WANTING EVERYTHING EPUB ED EB

Dorothy Rowe

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780007333912
• eBook ISBN: 9780007392711
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

From the moment of conception we are in the business of surviving. We come into the world expecting that we can have everything and seeing no reason why we should not have it.

But we learn fast, learning that we can't always get what we want. The accompanying feelings of loss, frustration, anger, aggression, resentment and sadness can dominate the rest of our lives.

This book is all about the frustration endemic in our experience of life. It is about the strategies we evolve to cope with that frustration and convince ourselves that we can, after all, have everything. One strategy might be unlimited greed for possessions and power, and absolute determination to achieve the required goal without heeding any impediment. Another strategy might be to assume responsibility for everything, to saddle oneself with guilt for the world. Then there is the strategy of martyrdom, of "having everything" by publicly denouncing one's needs for anything. This book shows how the reader can free themself from the pain of loss, mourning, resentment, envy and greed to learn to live in the present, enjoying what they have.

1

‘I Can Have Everything’

At the end of my long life I realize that what I was looking for I had at the beginning.
MARCEL PROUST, Remembrance of Things Past

How sad we all are! Sure, there are times when we laugh and shout for joy, but most of the time we are so sad. Look about you on the subway in London or New York, on the streets of Tokyo or Sydney or Moscow, and what do you see? Silent, grim-faced people. Talk to them, and what do they talk about? Their troubles, of course. Sometimes they talk about their pleasures and their joys, but mostly they talk about what worries them.

Of course many people do have things to worry about – how to feed themselves and their families, how to preserve their lives and the roof over their heads. However, having ample to eat and a secure place to live does not make people cheerful. Indeed, not having to worry about basic necessities seems to free people to worry about everything else.

The word ‘worry’ implies some conscious thoughts. The world is full of expert worriers, able and ready to turn every benefit and pleasure into a danger and a misery. Some people say they don’t worry, but this is chiefly because they are continually doing the things which will stop worries from arising – working hard, being responsible, pleasing other people. In all these people, under the worries and the thought and the action to avoid worries is a deep rhythm of sadness.

In some people this sadness shows through as wistfulness. They are like children for ever locked out of a secret garden, not knowing for sure what the garden contains, but knowing that what is there would make their heart expand in complete and absolute joy, and knowing that what the secret garden contains can never be theirs. They say to themselves, ‘It cannot be,’ and try to comfort themselves, but the sadness remains.

In other people the sadness comes through as bitterness and resentment. They blame and they envy, and they want more. If they cannot have more, if the fruits of their labour bring them only modest rewards, they turn their bitterness and envy on those who might take away what little they have. They denigrate and perhaps attack those who are of a different race or nationality or religion or class or are not family members. If they can have more, if they can use their wealth to create more wealth and possessions, they try to assuage their bitterness and envy by acts of conspicuous consumption, but even as they do, they discover that the hunger of sadness can never be satisfied. The more they have, they more they want.

Why Are We Sad?

Where does this sadness come from? Of course in the lives of every adult there are some things to feel sad about – opportunities lost, love denied. But the sadness we feel is more powerful and more pervasive than these events alone would provoke. Even when other events in our lives might be regarded as more than compensating for these disappointments and losses, the act of counting one’s blessings does not dissipate the sadness. Nothing, it seems, can compensate for what might have been.

What has been lost? I have pondered about finding this sadness in me when I had reached a point in my life where all the disappointments and losses I had suffered had proved in fact to be very beneficial. I was now leading the kind of life I had dreamed of when I was an adolescent – writing, travelling, with family and friends, my own delightful home, a good income, and healthier than I had ever been. As well, I had been successful in excluding from my life quite a number of things which I did not want to do and which I would, when I was younger, have felt obliged to do (like being responsible for a husband, or devoting precious time to civic or charitable affairs, as many women my age, but less selfish than me, do). I had also relieved myself of the burden of worrying about whether people approved of me. I had decided that wise, perspicacious people approved of me, and anyone who didn’t wasn’t. Most of the time I felt extremely happy, but every now and then I would find myself feeling sad.

I thought about this, and I thought about my daydreams.

When I was young I imagined that as we get older we daydream less and less, because the alternatives open to us become less and less. (I think this idea came from a song, ‘When I Grow Too Old to Dream’, which my grandmother would get me to sing to her.) As adolescents we can dream of doing many things and falling in love with many different people, but with each passing year, I thought, the range of possibilities gets less and less, so that in old age there is nothing left to dream about.

I now know that this is not the case. We go on daydreaming, trying to dress up dull reality in fancy clothes. We go on telling ourselves stories to comfort ourselves and to view the future with hope. Even those last moments of thought which people in near-death experiences have reported seem to be daydreams about a heavenly future.

So I still daydream a lot, and these daydreams, like the daydreams of my youth, are about wanting everything and getting everything. I want to have it all. My sadness is because I do not have it all.

When I was comparing notes with Fay Weldon about what we each do when we are not writing, I found that we are busy publicizing our books and ourselves as a means of acquiring it all. Fay flies to New York to talk on television, to Moscow, or Melbourne, or Tokyo to talk to her readers, while I speak at Mental Health Association Annual General Meetings in Harlow or Rochdale, or answer listeners’ questions on local radio phone-in programmes. Fay and I do these things rather well and are helpful to the people who invite us and to some of the people who listen to us, so we can feel a glow of virtue if we wish. But we are honest enough to admit, at least to one another, that we actually do these things as a way of gaining our end, which is to have it all. Fay, I am sure, is only a few steps away from being the Queen of the World.

Fay and I are not two megalomaniac aberrations in the female sex where normal women eschew power, wealth and fame, and live lives of selfless devotion to others. Fay and I are just like all other women in wanting it all. It is just that so far we have been luckier than most. I know that women, like men, want it all because over the years so many people have talked to me about their fears and sadnesses, and there, under the sadness about all the terrible things that have happened to them, lies the sadness of wanting it all and not getting it all.

Usually, when a person first comes to see me we talk about the terrible, mysterious feelings to which he or she has fallen victim – the painful isolation of depression, or the heart-stopping panics, or the ridiculous, undisobeyable obsessions, or the irresponsible, ceaseless activity, or the strange thoughts and visions. These experiences seem to the person to have no connection with anything else in his or her life, and my first suggestion that there is a connection between the events of our childhood and ourselves as adults is usually rejected, for this would imply that the person’s parents had not always acted in his or her interests. (One of the most striking examples of our capacity to believe two incompatible things at one and the same time is the way in which many people believe that if a child learns that it is pleasant to clean his teeth each day this knowledge will stay with him for the rest of his life, but that if a child learns that it is not pleasant to be beaten, humiliated, abandoned, betrayed, bereaved or used as a sexual object, this knowledge the child soon forgets.)

Once the person realizes that to understand ourselves we need to see our lives as a connected whole, we can then begin putting together a picture of his past, present and future. At first the picture is one of a small child in the hands of powerful adults who, by simple neglect, or cruelty, or, most frequently, by wanting to make the child be good, have taught him that he is bad. Later, when he realizes that he is not intrinsically and really bad but just defined as bad, and that he can just as easily define himself as good, the picture changes to something more benign. He can see the adults who so affected him in childhood, not as the large, looming, mysterious and dangerous giants of his childhood, but as ordinary, fallible, ignorant human beings. His story has changed from ‘I can’t understand why I am like this. I couldn’t have had a better childhood’, through ‘If my parents had treated me better I wouldn’t be like this’, to ‘My parents did the best they could in the circumstances. They didn’t know any better. I can’t change what happened, but I can change how what happened affects me’.

This progression of understanding brings enormous changes in the way people live their lives. I have now seen many people make this progression and go on to live rich and fulfilling lives. They not only do things differently but they enjoy what they do.

And yet, underneath this joy and freedom, there is still sadness.

Many depressed people believe that people who are not depressed are happy all the time. They envy people who are not depressed, and when they themselves give up being depressed they are disappointed to discover that they are not totally and completely happy. Dropping the defence of being depressed means facing up to what is actually going on in your life. As one woman said to me, ‘My description of being depressed would be of a television set turned off. It is amazing how you can completely ignore quite important events by being depressed.’

Dropping the defence of being depressed also means discovering the underlying sadness.

Alice Miller has described how ceasing to be depressed requires the discovery of the ability to mourn those events of childhood for which there is no recompense or reward.¹ As children we are taught that if we are good nothing bad will happen to us, and children who are not canny enough to recognize that this is a lie grow up believing that if they work hard and give up their own selfish wishes and consider the wishes of others they will be rewarded. They manage to ignore the manifest unfairness of the world until compelled to do so by some event in their lives. It may be a sudden tragedy or the slow accumulation of misery in an unhappy marriage or an unsatisfying job. They can stave off disappointment, bitterness, sadness, and fear caused by the threatened collapse of the structure of their self² by clinging to the illusion that the world is just, by saying to themselves, ‘I am bad and deserve such punishment.’ However, defining oneself as bad leads inevitably to attitudes of fear and distrust towards other people and to life itself, attitudes which place the person in that peculiar isolation which we call depression.³

Horrible though depression is, there are many people who prefer to be depressed rather than confront two difficult truths.

The first of these truths is that whatever system of causality governs this universe, that goodness prevents disaster is not part of it. Being good does not necessarily either keep us safe or bring us rewards.

The second truth is that even good, kind, loving parents lie to their children. When parents say to their children, ‘If you are bad you will be punished,’ they are not lying, for so long as the child wants the parents’ love and approval the parents have the power to punish the child. But when parents say, ‘If you are good you will be rewarded and you will be safe,’ they are lying. No parent can guarantee their child’s safety, and while they can reward the child with their love and approval, they cannot guarantee love and approval by other people.

To recognize these truths for the first time in adult life means recognizing that we have wasted time in fruitless effort and have been betrayed by those we trusted. Lost time cannot be regained, while those who betrayed us are usually by then dead and gone, or old and frail, and while an apology from a parent might be comforting, we may not want to demand it, for such an apology requires the parent to make the painful discovery that he has erred and that his error cannot be put right. We then find that we have suffered a loss for which there is no recompense, and so we mourn.

Mourning can be a static, enduring state, or a process of feeling, thinking, discovering and learning. I have known many people who, having confronted the two truths, treated their mourning as a process through which they deepened their understanding of themselves, gained greater wisdom and drew closer to other people. Out of such a process of mourning came forgiveness. (Forgiveness is not something we can choose to do, although we often talk as if it is. It is spontaneous, like love.⁴) Such a mourning process is easier when the person’s life offers new opportunities and the possibility of other rewards.

Once we have got over the shock of realizing that goodness is not necessarily rewarded, we can abandon the burden of trying to be good. Instead we can be good simply because it pleases us to be good. Elizabeth,⁵ having discarded her disappointment that her efforts to be especially good as a wife and mother had not been rewarded, said to me, ‘I like being good. I like feeling that I’ve got things right and I have done things well. I am a naturally good person.’ Free though she is now to enjoy her natural goodness, Elizabeth does not see herself as young enough or sufficiently independent of family r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on the Notes
• Preface
• 1: ‘I Can Have Everything’
• 2: ‘What’s to Stop Me?’
• 3: ‘You Can’t Have Everything’ – Society
• 4: ‘You Can’t Have Everything’ – Parents
• 5: ‘Yes I Can’ – Power
• 6: ‘Yes I Can’ – Greed and Envy
• 7: ‘Yes I Can’ – Responsibility and Selfishness
• 8: ‘Yes I Can’ – Martyrdom and Revenge
• 9: The Best Is Good Enough
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Notes
• Index
• Other Works
• Copyright
• About the Publisher