‘She’s always doing housework,’ said Roy, who, depressed and unemployed, often sat doing nothing.
‘I’ve always worked,’ said Betty. ‘I brought home my first pay packet the week before I turned fourteen. My mother expected us to work. There were six of us. You couldn’t leave one job before you had the next lined up.’
However, she should not be working so hard now. She had angina, and the doctor said she should rest.
‘He says I should rest and put my feet up every afternoon. But I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be right.’
‘Why wouldn’t that be right?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. I’ve always been like that. I’m that sort of person.’
She said that she was frightened of dying, frightened of having a stroke and ending up like her mother, a helpless invalid. She was no stranger to fear. She knew what it was like to be swept by sudden, drenching fear. ‘I need to be out of the house and with people.’
She spoke of her childhood. ‘I was the third of three daughters and my mother didn’t want me. She told me that. She said when she had me she didn’t look at me for three days.’
So Betty learned early the dread of annihilation, and the way of keeping it at bay by earning her right to exist by working hard. She preferred to risk death by heart failure than face the greater fear of being annihilated by being abandoned and rejected.
Betty worried a good deal, but she dealt with her worries by working. There are many ‘characters’ who deny their fear by worrying. ‘I’m a worrier,’ they say, in the same way as they would say ‘I’m a left-hander’ or ‘I’m a Gemini’, something you are born with, something you cannot change.
Worrying is not good for the health. A churning stomach, tense muscles and an inability to concentrate on the task in hand can produce stomach ulcers, backache and accident injuries, as well as the kind of stress which scientists now see as important in the development of cancer and heart disease. However, worrying does have advantages, and committed worriers are reluctant to give them up.
First, being a worrier allows you to concentrate on small worries rather than a big fear. A worrier can avoid thinking about her fear that her husband is being unfaithful to her by worrying about the state of the carpets in her home; a worrier can avoid thinking about the fear that the economic recession will make his firm bankrupt by worrying about the state of his car. This way of worrying uses a lot of energy, but it does allow you to shut out a great deal of unpleasant reality and saves you from having to bother about the needs of other people.
Second, a worrier usually believes that the sign that you love someone is that you worry about that person. In the worrier’s way of thinking, worrying is a sign of virtue because worrying means that you care, and caring means that you are good. Thus the worrier will often say to loved ones, ‘I worry about you’ and then feel hurt because loved ones do not always react with warmth and affection to such statements. In fact, they often seem offended. They also become very secretive about their activities, so as to spare themselves the guilt of having made the worrier worry. Not that this makes the worrier any happier. Secrecy on the part of loved ones about their activities allows the worrier to expand the range of options about which to worry. Moreover, the worrier usually marries someone who never admits to anxiety, someone who takes pride in being imperturbable, someone who never says ‘I worry about you’. So the worrier has to find more and more to worry about in order to avoid the big fear that ‘Nobody loves me’.
Then the worrier might feel that the third advantage can make up for not being loved. If you feel that the people around you are too selfish and uncaring to love you, or if you suspect that you are unlovable, you can prevent yourself from becoming quite isolated by controlling the people around you and thus keeping them near you. If you cannot make your loved ones love you, you can make them feel guilty by showing them that they have given you cause to worry. Then they, trying to avoid the imposition of guilt, will carry out your wishes. They will come home early, wrap up warmly, not smoke (at least when you are around), drive carefully (with you in the car), not swear, work hard, pass their exams, and so on. A determined worrier can make the injunction ‘Don’t do anything which will cause me to worry’ the basic and absolute moral imperative in a family, and thus become the most powerful person in that family. I recall my father showing me a cartoon from the Saturday Evening Post. It featured a middle-aged couple in bed. The husband is settling down to sleep but the wife is sitting bolt upright and saying, ‘You go to sleep. I’m going to sit here and worry.’ It was the story of his married life.
The fourth advantage extends the worrier’s powers even further, into the realms of magic. There are many worriers who believe that ‘If I worry about something it won’t happen’. Since so many of the things we worry about never eventuate it is impossible to disprove that worrying is an effective way of controlling the universe.
Many worriers, I find, regard their habit of worrying as something they have inherited from a parent, like the colour of their eyes or the shape of their nose. It has not occurred to them that worrying was something they had learned. One thing which parents are always teaching their children is how to become aware of a particular situation, how to define it, how to identify certain elements in it, and how to predict what will follow. Thus one parent will say, ‘You’ve been invited to a birthday party. Won’t that be fun?’ and another parent will say, ‘You’ve been invited to a birthday party. Don’t eat too much or you’ll be ill.’ The ability to identify every potential disastrous element of a situation and to worry about it is a skill which passes from one generation to another, not by a worry gene but by learning.
Regarding the ability to worry as an inherited characteristic is one example of denying fear by keeping things the same. ‘I’m a worrier, my parents are worriers, my grandparents were worriers, my children will be worriers.’ There are many ‘characters’ who devote their efforts to stopping life changing. Since life is change, such efforts achieve little success. Nevertheless, that does not stop ‘characters’ who want to keep everything the same from trying to do this. Such extravert ‘characters’ try to maintain relationships no matter how damaging or empty these relationships may be. As Rachel said, ‘I can’t stand severing a relationship. It wounds me.’ Such introvert ‘characters’ try to prevent their organization and their control of situations changing. They insist that things have to be kept a certain way, that actions have to be performed a certain way. The contents of their rooms must never be changed around, or they must always dress in a particular style, or ceremonies, like the family’s celebration of Christmas, must always be carried out in the same way.
The belief that by repeating our actions we prevent life from changing is as magical as the belief that if you do not talk about a thing it has not happened. This belief often underlies the thinking of those ‘characters’ who take great pride in keeping things to yourself. Such people believe that talking about worries makes them worse, or that admitting fear to yourself and to others shows you to be weak and despicable. This can end in tragedy, as the story of Willie Peacock shows. In 1985 the UK government under Margaret Thatcher wanted to close down most of the mining industry. The miners fought back with a strike in which there was much brutality on the part of the police and, on occasion, on the part of the miners.
The widow of Willie Peacock yesterday accused his fellow miners of hounding him to his death. It was his wife Elizabeth who found him when she got home from work. She opened the front door and saw him hanging from a rafter - unable, she believes, to face one more day’s torment in the pit.
Yesterday, union delegate David Hamilton ordered 1,200 men at Willie’s colliery to stop work for 24 hours as a ‘mark of respect’ but Mrs Peacock is not impressed. ‘As far as I am concerned,’ she said, ‘the NUM can send them back.’
Willie’s friends say that men who stayed out on strike for a year picked on him because