THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.

.......................Louise and Ferdy: dramatic personifications.

....................................................by Stanley

....Are you missing your feelings? If so you’re lucky, for a long time I didn’t have any feelings to miss. Well, that’s not quite true. I did have feelings, but they were only for other people, not for me. I was known as a very feeling and sympathetic person. I could only feel sympathetic, sad or angry for others, on behalf of others, as it were. These days I am beginning to feel some of that compassion for myself, but for most of my life it never occurred to me. Even more so when I had children. Having children just reinforced my urge to self-sacrifice. I didn’t look upon myself as a good mother – although people used to tell me I was too good for my own good. I knew in a way they were right, but being that way felt natural. If you have lived most of your life without your own feelings it only occasionally seems like something is missing.

,,,,But now I know I also had a selfish reason for being so selfless. The first time I ever felt angry it surprised and horrified me. It happened in the kitchen when my husband criticized the way I cooked the potatoes. Small enough thing – nothing unusual. But there was a kitchen knife lying on the bench. Something rose up in me and I wanted to plunge the knife into his back. That moment in my mind I actually did it. I ran into the bedroom shaking with fear.

....It was after that experience I started therapy. I soon realised I did have a selfish reason for being so unselfish: I was afraid of myself – afraid, not only of my anger, but any sympathy I might have for myself. In my childhood they called it ‘wallowing in self-pity’. A big no-no. For me, feeling for others was a way of self-preservation. Deep down, the only way I knew to be accepted.

....In my sessions we did a lot of work on the feelings in my body. At first I didn’t know what my therapist was talking about. I got irritable when he asked me to look into my body to see how I felt. That irritability was actually the beginning of a feeling that was already there. Only it turned out to be much more than irritability – it was rage and sorrow.

....Another thing I found out was why I often felt so tired. Eventually I learned that to have my feelings I had to come home. Again and again I had to come home – I mean come home to my body, the place where you are supposed to live. I was always tired because deep down I didn’t want to live, I wasn’t living with myself, for myself. My body was my enemy. It had all the feelings I didn’t want, all the feelings that could have ruined me if they got out. I went through a period where I just couldn’t be bothered with the effort it took to stay alive and cope.

....The only way not to have feelings is to simply vacant. Now, when I meet a person like I used to be, I recognise that ‘no-one-at-home’ look. I feel sorry for them. They make a good show of being alive; doing all the right things; smiling and nodding at the right times. But that’s all it is – a show.

....When I was young I was taught a big lesson: having feelings was dangerous. Nobody said as much, but that’s how it was. I was the youngest with three bossy brothers, a macho father and a useless mother. I had to make a survival choice – hide myself and my feelings or face being ostracised and annihilated. That’s what it was like. Choosing to live took one sharp act of decision: leave home ! Home – the place where all one’s feelings are. Leave them all at home. Leave ones primary home whilst still living on in the family home. Strange isn’t it? One chooses to live and be good; set the body up to make the right noises and look OK – otherwise stand back and just watch yourself pretending to be in the game of life. Watch my body acting whilst having nothing to do with it. All the while knowing somehow one is hiding. I used to do that physically too. I used to hide in the kennel with the dog.

....Today life is much more difficult. Well, perhaps not so much for me, but for others whom I seem to puzzle. Some think I have changed for the worse. Particularly my husband Ferdy. He’s a good man, but he now finds me difficult. I feel sorry for him, but not so sorry that I will give up myself. My main problem with him now is he stifles me. The one thing he hates is me saying ‘I want some space’. I really don’t know whether  our marriage will survive and I don’t really know how I will feel if it doesn’t; but I do know I can’t go back to how it was.

 

 

HOW HUMAN NATURE BECOMES A PERSON

an excusion into evolutionary psychology
............................by Stanley

....The idea that all the great variety of cultures ancient and modern are built up upon a universally shared human nature has been out of fashion for quite a while. Instead we have had what is known as the ‘blank slate’ theory that says there is no such thing as human nature. You are born a blank slate and the habits, language and customs of your culture totally shape you – you live in it, you think with it. Culture is everything. This view is known as ‘post-modernism’. It is so called because it opposes what was a ‘modern’ view, starting with the 18th century Enlightenment, that there is indeed such a thing as objective ‘nature’ – human included. The post-modernists would insist that the whole of human history proves their point. Except that there is a small slice of human history they overlooked. 

......2.5 million years ago our ancestors, hardly recognisable as human, began a long journey through time that ended 12,000 years ago – a period roughly co-incident with the Pleistocene geological era. Someone from the end of that period you would recognise as fully human; and they would be in every sense – biologically and psychologically basically the same as us, with the same potentialities as ourselves. But it took evolution and natural selection over 2 million years to do it. 

.....In that ‘small slice of history’ human nature was formed and it remains basically unchanged in everyone today no matter what their culture. 

......Interesting to us are the more personal aspects of this. Some years ago when I first encountered evolutionary psychology I didn’t like it. I didn’t understand it because I had no knowledge of evolution. It seemed to me to be one of those dead-head scientific theories that would spoil my Jungian view of the world. I thought it could never account for the human imagination. I was wrong.

.....But still, a more pertinent question is this: if our inherited human nature make us all basically the same, the problem for us in person-centred psychology is how and in what way each human person is different; for us this is a crucial question. We are not asking about cultural differences – but the differences between you and me.

.....In our work, the concept of ‘the person’ is most important. Somehow we have to account for it. I believe what we are referring to is a continued development of a long evolutionary trend. What we call ‘the person’ is a refinement of our inherited ability to respond to the specificities of the environment. 

.....The more an animal can respond to the specifics of the environment the greater are its chances of survival. The ability to differentiate changes in the environment and respond appropriately is the key to the success of all the more highly developed mammals. The lower animals cannot do this so well. In  order to lay her eggs the female wasp (Sphex), first digs a hole in the sand, then goes out looking for a caterpillar which she stings and drags into her hole so  that her young can feed upon it. But first she leaves the caterpillar on the edge of the hole while she checks to see if the hole is OK. If you move the caterpillar while she is checking the hole she will go through the whole procedure again. No matter how many times you move the caterpillar while she is in the hole checking it, when she finds the caterpillar again she will go back and check the hole again. She never gets past this repetition if you keep moving the caterpillar.

.....Compare this to the ability of a cat chasing a mouse. The environment and the mouse are constantly changing and the cat responds to each specific change in present time. But far more complex is George at an interview with a board of examiners where he is trying to get a job as an electronics engineer. Not only is George facing a barrage of complicated questions coming from people who also emit shades of subliminal feelings towards him, he is also dealing with all his associated memories: the maths teacher who was sarcastic to him at school, his father’s heavy goals for him, his imagination and fears for the future, as well as his whole training as an engineer. All are present to him; and all are involved in answering the next challenging question from the examining board. No one in the world has ever been in exactly the situation George is in at this moment. And no one in the world will answer the next probing as George will. There are no existing patterns that will help him. His response in present time will come out of the total person George is. George is definitely no mere behavioral, stimulus response organism. He has come a long way from that.

.....Some evolutionary psychologists maintain that our value of the human person is a direct result of evolution and natural selection. I suppose you could say that the intrinsic value we place on the ‘person’ is the secular equivalent of belief in the soul which must have had, because of its ubiquity, some sort of adaptive advantage in evolutionary terms. 

.....All of which would have been laid down in our development during the Pleistocene some 2 million years ago. Evolutionary psychologist Nicolas Humphrey has said that we, and to some extent gorillas and chimps, have evolved to be ‘natural psychologists’. For good reasons we developed the ability to second guess the minds of our fellows, giving us, as a species, a survival advantage. 

.....From this beginning we became ‘a society of selves. The idea that everyone is equally special in this way is extraordinarily potent – psychologically, ethically and politically…  And from the beginning, it will have transformed human relationships, encouraging new levels of mutual respect, and greatly increasing the value each person puts on their own and other’s lives. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that it marks a watershed in the evolution of our species.’ 

..

..