Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Rebuilding Ourself

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

Changing inadequate and limited aspects of ourself is difficult and there are no fast solutions. The resolution of such problems takes a long time. Usually the basic issue is that the person’s sense of identity, with all its accompanying beliefs, values and attitudes, is no longer adequate for coping with the high stresses of modern social life.

Why is a sense of identity so important?  The ways we think of ourself when we are a teenager will be almost the same as the ways we think of ourself when we are 33 or 55 or 77. Although during our life our conscious beliefs may change to some extent, our subconscious beliefs remain constant. By remaining constant they provide us with a continuing sense of identity that rarely changes over the years. Hence when we explore our significant subconscious beliefs and start changing them, we will also automatically start changing our sense of identity.

Part of our present identity is based on any trauma we suffered in childhood. This trauma has warped our beliefs about life and relationships and about our own genuine likes and dislikes. So first of all we have to discover what we really like about life, about ourself, and what we really want from relationships. We cannot just sit down with pen and paper, scratch our head, and come up with a few ideas. Life is not that simple. We basically have to discover the real “me”. To do this we may have to discard all of what we have been taught by our parents, even what seems to be good.

Where this program of discovery gets especially difficult is in the matter of sexuality. Quite often our sexual identity has been stunted in its development, so that it remains immature. As a result we have ended up with immature beliefs about the role of sex. We may erect a defence against sexuality by believing that everything and anything about it has to be “pure”. But this idea of purity is based upon the hatred of life, and hatred of sexual relationships. So the “purity” theme is really to cover-up the fear of sexuality. If we naively attempt to reject this distortion, we may switch to the other extreme and become promiscuous and licentious. In order to try and create a new, holistic identity for ourself, we have to sort out our sexuality. The father usually presents the child with an image of masculinity, whilst the mother presents an image of femininity. So if, when we were a child, we had problems relating to the father, then our eventual image of masculinity is often distorted. If we had problems with the mother, then likewise our eventual image of femininity will be distorted too. If our sexual difficulties are severe, then eventually we will have to create a new sexual identity for ourself, incorporating what we really need from the influences of masculinity and femininity.

Overall, in order to create a better sense of identity, we have to find ways of discarding all our beliefs that are based on fear and hatred, which usually means fear of other people and hatred of ourself.

How do we discover what is good and what is bad in our sense of identity? Only by exploring everything about ourself, even what we consider to be our best qualities. First, though, we sort out our priority. We need to re-build our individual identity on a wholesome basis first, and then we build a more harmonious social identity. We need to re-build ourself before we can re-build our social relationships. To attempt to do this re-building in reverse, by building a socially-conditioned identity first and then building an individual identity, never works for long. It just produces the crisis of non-authentic identity that is the hallmark of existential writers in their critique of society.

Levels

There are levels to the depth that we can re-build ourself. Preferably we require to be alone, with little or no responsibilities. We need to be in a job that does not make many demands on us, and which if possible we do not “take home” – the job ends when we clock out and doesn’t start again till we clock in again next day. Low-status jobs are ideal. During my self-analysis I worked as a hospital porter attached to therapy departments; I had periods of free time regularly each hour so that I could hide away in the toilet when the stress on me was getting too much. I felt the stress mostly in the form of intense eye-ache, so I had to splash water on my face and eyes regularly throughout the day, sometimes every half an hour or so.

If we live with parents or have a family, we regularly need to have time on our own. I lived with my mother in my 30s and 40s, and the first time I had to negotiate time on my own was emotionally difficult for us both, because mother felt that I was rejecting her. Mother was on her own each day till I returned from work. All she wanted was to talk, whilst all I wanted was to rest and relax in quietness so that I could let the day’s stresses fade away. We agreed that when I returned home, I would spend 45 minutes in quiet relaxation before I was ready to chat with her.

The more alone we can be, the deeper into ourself we can go. Additionally, the more alone we can be, the faster our analysis can go. Hence if we have a family, the analysis will go more slowly and will not be so deep. Slowness of analysis is a safety feature. It allows us to gradually assimilate the insights about our limitations that we get, without inflicting any emotional upsets on other people.

Exploring the Need for Friendship

Often when we tend to reject aspects of ourself, it is because those aspects symbolise weakness in us. However, we discover that this tendency impinges on our ability to make social contacts and friendships. We will tend to reject people who we view as being weak. We want to be strong, so we prefer to be with other people who appear to be strong. Such people seem to be untroubled by any deep issues and they are good at casual conversation and have many friends. Our need for psychological strength comes from our childhood difficulties, which tied our sense of self to how other people thought of us. Hence we become driven to look for a strong character, representing either an ideal father figure or an ideal mother figure, to lean on for psychological support. We hope that such support will hide our weaknesses. However, what we find is that the people we admire usually have good self-confidence but little depth of experience.

The people that I used to admire seemed to have none of my problems, and this was what attracted me to them. However, when I actually managed to have a good conversation with them, I would rapidly find that they did not understand my problems (and didn’t want to make the effort to understand). This is the downside of people who are different from oneself. So I would then become defensive about talking about myself. Hence I would gain little from having a friendship with them. My best friendships will always be with people who have depth of experience, that is, with people who have a lot in common with myself.

When a person does not have depth of experience, then we may find ourself inhibited in our conversations with them. We desire friends who can understand what we have been through. We feel a pressure inside us to seek social validation (because our sense of self is tied too much to other people). This need for validation makes us want to talk about ourself and the difficulties we have faced. But we cannot do this with friends who lack depth to themselves. So we clam up and become frustrated. What is happening to us is that we become pressurised to talk but find we cannot. This pressure is a build-up of anxiety and makes it more difficult to talk the next time that we meet. In other words, our ability to talk becomes hampered: the pressure in our mind inhibits casual talk and makes us look a fool. All we want to do is to have a meaningful conversation, but unfortunately this is not what the other person wants. They just want casual conversation, with lots of laughs – they don’t want serious stuff. If we do find someone who is willing to listen to us, the pressure in our mind would make us talk non-stop for an hour or so (until the anxiety discharges itself ). In fact, we can only participate in casual conversation when there is no longer any pressure in our mind.

    This view can be put another way. The pressure in us leads to intensity in our emotional life. Someone who lacks this intensity usually has a shallow emotional life. This contrast affects our ability to make social contacts. This becomes most obvious at parties. A troubled childhood makes our emotions run deep. At parties we see people who seem to be untroubled and they are good at party-talk. We admire them and want to make friends with them. However, we often find that their emotional depth is shallow and so they can say what they are feeling, without it inhibiting them. In contrast, the intensity of our emotions means that it takes greater effort to talk about them and so our conversation becomes intense too. Alas, this intensity is not appreciated by the other party people. We just come across as being weird. Unfortunately it is not usually possible for people who are emotionally shallow to understand and be supportive to someone who is emotionally deep. The only people who can really get to know a troubled person are other troubled people.

Changing Our Approach to Failure

An important issue is how we view the negative aspects of our life. We can look at our failures and limitations of earlier years and repudiate them – so we split our identity into two halves, that which we like and that which we dislike. This is the old way that everyone tries, and nowadays it no longer works very well. What I did and am still doing is to regard my previous failures and limitations as my way of handling situations in the best way I could. I did the best I could, even though it wasn’t very good. And when old problems rear up for a time, I practise forgiveness and acceptance, both of myself and who or what I consider to be the cause of my problem. I prefer to integrate the old ugly parts of myself into myself, rather than repudiate them.

A psychological analysis enables us to turn our limitations and failures into means of acquiring psychological and spiritual wisdom. We can learn to see the usefulness of our faults. Difficulties do not completely disappear – instead they become “optional”, in that we can choose how we want to respond to old problems. In effect, it is the intensity of distress that really changes: though the difficulties remain, the distress that they cause us drops away to a low residue. It is the reduction in the intensity of distress that allows us to choose other ways of handling old problems. We can change the way we think of ourself. We can become more assertive and begin to develop self-confidence.

Assertiveness needs to be used in an harmonious way. Some years ago I began to go on assertiveness-building courses, and reading relevant books. When I began to practise assertiveness, I started picking minor faults in people and becoming rather moralistic. For example, I had some photographs developed at a chemist, and one or two of the photographs were not quite right. So I went back to the chemist and complained (whereas previously I would have just accepted the faulty photographs without complaint). What I did was to over-react. I was using assertiveness as a means to complain about other people. Now I am more balanced about being assertive.

Developing Character

When we begin to rebuild our sense of identity, a major task is to examine the flaws in our character. The present state of our character cannot handle our present difficulties, and so we need to change and develop it. It seem to me that whilst people can develop various abilities (in art, sport, science, etc) during happy times, people only develop character during unhappy times. It seems that conflict is required in order for a person to change and develop his character. After all, if a person is having a good time, why should he change?  But if he is having a bad time, then he has incentive to change.

When considering character we need to separate the development of abilities (artistic, intellectual, sporting, etc) from the development of character.  The former can be done through choice (you can choose what subjects you want to study at high school and college, for example). But the latter is nearly always a response to conflict.

Most often this conflict is felt first in childhood, as we learn to adapt both to the social and moral/immoral values of parents and society, and to close family relationships. Even if we subsequently decide to choose our own moral values, this will bring us into social conflict (since our values are sometimes different from the current social ones). If the conflict is too great for the child to handle then it may experience some form of trauma. So my view of character development implies that it is usually a distressful experience.

An important idea to grasp is that humans learn very, very slowly about character development. The truth of this is revealed by psycho-analysis, since it can take years to significantly change oneself through analysis. The abilities that we have, whether we are an artist, a soldier, a politician, etc, just determine the backdrop of our life. The spotlight is always on how we use our character and how we develop it when we are plunged into new kinds of situations that we have not met before. We learn to develop character through trial and error. This means that there are no ways to avoid making mistakes in life.

Character development is a seesaw process between individuality and social centredness; each side has its advantages and disadvantages. Because of the conflicts we experience in childhood, we cannot always develop character in an harmonious way. So we usually oscillate between the two sides of ourself, sometimes developing social traits of character and ignoring our individuality, and then changing focus so we develop our individuality and ignore our social side.

Choosing a Path

At some point in its childhood, a child chooses which path he will follow in order to develop his character. This choice is a subconscious one. He chooses between emphasising willpower or else emphasising emotion. Will power tends to enhance the masculine side of personality, whilst emotion tends to enhance the feminine side of personality.

The focus on will power produces problems when it becomes necessary to develop one’s character. Each child has to learn to make sense of the multitude of sensory impressions that bombard us each moment of life. By the time that a child has grown up and become an adult, he has usually arranged his ideas about life into a set of beliefs that will help him follow a reasonably-consistent path through life. If he has strong will power, then he will adhere to his beliefs very strongly. If his will power is weak, then his adherence to his beliefs is likely to be shaky. What this means is that the person with strong will power follows his beliefs – they take precedence over any sensory impressions that may indicate his beliefs are limited or wrong. Such people usually try to prevent themselves responding to emotional influences, especially negative ones. Hence it usually takes some form of disaster which will shake and collapse his beliefs before he will engage in changing his character.

A typical approach to difficulties when using will power is to tough it out when times get hard (in the past, it was called keeping a stiff upper lip). Toughing it out is necessary sometimes, but it is inadequate as a general approach to life’s problems. Character traits exist as complementary pairs (pairs of opposites), so the paradox of toughing it out is that the stronger a person is, the more aware he often is of how weak he can be. Character strength is admired because often we only see a person’s strengths and not his weaknesses: we show our strengths but hide our weaknesses. Complementary character traits exist as a see-saw: a trait of average strength is opposed by a trait of average weakness, whereas the greater you make a strength, the greater becomes the complementary weakness.

In order to achieve a stable maturity, we have to learn to handle both success and failure. Hence my view of life on Earth is that it is a learning experience. This view is also found in tradition, but the interpretation of it has changed. The old view was that primarily we had to shrug our shoulders and suffer failure with detachment (toughing it out). The more immediate view has become that we have to stop denying the unpleasant aspects of our character and integrate our failures into our sense of identity. This is the only way to learn acceptance of life, with all its ups and downs.

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