September 2022
I’ve hired a painter to do the railings, eaves, front door frame, windowsills, and the like in colorbond classic cream. The door frame to the glorious red front door had been a Chinese green, but now I’m having to subdue my exuberance a little. The plan is to sell my house and move elsewhere, and so I’m following the painter’s advice: provide more of a blank slate, a tabula rasa, for potential buyers.
The whole notion of a tabula rasa goes against my grain, aesthetically as well as theoretically. Those who know me know I love colour and beige and grey just doesn’t do it. Classic cream, I’m discovering, as more surfaces are painted, is bringing a lovely sunshine to the place. The house has, after all, violet-blue posts and a deep red roof and a wall cladding of soft golden ochre. She won’t be losing her personality getting classic cream railings.
When I was a child my father would consult me as to what colours to paint the doors of the family house, or the family car, or anything else that needed colour. I loved light green (still do), and so we travelled around in a couple of light green cars over the years (my father clearly liked the colour too). For the exterior doors of the house that my architect father designed, I chose red for the front door, green for my room, yellow, blue and white for the other doors. It looked like a Miro painting.
My trip to China in 1998 saturated my colour passion even further. How incredible were those archways and porticos of temples in their reds, blues, yellows and greens, dappled in the autumn leaves of November. How very un-beige was that experience.
I’m not made for the idea of the blank slate, and I certainly know that the art of psychotherapy cannot operate from such a bland stance. A person comes for their first (middle and last and every session in between) filled with their uniqueness of life, their palette of intensity and lightness and darkness and different shades of being. And yet, some branches of psychotherapeutic thought persist with the idea that we are born as blank slates that fill with novel learned and perceived post-natal stuff.
We are already shaped physiologically and emotionally (and thus style and possibly contents of thoughts) by maternal stress levels, our mother’s consumption of alcohol and drugs, her experiences of economic and cultural pressures, and other environmental influences all contribute to how we are when we are born, and often, how we are throughout our life.
Too much alcohol consumption affects pre-natal growth, such that offspring can be born with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder causes brain damage and growth problems. The child also craves alcohol. The effects of FASD last throughout life. The problems change as the child grows up. Behaviour and mood problems such as alcohol and drug abuse, depression, psychosis and aggressive behaviour may develop in the teenage years. The problems vary from child to child, but defects are not reversible. And then there’s Neonatal abstinence syndrome which is what happens when fetuses are exposed to drugs (opiates, mostly) in the womb before birth. Babies can then go through drug withdrawal after birth. Prenatal stress can increase the development of depression and anxiety in babies, that may persist throughout life.
On the positive side, newborn babies can remember melodies played to them while they were in the womb, according to some research. There’s also that rather mysterious thing of reincarnation: some children, it seems, are born with knowledges of other lives. Who really knows the veracity of these things, but, in some parts of the world, this is idea is built deeply into the psyche of the people.
There is no tabula rasa, we are all part of the rich abundance of human experience and that everything we engage in remains present in the broader field of lives. Same goes for houses. Whatever others make of my house, some of my presence remains. And that’s rather fun.
