The smell of freshly cut grass reminds you of springtime as a small child, evoking images of your sweaty father ploughing up and down the lawn.
A song comes on the radio taking you straight back to the first time you met a lover.
As you slice the toast into strips for your child’s dippy egg, you recall how negligent your mother was in distributing the butter equally across the bread, so that each soldier had some on it.
These are common kinds of ‘conscious’ memories: we know that our present experience is sometimes informed by the past. Less well known is the extent to which this is happening all the time, without our realizing it. At a fundamental level, how we were cared for in the early years is constantly affecting how we feel and react today, for better and worse. Having the insight to identify the early patterns that reduce emotional health, and building on the ones which amplify it, are the main routes to emotional health.
Sometimes, it can be just a matter of deleting bad habits learnt from our parents. Jim’s dad tended to lecture people; Jim was the same, harming his relationships. Sarah’s mum was chaotically disorganized; so was she, making it impossible for Sarah to be relaxed and positive, reducing her vivacity. For these individuals, just realizing that they did not have to be like their parents in these respects allowed them to reap a rich emotional harvest. Alas, our problems and opportunities can be much deeper than that, unconscious, in other words, and therefore less easily identified.
The actress Mia Farrow was the fifth of eight children. Speaking at the age of nineteen, she believed that this meant she had been starved of love and affection, yet over the next twenty years she became the mother of fourteen, and now claims that being in a large family is beneficial. She would seem to have lacked insight into herself, a component of emotional health so crucial for enabling change, and instead, appears to have repeated her own family history.
But if pathology can cascade down the generations, so can emotional health. Ian was a much-loved son, his mother greatly enjoying his playfulness when he was small and, subsequently, they shared a subtle sense of humour. Both mother and son had many problems, but their sense of the comic was rarely stifled. The jokes were not attempts to compensate for misery, not of the ‘you have to laugh or you would cry’ variety, they were done for fun. When Ian became a father, he developed a similar pattern with his son. They tend to foster this humorous playfulness in all situations, albeit there are other aspects of their relationship that are less emotionally healthy. Ian is working hard to identify these less-helpful patterns and develop others.
The positive features of relations with parents are much easier for us to think about than the negative. As tiny children, we depend completely on our parents for our physical survival, so the love of a baby or toddler for its carer is unconditional. That often endures into adulthood. We are tremendously protective of parents. Deep down, we fear that airing criticism of our parents will lead to our being abandoned or rejected, and prefer to characterize ourselves as having had a happy childhood, whatever the reality. The most startling example I ever encountered was when I met the daughter of famous British serial killer Fred West. Despite having been repeatedly raped and brutalized, she was fierce in her defence of him.
The actress Mia Farrow was the fifth of eight children and she herself became the mother of fourteen.
In what follows, it is important that you understand that I am not trying to stir up trouble between you and your parents. I will not be encouraging you to become furiously reproachful or miserable about what went wrong. Rather, it is a case of understanding. If you can gain an accurate knowledge of how you were cared for as a child and develop insight into how it governs your present experience, it can transform who you are. The knowledge will ultimately improve your relationship with your parents, not poison it, and help create emotional health.
Before we go any further, there is a very important piece of information that needs reiterating: your emotional health is almost certainly not in the genes which you inherited. Health and illness both tend to run in families, and until now it was widely assumed that genes were the main reason. So if not them, then what?
Childhood
For several decades it has been increasingly clear that our early experience and subsequent childhood is critical in determining our emotional health in later life. At least twenty different studies suggest that the earlier we suffer maltreatment, the greater and more long-lasting the harm. For instance, among 800 children followed from birth to age nine, the ones who had suffered severe maltreatment before the age of three were more disturbed than those who had suffered it only between the ages three and five. The latter group in turn were more disturbed than children who had only suffered it aged five to nine.
The specific form of the maltreatment also predicted the type of later disturbance. For instance, children who were physically neglected had different outcomes from those who had been physically abused. Furthermore, the levels of cortisol, the ‘fight–flight’ hormone which is secreted in response to threat, were abnormally high if they had suffered maltreatment such as neglect, whereas cortisol levels were abnormally low if they had only suffered occasional physical abuse. Other studies suggest that, had these children’s brains been tested, abnormalities in electrochemistry and structure would increase in severity according to how early the maltreatment occurred.
Our first six years play a critical role in shaping who we are as adults, physically and psychologically.
The tree of emotional health
Our emotional evolution is like climbing the branches of a tree. At each stage, depending on how we are cared for, we proceed along a different branch. If you think of the top of the tree as emotional health, the danger is that early deprivation or maltreatment traps us on a low branch. That sprouts new twigs which sprout still more, till we find ourselves at the end of a self-destructive branch – perhaps we are addicted to stimulation, a workaholic with the attention span of a flea, who cannot sit still and is prone to gambling or casual sex or binge drinking.
Our emotional evolution is like climbing the branches of a tree.
Take Simon, now in his fifties, who had a successful banking career. His mother never managed to tune into him as a baby, so she could not recognize his signals – that he was hungry, or wanted a cuddle, or was tired. This left him permanently anxious, never sure if he was safe or whether his hunger would be satisfied, pretty much having to look after himself. As a toddler, it was no better. He was dumped abruptly with a succession of carers who had minimal knowledge of, or interest in, his specific wishes. By age three, he was a jumpy child who did not mix well with others. His father added to the problems by being increasingly enraged at Simon’s behaviour, lashing out at him, sometimes using a shoe to beat him. The cruelty of these beatings amounted to abuse.
When Simon started school, he felt angry and isolated, making him unpopular. However, both his parents were highly intelligent and successful, and demonstrating his own intelligence and success became the only way he could get their attention. Simon quickly learnt to use his cleverness to do well at school. Whilst his teachers complained that he was badly behaved in and out of class, they were impressed by his marks on tests. He fell in with a few other pupils who were similarly angry or insecure. Some were the sort of children who get bullied, some were bullies – like Simon. As a group, on the whole, they were up to no good.
At this point, you can see that Simon had gone down a branch which was shared by other children like him and this only served to make his behaviour worse. But it is a myth that peers are a major influence on children. Our prior early childhoods determine which friends we make, and that in turn reinforces what we are like.
Simon’s parents were forever being called in by the headmaster to hear of the latest atrocities – shoplifting, bullying, disobedience. Nothing anyone said made any difference, and as you can imagine, when he entered the teenage years, he and his gang were the first to be smoking, trying drugs, having sex. Nonetheless, he continued to use his cleverness to succeed in exams, so despite his delinquency, he proceeded to a top university. He had become an impatient young adult, always searching for the next distraction; to be still was his worst nightmare: he would immediately be assailed by a nameless fear, a sadness and an anger dating all the way back to the cot.
By the time he graduated from university he was already addicted to smoking or sniffing heroin. He had taken plenty of marijuana, cocaine and amphetamines, but from the first time he smoked heroin he instantly felt he had found a new home, somewhere he was safe. It took him to a calm, dreamy world. He could watch himself watching others, he even became nice to know, no longer a bully. Apart from a small coterie of fellow addicts, his social circle did not realize he was taking the drug. It did not much reduce his academic efficacy.
Having obtained a good degree, for a few years he did very little before taking a job in a merchant bank. He was witty, smart and, so long as he had taken heroin, personable. Whilst it was noticed that he could sometimes seem a bit frantic (during the gaps between drug use), that was normal in his world, a frenzied deal-making department of the bank. He was comfortable with the hectic atmosphere – it soaked up his unease and nerviness.
After various unhappy love affairs, he eventually married a woman who also was prone to drug-taking and they started a family. He was an affectionate, if erratic and tempestuous, father and husband. From time to time he would kick the drugs, but never for more than a year or two. In his forties he took heroin continuously but still succeeded in his career.
When Simon was fifty-two, the bank conducted a random drug test and, much to his managers’ surprise, Simon was exposed. Forced to leave, he joked that he would have to start a new profession as a novelist: the title of his first book would be High Finance (sadly he never wrote it – he could have produced something very amusing).
Simon had some elements of emotional health, most notably his playfulness (often expressed in amusing wordplay), and from time to time a rich capacity to live in the present. But for the most part he inhabited the unreality of drugs and this meant that, in person, he was often unaware of what he or others were feeling and thinking, and this distorted his relationships. He also lacked insight into the roots of his own behaviour and, therefore, the capacity for change.
Although unusual in some of its details, Simon’s story is no more representative a journey up the tree of emotional health than any other. Everyone’s history illustrates certain fundamentals. Research has shown how, as a result of experiences we have in the womb and onwards, all of us develop unique patterns of brainwaves and levels of key chemicals in our nervous systems. These are primarily dictated by the kind of nurture we experience. They become the electrochemical thermostatic base levels to which our system returns, all other things being equal. Just as your house’s central heating or air conditioning come on and off depending on the temperature, so our brains adjust the patterns of neuronal firing and chemical levels in response to the emotional warmth or coldness of the environment. Early experiences set our unique basal thermostatic levels and patterns.
Your emotional thermostat
Almost from the moment we are conceived, the growth of our brain and the chemicals in it are affected by the physical and emotional state of our mother. For example, if she is stressed during the last three months of the pregnancy, she secretes large quantities of cortisol, the ‘fight–flight’ hormone. These high levels are passed through the tube which connects the mother to the foetus. Years later, at age nine, her child will be twice as likely to be suffering from aggressiveness and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD, a disorder defined by symptoms that include a short attention span and a tendency to rush about).
Even after you have taken into account how the child is cared for subsequently, on its own the high cortisol in the foetus puts the child at greater risk. But the high levels can also set off a chain of unfortunate consequences.
Such babies are liable to be born irritable or jumpy or floppy, potentially affecting how the mother reacts. If she is very responsive, the cortisol levels drop and the baby becomes routinely calm by the end of the first year of life. In Simon’s case, his mother was not only stressed during the pregnancy, but because of her own history she was unable to respond to his difficultness when born. Since he was already jumpy, he was vulnerable. Her lack of responsiveness and subsequent care meant that he became a very twitchy, angry and sad 3-year-old. His father’s abusive behaviour only served to make matters worse. By the time he was six and going to school, his electrochemical thermostat was set at a baseline level that spelled trouble.
Whilst the accident of his parents’ appreciation of intelligence fostered abilities which were to enable him to have successful educational and professional careers, that did not take away his fundamental sense of unease. He embarked along the branch of delinquency from a young age and proceeded eventually towards the leafy haze of the addictive shoots near the end of that branch.
As we shall see again over the course of this book, different aspects of what we are like are affected by care at different ages in our development. The first year establishes our deepest sense of who we are, the strength and solidity of our identity. Between six months and three years, the responsiveness of our parents and the consistency of the care we receive affects how emotionally secure we are in relationships. Between three and six, the way we are rewarded and punished, and the way our parents pass on their values to us (either coercing us to adopt them, or enabling us to feel we are choosing to adopt them) determines our basic levels of motivation and conscience, expressed in our careers. All of this means that, by age six, we are already hugely influenced by our upbringing (indeed, by age three, the differences in mental ability between the social classes have already been nurtured) and that affects what kind of friends we are drawn to, what sort of hobbies we take up, and our attitude to teachers and schooling. Soon we begin to be classified by our social world as ‘bright’ or ‘lively’ or ‘moody’, depending on our early childhood experiences. And these classifications quickly turn into self-fulfilling prophecies.
Of course, it is not all done and dusted at age six. What happens subsequently can radically affect which branches we move along, for good and ill. Severe abuse or a radically better kind of nurturing (as may happen if parents divorce and instead of an abusive father, a tender and loving stepfather appears) can dramatically alter the route taken. Alas, in most cases, that does not happen. All parents vary to some extent in how they react to their children at different stages – some prefer babies to toddlers, others only really enjoy over-threes, and this has variable results. But if you have benign parents early on, they tend to stay that way; likewise if your parents are the opposite. That is why it is so hard for us to clamber back along the low-hanging branches of addiction, emptiness or despair on which we are liable to become stranded, and return to the tree trunk in order to set off upwards. Our early years can send us in unfortunate directions, and in the absence of an alternative emotional map, we just cling on to the familiar.
The branching analogy shows why it is so hard for us to change, something that is crucial for emotional health. From birth onwards, our IQ and personality characteristics (like being shy or aggressive) usually do not much alter. By age thirty, our proneness to common emotional problems, like depression or anxiety, is well-established. If you have already suffered them by then, you are liable to do so again. Our main tool for change for the better is insight, especially about the influence of the past upon our present.
The early years are so influential because they are an extended period of extreme dependence on others for survival, much longer than any other species in the animal kingdom. To survive, we do our best to keep our parents, or whoever is caring for us, sweet. When small, we feel unconditional love for them and a great concern to make them happy. The most obvious tactic is to imitate; we all like it if others seem to agree with us and follow what we prefer. Whether our carers are chirpy or gloomy, we mirror it and that is what comes to seem natural.
We also absorb their skills and attitudes to give ourselves a feeling of control, safety and identity. To ingratiate ourselves and to compete with siblings and other children, we take the line of least resistance in adopting parental characteristics. At the most basic level, we identify with our parents in order to know who to be. We feel safest with the familiar, even if that was maltreatment.
Because we are already prone to being a certain way, we get stereotyped accordingly. Once placed in that box, it becomes ever harder for ourselves or those around us to think of our character in any other way – a self-fulfilling prophecy. The patterns of being bright or lively or moody become very ingrained.
During adolescence, we start forming romantic relationships, trying out different kinds of sexual partners. We begin the social networking that will ultimately be expressed in our professional careers. Whether leaving school young and getting a job, or continuing in education, each route leads to a specialization which is further narrowed by our choice of profession or university degree. All the time we are constantly making decisions based on our original family history, which restricts our alternatives and ingrains the patterns still further.
In our twenties and thirties the consolidation rigidifies. We are likely to pick a mate strongly influenced by what our opposite-sexed parent was like. The result is a family life in which we live out scenes from our original family drama with exquisite precision, incorporating scripts from our partner (hand-picked, remember, for his or her similarity to our father or mother). We will probably seek a career which is either a reflection of what our parents did, or a reaction to it.
How rich or poor our parents were, and their cultural preferences, are all strong influences on the details of these developments, like the sort of lifestyle we prefer or our taste in food, but affluence or its lack does not in itself affect how emotionally healthy we are. Our gender also has an effect, if only because our parents and wider society have such strong reactions to it. What is more, the kind of society we are in is a powerful influence – to take two startling examples, a Nigerian is six times less likely than an American to suffer a mental illness, and a Singaporean child is ten times less likely to be illiterate than a British one. Yet none of these things is as important to emotional health as our early care.
The greatest challenge is the fact that the ‘you’ who is reading these words and thinking about your childhood is doing so according to ways of thinking and feeling that were created by that childhood. To use a simple analogy, if you are wearing a pair of spectacles with the wrong lenses, everything you see will be distorted, however hard you strain your eyes. As the British psychoanalyst Ronald Laing put it, ‘We are the veils that veil us from ourselves.’ We have a huge loyalty to that veil, because it came from our parents and all too often, grandparents and great-grandparents. Consider the following example.
Gerald was raised in a large family by socially insecure parents. They impressed upon him the importance of honesty and authenticity, and yet they also covertly pressurized him to be a pleasing, compliant, upwardly mobile and socially successful boy. He developed a false persona, a carapace behind which he concealed his true emotions when in the company of others. The vicious twist was that he pretended to be real, in obeisance to the parental instruction to be authentic. Hence, he would tell teachers and bosses when he thought they were wrong, although it would have been better to keep quiet, or he would tell friends their faults without reference to what they could cope with hearing. In doing so, he would believe he was being authentic, whereas, in fact, he was merely living out his parents’ beliefs, not his own true wishes or the demands of the real situation he was in. He followed his parents in confusing the unfailing expression of his true opinions in all situations with authenticity.
It was very confusing for him and he married a woman who shared this problem. Their children were presented with the same muddled message. On the one hand, they had to be true to themselves, on the other, they must conform to the conventions of their social class and gender. In due course, they married partners with the same confusing attributes, had children, and, lo and behold, there arose a fourth generation embarked on the same struggle of competing, paradoxical demands: to be both true and false. In this generation, however, one of them was able to escape the trap.
A youngest child, Emily, was less brainwashed by the family ideology. She moved away from her home town after attending university and was able to see with remarkable clarity how the trap had been set all those years ago. Not only was she able to grasp that her people-pleasing tendency was a false self, she realized that the family’s intergenerational compulsion for speaking honestly was both self-destructive and a form of falsehood, because it was not something she had chosen for herself, it was simply a family tradition passed down the generations. With this insight, she set about building her own self, one which was truly authentic rather than a pretence thereof, whilst also developing a facade of her own which she could use to deal with situations that required tact and diplomacy, or even lies. She became far more emotionally healthy than any of her siblings or ancestors.
A key reason for her escape from the historic pattern was the accident of Emily’s birth-order (she was the youngest of five), a big influence on us all, along with the nurture we experience before age six. We have to find ways as children to attract the love and resources of our parents. We seek niches that will enable us to do so, personae that mark us out.
If firstborn, we tend to take the line of least resistance, providing parents with what they want and siding with them. When the next child arrives the firstborn is quick to assert its prior claims and do his or her best to dominate. Since, as the firstborn, we are bigger and stronger, this makes us tend to be more self-assured. However, depending on how successful our younger siblings are in grabbing attention, we may be angry and vengeful at being supplanted. Behind the veneer of confidence there is liable to be considerable fear. As the oldest, we are likely to be roped into child-rearing tasks and be required to act as the responsible sibling. This makes us less keen on risk, more conservative, and anxious to conserve the status quo which preceded the birth of our siblings. Being a conscientious pupil at school is a simple way to curry favour with parents, if this is important to them.
By the time the lastborn comes along, many of the obvious niches for attracting parental love and investment are liable to have been taken. Given limited options, as a lastborn we may find our best strategy is to innovate and reject the status quo. Travel may appeal as a way of escaping from a family which has less to offer us, whilst also providing useful ideas on how to be different. At the same time, we may find that being altruistic and supportive is a way to pre-empt hostility from older, stronger siblings. This can make us a good team player.
As the youngest of five, much less of the family culture rubbed off on Emily. Once she reached university, she began to question the family’s messy mixture of falsehood and authenticity. The veil that veiled her from herself was flimsier than that of her ancestors. She saw through it partly just from noticing that being false was making it hard for her to get close to anyone, but this clarity was also nurtured when a lecturer encouraged her interest in the novelist Jane Austen. From reading these books, rich in realism, irony and social commentary, Emily was able to conceptualize her family’s mistaken presentation of a stark choice between frankness (often amounting to giving other people more information than they needed) and dissembling. Instead, she began trying out a more balanced approach, the kind found in emotionally healthy dealings with others.
Previously, when feeling insecure, she had been liable to become either jammed on ‘transmit’ or on ‘receive’. In ‘transmit’ mode, she would be like someone who had taken cocaine, convinced that only what she was saying was of interest and right. Whether arguing about politics or the virtues of a TV programme, she would hold forth with an opinionated inflexibility. Equally, if in ‘receive’ mode, she would become compliant and ingratiating, agreeing with opinions that she really disputed, a chameleon. Now she became much better able to tolerate the notion of self and others’ view of themselves, depending on the person and situation. She was able to remain herself and be assertive, yet listen to others and hear what they were really saying; her interactions were much more nuanced. Little by little she started finding friends she could speak openly to about matters that were troubling her, rather than always being the one others used as a sounding board. If she was sad or angry, she felt able not to conceal it, but only if that was appropriate. For, equally, she became much more cunning. She was able, as the emotionally healthy are, to keep quiet if saying something was not going to have any useful effect. With her friends, she ceased to be tactless. With her boss she became more artful, yet at the same time was less likely to be selling herself short by not asserting her rights. Instead of a self-destructive combination of falsehood and crassness, she became much more subtle, able to be herself and to adapt to the situation she was in.
An additionally liberating accident was the significance of Emily’s gender. All parents react to their children’s gender, but in her parents’ case, they had longed particularly for a girl, after having had four boys. This special status gave her unusual freedom to challenge the established order.
Her story illustrates how much freer we are to move towards emotional health if the obstructions to it are a matter of family culture and events that occur largely after age six. To the extent that you have simply inherited a damaging family culture, and depending on your capacity to feel safe to challenge your parents in your mind, you can call that culture into question. As we shall see in the coming chapters, it is a bigger challenge to address earlier experiences, because, although they are vast, we have little conscious memory of them – but it is still possible.
But regarding your gender, birth order and the more or less explicit imperatives of your family culture, these factors are identifiable and can be addressed.
Exercise
Write a list of the attributes that were scripted for you. Then you can begin to challenge them. For example, before the next family gathering, write down the expectations that each of your parents and siblings will have of you. You might be seen as the bossy or shy or clever one, the girly girl or the tomboy, the driven man or the passive one. Instead of conforming to these stereotypes, try deliberately behaving in the opposite fashion. If nothing else, this experiment should be entertaining; but it might also give you some insights into ways of behaviour which have become routine, and which impede your emotional health.
Don’t bow to genetic determinism
In Emily’s case, perhaps the most important aspect of all was her refusal to accept the idea that the patterns in her family were an unchangeable genetic destiny (this was something that her relatives believed). Believing in genetic determinism is bad for your emotional health. There are a host of studies showing that – whether you are the child concerned, or the parent or teacher thereof – believing that a trait is predetermined by genes influences the child for the worse. But with the findings of the Human Genome Project, at last we have a solid scientific basis for dismissing this restrictive ideology and replacing it with one that will maximize our emotional health.
I will not pretend that it is easy to derive from one’s life the freedom to live at first hand. Yet, in a sense, that is what we were put on this earth for: we exist to work towards greater emotional health, not to be happier or to reproduce our selfish genes. You can decide to continue to live in your established ways, endlessly repeating the past, believing yourself to be unchangeable, constantly getting back (and being crammed by others) into your box. Or you can challenge your status quo and your genes will do almost nothing to stand in your way. Yes, your childhood history, your friends and family, your society, they will have to be constantly confronted. But the first critical step towards emotional health is the conviction that through insight, you can colonize the past in your present, and start to live.