What didn’t make sense in the book was the way I kept wavering between each category, introvert and extravert. I know, for example, that I experience my existence as a member of a group, but I feel I should experience it in terms of individual achievement. Am I a guilty extravert? I can certainly rush around, making myself busy, but I’m also brilliant at worrying about what might happen in the future, looking at every possibility and trying to work out in advance what I’d do. There were so many examples where I identified as an introvert then turned the page to find an extravert characteristic that fitted. Maybe I’m a reluctant extravert who admires, and therefore wants to identify with, introvert characteristics.
Knowing yourself is very difficult when you have always had powerful people around you telling you what they think you are.
As I travelled in the USA and talked with many different women I was struck by how frequently a woman would mention how she feared that she might become a bag-lady. I thought that only American women had this fear until I saw the British television series Behaving Badly, where the middle-aged heroine Bridget, played by Judi Dench, was spurred into living her life on her own terms (that is, according to her family, behaving badly) by the sight of an English bag-lady, though in this case the bag was an old pram.
We can all become bag-ladies, down-and-outs, or lonely, dissatisfied, unhappy people because we have failed to take account of what we need most in our lives and have failed to ensure that, at least to some significant degree, our needs are met.
However, to meet our needs we must first know what they are. We can all say, ‘My needs are to achieve and to have strong relationships with other people’, but what actually happens is that time and time again we have to make a choice between the two.
As a child, will you pursue your own interests or go along with your friends?
At school, will you study the subjects that interest you, or please your parents by studying the subjects they think are important?
In choosing your first job or your college, will you leave your family?
(D 3) What will you put first, your career or your family?
If you make your choices according to what you think you ought to do, rather than according to what is right for you, no matter how successful you might appear to others to be, you will be dissatisfied and unhappy.
If you experience your sense of existence as being a member of a group, but you feel that you ought to strive for individual success and achievement, then as soon as you reach a position of authority or individual success, you know that you are in danger. People will dislike you when you exercise your authority and will envy, often spitefully, your success. Of course you can decide most wisely that it is possible to survive without absolutely everyone liking you, but, until you do, choosing individual achievement before personal relationships will cost you dear.
If you experience your sense of existence in terms of the development of individual achievement, clarity and authenticity, but you feel that you ought to devote your life to your family or the care of other people, then as you discover that your devotion to the careers of your spouse and children does not make their success your success, or that the repetitious tasks of housekeeping and caring for others do not create a sense of achievement, you know that you are in danger. Until you clear a space in your life where you can cultivate some activity which does give you some sense of individual achievement, choosing personal relationships before individual achievements will cost you dear.
We need to know what our priorities are so that:
1. We can guard against our greatest fear.
2. We can enjoy what matters to us most.
Among those of you who are depressed, there are many extraverts who, having failed to maintain old friends and to make new ones, find yourselves alone, bereft of family and friends. Also, there are many introverts who, believing that you have no right to organize your own life, find yourselves in situations where you have no control and no sense of achievement.
Often we get ourselves into such unpleasant, debilitating situations because we are so frightened of our greatest fear that we never allow ourselves to discover that what we fear is not as fearful as we thought.
As extraverts we need to learn to make the journey inward, into our internal reality, so as to discover that there is nothing there to fear but something there to value, the capacity to be alone.
As introverts we need to learn that we do not need to keep the entirety of external reality organized and under control in order to make it safe, and that we can acquire social skills which enable us to act on external reality effectively and to relate to other people easily and without the need to control them.
Along with this is a task which we must all undertake. We must learn to value and accept ourselves.
The more we value and accept ourselves, the less we are under the threat of the annihilation of our self.
Extraverts who value and accept themselves know that other people will value and accept them, and that if death and disaster or just the changes that life brings take away the people whom they love and rely on, they can make other relationships because they have within themselves something of value to offer.
Introverts who value and accept themselves know that they are able to achieve what they want to achieve, and that if death and disaster or just the changes that life brings prevent them from achieving or destroy what they have achieved, they can change their plans and try again because they have within them the power to do so.
Extraverts who believe that they are bad and valueless believe that all other people will sooner or later discover this and so rejection and abandonment is inevitable, and they will be left completely alone.
Introverts who believe that they are bad and valueless believe that no matter how hard they try to organize, control and achieve, it is inevitable that they will fail and fragment as everything falls into chaos.
Whenever we lose confidence in ourselves the threat of the annihilation of our self comes upon us and we feel the greatest fear.
Why do we lose confidence in ourselves? Why do we feel that we are not good enough, not acceptable, bad, perhaps even evil?
4 Believing That We Are Not Good Enough
We all, as babies, entered the world knowing that we had the right to exist. We were there, so we had the right. We were there, and we accepted ourselves. We valued ourselves, so when we felt discomfort we did what we could to look after ourselves. Crying, yelling and thrashing about were usually effective in getting the relief we needed. We did not waste time asking ourselves, ‘Do I have the right to exist?’, and, ‘Dare I ask for anything for myself?’, questions which bedevil and sometimes ruin the lives of a great many adults.
As babies we could not have wasted time on such nonsensical questions because we were too busy doing something else – making sense of what was happening around us and to us.
Making sense of what happens around us and to us is like breathing – something we do every moment we are alive and something we cannot not do. Even when we have dulled our senses with alcohol or drugs, or when our brain has suffered injury, we still go on making sense of everything, even though the sense we make in dreams, or stupor, or confusion is not very sensible.
We start making sense of everything when, in the womb, our little, developing cortex begins functioning as a cortex.