What follows at great length shifts the focus of this blog away from its usual subject matter, which, however personal to its creator, might claim some universalising elements. This is an account of subjective experience and I recognise that both the writing and publishing of it performs, in the first and maybe the last instance, a therapeutic function.
This presentation doesn’t represent a permanent shift from familiar territory. Normal service will be resumed with the next post. But it’s important to me to take this wayward step now and – as stated before – it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to. And since behind the masks most of us are constituted in pretty much the same fashion, it‘s possible that it may resonate elsewhere.
That the birds of worry and care fly over you head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent.
Chinese Proverb
Anxiety is humanity’s default state. Death, taxes, anxiety – the three inevitables. Through all of our triumphs and our falls from grace, our towering rages and our blissed-out ecstasies, anxiety defies transcendence and grounds us in a permanent present made hostage to tomorrow’s fears.
And so, by and large, we accommodate it. It tracks us but we cope. Fear ringed by doubt, says Malcom Lowry, is my eternal moon. Yes, that’s it and wherever we go we move within its penumbra. Then something untoward causes that moon to shine the brighter and the careful calibration whereby anxiety was held in check shifts and we’re in thrall.
For me, as for you, the taproot of quotidian anxiety is buried deep within childhood. Its core substance is fear, primal, elemental and inchoate, the child’s sense of the falling away of all structure and order. In search of my own informing fear, all minute scrutiny arising from piecemeal reflection has taken me back to familiar landscapes and well-remembered rooms and those fragmentary scenes played out within them have been reprised again and again. And, paradoxically, they have arisen as frequently from contexts of remembered warmth and security as from settings of froideur and alienation.
My childhood was a happy one. And yet, and yet... I knew with certainty, nearly all the time, that my parents loved me and that my happiness and security was their priority. And yet there was a fault line, narrow but deep and long, that ran through the family ground. Tracking it back patiently, step by step through the years, I have found that it started at the childbed where my mother lay on the Christmas night of my birth.
When my parents married in 1938, they took a flat in Balham, South-West London. At the beginning of the War, Mum did some temping work for a young articled clerk, A., shortly to take his accountancy exams, and shortly after that to be posted to RAF Coastal Command in India. Having no family in London (or, functionally, anywhere else), he was looking for accommodation and he moved into the spare room in my parents’ flat.
I have written elsewhere, both in prose and verse, of these times and of the strange triangular relationship that evolved rapidly between my parents and A. He was my father’s junior by 11 years and my mother’s by 8 – a gap insignificant nowadays, but telling then. With only a pair of maiden aunts and a brother in South Africa as blood family, my youthful mother and father effectively parented A. In return, A. committed himself to them with an unwavering loyalty that endured throughout their long lives. Although as a senior partner in an international accountancy firm, he had his own flat in the centre of London, he spent every weekend with my parents and, after my father and A. retired, they spent every winter and spring at his house on the Cote d’Azur.
The fact is my mother rapidly became entirely dependent on both men. And they in turn became accustomed to their fixed positions either side of her, the one the adoring and constant life partner, the other the steadfast filial devotee and boon companion. For many, approval and validation provided in such unstinting measure would lead to empowerment and growth – the ability to self-motivate through a belief in their own substance and worth. But for reasons that continue to frustrate my attempts to analyse and understand with clarity, my mother was either unable to step forward from between my father and A. towards some kind of free mutuality or she simply chose not to.
Mum spoke often throughout her life of having confounded her own mother’s aspirations for her. Frustrated in her ambitions to become a teacher by a hidebound working class Victorian father, my grandmother had hopes that my mother would choose some similar direction. A spirited and somewhat rebellious daughter, she showed no such inclinations and her legacy – whether imposed or adopted, I never found out – was an overwhelming sense of her mother’s deep disappointment in her. Into young adulthood and marriage and throughout her long life, Mum sought approval, validation, praise, love out of an all-consuming need.
And within that triangle she found it and it became her sustenance and support, feeding that need but never assuaging it. As a result, her emotional capacity was entirely reliant on the circulation of a steady current of refined love and personal endorsement, unpolluted by negative judgement or censure. And if anything compromised the free flow of that current – Dad’s occasional impatience or A’s frosty withdrawal – Mum was distraught, concealing an eruption of guilt, perceived inadequacy and agitated anxiety behind a Janus mask of aggression and melodramatic collapse. In the face of which display, Dad and A. would buckle instantly and fly to her side to minister and comfort and so restore the healing source.
By the time I came along, the triangle was firmly in place. I occupied the territory within its three sides. As an only child I was contained and cherished. My material requirements were anticipated and provided for; songs were sung to me; stories were read to me; I was encouraged in my early endeavours; I was comforted in distress; I was loved. But there prevailed a set of unquestioned protocols that governed the functioning of the family to which all were subject: that my mother’s emotional needs be prioritised in all situations.
In babyhood this was no problem: I was simply a symbiotic extension of my mother and where she benefitted, so did I. But as the dual autonomies of a growing sense of the world beyond my tiny self and will power began to develop in childhood, our interests began to diverge. The glorious guilt-free selfishness of the infant made no allowance for the febrile sensibilities of the adult and the conflicts between mother and son began.
By the time I was of infant school age – four, rising five – I was entirely accustomed to a standard pattern of behavioural cause and effect. A clash would occur; positions would be taken up; I would be resolute and unyielding; my mother would fly the scene, run upstairs and throw herself on the bed. Unvaryingly, neither Dad nor A. would react in anger. One would trudge patiently up the stairs to provide succour; the other would crouch down beside the implacable child, still weeping, still defiant. “I think maybe you should go up to Mum and say sorry, old chap”, he would murmur. No obligation, no insistence, no demand – just a gentle appeal to what must surely be nascent conscience, some basic sense of what is appropriate in the circumstances. And always, into the turbulent wake of the child’s protestations of injustice and the refusal to make good, a small but devastating morsel of disappointment would be dropped.
And so, with Larkin-esque inexorability, the alienation and isolation, the resentment and the guilt, ‘steepened like a coastal shelf’. Baffled by the chaotic contradictions arising from a situation within which authentic love and caring were so clearly in evidence in counterpoint to the relentless and unyielding assertion of my mother’s emotional rights, I became anxious and insecure. Physical self-confidence was non-existent: competitive games, tree-climbing, play-fighting, scrambling over rocks defeated me completely. Large gatherings focussed on specific activities terrified me: kids’ parties, school assemblies, church services induced in me a sense of impotence and suffocation. Any context within which some expectation of the participants prevailed defeated me from the start. By the age of 7 weekdays were blighted by school phobia and nights by alternating insomnia and nightmares. Already recreationally and creatively self-sufficient as an only child, I retreated into myself and the microworld of my books (I was reading by age 3) and my toys.
Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love, Freud tells us. Inasmuch as I had to deal with the inexplicable opposition set up between a love that I took for granted but also experienced constantly as eclipsed by my mother’s absorption of all the emotional energy created in times of conflict, there may have been some truth for me in this proposition. One thing is certain through the relative wisdom of hindsight: the tension set up and maintained throughout my childhood by this self cancelling equation was a major disabling factor in my early emotional development. It blurred my perception of the right functioning of family dynamics and through adolescence and into youth and adulthood infected my own capacity to initiate and manage close relationships and, ultimately, my first attempts at family.
With the same scrutiny of hindsight, I am certain now that had my parents not had the courage and enlightenment to take me out of traditional education and to place me in a small Summerhill-style progressive school, New Sherwood, a half hour bus ride from home, I’m sure that the effects of my domestic destabilisation would have been much more severe. In the final analysis, I see in this decision the clearest evidence of the predominance within that complex mesh of intra-personal relations of their love for me and their ultimate desire for my happiness and well-being.
I emerged from weekly boarding at New Sherwood five years later tougher and bolder. I left full boarding at Wennington School at the age of 18 with the determination to change the world. I could kick a ball the length of a football pitch, climb to the top of a beech tree, throw a large opponent to the ground using the judo trip-fall osotogari, and hurtle down a Cumbrian scree run. And I could bellow harmony parts to the hymns we sung in Sunday Assemblies.
I had discovered that I was presented with options: that there were alternative emotional alignments and equations and that my understanding of relationship dynamics didn’t have to be dictated by those aspects of family structure that inhibit and disable. I had learned, overall, how to manage my fears, negotiate within the family so as to maximise that which was positive and whole, and, beyond, to function on the world’s terms. And all of this empowered me and provided me with choices.
But management is not cure and I have carried my deeply seated legacy of anxiety through life. It operates as a constant baseline counterpoint to all that I think, feel and do. Most of the time it presents no functional problem and is controlled through a set of response devices. But in circumstances in which there may be cause for genuine concern, it rises like a tide and augments and exacerbates it, distorting the true picture, defying all objective rationality and causing in its worst manifestations real distress and functional difficulty.
Its current viral operation is on my perception of the condition of my sarcoidosis. My specialist insists that it is mild and manageable, in spite of the recent bouncing around of the blood test readings that indicate the level of its activity. It’s not active in the lungs – the most common (and debilitating) of sarcoid sites – and where we know it to exist (in the lymph glands in the chest, in the right eye and in the form of small lesions on the hands), it’s causing TW, my consultant, no concern and me no discomfort. But when the prospect of having to be on a course of the immunosuppressant prednisolone (the standard treatment for lowering the sarcoid-indicating ACE levels in the bloodstream) is set alongside the predictions of a massive increase in swine flu infection by the autumn, the compound of sensible concern and onboard anxiety balloons out of my control and becomes a problem in its own right.
Which is how things are now. And to avail myself of some assistance in doing battle with what I now define to myself as an emotional condition, I have started a course of counselling. I don’t anticipate the process as one of coruscating soul-searching or demon confrontation. Nor do I perceive it as a process of spiritual salving, seeking out my Higher Self or anything involving healing with an upper case ‘H’. I see it more as a search guided by an expert for practical strategies to deal with something that will never dissipate or diminish so that I can lead a more fulfilling and untrammelled life here with those I love and within myself.
It seems to me that if we’re to see growth as a continuing process that only ends with our extinction, we must each of us do what we can to accommodate, to negotiate, to manage that which is unformed, malformed or fragmented within us. There is nothing else that has greater value or priority – for ourselves and for the world we inhabit.
This presentation doesn’t represent a permanent shift from familiar territory. Normal service will be resumed with the next post. But it’s important to me to take this wayward step now and – as stated before – it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to. And since behind the masks most of us are constituted in pretty much the same fashion, it‘s possible that it may resonate elsewhere.
...
The History of a State of Mind
The History of a State of Mind
That the birds of worry and care fly over you head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent.
Chinese Proverb
Anxiety is humanity’s default state. Death, taxes, anxiety – the three inevitables. Through all of our triumphs and our falls from grace, our towering rages and our blissed-out ecstasies, anxiety defies transcendence and grounds us in a permanent present made hostage to tomorrow’s fears.
And so, by and large, we accommodate it. It tracks us but we cope. Fear ringed by doubt, says Malcom Lowry, is my eternal moon. Yes, that’s it and wherever we go we move within its penumbra. Then something untoward causes that moon to shine the brighter and the careful calibration whereby anxiety was held in check shifts and we’re in thrall.
For me, as for you, the taproot of quotidian anxiety is buried deep within childhood. Its core substance is fear, primal, elemental and inchoate, the child’s sense of the falling away of all structure and order. In search of my own informing fear, all minute scrutiny arising from piecemeal reflection has taken me back to familiar landscapes and well-remembered rooms and those fragmentary scenes played out within them have been reprised again and again. And, paradoxically, they have arisen as frequently from contexts of remembered warmth and security as from settings of froideur and alienation.
My childhood was a happy one. And yet, and yet... I knew with certainty, nearly all the time, that my parents loved me and that my happiness and security was their priority. And yet there was a fault line, narrow but deep and long, that ran through the family ground. Tracking it back patiently, step by step through the years, I have found that it started at the childbed where my mother lay on the Christmas night of my birth.
When my parents married in 1938, they took a flat in Balham, South-West London. At the beginning of the War, Mum did some temping work for a young articled clerk, A., shortly to take his accountancy exams, and shortly after that to be posted to RAF Coastal Command in India. Having no family in London (or, functionally, anywhere else), he was looking for accommodation and he moved into the spare room in my parents’ flat.
I have written elsewhere, both in prose and verse, of these times and of the strange triangular relationship that evolved rapidly between my parents and A. He was my father’s junior by 11 years and my mother’s by 8 – a gap insignificant nowadays, but telling then. With only a pair of maiden aunts and a brother in South Africa as blood family, my youthful mother and father effectively parented A. In return, A. committed himself to them with an unwavering loyalty that endured throughout their long lives. Although as a senior partner in an international accountancy firm, he had his own flat in the centre of London, he spent every weekend with my parents and, after my father and A. retired, they spent every winter and spring at his house on the Cote d’Azur.
The fact is my mother rapidly became entirely dependent on both men. And they in turn became accustomed to their fixed positions either side of her, the one the adoring and constant life partner, the other the steadfast filial devotee and boon companion. For many, approval and validation provided in such unstinting measure would lead to empowerment and growth – the ability to self-motivate through a belief in their own substance and worth. But for reasons that continue to frustrate my attempts to analyse and understand with clarity, my mother was either unable to step forward from between my father and A. towards some kind of free mutuality or she simply chose not to.
Mum spoke often throughout her life of having confounded her own mother’s aspirations for her. Frustrated in her ambitions to become a teacher by a hidebound working class Victorian father, my grandmother had hopes that my mother would choose some similar direction. A spirited and somewhat rebellious daughter, she showed no such inclinations and her legacy – whether imposed or adopted, I never found out – was an overwhelming sense of her mother’s deep disappointment in her. Into young adulthood and marriage and throughout her long life, Mum sought approval, validation, praise, love out of an all-consuming need.
And within that triangle she found it and it became her sustenance and support, feeding that need but never assuaging it. As a result, her emotional capacity was entirely reliant on the circulation of a steady current of refined love and personal endorsement, unpolluted by negative judgement or censure. And if anything compromised the free flow of that current – Dad’s occasional impatience or A’s frosty withdrawal – Mum was distraught, concealing an eruption of guilt, perceived inadequacy and agitated anxiety behind a Janus mask of aggression and melodramatic collapse. In the face of which display, Dad and A. would buckle instantly and fly to her side to minister and comfort and so restore the healing source.
By the time I came along, the triangle was firmly in place. I occupied the territory within its three sides. As an only child I was contained and cherished. My material requirements were anticipated and provided for; songs were sung to me; stories were read to me; I was encouraged in my early endeavours; I was comforted in distress; I was loved. But there prevailed a set of unquestioned protocols that governed the functioning of the family to which all were subject: that my mother’s emotional needs be prioritised in all situations.
In babyhood this was no problem: I was simply a symbiotic extension of my mother and where she benefitted, so did I. But as the dual autonomies of a growing sense of the world beyond my tiny self and will power began to develop in childhood, our interests began to diverge. The glorious guilt-free selfishness of the infant made no allowance for the febrile sensibilities of the adult and the conflicts between mother and son began.
By the time I was of infant school age – four, rising five – I was entirely accustomed to a standard pattern of behavioural cause and effect. A clash would occur; positions would be taken up; I would be resolute and unyielding; my mother would fly the scene, run upstairs and throw herself on the bed. Unvaryingly, neither Dad nor A. would react in anger. One would trudge patiently up the stairs to provide succour; the other would crouch down beside the implacable child, still weeping, still defiant. “I think maybe you should go up to Mum and say sorry, old chap”, he would murmur. No obligation, no insistence, no demand – just a gentle appeal to what must surely be nascent conscience, some basic sense of what is appropriate in the circumstances. And always, into the turbulent wake of the child’s protestations of injustice and the refusal to make good, a small but devastating morsel of disappointment would be dropped.
And so, with Larkin-esque inexorability, the alienation and isolation, the resentment and the guilt, ‘steepened like a coastal shelf’. Baffled by the chaotic contradictions arising from a situation within which authentic love and caring were so clearly in evidence in counterpoint to the relentless and unyielding assertion of my mother’s emotional rights, I became anxious and insecure. Physical self-confidence was non-existent: competitive games, tree-climbing, play-fighting, scrambling over rocks defeated me completely. Large gatherings focussed on specific activities terrified me: kids’ parties, school assemblies, church services induced in me a sense of impotence and suffocation. Any context within which some expectation of the participants prevailed defeated me from the start. By the age of 7 weekdays were blighted by school phobia and nights by alternating insomnia and nightmares. Already recreationally and creatively self-sufficient as an only child, I retreated into myself and the microworld of my books (I was reading by age 3) and my toys.
Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love, Freud tells us. Inasmuch as I had to deal with the inexplicable opposition set up between a love that I took for granted but also experienced constantly as eclipsed by my mother’s absorption of all the emotional energy created in times of conflict, there may have been some truth for me in this proposition. One thing is certain through the relative wisdom of hindsight: the tension set up and maintained throughout my childhood by this self cancelling equation was a major disabling factor in my early emotional development. It blurred my perception of the right functioning of family dynamics and through adolescence and into youth and adulthood infected my own capacity to initiate and manage close relationships and, ultimately, my first attempts at family.
With the same scrutiny of hindsight, I am certain now that had my parents not had the courage and enlightenment to take me out of traditional education and to place me in a small Summerhill-style progressive school, New Sherwood, a half hour bus ride from home, I’m sure that the effects of my domestic destabilisation would have been much more severe. In the final analysis, I see in this decision the clearest evidence of the predominance within that complex mesh of intra-personal relations of their love for me and their ultimate desire for my happiness and well-being.
I emerged from weekly boarding at New Sherwood five years later tougher and bolder. I left full boarding at Wennington School at the age of 18 with the determination to change the world. I could kick a ball the length of a football pitch, climb to the top of a beech tree, throw a large opponent to the ground using the judo trip-fall osotogari, and hurtle down a Cumbrian scree run. And I could bellow harmony parts to the hymns we sung in Sunday Assemblies.
I had discovered that I was presented with options: that there were alternative emotional alignments and equations and that my understanding of relationship dynamics didn’t have to be dictated by those aspects of family structure that inhibit and disable. I had learned, overall, how to manage my fears, negotiate within the family so as to maximise that which was positive and whole, and, beyond, to function on the world’s terms. And all of this empowered me and provided me with choices.
But management is not cure and I have carried my deeply seated legacy of anxiety through life. It operates as a constant baseline counterpoint to all that I think, feel and do. Most of the time it presents no functional problem and is controlled through a set of response devices. But in circumstances in which there may be cause for genuine concern, it rises like a tide and augments and exacerbates it, distorting the true picture, defying all objective rationality and causing in its worst manifestations real distress and functional difficulty.
Its current viral operation is on my perception of the condition of my sarcoidosis. My specialist insists that it is mild and manageable, in spite of the recent bouncing around of the blood test readings that indicate the level of its activity. It’s not active in the lungs – the most common (and debilitating) of sarcoid sites – and where we know it to exist (in the lymph glands in the chest, in the right eye and in the form of small lesions on the hands), it’s causing TW, my consultant, no concern and me no discomfort. But when the prospect of having to be on a course of the immunosuppressant prednisolone (the standard treatment for lowering the sarcoid-indicating ACE levels in the bloodstream) is set alongside the predictions of a massive increase in swine flu infection by the autumn, the compound of sensible concern and onboard anxiety balloons out of my control and becomes a problem in its own right.
Which is how things are now. And to avail myself of some assistance in doing battle with what I now define to myself as an emotional condition, I have started a course of counselling. I don’t anticipate the process as one of coruscating soul-searching or demon confrontation. Nor do I perceive it as a process of spiritual salving, seeking out my Higher Self or anything involving healing with an upper case ‘H’. I see it more as a search guided by an expert for practical strategies to deal with something that will never dissipate or diminish so that I can lead a more fulfilling and untrammelled life here with those I love and within myself.
It seems to me that if we’re to see growth as a continuing process that only ends with our extinction, we must each of us do what we can to accommodate, to negotiate, to manage that which is unformed, malformed or fragmented within us. There is nothing else that has greater value or priority – for ourselves and for the world we inhabit.
