I said to Ruth, ‘If you could paint a picture of what you feel when you’re depressed, what sort of picture would you paint?’
‘Because I don’t visualize well at all that’s a very difficult one for me. Can I paint you a word picture? It’s an emptiness in the pit of the stomach, and an inability to concentrate on anything, and a jumble of thoughts, a great deal of lethargy. I’m now beginning to get a picture of a bloated child with a hole down the middle of her stomach, sort of one of those starvation pictures with a big bloated belly, but there’s a hole. That’s the best I can do visually. It’s an emptiness. It’s a feeling of lack of control about my own life. I can’t make it better. I can’t make it work. I can’t solve the problem.’
‘I get a picture of a child, when you said emptiness, there’s emptiness around the child. There’s also that lack of control in that when you were a little girl having these things done to you, you weren’t in control of that. That’s complete helplessness.’
‘I like to believe that, but I think I could have controlled it if I’d tried.’
‘How old were you?’
‘I think eight. I certainly could have controlled it later on and I certainly could have controlled it then simply by saying go away. Maybe I didn’t know that then, but I know that now.’
‘That’s the difference. When we’re children and in the power of adults we experience a terrible helplessness.’
Now I asked Ruth how she imagined death would be.
‘Peace. It’s just peace. I have no fear of it at all. If we decide to have an atomic war I want to be right under it when it falls. Death is peace, an end to all the hassle.’
Ruth clearly understood that she experienced her sense of existence as a relationship to other people, and hence other people were essential to her. But other people had hurt her badly, so to protect herself she had withdrawn from people, and maintained only those relationships, like those at work, where she was in control. Her feeling of being used, rejected and abandoned, and her suspicion that this was what she deserved created in her a sense of emptiness, mirrored in her image of herself as a starving, empty, lonely child.
As a small child Ruth knew that she needed other people to give her her sense of existence. So when her father used her as an object to relieve his own sexual needs, she dared not refuse, even though she hated him for what he did. Such an experience has been described by Sylvia Fraser in her autobiography My Father’s House:
My arms stick to my sides, my legs dangle like worms as my daddy forces me back against his bed. I love my daddy. I hate my daddy. Love hate love hate. Daddy won’t love me love me hate hate hate. I’m afraid to strike him with my fists. I’m afraid to tell my mommy. I know she loves Helen because she is good, but she doesn’t like me because I am dirty dirty. Guilt fear guilt fear fear dirty dirty fear fear fear fear fear.15
Like Sylvia, Ruth dealt with her rage against her father and her disappointment and anger with her mother by blaming herself and by trying to deny her anger. Again, like Sylvia, to recover her sense of being a whole, valuable and acceptable person she would need to let herself feel her anger at being so badly used, and through that find forgiveness for herself and those who took advantage of her innocence.
To an outside observer, George’s depression, sleeplessness and inability to concentrate, and Ruth’s depression and suicide attempts seem inexplicable, crazy even. But once we know the reasons which gave rise to these actions it becomes clear why they lost confidence in themselves and why George cannot sleep or concentrate and Ruth seeks the peace of death. Not only can we understand why, but we can see how change is possible. Reasons are not fixtures. They are ideas which we have created, and since we created them, we can change them.
However, quite often we create our reasons without bringing them clearly into consciousness. Often we take our basic reason – how we experience our sense of existence and see the threat of annihilation – so much for granted that we never think about it. What we all need to do is to make our basic reason quite dear to ourselves. We need to know what our priorities are.
(D 2) If you don’t already know this about yourself, you can work it out by choosing something that is important to you and asking, ‘Why is this important?’, and, with the answer, asking again, ‘Why is this important?’, until you can go no further, for you have arrived at your reason for living.
For example, take the statement, ‘I like to keep my home clean and tidy’. Lots of us do, but we differ on the reason why.
To the question, ‘Why is it important to keep your home clean and tidy?’, some of us would answer in terms of other people. We might say, ‘I think a clean and tidy home is always inviting, and I want my friends to like coming here’, or ‘I wouldn’t want people to think I was dirty and untidy. They wouldn’t like me if they thought that about me.’ To the question, ‘Why is it important to you that your friends visit you/like you?’, we might say, ‘Because having friends/being liked is what life is about.’ If asked, ‘What would happen to you if everyone rejected you and no one liked you?’ we might say, That would be the end of me’, or ‘I would cease to exist’, or ‘I would disappear, just wither, fade away’.
To the question, ‘Why is it important to keep your home clean and tidy?’, the rest of us would answer in terms of control, organization and fear of chaos. We might say, ‘A clean and tidy home is an efficient home, and I need to be efficient to achieve’, or ‘Mess makes me feel nervous. Once I’ve tidied up and got things under control I feel better.’ To the question, ‘Why is it important to achieve/get things under control?’, we might say, ‘That is the purpose of life’. If asked, ‘What would happen to you if you could not achieve anything and everything got out of control?’, we might say, ‘I’d fall to pieces, I’d shatter, I’d crumble to dust’.
Sometimes I call the first group People Persons and the second group What Have I Achieved Today Persons (that is, to sleep soundly after reviewing their day, they have to feel that they have achieved something, even if it was no more than tidying the kitchen cupboards).
Sometimes I use the words ‘extravert’ and ‘introvert’.
‘Extravert’ here is spelt with an ‘a’ and not an ‘o’, which is the more usual spelling. There is a very important reason for this. It refers to the way we live all the time in two realities.
Our two realities are:
External reality, that is, everything that goes on around us,
and
Internal reality, that is, our internal experience of our thoughts, feelings and images.
These two realities have a quality of realness. They can seem totally real, or less than totally real, right through to not seeming real at all.
To function efficiently we need to perceive both our realities as real and equally real. We need to be sure that, This is what is happening around and to me, and this is what I think, feel and imagine’.
Unfortunately, perceiving both our realities as equally real is not something that comes to us as naturally as breathing. It is something which comes only when we strive to understand the world we live in and to understand ourselves. However, no matter how efficient we become in maintaining our two realities as real and equally real, when we are under stress we find that we retreat to our original position where one reality was more real than the other.
Which reality is the more real relates to how we experience our sense of self and perceive