‘Well, it was just a week before my seventh birthday, and he came home on the Saturday evening and found a whole bed of young tomato plants all trampled down. He decided I’d done it. I hadn’t. I’d been at a neighbour’s house all afternoon because my mother and grandmother had gone to visit an aunt who’d had a baby. When he saw me coming in the front gate he just grabbed me by the collar and dragged me inside. Then he got his razor strop – do you remember those heavy leather straps that men used to use to sharpen their cut-throat razors on? – well, he just started in on me. I thought he was never going to stop. I was sure he was going to kill me. When he did stop, he shoved me in my bedroom and locked the door. I was crying and hurt, and I was so mad at him. When I knew he couldn’t hear me I said out loud, “I hope you die. God, make him die.” A week later he did. Had a heart attack and keeled over, dead. I knew I’d done it. I knew I was wicked. After that I just had to make up for being so wicked. That’s why I’ve always worked so hard and why the place burning down really got to me. I thought that at long last I was being punished for my wickedness.’
When Dan had first come to see me, many months before he told me this story, his wife had said to me that she thought Dan had been too strict with their son Danny when he was a child. ‘Nonsense,’ Dan had said, ‘children, especially boys, need a firm hand. My father often took the stick to me and it never did me any harm.’
We all, like Dan, have very convenient memories, or, rather, forgetories. We all can forget something that is too painful to remember. Thus many of us who concluded from one traumatic incident that we were bad have forgotten all about the incident.
Lisa had done this. When she first came to see me she described her childhood as idyllic and her parents as perfect. Months went by before she could tell me about her parents’ quarrels, and many more months before she could allow herself to remember a terrible incident when she was five and her grandfather had undressed her, explored her genitals with his fingers, and then put his erect penis in her mouth. Lisa found it impossible to describe this clearly, but when she said, ‘I thought I was going to choke to death’, I guessed what had been done to her.
She told me that her grandfather was a minister and that her parents were very proud of him. He lived in another state, so a visit from him was a special occasion. On that particular day, her parents had to go out and her grandfather had offered to mind her. Her parents had instructed her that she had to be very obedient and do whatever her grandfather wanted her to do.
‘I was very confused,’ Lisa told me. ‘I knew it was wrong to take your clothes off like that, but I didn’t dare be disobedient. I thought that perhaps this was something ministers did and that I was stupid, that I wasn’t doing it right.’
‘Did you tell your parents?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t dare. I thought they’d blame me. I hated him, but I wanted him to like me so he wouldn’t turn my parents against me. I already knew they thought more of him than of me. He took over my bedroom when he came to stay and I slept on a couch on the back verandah, and they always served him first at meals and gave him second helpings. So I just kept it to myself and tried to forget it.’
My friend Jill had a similar experience and, like Lisa, did not tell her parents.
‘I kept my mouth shut, until I was about nineteen or twenty. It was my mother’s father. Everybody was reminiscing about him and deifying him. I’m not sure when it started, I might have been eight, it certainly was between when I was ten and twelve. It was just sick. I kept saying to my mother, “I don’t want to go there, I don’t want to go there.” I finally got him caught by my grandmother, but then, of course, my grandmother would have nothing to do with me.’
These experiences left both Jill and Lisa extremely frightened and disgusted with themselves, but they each expressed this fear and disgust in different ways.
Lisa, being an extravert, ‘ran away’ from what was happening in her internal reality into her more real external reality. She always kept herself very, very busy. She had a full time job, kept her house perfect, and was a superb cook and dressmaker. She sought and made friends, and was a popular, sociable woman. The fear inside her could not be denied, however, and she located the source of her fear as being in the world around her. Lisa feared spiders and all creepy crawlies, she feared ugly people and anyone who was deformed in any way, she feared crowds and open spaces, and, most of all, she feared that everyone she loved and needed would reject her. She believed that no matter how hard she worked to make people love and need her, sooner or later they would discover that ‘inside I’m foul and disgusting’.
Jill, being an introvert, was always concerned with achieving, and this she managed to do, even though from her earliest childhood she was always afraid.
She told me, ‘I think I could be scared pretty easily as kid. If someone strange came to the door, I would hide under the bed.’
‘What did your parents think about this?’
‘They weren’t picking it up. School was just hair-raising. I’d vomit every morning before I went to school. I was frightened about my ability to achieve.’
Jill did achieve. She took two degrees, became a university administrator, and married. But she was always anxious, always somewhat defensive with other people. She said, ‘I was going all right until I was thirty-seven and then the bottom just dropped out. I remember being awakened at night. I knew something horrible was going to happen. I made the mistake of going to work that day and things got all out of proportion. People were looking at me, and I don’t think I was acting too well. That night I came home and I couldn’t sleep. There were cars coming round and I could see their lights and I thought they were checking on me. After that I went into hospital, altogether five times, and each time I was just given drugs. I’d get into these panic states and I’d go back in. I’d be running up and down the hall. I couldn’t sleep. I’d get more and more frightened. I’d be thinking a lot of different things very fast, interactions I’ve had with my brothers and with my dad, a lot of different things, all frightening things. Then I’d get even more frightened. In hospital they’d have four, five, six people dragging me down in order to shoot me with something. And they put me in isolation. That was the worst experience. Suddenly people were following me and I was put into a locked ward. I don’t know how long I was in there. I haven’t been in hospital now for eight years or so. But it’s terrible, I just stay in bed. I’m immobilized. I don’t know what the drugs are doing for me. I guess I’m suicidal because not a day goes past but I think of ending it. The psychiatrist sees me about once every three months for a change of the pills. He just asks me how I am. It’s terrible being at home day in and day out, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s terrible enough for me to try to get out of it.’
When terrible things happen to us we can find ways of coping with them and coming to terms with the results of them if the people around us acknowledge what is happening to us, allow us to talk about what is happening and how we feel about it, and confirm our value by giving us love and support. When bad things happen to introverts they need the people around them to help them sort out the confusion and to maintain the sense that external reality is real. Once external reality seems unreal, it becomes more and more difficult for introverts to distinguish between the thoughts in their internal reality and the events in their external reality.
All of us can have difficulty in distinguishing the enemies we actually have from our feelings of being persecuted. Introverts, when they find themselves in danger, can feel themselves persecuted by strangers or people with whom they have little connection. After all, it is better to see a stranger as an enemy that to see yourself as betrayed by those who