DOROTHY ROWE
Guide to Life

Dedication

To my publisher and friend

Mike Fishwick

Epigraph

Some five hundred years before the birth of Christ the Greek poet Xenophanes wrote,

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,

All things to us; but in the course of time,

Through seeking we may learn, and know things better.

But as for certain truth, no man has known it,

Nor will he know it; neither of the gods,

Nor yet of the things of which I speak.

And even if by chance he were to utter

The final truth, he would himself not know it;

For all is but a woven web of guesses.¹

Albert Einstein wrote,

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.²

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1 The Secret of Life

2 Life – What You Can’t Change and What You Can

3 You and Your Own Truth

4 You and What ‘You’ Is

5 You and How You Feel About Yourself

6 You and Tour Priorities

7 You and Your Life Story

8 You and Death

9 You and Depression

10 You and Other People

11 You and Emotion

12 You and Power

13 Is It All Your Fault?

14 You and Communication

15 You and the World

16 You and Time

17 Living Your Own Life

18 If You Want to Learn More

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for Dorothy Rowe:

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1 The Secret of Life

THE SECRET of life is that there is no secret.

All that you need to know about life is there for you to see. All you have to do is open your eyes and recognize what you already know.

However, down the centuries, many people wanting power have tried to keep the secret. They have created their theories and their jargon, and told us that they and they alone know the secret of life. These are the people who have claimed to be the wisest of the wise. They have called themselves philosophers, theologians, clergy, doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, counsellors – in short, experts on life and living. Jungians say we are all part of the collective unconscious, while psychiatrists say that we are the product of our genes. Each of these theories is a way of describing and explaining certain parts of human experience, but no one theory can describe, let alone explain it all.

Some of these people have always known that there is no secret, while others have insisted that they and they alone know the Secret Truth About Life.

Down the centuries a few of these experts have dared to reveal that there is no secret, and, consequently, have been reviled by their colleagues. How dare such renegades say that each of us can sort things out for ourselves! How dare they threaten the experts’ power, prestige and wealth!

The experts always protect themselves by forming themselves into an elite and guarding the entrance with a formidable barrier of examinations and rituals through which only a chosen few can pass.

When the selected few do get through the barrier they are faced with a choice. Do you now tell yourself that you are initiated into the Secret Truth About Life? Or do you bear the disappointment of your discovery that what you might have is simply a collection of useful research results (for instance, we now know that babies are born with the ability to distinguish faces from all other phenomena) and, if you look for it, the kind of wisdom in living which has always been available to every generation.

Amongst the experts this wisdom has been more known than used. On the whole, the personal lives of experts are far from edifying. Some experts do live wisely but most (I’m speaking from years of observation) manage their lives no better than the rest of us. They’ve been so busy being experts they haven’t learnt what they need to know.

The secret which is no secret is that there is a body of knowledge which concerns how to live wisely. This wisdom is available to all of us. You don’t need a brilliant intelligence and a superb education to understand it, absorb it and use it.

However, just as we are all born artists, musicians, mathematicians and explorers and our upbringing and education take most of these abilities away from us, so we are born with the ability to understand ourselves and life, and the adults around us pour scorn on this ability and forbid us to use it. In learning to be good, obedient members of society we lose touch with the knowledge we need if we are to live our lives in ways which are rich and fulfilling.

A rich and fulfilling life is not one of unalloyed happiness. No amount of wisdom can defend us from loss, disappointment, old age and death, nor from the idiocies committed by those who have political and economic power.

However, such wisdom does ensure that we can live comfortably with ourselves and with other people. Being comfortable with yourself means that you are not forever thinking about and worrying about yourself, always prey to difficult and unpleasant emotions. Being comfortable with other people means that you are not afraid of others but can enjoy their company. There’s no longer a barrier between you and other people. No longer burdened with the sense of your own inadequacies, you cease to see the world as a cold, evil, disappointing place and instead become aware of the world’s infinite possibilities.

What follows here is not a list of Absolute Truths. The way we are physically constituted means that if there are any Absolute Truths in the universe we could not recognize one even if we stumbled over it. What we have are relative truths, conclusions we have drawn from our experience and which are always relative to our past experience and the situation in which we find ourselves.

We each have our own relative truths, and if we compare notes we can see that some of us have arrived at much the same relative truths. This suggests that perhaps we have managed to approximate that kind of relative truth which, in a random universe, turns up fairly frequently. We can then decide, if we were laying a bet, on which of these truths we would put our money.

Writing this kind of book creates for me the problem of which of the personal pronouns I should use. Should I say ‘them’ or ‘us’, ‘me’ or ‘you’?

Using ‘they’ and ‘them’ puts a distance between them and us (my reader and me) and sometimes I want to do this.

I use ‘we’ and ‘us’ when I’m talking about something which everybody is likely to do at some time or other.

I use ‘I’ and ‘me’ when I’m talking about some part of my own experience which may or may not be like that of other people.

When I use ‘you’ and ‘your’ I don’t mean that you, my dear reader, have had all the experiences or think in all the different ways which I am describing. No person could live so long or be so changeable. I am simply assuming that with some of my anecdotes about ‘you’ you will feel an identity. Others of these anecdotes are an invitation for you to make a leap of imagination into someone else’s world. ‘Ah, yes,’ you might think, ‘that reminds me of so-and-so. Is that what he thinks? I wonder.’

Understanding yourself and understanding other people are exactly the same process.

CHAPTER 2 Life – What You Can’t Change and What You Can

WHEN YOU think about your life, do you feel that you are as you are, the world is as you see it, your past was what it was, your present is what it is, and your future will be very much what you expect it to be?

Do you feel that although some parts of you, your life and the world can change, you, your life and the world are, in essence, fixed?

Do you feel that you are as you are, your life is what it is, and the world is what it is?

Do you feel that in knowing yourself, your life and the world, you know what reality is?

Do you feel that you, your life and the world are your fixed, unalterable fate? They are as they are, and they are your lot. They are reality.

If this is what you feel, then you are mistaken.

You, your life and the world are not fixed, unalterable parts of reality which you have to put up with and cope with as best you can. What you see as being you, your life and the world is not reality. You, your life and the world are matters that you can change.

What you see as you, your life and the world are the set of conclusions you have drawn from your experience of life which began when you were a tiny babe tucked in your mum’s womb and your growing brain, like the hardware in a computer, got to the stage where it could run your software, commonly called your mind or, less commonly, your ‘meaning structure’.

To describe what I mean by a meaning structure I have used the analogy of a computer, but this is quite inadequate because our brains can do much more than the most advanced computer can.

A computer’s hardware is built and then the software, which someone has constructed separately, is fed into it, whereas the hardware and the software of a brain develop together. Our brains come equipped with much more than what can be observed when a brain is dissected or scanned.

Our brains come equipped with tools which are there as potentialities until our interaction with the environment brings that potential into use. Thus before the potential of your tool of language could come into being and be used you had to have a language spoken around you and you had to be able to hear it.

Clever though these tools are, their function is not to reveal reality to you. They are not transparent windows on to the world. Instead, the tool’s function is to create a construction which represents some aspect of your experience. This construction is a meaning. If the language you learn to speak is English you’ll see the world in the way English creates it. If you learnt Latin or Spanish or Italian or were born in the West Indies you’ll see the world differently.

A study of the derivation of words will show just how diversely different languages ‘see’ the world. The word ‘dawn’ comes from the Old English daeg, ‘day’, and dagian, ‘to become light’.³ Ancient Romans saw dawns where ‘the air grows golden’, hence aurora from aurum, gold. Spaniards and Italians saw a white dawn, alba, ‘the white’. Out of African languages dawn in the West Indies became ‘day clean’ and cock crow ‘Gi me trousers’.⁴

When, shortly after birth, your eyes open, you seem to be surrounded by a blur of events. Then one of your tools comes into operation – the tool of contrast. With this tool some parts of the blur look different from other parts. You start to see patterns. For the rest of your life you will continue to see patterns, even where no patterns actually exist. You’ll hear patterns and learn to call the clearly structured patterns you hear ‘language’ or ‘music’ and the less clearly structured ‘noise’. You’ll also learn to feel patterns, taste patterns and smell patterns.

Within a day or so one of these patterns which you see becomes very significant though as yet you don’t know why. Your tool of face recognition has come into operation and a few days later you know, though you haven’t the words to say it, That’s my mum.’

Aren’t you clever? That’s because

The function of your brain is to create meaning.

You could ask, ‘Isn’t the function of the brain to keep the body alive?’

I would say, ‘This is the meaning for the brain which many people now use because this meaning seems to give useful results. But it’s only recently in human history that the brain has been given this meaning. In other times and cultures other organs of the body – the heart, the stomach and the bowels – have been given the meaning of being the most important organ. Current research on genes and DNA suggest that it’s our genes that have the primary importance. No doubt there are genes which enable our brain to create meaning.’

At the moment of conception the brain starts developing and at some point (current research suggests at about 18 weeks’ gestation) meaning starts to be created.

Note that I did not say, ‘You start creating meaning.’

There is no YOU sitting inside your brain creating meaning.

Or at least I hope there isn’t, because then I’d have to work out how little you-inside-your-brain creates meaning and if little you has a littler you inside and so on and so on to an infinity of you’s.

So let’s stick with your brain creating meaning.

Now I’m going to abandon the computer metaphor and turn to Lego.

For those of you bereft of children I shall explain that Lego is a toy made up of plastic blocks of all shapes and sizes but all with a regular pattern of circular indentations and raised rings. The rings on one block fit into the indentations of another, thus allowing all sorts of structures to be built. However, if you imagine your brain being made of blocks of Lego the difference would be that this brain Lego is infinitely flexible so that every part can be attached simultaneously to every other and can reform itself to accommodate any new part that arrives on the scene.

This happens often, because your Lego/brain has many tools which, sometimes working together and sometimes working alone, create new pieces of Lego. Each piece of Lego is a meaning.

Your first piece of Lego/meaning, formed at some point after conception, probably had to do with pleasure and pain. Soon would follow Lego/meanings to do with sounds and pressure, and these would all link together. Ease of pressure would link to pleasure, harsh sounds to pain.

The linked pieces of Lego/meaning form a structure, hence the term meaning structure. This meaning structure constantly accommodates new pieces of Lego/meaning and reforms itself in the process. Encountering the outside world brings a constant, never-ending influx of changes, and at some point the meaning structure starts to call itself ‘I’.

You are your meaning structure. Your meaning structure is you.

If you like you don’t have to think of yourself as a set of flexible Lego. Perhaps you could think of another metaphor. A cell dividing and enlarging, with each new cell being a meaning, is another image I sometimes use.

One of our greatest problems is that the only way we can make sense of anything is in terms of our current meaning structure. We understand something new by seeing it as being like something we already know about. Whenever we encounter something which actually is so new to us that there is nothing in our meaning structure like it we find it hard to make sense of it. This is why keeping up with modern physics is so difficult. It is hard to imagine images like black holes and alternative universes, and even these images are likely to be quite inadequate in describing what is actually out there because the physicists have to rely on using images that already exist.

I use the Lego image as a way of explaining, first, that what all of us do all the time is to create meaning, and, second, that these meanings hang together and add up to an understanding of what we/our life/the world is.

The fact that you are in essence a meaning-creating creature is what you are stuck with and cannot change.

You cannot change the basic physical constituents of your body.

You cannot grow wings and fly.

You are a non-flying creature but you are a meaning-creating creature.

Your brain/hardware can grow, or suffer injury and decay, and your meaning structure constantly changes, but they are the constituents of your being and you cannot leave them.

You can imagine leaving your body, but this is just one of the amazing tricks your meaning structure can play.

Your meaning structure cannot show you what reality is. All your meaning structure can show you are your own pictures which represent what you think reality is. These pictures are actually inside your head, but your amazing brain and meaning structure persuade you that you are inside the pictures and that what you picture is real.

Presumably some kind of reality outside ourselves exists.

Some philosophers have argued that all that exists are our thoughts, but that seems nonsensical. Am I just imagining the paper I am writing on and you just imagining the book you’re reading? I’m sure that if you and I had simply imagined the universe and everything in it we wouldn’t have created the terrible things that happen in the world.

The evidence from our experience does seem to point to the existence of reality, the sum total of everything that exists. What this everything is is something we human beings can never know directly. We can only know it indirectly through careful judgement and thought.

Physicists talk about everything that exists as being made up of tiny particles which they give curious names like neutrino, charm, and quark. To large parts of everything that exists they give names like galaxy, nebula, solar systems and black holes.

They talk about these things as if they are reality, but when pressed physicists will explain they cannot possibly see reality.

Erwin Schrodinger wrote,

The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain.⁵

We all make different kinds of observations, but these observations depend on where we are and what we expect to see. What we see and report is not reality but our interpretation of reality.

This is all that any of us can do.

We can never know reality directly.

All we can ever know are our interpretations of reality.

What you know as you, your life and the world is not reality. What you know as you, yourself and the world is your interpretation of you, your life and the world.

Seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting are always, even at their very simplest, interpretations, just as intuitions are interpretations.

Interpretations are meanings.

We are always in the business of creating meanings.

This is what you cannot change.

You cannot not create meaning.

Imagine you’re sitting quiedy in your room and something happens. Your awareness of this happening is your interpretation. The beginning of your interpretation, entirely without words, is, say, ‘a very loud sound’. Immediately, before you stir from your seat to find out why the loud sound occurred, you give the sound a meaning. You might think it was an explosion, or a car crash, or a breaking window and so on. After interpreting the sound you might decide to check whether you were right.

You don’t have to be conscious to create meaning.

Even fast asleep, you interpret a happening as being in your body and you move to release your trapped arm, all without you waking.

It is our interpretations which determine how we think, feel and act.

Thus,

It’s not what happens to you that matters but how you interpret what happens to you.

You ALWAYS have a choice about how you will interpret what happens to you.

This applies even in the most extreme situations.

Suppose you are told that you have a particularly nasty form of cancer. How will you interpret this?

Some alternative interpretations are:

I won’t let this beat me.

This is the end.

This is God’s punishment for my wickedness.

If I’m a good patient the doctors will save me.

Conventional medicine is useless.

And so on.

Anyone who says, There is no alternative’ has merely rejected all other choices.

Interpretations are choices.

A friend who had had a Catholic upbringing and so saw herself, her life and her world as an unchangeable part of the Absolute, Eternal Truths of the Catholic Church told me that the best thing she got from therapy was learning that she had choices.

You can always change your choice.

You might initially interpret your illness as, ‘This is God’s punishment for my wickedness’ but later think, ‘That’s silly’ and decide upon, ‘I won’t let this beat me.’

Having made one interpretation you then interpret your interpretation.

Interpreting your illness as God’s punishment might lead you to further interpretations such as, ‘I deserve this punishment,’ or, ‘I must be good and accept my punishment and not do anything to get better.’ Deciding that your illness is a challenge to be mastered might lead you to interpret this as, ‘I’ll do everything I can to get better,’ or, ‘I’ll get on with my life as normal.’

Life has many paradoxes.

A paradox is not a problem.

A problem is a question which, in theory at least, is capable of being answered.

A paradox is a seeming contradiction which nevertheless contains an element of a truth.

A PARADOX OF LIFE

Even though we can never know reality directly, to survive and flourish we must always strive to make interpretations that are as close to reality as possible.

For instance, suppose you’re about to cross a busy road. You can’t possibly know the exact speed of approaching traffic, but to cross the road safely you must judge the speed of the traffic as accurately as possible. How do you make this judgement?

Suppose a friend who is a very successful stockbroker advises you to put your savings in shares that, he says, are sure to increase in value. How do you judge the likelihood that what he says is true?

We create new interpretations out of the interpretations we have already acquired. We have nothing else to use. We might decide not to bother with sorting through these old interpretations to create something new and just run out on to the road or impulsively give our money to the stockbroker. Or we might think carefully about our past experiences, contrasting one with another, and compare our past interpretations with our present observations to be as sure as we can that our new interpretation is as good an interpretation of reality as it can be. We can compare the speeds of a number of passing cars, or do some research about current stock prices.

Although we might know about many alternative ways of interpreting some aspect of reality, we each can have our own favourite way of interpreting that aspect.

However, our favourite ways of creating our interpretations can result in interpretations which are far from reality.

For instance, we all know that envelopes come in many sizes and colours. Some people, however, when inspecting their mail, see and open white and coloured envelopes but never see, much less open brown envelopes. Yet unpaid bills don’t disappear into thin air.

We need to be aware how one group of our wishes can dominate all our interpretations. We can choose to see only what we wish to see and thus do only what we wish to do. However, our wishes might not be an accurate reflection of reality, particularly that part of reality which is composed of other people’s interpretations. We forget that other people see things differently from us.

You must have noticed that no two people ever interpret an event in exactly the same way. You interpret a television programme as being excellent. Your friend thinks it’s rubbish. This is not a matter of other people being mad, bad or awkward. It is an inescapable part of the way we are physically constituted.

Each of us, every moment of our lives, asleep or awake, is engaged in interpreting what is happening.

Each of us has only one source we can draw on in creating our interpretations.

This is our past experience.

No two people ever have the same past experience.

Identical twins might begin life with the same genetic components, but life in the womb differs for each of them, one is born after the other and from the moment they are born they have different experiences.

To the extent that two people create similar interpretations they can communicate, but even when two people speak the same language they create very different interpretations. Thus two people can live side by side, speak the same language, yet each interpret the world in totally different ways. It’s often said, for instance, that men and women inhabit different planets!

So here we are, each of us in our own little world of interpretations, yet, at the same time, we are born social animals.

We are physically constituted as social animals.

When you were born you didn’t just search around for a food-bearing nipple. You also searched for a friendly face. You were born knowing how to recognize a face and preferring to look at a face than at anything else.

If a friendly face hadn’t turned up for you to talk to, you wouldn’t be reading this now. Without a friendly face, even if you’d been adequately fed and kept warm, you would have either died in the first few weeks (it’s a condition known as ‘anaclitic depression’) or you would have gone on to become one of those strange individuals who are unable to see other people as being in any way different from other objects.

Out of the bond we develop with a mothering person in our own first months of life grows our sense of right and wrong, guilt and reparation. Babies who don’t get the chance to develop this bond grow up to be conscienceless people. They might lead apparently quite ordinary lives, whether criminals or company directors, but their personal relationships are always a disaster.

A PARADOX OF LIFE

We are each a unique individual living in our own individual, self-created world, yet we need one another in order to survive.

The interpretations we create don’t just exist on their own. They arise out of the set of interpretations we have created in the past and they also determine how we think, feel and act.

Whatever we think, feel and do has endless consequences.

This is another aspect of life which we cannot change.

It has to do with the nature of reality.

Whatever reality is, it does seem that it is a vast, ever-changing interconnectedness. Everything is constantly moving and everything is connected to everything else. Physicists say this, and so did the ancient Hindu, Taoist and Buddhist philosophers.

Because everything is connected to everything else,

All our acts have consequences.

Don’t kid yourself that what you do will have no consequences, or very limited consequences, or that you can decide what the consequences will be. A father might say, ‘I caught my son stealing. I gave him a good hiding and that was the end of it’, but he is deluding himself. The father’s actions will have consequences beyond the father’s control as a result of how the son interprets what his father has done.

Everything you do has consequences and these consequences spread in all directions and go on forever.

A PARADOX OF LIFE

Everything that happens has good consequences and bad consequences.

For instance, you win the lottery.

Good consequences: You give up working and plan a round-the-world luxury voyage.

Bad consequences: Your entire family comes too.

Remember that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are not Absolute and Eternal Judgements existing outside our human life. We each have our own interpretation of good and bad. Some people believe that lotteries are wicked. Some people wouldn’t want to go anywhere without their family.

A PARADOX OF LIFE

Every interpretation we can create has good and bad implications.

Suppose your interpretation of the right way to behave includes the belief that you will always tell the truth.

The good implication of this is that people always know where they are with you, and the bad implication is that people are sometimes hurt by what you say.

Because every interpretation has good implications and bad implications, and every action has good consequences and bad consequences, life can never be perfect.

The longing for perfection is the longing for an illusion.

If you want to be miserable, believe that you and the world ought to be perfect.

You will always feel guilty, angry and disappointed.

If you want to be miserable, don’t try to make your interpretations as close to reality as possible.

You will always feel surprised, confused and fearful.

If you want to be miserable, believe that you, your life and the world are reality, fixtures which you cannot change.

You will always feel trapped and hopeless.

If you are miserable and want to change, say to yourself,

The way I interpret myself, my life and my world has implications and consequences which make me miserable.

What alternative interpretations can I discover for what has happened, is happening and will happen to me?

Which of these interpretations will give me the most satisfaction and happiness?’

Let’s look at the important components of ‘myself’, ‘my life’ and my world’.

CHAPTER 3 You and Your Own Truth

IF I WERE to ask you, ‘What kind of a person are you?’ and you were to answer truthfully, would you say,

‘Other people looking at me think that I’m a very together person, that I’m competent and confident, get on well with other people, always cheerful, kind – but they don’t know the real me. Underneath I’m very different. I’m not as confident and competent as I make out, and I’m not a nice person at all. I try not to let people know me as I am.’

If I asked you, ‘If you were a house, how would you describe yourself?’ would you say,

‘As a house I’ve got lots of rooms that represent different parts of me. On the outside the house looks all right – could be better but it will pass. There’s a front door that’s always closed. I’ll let a few people into the front rooms. They’re cheerful, nicely furnished rooms, good for work and socializing. There’s a room behind the front rooms where I let only one or two people in. It’s a rather sombre room. That’s where I am when I’m not with people. Beneath that room there’s a cellar. I keep the door to the cellar locked. There’s something terrible in that cellar. If people knew about what’s at the centre of my house that would be the end of me.’

Most people experience their existence as being something like this house.

Some people try to pretend that their cellar and its terrible contents don’t exist. This pretence leaves them feeling that they don’t have a whole house, just a facade of a house. They feel that they aren’t a person, just a facade of a person. They spend their time in their front room socializing and being good and kind to people. They need to be busy and have lots of excitement to stop them being aware of the emptiness and darkness lurking inside themselves.

Other people are always aware of the danger in the cellar. They believe that the only way to keep the cellar locked and hidden is for them to be very good. If they’re a good son/daughter, wife/husband, father/mother, employer/employee, friend and citizen they can keep the evil danger inside them well locked away. This is a never-ending task and their vigilance must be constant.

Most people believe that they are, in essence, bad and unacceptable, but that if they keep this essence hidden, and if they work hard to be good, other people won’t discover how bad they are and they’ll be accepted, and even liked and laved.

Most people believe that this is how they are, and that this is fixed and unchangeable.

If this is what you believe, then you are mistaken.

When you were born you didn’t experience yourself as being bad and unacceptable. When you were born you/your house was open-plan and everyone was invited in. You didn’t know anything about cellars and dangerous, dark forces inside you. You were as you were, open, curious, trusting, wanting to love and be loved, to please and be pleased.

Then the people around you, the very ones you wanted to please so they would love you, began suggesting that there was something nasty inside you and that your open-plan house needed a cellar where this nastiness could be locked away. This nastiness had names. There was greed (‘Babies should be fed at regular intervals and not just when they want to be fed’), dirtiness (‘You’ve soiled yourself. You’re disgusting’), selfishness (‘Wait your turn’), aggression (‘You’re a wicked child to hit your sister’).

All the time you were interpreting what was happening to you.

(You developed the ability to create meaning while you were still in the womb. We begin creating interpretations long before we have a language in which to describe these interpretations. Our interpretations take the form of feelings, images and sounds. Studies of babies in the womb show that they prefer the sweet melodies of Mozart to the taut sharpness of Stravinsky. No doubt once born they can distinguish the sound of ‘Dearest darling’ from the sound of ‘You filthy pig’ even though they don’t know the meaning of the words.)

Like everyone else, the only way you could create your interpretations was to use your past experience. But you were a tiny child. You didn’t have much experience but you did try to create the very best interpretations that you possibly could. You interpreted events and drew conclusions from your interpretations.

You found the world to be a very confusing place. Fortunately your mother explained the world to you.

There you were, toddling along on unsteady feet and your mother said, ‘Be careful or you’ll fall and hurt yourself.’

You took no notice. Then you fell over and hurt yourself. You drew a conclusion from this. You thought, ‘My mum knows what’s what. She tells me the truth.’

Soon after you had another accident. Perhaps you wet yourself or knocked over a glass of milk. Your mother said, ‘You disgusting, wicked child. You’ll be the death of me’ (or words to that effect).

Using your past experience you interpreted what she said.

You had found out that your mother knows the world and tells the truth. (You had no idea that she’d quarrelled with your father and was taking her bad feelings out on you.)

For you the truth now is that you disgust your mother and you are so wicked that you will kill her with your wickedness.

This dangerous, disgusting wickedness is inside you.

And so your open-plan house acquires an inner room.

You know now that this inner room can get you into trouble.

And so it does.

You find yourself in a situation from which you cannot escape and in which an adult whom you rely on is inflicting pain on you.

Perhaps it’s your mother or father, who love you and only want ‘the best’ for you. They want you to be clean and toilet-trained. They want you to do as you’re told, to be a sweet, pleasant, good child, a credit to them as parents. So they punish you when you’re not.

Perhaps your parents have abandoned you. Perhaps they don’t want you, or perhaps they’re doing the best they can for you but have to earn a living. Perhaps they’re ill, or dead.

Perhaps an adult is beating you, or using you in strange and painful ways.

Whatever the situation, it is for you the extremes of pain and danger.

You interpret the situation as, ‘I am being punished by my bad parent.’

Then you remember that you depend on this bad parent and you feel even more frightened.

What can you do?

You can do what we all do when we are in a situation from which we cannot escape and which is causing us pain.

We can change how we interpret the situation.

This is what you do.

You remember that dark room in your self/house. You realize that it is your fault that you are suffering. Your interpretation of the situation now becomes, ‘I am bad and am being punished by my good parent.’

Now you are safe in the care of you good parent.

Now your house has a cellar that contains something dark and dangerous and which you must keep hidden.

Now you can never just be yourself.

Now you know you must be good. Soon you are an expert in being good.

Some unlucky children do more than just learn how to be good. Perhaps this happened to you. Perhaps instead of that extreme situation occurring just a few times in your early childhood it occurred again and again. The adult you relied on kept inflicting pain on you.

How could you keep telling yourself that this adult was good and you deserved this punishment?

By re-interpreting your interpretation.

You decide that, ‘I am bad and am being punished by my good parent, and when I grow up I shall punish bad people in the way I was punished.’

Now you have learnt how to be cruel. Now when you grow up you’ll be able to say, ‘I was beaten as a child and it never did me any harm.’ What you don’t realize is that the harm the beatings have done is to let you think that you haven’t suffered any harm.

The harm that you have suffered is that you no longer know what your own truth is.

You think that your dark cellar contains something wicked and dangerous. You don’t know that it contains nothing dangerous at all. What is hidden in there is something you came into the world knowing, something the adults around you have forbidden you to know: your own truth.

Once you know something you can’t unknow it. So, to survive you had to hide your knowledge. This is what you did.

When you were small you didn’t need me to explain to you that each of us has our own way of seeing things. You knew that. You were often surprised that other people didn’t see things in the same way as you. You’d say, ‘Oh yes’ to something, and your parents would say, ‘Oh no.’ But that was one of the things which you found interesting.

You knew that you saw things in your way. You had your own truth.

Then the adults took that knowledge away from you.

The first time that happened was perhaps something like this. You were just big and strong enough to take a loose lid off a jar. Inside was something white which oozed when you squeezed it. If you moved your hand it spread itself across the carpet in a very interesting way, and if you bounced your hand against the carpet bits of it flew off and formed a pretty pattern. You were busy being a scientist and an artist. This was exciting. This was marvellous.

Then your mother arrived.

You recognized that she did not see the situation in the same way as you did.

If you were lucky she reacted calmly. Perhaps she said, ‘I know you’re enjoying yourself and that you’re learning a lot, but I’d rather you did that with soapsuds instead of my expensive face cream. I have my way of seeing things and on this occasion my view is going to prevail. Let’s get you and the room cleaned up.’

Most of us weren’t that lucky. Most of us were left in no doubt that our mother saw the situation differently. What she did was to show us that our way of seeing the situation was utterly, utterly wrong while her way was right and that we were very bad.

Bringing up children isn’t easy. Children do have to be told that many of their interpretations are not a good reflection of the situation and thus likely to lead to danger. Many a child has thought that the red circle on top of the stove would be nice to touch. But parents have a choice of how to tell the child this isn’t so.

(1) Parents can concentrate on the child’s interpretation of the event and, arising out of this interpretation, what the child did.

For instance, a parent restraining a child from running across a busy road can say, ‘The cars are moving faster than you think. Wait until the road is clear.’

OR

(2) Parents can ignore how the child has interpreted an event and simply tell the child that he is silly, stupid, childish, wicked to do what he did.

They can say, ‘You wicked child. How many times have I told you not to run across the road!’

(1) draws the child’s attention to the interpretation he has created and suggests that he can create a better interpretation and thus act more effectively.

(2) tells the child that there is something intrinsically wrong with him.

However,

(1) requires the parent to think, be creative, be patient and to ignore those adults who are watching and thinking, even saying, ‘If that was my child I’d give him a good hiding.’

Whereas

(2) is quick and can be a self-satisfying expression of the parent’s anger arising from his or her anxiety about the child.

On the whole, parents are more expert in interpreting the world than are children. However, there is one part of the world where the child, not the parent, is the expert.

The child is the expert in knowing about his own thoughts and feelings. The child knows what these are. The parent can only guess.

This applies to all of us.

When I say, ‘We can never know reality directly,’ I mean the reality of what goes on around us. There is one aspect of reality we do know directly and that is our inner world of thoughts and feelings. In judging the world around us, however carefully, we can only make approximations; we can never enter and know another person’s inner world, but we always know directly and accurately what we think and feel and why. We know our own truth.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t know that we know. We had that knowledge taken away from us when we were children.

Some parents take our knowledge away accidentally out of exasperation. Imagine the kind of scene where the child is making those unpleasant sounds which Australians call ‘grizzling’. The child feels in need of a cuddle and something to eat. He says, ‘I’m hungry. I want a biscuit.’ His mother says, ‘You’re no; hungry. You’re tired. Go to bed.’

The child is confused. He thought his feelings meant he was hungry but his mother says this isn’t so. She implies that she knows his feelings better than he does.

Our own truth is always private. Other people cannot know our truth unless we choose to tell them.

Small children have to learn that this is so. Some parents lie to their children in order to make them obedient. They say to the child, ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

Sometimes the parent is right about what the child is thinking. It’s an educated guess, not direct knowledge, but the child doesn’t know that her parent is making a guess from an assessment of the situation and the expression on the child’s face. The child thinks that the parent can read her mind.

I’ve met many adults who still have the feeling that their parents can read their minds. They dare not think, much less say, anything critical about their parents in case the parent, however far distant, knows what they are thinking and punishes them by making them feel guilty. ‘How could you think that, after all I’ve done for you.’

I’ve come across many people who, seeing psychologists as parental figures, believe that psychologists can see their deepest secrets. I’ve seen a banker turn pale when I’ve asked him if I could ask him a few questions about banks and money, while dozens of people, in the course of a casual conversation, have nervously asked me, ‘Are you psychoanalysing me?’, that is, ‘Are you seeing into the deepest recesses of my being?’

Some parents tell their children that God knows what they are thinking.

If God made us, He equipped us puny creatures with aggression to help us to survive in a hostile world, and with imagination to let us express our aggression towards one another in thoughts rather than in deeds.

When we are children, we become aggressive because parents necessarily frustrate us. Frustration leads to aggression. Children soon discover that they can vent their aggression in fantasy, allowing them to both murder (in fantasy) and preserve (in reality) their parents.

But if God can read your thoughts, and if anger and aggression are wicked, your own truth ceases to be your own certainty and becomes instead a source of shame, guilt and confusion.

It’s no wonder that some people come to feel that their thoughts are known to powers outside themselves and that these powers insert thoughts into their minds.

Some parents know that it is important to recognize and respect their child’s own truth. However, knowing your own truth and hanging on to it no matter what is not without its problems. My friends Galen and Helen have brought up their daughter Naomi to know her own truth. Naomi has always been allowed to say what she thinks. Now she is a beautiful sixteen-year-old. Recently Galen said to me, ‘She’s utterly fearless. I’m afraid for her.’ People alienated from their own truth often envy those who aren’t and will seek to do them harm. Naomi said, ‘Why should I be afraid of people? They’re just people.’

Surviving as a person knowing your own truth is a matter of deciding in an imperfect world which imperfections are the easiest with which to live.

Some children manage to hang on to their own truth, or at least some part of it, because they are brought up by parents who are too lazy, or too busy, or too inconsistent to police the child’s every act. These parents might, however, on occasion mock or punish their children when they reveal their own truths. Their children soon learn to keep their thoughts to themselves.

What effect this has depends on how well the children think of themselves.

If they manage to hang on to some self-confidence they become revolutionaries, inventors or artists who can decide which of the imperfections of this imperfect world they will accept and which they will try to change. The revolutionaries might not lead a revolution except in their own lives. They are critical of society and fail to conform. The inventors and artists preserve something of the child’s fresh vision of the world and out of this vision develop other possibilities.

Children who grow up knowing that they see the world in their own individual ways but who don’t think well of themselves feel that the fact that they see things differently means that there is something wrong with them. They think, ‘I oughtn’t to feel like this. I ought to be like other people.’

Some children are brought up by parents who police their every act and forbid the children to have their own truths. Such children cease to recognize what their own truth is.

Some of these children, as adults, know only what they ought to think and feel and not what they do think and feel.

Others sense their own truth as a void inside themselves. They say, ‘I don’t know what I feel,’ and ‘I don’t know who I am.’

To be born deaf and blind to the world around us is an immense handicap to living a full life, but to become deaf and blind to yourself is a far greater handicap – it means losing most of the unique ability we have as human beings to reflect upon our thoughts and actions and the world around us.

It means too losing the only reliable sense of certainty in an uncertain world, the certainty of knowing what you think and feel. If you have this you have a benchmark against which you can measure every event you encounter.

However, to know what you think and feel you need to be able to accept what you think and feel. This isn’t always easy.

Parts of our own truth might cause us pain and fear, and so we try to hide them from ourselves. A friend told me how her parents had always seen her as the good daughter while her sister was the bad daughter. She had accepted this role because she thought that by being good she could stop her parents fighting one another and punishing her sister for her supposed wickedness. Now in her forties, she says, ‘I’m just starting to recognize the anger I felt because I had to be the one that kept the family together.’

Parts of our own truth can cause us shame and guilt. If you’ve been brought up to believe that anger is wicked and that you have no right to be angry, no matter what is done to you, you have to shut away in your dark cellar all your angry thoughts and feelings. Then you can say to yourself, ‘I never get angry.’

This, of course, is a lie.

Telling yourself that you don’t get angry, indeed that you have no need for anger, is as realistic as telling yourself you don’t breathe and have no need to breathe.

Here is one of those relative truths for which I have yet to encounter an exception:

Provided you’ve got a good memory you can lie to other people and get away with it, but you can never get away with lying to yourself. Lying to yourself always leads to disaster.

People who deceive themselves deceive themselves about deceiving themselves.

I’ve met many people who have led long lives of self-deception. They do not enjoy close relationships, for how can someone know you if you are always pretending to be someone else? Some of these people have a history of failed relationships. Others have managed to acquire a long-suffering spouse (usually a wife) who believes that to be a good, acceptable person she must protect her husband from the consequences of his folly.

If you want to have a sense of security in an insecure world, and to have good relationships with the people who matter to you, you must know and accept your own truth.

CHAPTER 4 You and What ‘You’ Is

‘YOUR OWN TRUTH’ might sound like some solid mass of gold at the centre of your being, but actually it is your whole being.

Your whole being is your evolving, changing structure of meaning which came into existence in the womb and ever since has been growing and changing. It is the sum total of all the conclusions you have drawn and are always drawing from your experience, all your ideas, attitudes, expectations, opinions and belief.

Whenever I try to describe our structure of meaning I often use a sentence like, ‘You created your structure of meaning.’

This sentence has the same form as the sentence, ‘You wrote a book.’

We all know that this second sentence is about two things, you and the book. But the first sentence isn’t about two things. You and your structure of meaning are one and the same thing. To be accurate I should say, ‘Your structure of meaning created your structure of meaning.’

There is no little person, no soul, spirit, self, person or identity inside you busily constructing your structure of meaning. Your structure of meaning is you, your soul, spirit, self, person, identity.

If a structure of meaning can survive the death of the body, when you die and go to heaven you/your structure of meaning will be busily making sense of heaven just as you/your structure of meaning is busy making sense of the world.

If you understand that you are your structure of meaning you will know what is happening to you when you make a serious error of judgement.

To feel secure you/your structure of meaning has to feel that your structure is an accurate representation of reality. Then you can say to yourself, ‘This is me, this is my life, the world is such and such and my future will be so and so.’

Perhaps as part o f this secure structure of meaning you are saying to yourself,

‘I have my career mapped out and it’s all going to plan’

or

‘My partner and I love one another and we’ll be together for the rest of our lives’

or

‘If I’m good nothing bad can happen to me.’

Then one day you discover that your judgement is wrong.

You lose your job, your partner leaves you, you are struck by some terrible disaster.

If something like this has happened to you, you’ll know what it feels like when you discover that you’ve made a major error of judgement.

You feel yourself falling apart.

You feel yourself shattering, crumbling, even disappearing.

If you know that you are your structure of meaning, you’ll know that what you are feeling is your structure of meaning falling apart, and necessarily so because it has to break apart in order to re-form into a structure which is a more accurate representation of reality. You have to re-plan your future, or build a life without your partner, or modify your religious or philosophical beliefs. This process is unpleasant and scary, but if you understand about your structure of meaning you’ll be able to look after yourself while you go through it.

However, if you don’t know that you are your structure of meaning you’ll become terribly, terribly frightened.

If you don’t understand that you are your structure of meaning you might resort to desperate defences to try to hold yourself together and to ward off the fear.

You might become too scared to go outside because you fear that if you do the terror will kill you, or that everyone who encounters you will reject you because you’ve done something completely unacceptable like vomiting or fainting.

You might get frantically busy, hoping that by being very active and pretending that everything is all right you can run away from the terror.

You might start tidying and cleaning everything, checking and rechecking that everything is safe, all in the hope that if you get everything under control you’ll be all right.

You might become convinced that certain things have special meanings and that you are the object of special attention from certain powers, all in the attempt to make an unpredictable world predictable.

You might decide that you alone are responsible for the disasters that have befallen you and that you are too wicked a person to be close to others and be part of the world.

If you don’t understand that you are your structure of meaning when you feel yourself falling apart you think that you are going mad.

If you then resort to one of those desperate defences, other people who share your lack of understanding will also think that you are mad.

Psychiatrists will tell you that you have a mental illness. They’ll say you’re agoraphobic or manic or compulsive-obsessive or schizophrenic or depressed. If you become a psychiatric patient, over the years you’ll be given all these diagnoses – and many more fancy ones besides.

Yet all that happened was that your meaning structure hadn’t in some respects reflected reality accurately enough.

Whenever we discover that we have made a major error of judgement we question every other judgement we have made. Such doubt loosens the other parts of our structure of meaning and so it all feels like it is falling apart.

Even when we understand that this is what is happening, the shock of the discovery of our error is followed by pain, anxiety, disappointment, disillusionment and varying amounts of anger and resentment. (At the same time there can be a sense of exhilaration and freedom. The day after I discovered I had misjudged the degree of my husband’s faithfulness I went into a state of shock AND I bought myself a complete new set of make-up. Part of me was saying, ‘Whoopee!’ because the freedom I longed for was now mine.)

Just as our body following illness or accident will strive to heal itself, so our meaning structure will strive to re-organize itself and align itself with reality in such a way that we can go on living with a sense of security and hope.

But, just as when ill or injured we have to assist our body to heal itself by taking care of ourselves, so when our meaning structure has to reform itself we have to assist it by recognizing that, ‘By changing I’ll survive,’ or even, ‘By changing I can improve my life.’ We need to be prepared to let go of some cherished ideas and to modify others. Unfortunately our vanity often prevents us from doing this.

If your meaning structure still contains ideas like

‘The only job I can have is one which commands a top salary’

or

‘I can never be happy without my partner’

or

‘The world has to be the way I want it to be’

your meaning structure is prevented from re-forming itself in such a way that you can feel at peace with yourself and find new ways of creating happiness and security.

Whether you want to change or not, a large part of your meaning structure is changing all the time. Every experience is a new experience, even if it is like a past experience. I’m sure you’ve met someone at work who’s had one year’s experience twenty times over, but even non-learners change. They just don’t recognize that they’ve changed.

However, some parts of your meaning structure stay relatively stable over time.

For instance, the meanings you created when you were a baby so as to be able to tell whether an object was close to you or far away remain fairly stable, though as you get older you might need glasses to let you see the world as being crisp and clear.

Most of us form a meaning about what gender we are and stick with that throughout our lives, though a few people become increasingly convinced that their family have assigned to them an inappropriate gender and they do what they can to bring society’s assessment of their gender into line with what they now experience.

Some of us hold for all of our lives a belief in, say, the existence of God or the natural supremacy of our nation, while others change their beliefs over time. A person might believe in God for the entirety of his life but his image of God might change from an old man on a cloud to an unknowable power.

Every part of our meaning structure is connected to every other part. The part we are conscious of at any one time is really quite small, but the unconscious parts, whether buried in our cellar or just a part we haven’t had any cause to use for a long time, are linked to our conscious part and to one another.

Many people like to delude themselves that they can split their meaning structure into parts which have absolutely no connection with one another.

One extremely popular delusion, especially prevalent in the sciences and the professions, is that you can isolate your personal views and feelings and not allow them to play any part when you make an objective judgement. In psychoanalytic circles this is known as the defence of intellectualization.

Of course, when you are considering a subject which is far removed from your personal life it is possible to take a multitude of factors into consideration and weigh the evidence carefully. However, the more the subject affects you directly the less you can do this. In following the fortunes of the England Football Team I am quite dispassionate about who should be manager, but whenever I was driving from Huddersfield to my home in Sheffield late on a Saturday afternoon and there was an important match being played at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground at Hillsborough my views about football and its fans would become distinctly emotional as I battled through the traffic. Nevertheless, even when a subject doesn’t affect me personally, the only way I can make any sense of it is in terms of my past experience, that is, my meaning structure. I have nothing else on which to draw.

The delusion of objectivity allows many of those who regard themselves as the intelligentsia to believe that they are entitled by their education and intelligence to pontificate on all and sundry. Their education and intelligence have failed to make them aware that they cannot perceive reality directly, that all they have are the interpretations which they have acquired, as we all have, from their personal experience.

If people do not know this they cannot identify just which part of their structure of meaning is influencing their judgement. They then offer spurious reasons for the opinions they hold. They angrily reject any suggestion that there is a connection between their childhood experience and their current opinions or, as a member of that most privileged group, the White, Middle-class Male, they claim that they and they alone have the education and intelligence to know what is best for everyone else.

Such a way of thinking requires little mental effort. In contrast it took me some time and effort to work out that I held approving views about football because my dad approved of football, but, if a particular football match prevented me from doing what I wanted, which was to get home quickly, I wanted to banish football from the face of the earth.

One version of the delusion of objectivity is the belief that politics is totally separate from our personal lives. The feminists who created the slogan ‘The political is the personal’ were derided by their male critics for being weak-minded and emotional. Yet you can’t even draw breath without being affected by politics. Even the quality of the air you breathe has been affected by the decisions made by politicians about pollution.

Psychologists have contributed to our lack of understanding of ourselves by the way they have traditionally separated individual psychology from social psychology, as if you as an individual are separate from the society in which you live. Yet you are a social animal and could not survive without being able to interact with other people.

Intellectualization isn’t the only delusion about the supposed divisions in our meaning structure.

Where the next delusion is concerned we fall into two groups.

We have all been taught one basic delusion, namely that we can separate our experiences from our emotions. Having acquired this delusion, some of us believe that we can dispose of our emotions and just have our experiences. Psychoanalysts call this the defence of isolation and often call such people obsessive-compulsives or introverts. These are the people who can suffer a disaster but still say, ‘I wasn’t upset.’

Others of us believe that we can dispose of our experiences and just have our emotions. Psychoanalysts call this the defence of repression and often call such people hysterics or extroverts. These are the people who will say, ‘Do people really remember their childhood? I don’t,’ and then ‘I don’t know why I get so upset.’

Of course there are often situations where it’s a good idea to keep your emotions in check or to banish certain thoughts from your consciousness, but if you kid yourself that you have disposed of these inconvenient aspects of your structure of meaning once and for all you will soon be in trouble. If, at some later stage, you don’t recognize and deal with these aspects they will come back to haunt you and disrupt your life.

You will have noticed that when a death occurs in a family some family members are very calm and sensible and able to attend the deathbed, agree to an autopsy and arrange the funeral, all without showing many signs of grief. Other family members become distraught with grief, so much so that they cannot contemplate, much less discharge, those difficult tasks which arise from the harsh reality of death.

If you are one of those people who in a crisis become very calm and sensible you need at some later time to allow those unacknowledged feelings of rage and fear to surface and express themselves without any sense of shame or guilt on your part. The people around you need to be able to accept your feelings without criticizing you or rushing to ‘make it better’. If your loved ones lack such wisdom, you need to find a private place where your feelings can come in the full flood which brings its natural conclusion.

If you are one of those people who reacts to a crisis with great emotion and a refusal to acknowledge those aspects of the situation which terrify you most, you need at a later time to confront those aspects of the situation which you so wish to deny. These aspects are not simply part of the harsh reality of life but aspects which carry a personal threat to you: the threat of loss, of being abandoned, of being utterly alone. Such a confrontation is easiest done in the company of people who do not criticize you or rush to ‘make it better’, but developing the skill of quiet and solitary contemplation will stand you in great stead.

Emotions which have not been recognized and dealt with come back in unbidden rage or ‘irrational’ tears or in unpleasant dreams. They will interrupt the efficient functioning of the autoimmune system, thus making the way clear for the development of disease and disability.

A less popular delusion but one which has caught the imagination of the media is that of believing that you can divide your meaning structure into different people. Psychiatrists call this Multiple Personality Disorder. It is an extension of the second delusion where you bury your experiences and invent another role to play.

Women who, as children, have been repeatedly sexually assaulted often report how they tried to split themselves in two, in effect becoming two people, a sexual being and an ordinary girl. While enacting one role they tried to forget that the other role existed. Acquiring the skill necessary to use this desperate defence against annihilation can lead a person to create more and more separate ‘selves’.

If a person does this without reflection upon what she is doing it is not difficult for her to claim that it all ‘just happened’. The professionals and others who become involved with these multiple selves can be so caught up in the drama that they might never try to discover the gross cruelty the person suffered which made such a defence necessary or, equally foolishly, they might decide that sexual abuse is the one and only cause of the person’s behaviour.

Whatever you might like to tell yourself, your meaning structure is all of one piece and each part is connected to every other part. Each part can influence every other part. It is the sum total of all the conclusions you have drawn and are always drawing from your experience, all your ideas, attitudes, expectations, opinions and beliefs. You and your meaning structure are one.

CHAPTER 5 You and How You Feel About Yourself

SOME PARTS of your meaning structure don’t have much influence on the rest of your meaning structure. You mightn’t be greatly concerned about what kind of biscuits you have for morning tea or whether your aunt sent you a Christmas card, although if pressed you would admit that you prefer a crisp biscuit to a gooey chocolate mess or that you do think it important that family members keep in touch.

However, there are two structures in your meaning structure which are central to it and influence every other part.

They are:

1. How you feel about yourself

2. What the top priority is in your life.

I have talked about how we are all born full of unselfconscious self-confidence and how we lose this. We become self-conscious and so acquire a vital part of our meaning structure, namely, ‘How I feel about myself.’

Having a visual image of an idea, even if it bears no relation to reality, can help in understanding that idea. Suppose you imagined your meaning structure to be not you-shaped, coterminous with your skin, but egg-shaped. If you stood it on end and pushed a skewer from top to bottom the passage of the skewer through the egg would mark the central position of the particular meaning structure, ‘How I feel about myself.’ Every other part of your meaning structure is attached to and revolves around this structure.

Now let’s think of this central meaning structure as being a straight line or dimension which measures just how you feel about yourself.

At the top is that blissful state of feeling at home with yourself, not criticizing yourself, feeling that you’ve got everything right and that everyone who matters to you loves you.

At the other end is that most unpleasant state of feeling yourself to be alien and hateful, criticizing yourself for everything you have ever done and ever been, feeling that you have made a mess of everything and that everyone who knows you hates and rejects you.

Daily, how you feel about yourself moves up and down this dimension.

Most days there mightn’t be much movement.

If you’ve retained or recovered some of the self-acceptance with which you were born you stay above the mid-point, but if your cellar is jam-packed full of the darkness which you see as bad, you hover between the mid-point and the depths of self-rejection.

In both cases, there might sometimes be a wild swing to the heights when something has gone extraordinarily right for you, or to the depths when something has gone devastatingly wrong.

Whenever you have to make a decision on any matter, however trivial or important, and whenever you create an interpretation about any matter, how you feel about yourself will play an essential part in that process.

A simple example.

You wake up in the morning and you think, ‘I feel sick.’

What are you going to do about this?

If your feeling about yourself is in the top half of the dimension your thinking will go along the lines of, ‘I’ll take care of myself,’ ‘I’ll stay in bed,’ ‘I won’t go to work today,’ ‘I’ll get the doctor to come and see me.’

If your feeling about yourself is in the bottom half of the dimension your thinking will go along the lines of, ‘I can’t stay in bed. I’ve got work to do,’ ‘I’ve got to go to work or they’ll think I’m slacking,’ ‘I can’t trouble the doctor.’

While you’re lying there making up your mind what to do you switch on the radio and listen to the news. There is the usual litany of tragedies, deaths, destruction and infamy. How you interpret all of this depends on where you are positioned on your ‘How I feel about myself’ dimension.

If your feeling about yourself is in the top half of the dimension you don’t feel threatened personally by such events although you might deplore the stupidity, immorality and greed of the people who brought such events into being. You might even heighten your resolve to improve the world in some way.

If your feeling about yourself is in the bottom half of the dimension you do feel threatened personally by such events. You deplore the stupidity, immorality and greed of the persons who brought these events into being, but all this only supports more strongly your conclusion that the world is a wicked, evil place and that all the future holds for you is despair, doom and disaster.

The better you feel about yourself, the better the world and the future look.

The worse you feel about yourself, the worse the world and the future look.

If you don’t understand how your decisions and your interpretations are influenced by how you feel about yourself, you will, like those people who suffer from the delusion of intellectualization, think that you are making decisions and interpretations on purely objective grounds when in fact you are not.

If you don’t realize that how you feel about yourself is an interpretation and instead think that your feeling of badness and unacceptability is an irrefutable fact of the universe, a part of the natural law, you will always feel trapped and miserable, no matter what good fortune comes your way.

If you do realize that how you feel about yourself is an interpretation you know that when good fortune eludes you or friends betray you or you make mistakes you are free to create whatever interpretation suits you best. Be miserable if you want, or lay the blame on others, feel guilty and vow to improve, enjoy the comfort of self-pity, or tell yourself that things are bound to get better.

You are free to choose.

Choosing to change how you feel about yourself and actually changing can be very easy. It can also be very difficult for three important reasons.

The first reason has to do with our relationships with other people.

Suppose you’re one of those nice, quiet, amenable people who never disagrees with anyone and who always fits in with what other people want. You do this because you think that this is what being a good person means, but as a result other people use you and trample over you. At work you get the jobs no one else wants and at home the family take you for granted. So you decide to change.

You make a very big change. You give up judging yourself on a ‘good/bad’ dimension and choose a ‘making the most of my life’ dimension. From now on all your decisions will be based on what you need to make your life satisfactory. You will still continue to be kind, caring and helpful when you feel it is appropriate but you will no longer be at everyone’s beck and call. You state your needs and where necessary you criticize and argue. You now feel much happier.

Are your friends and family pleased with your change?

Not for a minute.

If you change they have to change. They have to see you differently. They have to behave differently towards you. They don’t mind you being happy but not at their expense.

So they decide to push you right back where you were.

Just how they try to do this can range from violence (‘She answered back so I hit her’) through guilt (‘I never thought I’d see the day when you wouldn’t take care of your mother after all I’ve done for you’) to humiliation (‘You must be crazy’). Any attempt to do anything that you haven’t done regularly before can be met with a hand applied to your forehead with the implication that you must be in delirium to behave in this way.

You have a choice – defend your own interests or be conquered.

The second reason why change can be difficult has to do with secondary gain. You might be suffering but you’re also getting something out of it.

I used to run courses on self-confidence which were attended by business and professional men and women who felt that they were lacking in self-confidence. At the beginning of the course I would ask them to write down their answers to several questions, one of which was, ‘What advantages do you get out of lacking self-confidence?’ There would be protestations that there were no advantages but then everyone would settle down and list the advantages of not thinking much of yourself.

The most popular advantage was that you don’t have to do anything where you might fail. You entered only the races where you knew you would win. Many women spoke of how, by being hesitant and uncompetitive, they ensured they were liked. One woman said she feared that if she became self-confident her husband would cease to pay her the wonderful compliments which he did when he was trying to persuade her to attend some important social function.

It is the fear of losing their advantages which stops most people from changing.

The third reason which stops people from changing has to do with the nature of change itself.

Our meaning structure is changing all the time as every moment we are encountering a new situation. However, most of the time we interpret the new situation as being just like an old one and so our meaning structure easily accommodates this new interpretation within the old ones. Certain of our ideas stay the same no matter what happens. As Jack Lyle, my psychology lecturer in Sydney, used to say, ‘The older we get the more like ourselves we become.’

However, those ideas which form the ‘How I feel about myself’ dimension can undergo two kinds of change, first-order change and second-order change.

In first-order change we simply move up and down on the dimension. Today you can be right at the bottom of your ‘good/ bad’ dimension because you’re worried that the work you’ve done doesn’t meet the necessary standards. Tomorrow important people praise you for your work and you go right up your ‘good/bad’ dimension.

Second-order change occurs when we abandon a dimension as being salient in how we judge ourselves and put another in its place. You might have measured your value along the dimension ‘the best footballer in the world/the worst footballer in the world’ but at thirty you decide that, contrary to what you had always thought, life does not end at thirty and that you will now measure yourself on the dimension ‘the best football manager in the world: the worst football manager in the world’.

Changing from a ‘good/bad’ dimension to some kind of ‘making the most of my life’ dimension is a second-order change. It is this change which is much more likely to ensure your happiness.

However, a second-order change means that every other part of your meaning structure will change. Every part of your meaning structure is connected directly to every other part and when the central dimension of how you feel about yourself changes, your whole meaning structure changes.

No wonder friends and family object!

There’s great pleasure in being able to set your own agenda!

CHAPTER 6 You and Your Priorities

NOW TO the second part of your meaning structure which influences every other part of your meaning structure: what the top priority is in your life.

This is something about which I have been writing and teaching since the early eighties. I find that people respond strongly to what I say about this, but in doing so they fall into three groups:

1. Those who say, ‘I’ve always known that about myself and others. I just didn’t use the words that you use.’

2. Those who say, ‘I’ve learnt something exciting about myself and other people. A lot of things have now fallen into place.’

3. Those who, no matter how often I explain, cannot see that I am talking about the reasons why we do something and not about a classification of people into two types. They say, ‘I think I’m a bit of both.’

The people who fall into the third group are usually those who all their lives have directed their attention to the world around them and away from their internal reality of thoughts and feelings. They haven’t developed to any great degree the skills of inspecting and assessing this internal reality and indeed they might feel that it is not right and perhaps somewhat frightening to do so.

Also in this group are people who have completely lost touch with their own truth. They know what they ought to think and feel but not what they do think and feel.

What this group of people is really saying is, ‘I don’t know what matters most to me.’

If you don’t know what matters most to you, how can you make sure you get it?

What matters most to all living creatures, from the amoeba to Homo sapiens, is to keep on living. The purpose of life is to live.

I don’t know how an amoeba or any other insect, fish or animal species experiences living, but I do know that for us Homo sapiens ‘living’ is far more than bodily survival.

We all do almost everything we can to survive physically as a body, but most of us would throw away our physical survival in order to survive as a person, that is, in order for our meaning structure to keep itself intact.

Many of us, when our meaning structure feels overwhelmed by demands, conflicts and anxiety, reach for some deadly nicotine, alcohol, cocaine or heroin.

Many of us, if our meaning structure did not want to be overwhelmed by shame and guilt, would fight and die for some cause.

Many of us, if our meaning structure did not want to be overwhelmed by loss and guilt, would relinquish our lives in order to preserve the life of someone we love.

Many of us, if our meaning structure interpreted its situation as, ‘I cannot continue to exist in these circumstances,’ would kill our bodies in the hope of preserving the integrity of our meaning structure. (More about suicide later.)

You might never have found yourself in a situation where you had to choose between surviving as a person (an intact meaning structure) or surviving as a body, but every moment of your life you are in the business of keeping your meaning structure intact (or rather your meaning structure is in the business of keeping itself/you intact). The way you’ve tried to organize your life, all the habits you’ve developed, all your pleasures and all your fears have developed as the means whereby your meaning structure tries to keep itself together.

Whenever you feel anxious it’s because something has happened which your meaning structure sees as a threat to its integrity. Whether it’s the passing anxiety of being late for a meeting or the drenching fear that awakens you in the darkness of the night, your meaning structure has seen a threat to its integrity. The threat is that of annihilation. You/your meaning structure will become nothing, a no-thing. You/your meaning structure will no longer exist and never will have existed.

Let’s take this anxiety about being late for a meeting. With traffic being what it is today anyone can unintentionally be late for anything. Why is your meaning structure getting in a state?

It’s not the lateness per se but what being late means to you. Your meaning structure knows exactly what being late means and doesn’t need to spell it out to itself, but here I shall.

Suppose you said to me, ‘I just can’t stand being late for meetings.’

I would ask, ‘Why is it important to you not to be late for meetings?’

Here I am asking you for reasons, why you do what you do. I’m asking you to tell me, not what other people think, or what we’re all supposed to think, but what you think and feel. It’s an exploration of your own truth.

Some people, about half of us, answer this question with something like, ‘Punctuality is important to me. Being late is such a waste of time.’

I now ask, ‘Why is it important to you not to waste time?’

‘It’s inefficient.’

‘Why is it important to you to be efficient?’

‘Because by being efficient I achieve what I want to achieve.’

When I ask, ‘Why is it important to you to achieve?’ it rapidly becomes clear that there is no further reason hiding behind this reason. This is your ultimate reason.

That sense of achievement is your ultimate reason. You mightn’t be talking about fame and fortune. Even if you are, you’re talking about these in terms of the sense of satisfaction of getting something done, of organizing and clarifying something and with that some sense of being a stronger, more competent person.

Thus for you being late means disorder, chaos, annihilation.

Now if this isn’t ringing bells for you it’s because if I had asked you, Why is it important to you to be punctual?’ you would, like the other half of the human race, have answered differently.

You might still have talked about not wasting time and being efficient but when we got to your needing to achieve there would have been no sense of having gone as far as we could go. Instead there would be a further, more important reason.

Thus, when I ask you, ‘Why is it important to you to achieve?’ you start talking about other people, how, when you achieve people notice you, admire you, like you, even love you. When you don’t achieve people ignore you, scorn you, dislike you, even hate you, and that means rejection, abandonment, annihilation.

By looking at the reasons which lie behind an apparently trivial decision like, ‘I don’t want to be late,’ you can reach a reason, a meaning within your meaning structure, which lies behind every decision and every interpretation you make.

This part of your meaning structure which influences every other part is concerned with how you experience your sense of existence and how you see the threat of annihilation of your meaning structure.

This sense of existing as a person and the threat of being annihilated as a person we each experience in our own individual way. However, as I have just shown, this infinite number of ways falls into two groups which can be defined in very general terms.

1. Experiencing your sense of existence as developing, organizing, clarifying, achieving; seeing the threat of the annihilation of your existence as disorder, mess and chaos.

2. Experiencing your sense of existence as being in relationship to other people; seeing the threat of annihilation of your existence as rejection and abandonment.

Each of these definitions of two kinds of meaning structure runs to 25 words. A simple shorthand reference for each definition would be useful, but immediately there is the danger that this word would be seen as being one of the fictions in psychology which confuse and mislead. This is the notion that there are personality types.

Personality types are no more than ideas invented by psychologists in order to measure the characteristics of people in the way that zoologists measure the features of animals or geologists measure the composition of rocks. Personality types do not explain why individuals behave as they do.

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