Learning to be ourselves by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
A girl, born twenty or sixty or two hundred years ago to a woman who was dislocated from her family by war, thrown out of sync with usual ordinary things, develops severe asthma and needs, according to her parents, constant monitoring. She was never left alone. All the little girl knew was struggling to breath. The more she struggled, the tighter the parental vigilance and control of her life. Literally, there was no air to breathe and she did not find herself as herself, but always as something looked over by others. In time, the asthma subsided, but her feeling of being in the public space never really did.
Everything in her place had to be kept clean and untainted by the lingering presence of another person, her clothes had to be washed after visiting other people, her furniture had to be taken outside and scrubbed down if anyone else had touched it; her place was her place. Very OCDish. Still, though, his mother came and entered her place, still telling her what to do, to think, to eat. Her life outside her mother’s presence was indeterminate and a bit chaotic, because she still didn’t really know who she was. She was getting older, but still trapped in that purgatory of undifferentiation. Mother, at one point, decided daughter should marry the nice guy over the road, and she did. This life, though, was not her own.
It is critical that children find their own feet. For sure, support and security is essential, indeed critical for human and animal development. Without security and support a little infant does not develop confidence to venture out into the world without intense anxiety. This is the principle of attachment theory as described by John Bowlby (1907-1990). Security and support, and low levels of caregiver anxiety, where a crying infant is attended to straight away, gives the little one a sense that it is safe to simply be him or herself, in process of self differentiation. The process of self differentiation (learning what one is and is not responsible for) is in turn, the development of emotional intelligence.
Depression, anxiety, certain psychosomatic disorders, and obsessive compulsive disorders are associated with not being able to determine the boundary between oneself and others, as well as knowing that the mind of others cannot be completely known and is not one’s own, though an empathy with them is possible. In these conditions, ambiguity is not tolerated and conclusions about things is fitted, far too quickly, into a familiar account of things, even though a non-differentiated state is an ambiguous one. The familiar account of things can be the stories of family, culture, and personal experience that has become ingrained, and offers some sense of security. For example, the person who says, “I can’t have a normal relationship because I am always rejected,” stymies themselves right from the word go by the story they have. “I will be rejected because I am always rejected.” But, really, maybe it isn’t so.
When we develop a capacity to look at our circumstances by gathering and discriminating and weighing up other explanations for what we have hitherto assumed to be true, we can begin to untangle assumptions about our world and work out where we individually stand on matters concerning ourselves. Untangling our accounts of things as we know them, is part of the process of increasing emotional intelligence and lowering our propensity for depressive illness. Such a process also loosens us from our past.
Learning what one is and is not is the basis of discovering our uniqueness and celebrating it. Learning what one is and is not is a work that continues throughout life. Mothers and sons and daughters, of whatever age can engage in developing this knowledge, for what used to be a condition of the past doesn’t need to continue to be a condition of the present. Nothing is set in stone. This is where therapy becomes very useful indeed. I am, and you are and together we can find new ways of feeling, of living.
