We are, all of us, beautifully crazy or, to put it in gentler terms, fascinatingly unbalanced.
Our childhoods, even the apparently benign ones, leave us no option but to be anything
else. As a result of these childhoods, we tend, over most issues, to list – like a
sailing yacht in high wind – far too much in one direction or another. We are too timid,
or too assertive; too rigid or too accommodating; too focused on material success or excessively
lackadaisical. We are obsessively eager around sex or painfully wary and nervous in the face
of our own erotic impulses. We are dreamily naive or sourly down to earth; we recoil from
risk or embrace it recklessly; we have emerged into adult life determined never to rely on
anyone or as desperate for another to complete us; we are overly intellectual or unduly resistant
to ideas. The encyclopedia of emotional imbalances is a volume without end. What is certain is
that these imbalances come at a huge cost, rendering us less able to exploit our talents
and opportunities, less able to lead satisfying lives and a great deal less fun to be around.
Yet, because we are reluctant historians of our emotional pasts, we easily assume that
these imbalances aren’t things we could ever change; they are fundamentally innate.
It’s just how we were made. We simply are, in and of ourselves, people who micromanage
or can’t get much pleasure out of sex, scream a lot when someone contradicts us or run away
from lovers who are too kind to us. It may not be easy, but nor is it alterable or up
for enquiry. The truth is likely to be more hopeful – though, in the short term, more
challenging. Our imbalances are invariably responses to something that happened in the
past. We are a certain way because we were knocked off a more fulfilling trajectory years
ago by a primal wound. In the face of a viciously competitive parent, we took refuge in underachievement.
Having lived around a parent disgusted by the body, sex became frightening. Surrounded
by material unreliability, we had to overachieve around money and social prestige. Hurt by
a dismissive parent, we fell into patterns of emotional avoidance. A volatile parent
pushed us towards our present meekness and inability to make a fuss. Early overprotectiveness
inspired timidity and, around any complex situation, panic attacks.
There is always a logic and there is always a history. We can tell that our
imbalances date from the past because they reflect the way of thinking and instincts
of the children we once were. Without anything pejorative being meant by this, our way of
being unbalanced tends towards a fundamental immaturity, bearing the marks of what was
once a young person’s attempt to grapple with something utterly beyond their capacities.
For example, when they suffer at the hands of an adult, children almost invariably take
what happens to them as a reflection of something that must be very wrong with them. If someone
humiliates, ignores or hurts them, it must – so it seems – be because they are, in
and of themselves, imbecilic, repugnant and worth neglecting. It can take many years,
and a lot of patient inner exploration, to reach an initially less plausible conclusion:
that the hurt was essentially undeserved and that there were inevitably a lot of other
things going on, off-stage, in the raging adult’s interior life for which the child
was entirely blameless. Similarly, because children cannot easily leave an offending
situation, they are prey to powerful, limitless longings to fix, the broken person they so
completely depend on. It becomes, in the infantile imagination, the child’s responsibility
to mend all the anger, addiction or sadness of the grown-up they adore. It may be the
work of decades to develop an adult power to feel sad about, rather than eternally responsible
for, those we cannot change. Communication patterns are beset by comparable childhood
legacies. When something is very wrong, children have no innate capacity to explain their cause.
They lack the confidence, poise and verbal dexterity to get their points across with
the calm and authority required. They tend to dramatic overreactions instead, insisting,
nagging, exploding, screaming. Or else excessive under-reactions: sulking, sullen silence,
and avoidance. We may be well into middle-age before we can shed our first impulses to explode
at or flee from those who misunderstand our needs and more carefully and serenely try
to explain them instead. It’s another feature of the emotional wounds of childhood that
they tend to provoke what are in effect large-scale generalisations. Our wounds may have occurred
in highly individual contexts: with one particular adult who hit their particular partner late
at night in one particular terraced house in one town in the north. Or the wound may
have been caused by one specific parent who responded with intense contempt after a specific
job loss from one specific factory. But these events give rise to expectations of other
people and life more broadly. We grow to expect that everyone will turn violent, that every
partner may turn on us and every money problem will unleash disaster. The character traits
and mentalities that were formed in response to one or two central actors of childhood
become our habitual templates for interpreting pretty much anyone. For example, the always
jokey and slightly manic way of being that we evolved so as to keep a depressed, listless
mother engaged becomes our second nature. Even when she is long gone, we remain people
who need to shine at every meeting, who require a partner to be continually focused on us
and who cannot listen to negative or dispiriting information of any kind.
We are living the wide open present through the
narrow drama of the past. We suffer because we are, at huge cost, too loyal to the early
difficult years. We should, where we can, dare to leave home.
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