Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe

story.

      You might be in your house or office when, quite unexpectedly, something happens. You immediately name this unexpected happening ‘an extraordinarily loud noise’. Your naming of this event could be quite accurate, but the meaning of the event cannot be complete until you create a story around it. Immediately you create a theory about what the noise was. You might decide that it was a clap of thunder, or an explosion, or a traffic accident, and so on. Your theory must include the beginning of the story – what led up to the clap of thunder or the explosion or the accident – and the end of the story – what effects the thunder, the explosion, the accident will have. By creating this story you complete the meaning you have given to the event. Then you might decide to check the accuracy of your story by going and looking, or you might decide that you are sure you are right, and get on with what you are doing.

      We are busy creating stories and listening to stories all the time. We gossip, we watch television, we daydream and tell ourselves stories. We love stories, but the story which matters most to us is our own life story.

      Our meaning structure is a collection of stories, but all these stories are held within one story, our life story. Our sense of identity – that is, the person we experience ourselves as being – and our life story are one and the same. We can think of them as being separate – ‘This is me and this is my life story’ – but in fact me/my life story is the form which holds the meaning structure together and gives it a certain coherence.

      It is our life story which embeds us in time and place. Our actual experience of living is a string of present moments. The form of the story gives us a sense of time (or it might be that our sense of time gives us the form of the story, or that the form of the story and the sense of time are aspects of the one form). We never actually experience the past or the future. They are just ideas, parts of the form of the story. Out of the story form/sense of time comes our life story/identity.

      In our life story the middle is where we are now. The beginning is not just about our own past life. It is about our family, our roots. Knowing who our family was and where we came from is tremendously important in creating a complete sense of identity. In 1994 many Sydney suburbs were threatened and some houses engulfed by huge bushfires which, leaping at high speed from the top of one tall tree to another, would bear down on houses where the occupants, believing they were safe, were peacefully going about their business. Many families had to flee with little time to gather up valuable possessions. All Australians considered the question, ‘What’s the most important thing to take with you if you have to leave your home in such a hurry?’ There was universal agreement on what to take: the family photograph albums. There could be no replacement or recompense for such a loss.

      One of the cruelties inflicted on children down the centuries has been to deny them the right to know where they came from and who their family was. Orphanages have often been guilty of this crime against the children in their care. Nowadays some child-care agencies have a policy of helping children separated from their families to put together a ‘life story book’ containing the letters and photographs which enable the children to create the beginning of their story. Children thus helped speak of their life story book as giving them great comfort, but, alas, there are still many adults involved in child care who do not realize the importance of the life story and they fail to provide children with the means of creating and maintaining the beginning of their story.

      The ending of our life story has yet to be lived. It is made up of expectations and predictions about what our life will be. This is where the coherence and stability of our meaning structure is at its most vulnerable. If ever we discover that we have got the beginning of our life story wrong, if we discover that our parents were not the people we thought they were, or the circumstances of our birth were markedly different from what we had been told, we can feel quite disturbed, particularly if these discrepancies have implications for how we have chosen to live our lives and how we see our future. However, such discoveries are made by only a few of us. What happens to us all is that at least once in our lives the ending of our life story is disconfirmed. Our life is not going to turn out as we expected. We discover that John Lennon was right: ‘Life is what happens while we’re making other plans.’

      Usually it is other people who disconfirm the ending of our life story. They die, or they betray us, or reject us, or simply turn out to be different from what we thought they were. When they do this, or when other events show us that we have got the ending of our story wrong, we feel our meaning structure tremble and threaten to collapse.

      Dangerous though other people may be, we need them to confirm our meaning structure. The ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes spoke of how all we know is but ‘a woven web of guesses’. We need to check and to keep checking whether our guesses have some close relationship to what has happened, what is happening and what will happen. To do this we can see for ourselves and we can ask other people what they see. When people tell us that what we see is what they see we feel strengthened and more confident. But if someone keeps telling us that we have got it wrong we can come to doubt every meaning that we create.

      Women who are married to men who constantly denigrate them can lose their self-confidence and come to believe that they are so stupid and incompetent that they cannot manage without the man who is destroying them in order to overcome his own sense of weakness. Such women create life stories, not of escaping or of fighting back, but of being the passive victim of whatever their husband, or life, might do to them.

      Children need adults round them who confirm the child’s meanings, or, when the child has got it wrong, will gently steer the child to a more accurate representation of the circumstances the child is trying to understand. Alas, many adults do not do this. Instead, they tell children that they are stupid, or they shame them by laughing at them. Even worse, they tell the child that he has lied when he knows that he has not.

      This was a favourite ploy of my mother whenever I told her something which did not fit with the way she saw things. When I was twenty-seven and pregnant I was working very hard. In the last few weeks of the pregnancy I developed the early symptoms of toxaemia and was sent to hospital. My doctor told me that I had not been getting enough rest. When I told my mother this she said, ‘That’s not true, Dorothy. You never work hard.’ This for me at twenty-seven was a story I could joke about with my friends, but when I was a child such a rejection of my truth was very disturbing.

      At four I developed symptoms which could signal the onset of diphtheria, a disease from which, in those pre-antibiotic days, many children died. I was put into the infectious diseases ward in the local hospital and my parents forbidden to visit. I remember my stay there extremely well. For the first few days I was in a cot but some days later I was shifted to a bed, not my own bed but one which I shared with another girl. She was older than me and was already at the head of the bed where she could use the radio headphones. I was at the foot, and so did not hear the message my parents had arranged to be broadcast over the local radio. Eventually I was sent home (I didn’t have diphtheria, just the incurable bronchiectasis which has plagued my life) and my mother asked me if I had heard the radio message. I said I had not and explained why. My mother told me I was lying. ‘They wouldn’t put you two to a bed,’ she said. No doubt she had her reasons to say that. Her own anger and disappointment that I had missed the radio message, and, possibly, her guilt at not being there to look after me, were hard for her to deal with, but she held the view, as most parents did then, that one of the uses of children was to be a scapegoat on which parents could vent their feelings.

      My big sister must have observed my mother’s success in being able to deny inconvenient facts because she adopted the ‘Dorothy’s lying’ ploy. Such constant assaults on my understanding of what went on around me had devastating effects on my self-confidence. I could not show that I was distressed by what they said because, if I did, they would tell me I was stupid to be so sensitive. Consequently, I grew up doubting my perceptions and in my teens and early twenties there were times when I nearly lost my grip on reality completely. Years later I worked with people diagnosed as schizophrenic and I heard stories of childhoods where the child’s truth had been denied by the family, stories which made my heart turn over just as it does whenever I discover I have just had a close brush with death.

      What we all want is that