Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

television news when pictures of war or starvation appear. We blame the victims of injustice as being the authors of their own suffering, and we claim that people of another race, religion or nationality are not fully human and therefore do not feel pain as we do. If this becomes our preferred way of dealing with the suffering of others we seriously diminish ourselves, becoming a lesser person than we might have been.

      Human beings are not merely conscious. We are self-conscious - that is, we can, as it were, stand outside ourselves and look at ourselves. We judge ourselves. We have feelings about ourselves, and these feelings can include empathy.

      Empathy is a blend of identifying with, feeling sympathy for and understanding of which we can direct not just at other people but also at ourselves. Empathy with oneself is not self-pity. Self-pity reflects the theme ‘Why me? It’s not fair’, and this complaint is based on the idea that life ought to be fair. The underlying theme of empathy with oneself is simply ‘This is’. To be able to empathize with ourselves we need to accept and value ourselves, not because we measure up to some standard which we have set ourselves but simply because we exist. When we reject and hate ourselves we have no empathy with ourselves.

      However, even if we do value and accept ourselves, we can refuse to empathize with ourselves. When we suffer either physical or mental pain we can reduce our conscious awareness of the pain by refusing to empathize with ourselves. We can split ourselves into two pieces - the piece that observes and the piece that suffers. We can do this, say, to reduce the pain and horror of having a tooth pulled or of being raped. As a short-term defence this can be a very effective means of surviving as a person, but if we do not reconnect ourselves when the period of suffering is over we do ourselves enormous damage. Split in two, we cannot feel whole and acceptable, and in denying our own pain we become oblivious to the pain others feel. Thus a boy who is frequently beaten by his father can, very sensibly, deal with the pain of the beating by detaching himself from it and telling himself that he feels nothing. However, if this becomes his habitual way of dealing with pain, he grows up to be a man who inflicts pain on others and feels that he does no wrong.

      To empathize with ourselves and with others we have to be able to feel our feelings fully and to name our feelings truthfully. Feelings or emotions are meanings. They are our interpretations of a situation. People often talk about emotions as if they are completely separate from thoughts, but this is not how we experience emotions. We see something happen and we feel an emotion, but what we feel is our interpretation of what is happening in relation to ourselves. For instance, you hear a very loud sound. You interpret this as, ‘That’s a bomb. I’m in danger. I’m frightened.’ The first two interpretations are thoughts, the third is a feeling.

      The bit of our brain that emotions relate to develops earlier than our cortex which relates to language, and so the meanings we call emotions are not initially expressed as words. However, these wordless interpretations can be turned into words. The meanings we create initially in words can be about things unconnected to us, but the meanings we call emotions are always connected to us. They are meanings about the safety of and danger to our meaning structure. When something happens which confirms or validates our ideas, we feel safe. These are feelings which can range from mild satisfaction to intense joy and happiness. These meanings/feelings are versions of the meaning, ‘I’ve got it right! It’s just how I want it to be! How wonderful!’ When something happens which disconfirms or invalidates our ideas we feel in danger. These are feelings which can range from mild anxiety through fear to terror, and they can be quite complex interpretations. The meanings of safety of and danger to our meaning structure are often referred to as positive and negative emotions. Positive emotions are meanings about being validated as a person (e.g., happy, content, satisfied) and negative emotions are meanings about being invalidated as a person (e.g., fear, anger, shame, guilt, hate, envy, jealousy and so on). We interpret being invalidated in a multitude of ways. Pride plays an important part in our emotions, not just in the safety emotions but in the danger emotions which can act as defences. Anger is the meaning, ‘How dare this happen to me!’; envy, ‘He has something which I want’; jealousy, ‘He has something which is rightly mine.’ Hate springs to our defence when we feel weak and helpless, and revenge turns the defence of hate into what is traditionally seen as the best of defences, attack. The emotion of forgiveness is the meaning, ‘I am no longer in danger from those who injured me.’

      Our emotions are statements of our own truth, but such truths can themselves seem to be dangerous to us. Introverts can find that the truth ‘I am afraid’ threatens chaos, while extraverts can find that the truth ‘I am angry’ threatens to sever relationships. Hence introverts favour the defence of isolation where they separate their feelings from their awareness of a troubling event and tell themselves that they are calm, completely undisturbed by any emotion. Extraverts favour the defence of repression whereby they separate their awareness of a troubling event from the emotion it arouses and then forget that the event has occurred. They remain aware of their feelings but explain them as arising from some other event or as being an inexplicable emotion. If these feelings are of anger they are likely to tell themselves that they are not angry but frightened. They dare not risk being angry lest those who angered them reject them.

      The dangers of employing either the defence of isolation or the defence of repression are well recognized in psychotherapeutic circles, but the capacity to feel our feelings fully and to name them truthfully has in recent years been burdened with two pieces of popular jargon, namely ‘emotional literacy’ and ‘emotional intelligence’. The term ‘emotional literacy’³ quite rightly draws attention to our need to recognize and name emotions truthfully. The term ‘emotional intelligence’⁴ suggests that there is some kind of intelligence to do with the emotions which is the equivalent of intellectual intelligence, and thus, like intellectual intelligence, has some inherited component. Some people might seize on this to excuse their own lack of interest in trying to understand themselves and other people. Recognizing and naming our emotions is a learned, not an inherited, skill, a skill which we can constantly improve by being honest with ourselves and by observing other people closely.

      Babies, like all the newborn of other species, are born with the ability to seek out the conditions necessary for their survival. Just as a hungry baby will search for something to suck for sustenance, so a lonely baby will search for someone to love, and will offer this love trustfully and hopefully to the person who offers in return care and protection. Mothers sometimes have difficulty in loving newborn babies, but we, as babies, have no difficulty in loving our mothers, and this hook remains in our hearts for ever, no matter what our mothers do to us. We may give up loving our mothers when our love is not returned, but we never give up wishing that we had had a mother who loved us as we wished to be loved. We can feel the same about our fathers. After a lecture in which I talked about friends and enemies, a man told me about how his father had always rejected him. As he did so his eyes were squinting in the way that eyes do when they are holding back tears. His father was ninety-four and he was in his sixties.

      Babies are very good at being themselves, but this does not suit whatever society they have been born into. Every family has its own rules and expectations, and the baby has to learn to conform. Long before we had words to define it we were presented with the dilemma ‘Shall I be an individual or a member of a group?’ We knew, though we felt our knowledge only in our fear and anger and our sense of our existence, that we could not survive alone, yet it was equally dangerous to give up being ourselves. If we were lucky we had parents who understood this, treated us with respect and loved us for what we were, and not for what we might become - that is, the person our parents wanted us to be.

      Before they are even born, babies start receiving messages from their parents. It is now well established that quite early in the foetal life babies distinguish sounds and prefer pleasant sounds to unpleasant sounds. In the womb babies are able to associate one event (say, a sound) with another event (say, a change of conditions in the womb), and use the occurrence of the first event to predict the second. Thus one baby may associate the sound of sweet music with the relaxation of the womb as the mother, having switched on her favourite soap opera, puts her feet up for a rest, while another may associate the sound of a man’s voice shouting