Breaking the Bonds. Dorothy Rowe

in history books and documents, one of those who are expert in all branches of torture. She had the talent, though she was limited in scope; she had the tools, stored in an orderly fashion and always at hand; she had her mute sacrificial lamb, helpless and willing; and she had her secret, voluptuous pleasure, which released itself into a state of unconscious exhaustion after the execution of her task. She rarely allowed herself to be overcome by anger. She gave her victim notice – ‘Just wait until tonight’– but in the meantime I had to go to bed, where my fear would escalate into suicidal fantasies. Where did she learn that? What handbooks had she read? When the punishment began she expected self-control; crying and pleading just made it that much worse; self-humiliation set her off. Beating was a ritual surrounded by other rituals. Even her inspection of the red welts and bloodshot bruises, after the work was done, was part of it. Was she, in other words, one of those people whose careers are made in torture chambers and concentration camps? How shall I answer that question about her who was also my mother? The word Mama also meant the broad lap on which I was allowed to sit, the soft face you could kiss if you were good and brought home all A’s. Mama meant the pet names I never heard again in later life: ‘bunny rabbit’ and ‘sugarplum‘; it was the smell of Christmas cookies when I got home from school, out of darkness into the warm, bright living room in December. Mama meant safety and peril; she could protect me from just about everything except herself.

      Many of us had parents who would not think of beating us to make us good. Instead, the situations where we were helpless and in the power of adults who inflicted pain on us were when our parents gave us just a few sharp slaps, or were locking us up, or threatening never to love us again, or saying that we had caused them terrible pain or were making them ill, or were criticizing us in contemptuous and degrading terms.

      Whatever the circumstances of the situation, we were small, helpless, trapped and in pain.

      We may not have had the words to describe that situation but we knew that the meaning of the situation was, in essence:

      ‘I am being punished by my bad parent.’

      We were, for a while, angry with our bad parent, but then a most terrible realization dawned on us. We were little and weak and dependent upon the parent who was inflicting pain on us. We realized that we were in double jeopardy.

      What could we do?

      We could do what all people do when we cannot change what is happening. We redefine it.

      It is dangerous to suffer pain, but it is even more dangerous to be in the total power of someone who is bad. We could not stop the pain, but we could redefine our parent.

      Our parent was not bad, but good.

      Why do good parents inflict pain on their children?

      Because the child is bad.

      So we redefined the situation. It was not, ‘I am being punished by my bad parent’, but:

      ‘I am bad and being punished by my good parent.’

      (D 5) Now we were safe. We were still in pain, suffering, feeling guilty, but at least safe in the hands of a good parent. Just like Feiffer’s little girl,¹⁹

      Why did we feel we had to make this sacrifice of our sense of goodness and worth? What was there in that situation which threatened us so much?

Saving Our Self

      Whether we are an adult or a child, whenever we find ourselves in a situation where we are totally in the power of other people we face the greatest threat we can ever know. It is the threat to annihilate us as a person. Even if the people in whose power we are are kind to us, we are still in danger, for if they insist that we feel, think and act solely in the ways that they wish then we will cease to be ourselves. We will become an automaton, a puppet, not just a thing, but a no-thing.

      To preserve our self we will make all kinds of adjustments and rearrangements. We try to be as disobedient as we dare. No law-abiding citizen is a hundred per cent law-abiding. No one wants to be taken over completely by the government. Some of us in the situation of being completely in other people’s power will decide that if we cannot live as ourselves we will die as ourselves, either in heroic defiance or in suicide.

      When there is little we can achieve by action in preserving ourselves, we make alterations to the way we operate as a person. These may not be healthy alterations, but they enable us to survive. In the same way, when our body is starving, we will eat anything which will enable us to survive, no matter how noxious or unpalatable such food may be.

      There are many things we can do to ourselves to preserve our self. Frequently we choose one of the following:

      We can shut off our feelings and operate calmly, not letting our feelings come through to disturb us, perhaps even denying that we have feelings.

      Or we can insist that everything is perfectly fine, and resolutely forget every bad experience inflicted on us.

      Or we can split ourselves in two, making one part the person who lives an ordinary life and the other part the person who suffers horrible experiences.

      Or we can define ourselves as bad and deserving the terrible things that are done to us.

       Shutting off our feelings and operating calmly, not letting our feelings come through to disturb us, perhaps even denying that we have feelings

      What gets us into most trouble when we are children are our emotions. If we get angry, we are punished. If we are frightened we are told not to be silly, not to be a coward. If we are envious or jealous, we are told we are wicked. Even when we show our love we can be told that we are soft, or silly, or too clingy and dependent. The only emotion adults encourage us to feel is guilt.

      So we have to find ways of keeping our emotions under control. For introvert children, irrespective of what the adults around them might say, emotions pose a particular threat. They are disorganized and disorganizing, and so threaten a complete loss of control. So introvert children need to develop ways of organizing emotions and keeping them under control.

      What better way than denying that you feel any emotion?

      If you are an introvert you know how readily you can make yourself feel utterly, utterly calm while the crisis rages around you. You may have realized, too, how essential it is, once the crisis is under control or you have a chance to be alone, that you let the emotions out, cry your tears of rage or sorrow, or shake with fear, or curse the instigator of your anger.

      However, such calmness can get you into trouble. Extraverts can scorn you for, apparently, having no feelings. Worse, if you never allow yourself to feel and express your feelings you cease to be able to make proper sense of what is happening to you.

      By ‘proper sense’ I mean striving to get as close to the truth as it is possible to be. Discovering what the truth of any situation is is always difficult, but we, both introverts and extraverts, make it impossible to get anywhere near the truth if we lie to ourselves.

      There are times when for our own safety or for the welfare of others it is beneficial to lie to other people. But,

       Never, never, never is it beneficial to lie to yourself.

      Unfortunately for us, this is the kind of lie all of us use most frequently.

      In times of crisis, there is a world of difference between saying to yourself:

      ‘I’m going to keep calm. I’ll get upset about this later,’

      and

      ‘I’m not upset.’

      The first statement is a recognition