling, disappearing. You feel absolute terror.

That is, you feel such terror if you don't know how we all operate as human beings. Then it can seem that you are falling into madness. However, if you do know how we all operate, the experience is still unpleasant but you know it isn't madness and that it will come to an end.

We are, in essence, meaning creating creatures. Every moment of our lives, from the moment when our brain at about 20 months gestation becomes capable of creating meaning right through to the moment when our brain dies, we are creating meaning, interpreting, making sense. Of course the sense we make isn't always sensible, as when we're drunk or dreaming, but all we ever know and all we can ever know are the interpretations we create. We are so constructed that we cannot know reality directly, but we make pictures of what we think reality is. The sum total of these pictures - our perceptions, ideas, opinions, conclusions, beliefs - give us our sense of identity. You are the structured collection of all the meanings you have ever created.

If nothing happens to surprise us we can come to think that our picture of reality is reality itself. However, when we make an error of judgement our picture no longer fits reality. It falls apart, and, because we are our picture, we feel ourselves falling apart. One woman, on discovering that her ex-husband had betrayed her yet again, ripped up his clothes, broke his pictures and framed photographs, destroyed every possession of his she could find, and then piled the pieces into what she called "a big sculpture" of her ex-husband's life. She said, "I wanted to make a terrible mess like he'd made a mess of me. I wanted a representation of the devastation he'd caused me."

Of course, when we have made a major error of judgement, our picture needs to fall apart so we can construct another picture which might be a better representation of reality.

Errors of judgement can arise in many different circumstances. You can miscount the number of steps and fall down a flight of stairs. Your picture of yourself might be of a healthy person, and then you become seriously ill. However, most serious errors of judgement arise from being betrayed by someone on whom we depend.

As we feel ourselves falling apart we ask ourselves, "Why has this happened to me?" This question, "Why in the whole scheme of things has this happened?" has only three possible answers - it was someone else's fault, it was my fault and it happened by chance.

We don't like the answer "It happened by chance". That makes life far too uncertain and scary. Sondra wasn't likely to say to herself, "Oh, well it's just one of those things that happen." Wisely she didn't choose the answer "It was my fault" because that answer provides the doorway into the prison of depression, a most horrible experience, worse than any physical illness, and a complete waste of time unless from that experience you learn the wisdom of being kind to yourself and never get depressed again. Sondra chose the third answer, "It was someone else's fault," and blamed Clint.

The problem about choosing "It was someone else's fault" is that you then have to do something about it. In some situations the law provides a remedy. Where it does not revenge becomes the answer.

Whatever the revenge, the person is saying, "How dare you do this to me!", and behind that statement is personal pride. In the discovery of our error of judgement our pride has taken a terrible battering. We have to do something which will reassert our pride in ourselves. What we do depends on our wisdom and opportunity.

Stupid people choose a form of revenge which leads on to further and further disasters. Witness Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Israel. Murdering the betrayer does not enhance the life of the betrayed. What is needed is something which will cause the betrayer the maximum amount of discomfort and pain but is still within the law. If it can also amuse the onlookers it's an extra bonus. Remember how Sarah Graham-Moon lifted the hearts of the nation when she cut for four inches off the left sleeves of each of her husband's Saville Row suits and delivered his vintage wine to village doorsteps.

However, going public with your revenge, however effective, can lead to difficulties. Sarah Moon might have been applauded by the public but her family deplored her outrageous behaviour. Hence many people keep their revenge a secret between them and their betrayer. For instance, if the betrayer wants to believe that you treasure the memories of the two of you together, pack up all the artefacts associated with that time and send them to him with a note saying, "I don't want this rubbish cluttering up my home."

Writing a book about the betrayer allows the betrayed to have a very public revenge while appearing to do a public service. Sondra is saying that she wants to tell the truth so that we'll no longer be hoodwinked by such a hypocrite. Of course, some people won't want to be disillusioned with Clint, and others will think that a woman should suffer in silence, and most won't take sides but just enjoy a good gossip. Though, perhaps, her story will cause some people to stop and think about why we seek revenge and ask whether it is really necessary. If betrayal and errors of judgement do wipe you out, who is this you who knows that you've been wiped out and then seeks revenge? Perhaps all we need to know is how to adjust the picture.

Dorothy Rowe Wanting Everything HarperCollins.

8th October 1997

It's the Rich Wot Get the Pressure

The rich are selfish. Those who become philanthropists do so only when they feel the need to consider the future of their soul and their reputation. Will Hutton in his book The State We're In blamed the privileged elite for the parlous state of the British economy. He saw the cure for the country's ills as the privileged people giving up their privileges. The privileged have never done so without a gun pointing at their heads. If they are annihilated, another group soon takes their place. Russian royalty was quickly succeeded by the Communist elite.

The rich have never seen it necessary to be concerned about the welfare of the non-rich because the rich could always keep themselves healthy and safe, no matter what was happening to the rest of the population. However, we now live in a world where not even the greatest wealth can ensure good health and safety.

The list of the dangers from which wealth is no protection runs to three pages in my book The Real Meaning of Money. Here are just a few.

First, the danger from the environment. There's the hole in the ozone layer, which leads to an increase in melanoma, the fatal form of skin cancer which affects the rich more than the poor. Earthquakes are expected in Tokyo and Los Angeles. As the fires following the Kobe earthquake showed, a lack of preparation for such a disaster causes even greater disasters. The whole of the world is affected by pollution. Much of the vast industrial pollution of eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union is moving westward.

Then there's terrorism. Terrorists aim to effect destruction in places that represent wealth and power. Hence the IRA bombed Canary Wharf and Harrods, not Job Centres. In cities where the poor are very poor and the rich are very rich, the poor, seeing the State as the enemy, are at war with the city. As Johannesburg and Moscow show, no amount of high security enclaves and body guards can keep people safe.

And lastly, health. Asthma used to be comparatively rare disease. Now it is common, equally prevalent amongst the rich and the poor, and linked to pollution. Rich Victorians died of tuberculosis because it is a highly infectious, droplet borne disease. Now a drug-resistant form of the disease is spreading rapidly through the world and, according to the World Health Organization, killing more people than at any time in history. The diseases of syphilis, cholera, diphtheria and polio, once thought to have been defeated, have now re-appeared due to the breakdown of the economies in eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union. A drug-resistant form of malaria is increasing and extending its geographical distribution with global warming. A new hepatitis virus, Hepatitis G, is now being carried by a million people in Britain and can be transmitted through blood transfusions and blood products, as is Hepatitis C which can lead to cirrhosis or cancer of the liver. New viruses will continue to appear while people have exotic holidays, foreign travel and sexual freedom, thus increasing the risk of becoming infected with viruses living in small populations. New diseases like ebola and CJD have crossed from one species to another. The potentially fatal diseases of salmonella and listeria remain a threat to anyone who eats eggs, chicken and soft cheeses.

Male fertility, as measured by sperm count and abnormality, is declining at a rate which threatens future generations. Even extremely low levels of radiation can be very harmful. Everyone in Europe lives within 500 miles of a nuclear reactor.

To this list can now be added a drunken chauffeur.

The ultimate cause of these dangers is the despoiling of the planet in the search for riches and the great divide between the rich and poor. The rich need to discover that the only form of selfishness which can ensure health and safety is to be unselfish.

2nd September 1997

Being Good isn't Good for the Family

The news of Princess Diana's death shocked me, but what shocked me most was that on the day of their mother's death her sons had to show that they were good boys by putting on their formal suits, going to church and listening to a service where no mention was made of their mother even in the prayers. Sadly, this shows that the House of Windsor, like the Bourbons, the last of French royalty, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

It hardly seems possible that, from the work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in the seventies on the stages of grief to the present work of Susie Orbach on emotional literacy, anybody in the UK could not know how important it is to grieve and to be allowed to grieve. This visit to church illustrates not only how ignorant the Royal Family is of what it is to be human but also what little understanding they have of what non-royal people think. The Royals might have seen in Prince William a young man demonstrating the lack of emotion considered necessary for a future king, but what many people saw was an act of child abuse meriting a call to the NSPCC.

Anyone who has suffered a sudden, unexpected tragedy knows what a fierce and strange experience it is. Your first reaction is one of utter disbelief. This cannot be happening. All your surroundings, even the most familiar ones, become strange. You don't know whether you are in a dream from which you can't wake or whether your life is in ruins. This sense of strangeness is compounded if you are in unfamiliar circumstances which make it hard for you to be sure that it is not a dream, or if the people around you are behaving in ways which you feel is inappropriate if this terrible tragedy has in fact happened. Imagine your confusion if you are in a church, a place whose whole purpose is to help people come to terms with death, and the people there, one of whom has told you of the tragedy, act as if the tragedy has not happened and, indeed, as if the person you have lost has never existed. You might even think that you are going mad.

Some people hold on to this disbelief on the edge of madness to ward of the next experience, that of knowing that what is happening isn't a dream. Once you let yourself know that, the pain starts. It is terrible physical pain, the kind of pain that makes you scream and howl. There's no aspirin that dulls this pain. Then you need around you people who can tolerate this dreadful sound, and can also tolerate your tears. These are tears that need to be shed because with their shedding can come some ease from pain. These tears, so science now tells us, are life preserving. The tears we shed when peeling onions are little more than water, but the tears we shed in emotion take away various chemicals which, if retained, would impede the efficient functioning of the auto-immune system which maintains our health. The death rate amongst widowers in the twelve months following their bereavement is significantly higher than that for widows. Not a good advertisement for the stiff upper lip.

Next comes the fear, the fear we all feel when we discover that there is a huge discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it actually is. You feel that your whole self is disintegrating, shattering, disappearing. This is when you need to be held because someone's arms around you can actually hold your self together when you feel your self falling apart. On the way home from church a good father would have put his arms around his boys instead of just counting his fingers. Despite Diana's many demonstrations, Charles still hasn't learnt the wisdom of holding one another in times of grief.

These stages of grief, terrible though they are, have to be gone through to get to the most difficult stage, which is to reconstruct yourself and your life. However, shouting, screaming, crying, wanting to be held are not what the Royal Family regard as good behaviour. Good behaviour from children is behaviour which does not upset the adults, and Diana's boys are already very good. After the service the Rev Robert Sloan, the Church of Scotland minister at Crathie, said that the princes "were remarkable. They were very good indeed, despite what must have been going through their minds and their hearts."

Being good will from now on dominate the princes' lives even more, because, while they have lost a mother, they have gained a saint. Living up to the ideals of the Royal Family will be hard enough, but living up to the ideals which people will impose on Saint Diana will be impossible. Let's hope that the princes have learned and will always remember what their mother showed them, that the best kind of goodness comes from knowing and accepting what you think and feel.

4th January 1997

Friends of the Family

My friend Lou has a talent for friendship. If you are her friend you are indeed blessed. Everything she says and does makes you feel valued and important. I tease her about how she is always taking bowls of hot soup to her ailing friends, but I know that if I became ill everything she did for me would not be motivated by guilt or the need to appear virtuous but by friendship.

The Christmas before last I spent at Lou's home. Of those in our party only two were related, Lou and her niece to whom Lou is not an aunt or a surrogate mother but a best friend. For the rest of us no family Christmas was possible as our families were scattered across the globe. So our Christmas was a friendship Christmas.

And very pleasant it was. No one was pointedly not talking to someone else. No one shouted insults. No one was sobbing in a darkened room. No one was martyring herself in the kitchen, and no one was sloping off to the pub to avoid his in-laws. We made paper hats, told stories, ate marvellous food, drank excellent wine and laughed a lot.

But the question has to be asked, How could this diverse group of people have a happy Christmas when there wasn't a family value in sight?

Over the past few years politicians, religious leaders and moral pundits have been preaching the Gospel of Family Values. However, the upholders of family values never say what they actually are. It is assumed that everyone knows. I didn't, so I gave the matter a great deal of thought.

My years of working as a clinical psychologist have made me privy to the secrets of hundreds of families. Among clients, relatives, friends and acquaintances there are families whom I have known for going on five decades. As I reviewed all the families I knew I looked for the operation of values which are peculiar only to families. These values are not found in other groups, say, of friends or colleagues or sporting teams. I managed to isolate four such values.

The first value is one held by the parent in relation to his or her child and expressed as, "You are my possession and I can do with you what I want."

The operation of this value can be clearly seen in the millions of poor families around the world where the children are sent out to work as soon as they are old enough to be useful. It is this family value which supplies the children whose tiny fingers weave carpets or whose small bodies are abused in prostitution and pornography.

This particular family value enjoys world wide support. If it did not, if we all regarded children as persons in their own right and not as objects to be used to meet the adults' needs, we would organize our economies so that no child grew up in poverty. To deprive a child of food, shelter, good health and education would be unthinkable.

This value can operate in much more subtle ways than that of sending a child out to work. In many families in developed countries the child is given the task of meeting the parents' unfulfilled desires.

Recently I had dinner with a very successful woman engineer. I admired her achievements enormously, but she told me that they brought her little joy. She said, "All I ever wanted was to marry and have six children."

She went on to tell me how she had been the eldest of six and how her mother's interest an approval of her diminished with the birth of each successive child. Like most children deprived of a parent's love she searched for ways to gain her mother's attention and regard. Her mother often made clear her regret that she had never had an education and a career, so her daughter determined to do this for her.

Perhaps her mother now boasts of her daughter's achievements and feels fulfilled. Unhappily, many other children assume a lifelong task imposed by parents who want to be seen by society as being a Good Parent. The child scavenging on a rubbish tip to help feed his family can have some respite but being a Credit to Your Parents is a task for which your best is never enough.

The second family value is one which operates between siblings and can be expressed as, "Your task in life is to make up to me for what your existence has deprived me of."

This is the value which I have felt most keenly, born as I was on my sister's sixth birthday. My parents gave my sister no help in dealing with the shock of losing her position as the only child and so she decided to look for me for recompense. The only way I could recompense her and restore her to her former state would be to die, so whatever I might do for her can never be enough.

I might bemoan my fate, but no sibling position is safe from the imposition of this value. Eldest siblings can suffer as their younger siblings demand recompense for the way the parents gave the eldest privileges denied the younger. Sisters denied the privileges of being a boy demand recompense from their brothers, and brothers denied the privilege of being born a girl demand recompense from their sisters. Out of the jealousies of siblings arises that special family value, "You owe me!"

If as they enter adulthood siblings do not together seek to make themselves aware of the functioning of this value in their lives, all the anger, resentment, bitterness, jealousy and envy aroused in childhood can never be resolved, thus preventing the siblings from ever becoming friends. Some such siblings break off all contact with their family while others, feeling bound by the family rule that relatives must keep in touch, continue the battles of childhood, fought now on the battlegrounds of Christmas dinners, weddings, funerals, christenings and the reading of the parents' will.

The third family value is applied to all family members and is, "You have been given a role in the family which is your for life. You cannot escape it."

The greatest praise my mother could ever give to anyone was, "He is always the same." This is a very popular way of valuing people because people who stay the same make us feel safe. We can predict what they will do. If people change we have to change how we think about them and this is unsettling. So we like people to stay the same, and in many families the third value ensures that they do.

If, when you're small, the family decide that you are the Stupid One, little is expected of you when you go to school and when you fail everyone feels reassured. If, in later life, you decide to make up for your inadequate education your family's jokes about your lack of intelligence and their amazement that you can even contemplate getting an education can ensure that you lack the confidence to try.

Or you might have been designated the Fat One and fed accordingly. Once away from you might decide to slim, but each time you visit home your mother produces a large chocolate cake and says, "I've made it just for you."

Perhaps worst of all is to be designated the Competent One. Many able children accept this role in the hope of gaining their family's love, but once you have accepted it you begin a life of servitude. You are expected to be always strong, helpful and available. Never disclose to your family that sometimes you feel weak, vulnerable and distressed, for if you do they will either ignore you or bully you until you shut up and go back to looking after them.

The fourth family value applies to all the family and is the basis on which every family member must assess other people. It is, "Anyone who isn't family isn't important."

Of recent years the media have taken to bestowing with approval the term "close-knit" to families and communities who have suffered a disaster. It certainly seems safer to belong to a family or community where the people are independent and self-reliant. However, "close-knit" families can be those who divided the human race into two groups, family members who matter and the rest who don't.

Children born into families like this are likely to find it very difficult to mix with people who are not family. Even worse, if there are family members who cause them distress, and in close families the knives can go in deep, the children, even when adult, may be unable to envisage the possibility of living outside the family. Their mental map of their world is that life is possible only within the family space. Beyond that lie dragons and the terrors of the deep.

It is this family value, when "family" is extended to include those of the same religion or nationality, that makes war, conflict, terrorism, torture and persecution possible.

Of the families I knew who adhered to some or all of these four values none could be described as happy. Many these families would say they loved one another, but love alone does not promote happiness, especially when "I love you" has the corollary "Therefore you must do what I want". The only love which promotes happiness is that which says, "I love you and wish you well, even if that ·well' does not include me."

The happy families I know see that loving someone includes always treating that person with respect and dignity. The parents do not see their children as possessions but as persons in their own right towards whom the parents have a responsibility, not to mould into some pre-determined pattern, but to make possible the unfolding of the child's talents and potentialities.

Children learn most, not from what parents tell them, but from what they see their parents do. When parents treat each child with the generosity, respect and dignity that a person requires in order to feel valued and wanted the children learn to treat one another in the same way. They will still squabble, but they will lay the basis of a life long friendship.

When parents see each child as an individual they know that the child is not some fixed type but someone who has his or her own way of seeing things and who is always in the process of change. Such parents know that they need to be flexible, patient, tolerant, truthful, loyal and always prepared to co-operate with the child in order to find suitable compromises. There will, of course, be times when the parents' view of things must prevail, but allowing your child sometimes to win enables the child to lose without feeling vanquished.

Happy families are not closed in upon themselves, with few friends and fearful of the world outside. They are hospitable, kind, and interested in people and all that the world has to offer.

Loving, wishing the other person well, treating people as people, not objects, treating people with generosity, respect and dignity, valuing friendship, accepting the other person's point of view, being flexible, patient, tolerant, truthful, loyal, co-operative, hospitable, kind, interested in people and events are all wonderful values but they are not values specific only to happy families. Indeed, these are the values of friendship. If only we all aspired not to family values but to the values of friendship, how much happier our world would be!

Dorothy Rowe is an Australian psychologist and writer living London. Her books on how we make sense of our lives and our world have brought comfort and enlightenment to a great many people. They include The Successful Self, Beyond Fear, Wanting Everything, Time on Our Side and Dorothy Rowe's Guide to Life (HarperCollins).

31st August 1996

Liam Gallagher wants
to smash his brother's head in with a guitar

When Liam Gallagher stormed out of the passenger lounge at Heathrow 15 minutes before his flight to America he was doing what all brothers do - fight. And he was doing it in the way that families do - in the most public place, causing the most embarrassment and inconvenience to his nearest and dearest. Family fights usually erupt at wedding, christenings and funerals.

Liam hadn't hidden his feelings towards brother Noel. He's reported as saying of his brother and guitars, "I ***ing hate that tw*t there, I ***ing hate him. And one day I hope I can smash **** out of him with a ****ing Rickenbacker right on his head."

Liam is 23 and Noel? . In fifteen years time will they be giving interviews and talking about past misunderstandings but now they're older and wiser and the best of friends? Or will the hatred deepen and the rift widen?

Liam and Noel will find that if they don't patch up their differences and at least appear to get along they'll be criticised by those people who believe that families should stick together. The media praise a family when they call it "close", and make no mention of the fact that in a close family the knives go in deep, much more deeply than in those families where self sufficiency is the rule.

I've always thought that the old adage "Blood is thicker than water" is stupid. Certainly there's a never ending responsibility for those people we choose to create, our children, but parents and siblings we acquire by chance. If these people cause us pain and problems which, through our best efforts we cannot ameliorate, why stay around?

Reason might dictate this, but the messages we carry from childhood are deep inside us and very strong. You can put space between you and your sibs, but, wherever you go, they go too.

This mightn't apply if your sibs were adult when you were a child or for some reason were not physically present. However, if you grew up with your sibs you have many memories which aren't in words but in touch, taste, sound and smell, memories of being little in a world of giants. All your memories, whether describable or indescribable, have implications which are neither good nor bad but both. That's the problems of sibs. You love them and you hate them.

If you're the first born you begin life as an only child. People speak of lonely onlies, but the great advantage is, as my son, an only, said, "You don't have to share." When you're an only all that you're given is yours, and you can feel secure. When your sib is born, that security is gone. The rivalry between the sister Olivia de Haviland and Joan Fontaine started the moment Joan was born. Olivia's father wasn't interested in her so for 18 months she enjoyed the undivided attention of her mother. Then Joan arrived. According to their biographer, Charles Higham, this was when Olivia developed her technique, later used to great advantage in films, of creating heroic crying fits which got her all the attention of the adults around her.

The snapshots of A.S. Byatt in the first two years of her life are of a smiling, cheerful child. Then her sister, Margaret Drabble, arrived and little Antonia did not smile again. She recognised the rivalry she had with her sister and in later life said that she had seen such rivalry in every family she knew.

I've watched my friends, wise in the ways of children, trying to deal with this situation as it arose for their children and seen that, no matter how wise, careful and prepared the parents are, they cannot protect the older child from the shock of discovering that they are no longer the centre of their parents' attention and that life does not stay the same.

We're all born wanting everything. In the womb we get everything, so why shouldn't this continue? Learning that life doesn't give us everything and doesn't owe us anything is a lesson many people refuse to learn. They make their life a misery, but they prefer that to giving up the illusion that they can have everything.

Small children are nowhere near coming to terms with the fact that they can't have everything they want, and so they greet the arrival of another baby with rage and jealousy. This rage and jealousy can extend to things which the child knows intellectually, but not emotionally, could never possibly be his. One five year old boy I know told his mother how angry he was because his baby sister would one day have breasts like their mother and he never would. I do hope he has now abandoned this idea, otherwise he might one day be a rich and famous pop singer and be able to afford to have breasts grafted on. Michael Jackson has expended much money, effort and pain in getting to look like his sisters. One of them, LaToya, is angry that he "stole her face", yet, even though she has publicly criticised him, she hasn't tried to change her appearance so that she doesn't look like him. He still has something which she wants.

This rage and jealousy can last a life time and be provoked by the most extraordinary things. I was born on my sister's sixth birthday which, I can say with great feeling, was not a good career move for me. My sister has never forgiven me, and there is nothing I have ever possessed or chanced upon 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, sibs learn to compete. Many people describe this competition as extremely helpful to them. They say it made them stronger, pushed them in directions which proved to be successful. In saying this they tend to overlook just how painful the competition was at the time. In competing for a space of your own, or for the parents' attention and goods, children can be vicious with one another.

The fights, the pain, the suffering can be over small things and sound petty in the telling. But these small things can represent what matters most to all of us. All of us, every moment of our lives, are engaged in defending our sense of identity. If we don't do this other people will trample over us and, perhaps not physically killing us, annihilate our sense of being a person. As small children our sense of being a person is constantly under threat because we know so little of the world, we make so many mistakes, and other, older people can bamboozle us and us their power over us to humiliate and hurt us. Having your big brother steal and destroy the little shells you were treasuring can be more devastating than having your opera bomb or the critics slate your acting. Sibs are very good at knowing just what matters to you most. Olivia de Haviland as a child tried to ignore her sister's existence, something Joan resented very much. "To Olivia's fury, Joan would lash back by exercising a junior sister's prerogative in imitating her elder sibling: a wispy shadow, she would trail behind her, mimicking her."

Children, thus attacked, fight back. When the adults ban physical fighting the children fight in other ways, competing wherever competition is possible. The only way to avoid such competition is to withdraw from that particular activity. Thus many sibs grow up with greatly different abilities and interests. The three Attenborough brothers avoided a great deal of competition by becoming interested in different things. David took to biology, geology and climbing, Richard to acting, and John, the youngest, to aeroplanes. When during the war David had gone into the Navy and Richard into the RAF John felt that, despite his interest in flying, only the Army had been left for him.

Competing can become an ingrained habit which persists even when the need is well outgrown. When Lyn Barber interviewed John Selwyn Gummer, Minister for the Environment, and his younger brother Peter, now a Lord and Chairman of the Opera House, she noticed how John did most of the talking, often butted in when she was asking Peter questions, and, no matter what anecdote Peter told, John capped it with one of his own. John apparently still feels the need to keep his young brother in his place.

Many first borns feel that the compensation for losing the heaven of being the only child is that they have life long domination over their younger sibs. No doubt this is one of the causes of Liam's anger with his brother. Yet, by storming out as he did, Liam showed himself to be one of those younger sibs who might rage against the older sib's domination, but, at the same time, wants the older sib to carry the responsibility that he himself is not prepared to shoulder. Liam has left Noel with the responsibility of making the Oasis tour a success.

Even when the younger sib is prepared to give up the protection of the older sib relationships will still have their strains when they both enter the same field and, in the nature of the game, have to compete. The older sib can have a head start, but what happens when the younger starts to catch up?

Biographies of successful sibs usually show an ambitious parent who pushed the children and, in many cases, used the rivalry between the children as a way of spurring them to greater effort. This was certainly the case for the Drabble girls. Mrs Drabble planned that they should go to Cambridge and so they did. Antonia was a hard act to follow, getting a scholarship to Cambridge and then a First. Margaret got a scholarship too, but then a starred First. Margaret was first to write a novel and her novels have outshone Antonia's until fairly recently when the weight and depth of Antonia's work has been properly appreciated.

For some sibs the only connection between them is their competition, but for others there is a more complex closeness. Interviewers of Julian and Andrew Lloyd-Webber come up with different theories about the degree of jealousy Julian feels towards Andrew and about the degree of help Andrew has given Julian, but one thing comes through clearly, the feeling of loss Julian experienced when at school they went their separate ways. They both attended Westminster Prep where Andrew was known as Lloyd-Webber One and Julian Lloyd-Webber Two, something certain to keep the younger boy in his place. Yet when Andrew went to board at Westminster Great School on a scholarship and Julian, not so academically inclined, did not go on to join him Julian felt deserted. Thirty five years later he could say, "I was ten and I missed him terribly."

Getting the right balance between independence and closeness is a dilemma we each have to deal with every day. Independence can be lonely, but dependence can inhibit and stunt. L.P.Hartley in his novel Eustace and Hilda showed how a younger brother can become so dependent on his older sister that he cannot operate without her. Such dependence usually grows out of necessity but can continue after the need has gone.

The tragedy of a closeness that becomes a symbiosis is seen in the lives of Richard and Karen Carpenter. They too had pushy, perfectionist parents, but Karen looked for her support and guidance to Richard to such an extent that she could not conceive of living without him. After her death Richard described her as being "unnaturally possessive" of him, but actually he maintained the conditions whereby she could be possessive of him. He believed that "Karen and I were put here to make music." If being with your sister is God's purpose for your life, how can you insist that you both be independent?

Notions about God's purposes usually derive from parents, but it is hard to disentangle the effects parents have on children from the effects children have on one another. Parents often claim that they have brought up each child in the same way, but this is never the case. Parents often impose a different role on each child. This is the pretty one. This is the brainy one. That one's artistic. Once a role is imposed it's hard to shake it off. Our nearest and dearest don't like us to change because that means they have to change in the way they see us. Parents take their feelings out differently on each child. Murry Wilson, father of the Beach Boys Brian, Dennis and Carl, "beat the hell out" of Brian, and Dennis even more, but Carl hardly at all.

How do sibs over the years manage to put aside their differences and become friends? By talking. Antonia Byatt has described how she and her sister Margaret spend time together talking about the past, about their lives and the lives of their parents and grandparents. They see and accept that each has her own version of their shared history and how, as the years pass, their versions of their history develop and change. There must have been many occasions when each of them, knowing that the other would accept it, said, "Sorry." I envy them this. My sister is one of those rare people, someone who has never, in her whole life, done anything which warrants this word "sorry", and if I try to say that she has hurt me she flies into a rage. I find this sad. It must be nice to have a sibling who is also a best friend.

Perhaps Liam and Noel will ponder these two possible outcomes and take Bob Hoskins advice, "It's good to talk."

1st September 1999

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MEAL TIME

A great wave of sentimentality is spreading across Britain. In homes across the nation, in newspapers, radio and television, in pulpits and, no doubt in Thought for Today, people are bemoaning the loss not only of the country's favourite television advertisement but also the loss of that great institution, family meal. Since 1983 the Oxo family, at the end of every domestic crisis, has gathered at the dining table and enjoyed Mum's home cooking. This series of advertisements was the most popular in Britain, though it seems that the viewers did not rush out and buy Oxo gravy cubes. Instead, they bought packed pre-cooked dinners and gathered, not at the dining table, but around the television. Some research commissioned by Young's, the frozen food company, showed that in families with teenagers one family in twenty in Britain eats together only on Christmas Day, and over a third of those questioned said that they preferred to watch television while eating rather than sitting around a table with their family. Talking to other family members over dinner was not considered relaxing.

Advocates of the sacredness of the family and family values will be horrified by this news. What they will say about this news is likely to be sentimental tosh. They will speak of family dinners as if they are a sacred institution that has existed forever, when in fact the family eating together around a table is a custom which came into regular use only after the Second World War.

Eating is never an act which has to do only with providing ourselves with vital nourishment. It has many meanings for us, but when a group of people gather around a table the process of eating is usually more about power than about nourishment. When we lived in tribes all the tribe might gather at the site where food was being served, but those with the best access to the food were always the most powerful. The warrior men were served first and took the best food. The women and children were served last and got what was left over. When tables and seats at the table came into use, only those with power sat at the table, and then in a strict order of importance. The bowl of salt demarcated those who were of real importance and those who were not. The bowl of salt might have disappeared, but the hierarchical seating order still prevails where power and importance have to be demonstrated.

Children, servants and slaves had no power or importance, and so there was no place for them at the dining table. It has never been the tradition in Britain for children to be brought up in close proximity to their parents. If children had not been sent away to school or to work they ate in the kitchen or in the nursery. In Victorian times family meals were held on special occasions, but these again were occasions where power and importance were demonstrated. The father took precedence over all others. Children were required not to speak until spoken to and to follow a set of rules relating to what was regarded as proper behaviour at the table. Today many parents still impose the rule that a child must ask permission to leave the table. This rule certainly suggests that children have been forced to come to the table and, if given the choice, they would eat elsewhere.

The Second World War robbed middle and upper class families of one precious possession, the servant. Women had to learn to cook and serve their family meals. This was a tedious, time-consuming process, especially when there were none of the labour-saving devices which we take for granted today. To get feeding the family over as quickly as possible the women wanted the family to eat together. So the daily family meal was born.

What less peaceful ways are there of eating a meal than in the company of small children! Whenever I stay with friends who have small children I am usually offered a choice, to eat early with the children or to wait until the children are bathed and asleep in bed. Unless there is some practical reason for having an early meal, I usually choose to point out to my hosts that, as long as I am given easy access to gin and tonic, I am happy to wait until very late for my dinner. Invariably my hosts look relieved.

What would modern dramatists have done without the family meal? All human life is there, and usually the worst part of it.

There are those meals where not a word is said. My mother was always offended if any of her family said anything which she did not wish to hear, so I learned to hold my tongue. My father would try to make conversation, but if Mother did not feel like talking she soon froze him into silence.

In some families a family meal is the place for an argument. When I lived in Australia I was expected to visit a relative who had three school age sons. Every mealtime involved one of these boys, who had done nothing but be a boy, being yelled at, slapped and ordered from the table. I would get very anxious, fearing that I was next in line for such treatment. This behaviour was all about power, the parents wanting to demonstrate their power while at the same time fearing that their sons would be beyond their control.

Many parents find that the most effective way of controlling their children is to make them feel guilty. When I used to spend most of my working day listening to people who were depressed a recurring topic in our conversation was 'having to go to Mum's for Sunday lunch'. Even though my client knew only too well that this was a trigger for her depression, the guilt she would feel if she did not go would be worse than the depression. In all these cases the mother was a great upholder of the sacredness of the family.

From what I observed in my own family, from the families of friends and acquaintances, and from what my clients have told me it seems that there are a great many people who see nothing wrong in treating family members with immense disrespect, something they would never do to friends and strangers. This kind of behaviour is a refusal to talk. Yet, as everyone should know by now, it is vital that we talk to one another.

Family meals are hardly a good time to talk because food is best digested in a calm atmosphere, and a truthful sharing feelings and opinions is rarely calm. It is better to set aside some regular time when the family can be together to discuss matters like the washing up rota where opinions have to be canvassed and compromises made. Often we need to talk when we need to talk, and that means that the person we need to talk to has to be available. In the busy lives which parents and children lead availability can be difficult, but, if we take the time to be available when someone in the family wants to talk, we could then relax, our dinner on our lap, and watch television.

Dorothy Rowe

November 2, 2000

Notes & Queries

At school in the 40s I cannot remember any fellow pupils being hyperactive, disruptive or showing symptoms similar to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD). Is the recent growth of this due to a lack of firm discipline at home and in school, or to pollution radiation, junk food, etc?

There are always fashions in mental illnesses. In Freud's day conversion hysteria was popular. Now it is rarely found. In Sydney where in the 1960s I was working as an educational psychologist any child with a behavioural or learning difficulty was likely to be diagnosed as autistic. Since then, this diagnosis has come to be used much Discriminatingly.

Nowadays the psychiatric profession, supported by the drug companies, readily creates fashions in diagnosis. The committee which decides upon the contents of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, increasingly used here, needs only to ascertain that a group of psychiatrists reliably agrees that a mental disorder exists in order to include this disorder in the manual. Another committee could reliably agree that the moon was made of green cheese, but such agreement does not prove the cheesiness of the moon.

There have always been children who do not behave in the ways which the adults around them wish. A few of the these children have some actual brain dysfunction. Many more children, living under conditions which they find stressful, are constantly distracted by anxiety and so are hyperactive and disruptive. Other children have parents and teachers who cannot tolerate the exuberant behaviour of ordinary children and wish them to become unremittingly quiet and obedient.

The current popularity of the recently created mental disorder ADHD means that many anxious or ordinary children are diagnosed as ADHD and prescribed Ritalin or similar potentially addictive drugs. Their long-term effects on a developing brain are yet to be discovered.

Dorothy Rowe

December 13, 2000

LIFE OR DEATH DECISIONS: TEENAGE SUICIDE

The death of two teenage girls in a gas-filled car is shocking. Why would two young women, their lives ahead of them, choose to die in a suicide pact?

Teenage suicide is not rare. After 1945 around the world the rate of teenage suicide began to rise significantly. Of more recent years the rate for young women has levelled out while that for young men has continued to rise, possibly because many young men, faced with a dearth of traditional jobs and roles for men, found that society had no place for them.

The legal tradition has been to see suicide as an act committed when the balance of the mind is disturbed, that is, as a permanent or temporary madness. This formulation does not explain why a person commits suicide. Suicidal thoughts are considered to be a symptom of depression, but, while all depressed people contemplate suicide as a way of escaping from their misery, not all depressed people even attempt suicide, and it is by no means certain that everyone who commits suicide is depressed. However, it is possible to explain suicide in terms of what it is to be a person.

Each of us is keenly aware of being a person, that which we each call I, myself. This sense of being a person is made up of a structure of all our ideas, attitudes, opinions, memories and feelings. Within this structure are some central ideas about who we are and what our moral stance must be. Our sense of being a person is what we hold most dear, and our every decision and action is aimed in part at preserving our being a person.

But we also strive to survive as a physical body. For most of our lives surviving a person and as a body go along together. However, a situation can arise where surviving as a person and surviving as a body are incompatible. We have to sacrifice one or the other.

Suppose as a loving parent you find yourself and your child in some dangerous situation where only one of you can survive. Do you sacrifice yourself or your child? Your choice is simple. You die in order that your child will live. You sacrifice your body in order to continue being what you value most, a loving parent. You know that if you chose otherwise and lived while your child died you would have failed yourself. Many of the people who fall into the tortures of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder after a disaster believe that the only way they could have continued to be the person they valued was to have died in the disaster.

Some people abandon their bodies when they realise that the world no longer offers them the supports they know are essential to the maintenance of themselves as a person. Some of them simply lose the will to live. Others contract a survivable illness and yet die. Research shows that a significant number of widowers (curiously, not widows) die within a year of their wife's death.

However, the will to live can be very strong, and so some people who feel that their situation will not allow them to be themselves choose to kill their body in order to be the person they know themselves to be. If they cannot live as themselves they will die as themselves. In killing themselves they leave a message to the world at large and to some, if not all, of their nearest and dearest. Their written message might be, 'You will be better off without me,' but the sub-text is, 'You have failed to be what I wanted you to be.' Many of the parents of teenage suicides know that this is the message and they torture themselves with guilt.

As a parent it is very easy to torture yourself with guilt because none of us parents is perfect. Teenagers, suicidal or not, make life difficult for parents because the teenagers are reluctant to accept that they had less than perfect parents. Part of the process of growing up is coming to accept the fallibility of our parents and the impossibility of the world ever being what we want it to be. When we are teenagers everything matters enormously. To get older and wiser we need to understand that it is the nature of life never to turn out to be the way we expect. We need to learn to define compromise as wisdom, not as a betrayal of ideals. We need to understand that there are always alternatives because, while we can rarely change completely the circumstances of our lives, we are always free to change how we interpret those circumstances. If we feel boxed in it is our interpretation of our circumstances which has created our prison.

Adults can help teenagers arrive at such wisdom by listening and discussing, and refraining from criticism and instruction. One common feature of teenage suicide is that the young person felt that there was no one who would listen and accept. The Samaritans offer a special service to teenagers who find they have no one they can talk to. Listening to your children is not easy because you will hear a great deal which you wish you had not heard, chiefly accounts of your short-comings, but in doing this we give our children the greatest gift, the gift of being listened to and accepted.

Dorothy Rowe

Dorothy Rowe Breaking the Bonds: Understanding Depression and Finding Freedom HarperCollins

To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to www.guardian.co.uk

For Goodness Sake

Saturday 8, September 2001

How many of the people you call friends do you not really like? How many of them do you see as something of a burden, as relationships to be endured rather than enjoyed? You see them because you feel obliged, you resent the demands they make on you, and you don't feel good after seeing them. So why do you keep them in your life?

Whatever we do always has, in part, the aim of making us feel good about ourselves. To achieve this, we have to think that what we are doing fits our image of ourselves. Suppose you like to think of yourself as a kind, tolerant, generous, helpful person. You don't want to think of yourself as hard and cruel. When you've got a friend who is hurtful, even destructive, you can't say, "I don't want to see you again", because that would be hard and cruel, and you're not a hard, cruel person.

We want the people we know to see in us the qualities we most admire and which we hope we possess. So if you don't want to think of yourself as hard and cruel, you won't end a relationship that causes you nothing but pain.

Maybe you think of yourself as a person who isn't afraid of competition, who is not weak and emotional. You might suspect that you're not as tough as you'd like your friends to think you are, but you don't want them to find that out. So you have to act tough, and you can't reject any friend who challenges your toughness because that rejection will show how weak you are.

Being kind and helpful, or tough and unemotional, can mean to you that you are a good person, which is fine, provided you don't do what many people do - prefer to be good than happy. If you are going on and on, trying to be friends with someone who harms you, you are doing just that.

Trying to be good is something we do without thinking. It goes right back to when we were children and the adults around us showed us that if we weren't good in the way they wanted us to be, they would not accept us.

We each have our own way of defining "good". It might mean being kind and caring, or it might mean being strong and confident, and we feel comfortable only when we believe we are living up to our standard of being good. We maintain our sense of being by believing that the way we see ourselves and our world is the way things actually are. When we discover that we have made an error of judgment, that the world is not the way we thought it was and that we are not the person we thought we were, our sense of being threatens to crumble, shatter and even disappear, and this is terrifying.

To prevent this, we try hard to be the good person we want to think we are, but often we have set ourselves impossible standards of being good, such as never rejecting anyone, or wanting everybody in the world to like us, or never showing any vulnerability.

Whenever we go on doing something that hurts us, there is a reward in doing it. Often the reward is to know that we are good. If we set ourselves impossible standards of goodness, we suffer. Equating being a good person with being one who never rejects other people, no matter how damaging the relationship, is an impossible standard.

If you have reasonable standards instead, you will realise that you simply can't be nice to everyone and that it is not a healthy frame of mind. You have to say no sometimes, to chide people if their behaviour towards you is unacceptable - it is basic self-defence. Having reasonable standards of behaviour means not punishing yourself too harshly if you don't get along with someone. It's about looking after your own emotional state and being your own best friend, instead of acting like a punitive parent. It's about learning to accept that you are not going to get along with everyone.

Modifying your standards means that those closest to you are all that matter - accept that the rest of the world isn't even interested in your behaviour. If you do this, you will no longer face such a stark choice between being good or being happy. By having reasonable standards of goodness, we can be happy and good, and thus be able to protect ourselves from the people who hurt us.

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