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The Gaffer's Philosophy;
Part 34: Emotional Problems:
January 20, 2003:
In my last philosophy essay I offered this thought. These superior
people I am defining may be short of their potential for one very
good reason. They may, probably will, have emotional problems.
I believe many of the people who could have been these superior
people suffer from serious emotional disorders acquired in childhood.
In fact, the people most likely to have emotional problems are
exactly those who have the most potential for growth. These are
the most sensitive and insightful children who are most easily
damaged by the careless or mean actions of adults.
I will contend that the major cause of emotional problems is damage that was done to us when we were very young and defenseless. At that critical time we were damaged to the extent that we could not achieve our potential. Thus, we did not achieve the high levels of being we might have otherwise. I believe these emotional disorders are keeping most of us, perhaps all of use, from being the superior person.
How does this happen? Some of these most damaged people are likely to be those who have extraordinary perception right from their first exposure to the world. They have had very clear vision almost their entire lives. In their enthusiasm to learn and understand they will ask questions. In their clear vision, they are not likely to accept nonsense answers. They will see through hypocrisy and continue to question. They may even disagree. They may even offer different views of a situation.
Many adults will see this child's attempt to learn through exchange as a challenge. They will become annoyed, even angry. There is a good chance that the youngsters will be put down because of that. Most adults do not like kids to tell them how things are. They do not like kids to be more clever and insightful than they are. They don't like to be caught in their BS.
So, the kids will have been beat down, sometimes verbally, but too often physically as well. Let's understand that the kids are trying to learn, but they are also trying to survive in a world of irrational, unpredictable, dangerous giants. To survive, they had to accept or even agree to things they knew were wrong. To manage that, they had to suppress part of themselves. They learned to not question authority.
Let's be clear on this. Most kids are very clever. If a kid gets beat down or up often enough he will stop doing whatever is causing it. If his questions are the clear cause he will stop asking questions. The curious, clever genius will go into hiding and leave the conformer to cope. Now there is a suppressed personality fragment.
Oftentimes, this suppression of a troublesome personality characteristic will occur more than once. The youngster will have many suppressed personality fragments. As these parts are suppressed, the child becomes less and less three dimensional. He begins to become nothing more than a marionette to the adults around him. He becomes what they call a good little boy. He parrots what he is told and conforms. As a consequence he survives and is even rewarded, but the cost is enormous. It entails a loss of self.
Now, I will borrow a bit from my book, The Gaffer's Shorts. In the extreme case, psychology defines this fragmented personality situation as a serious emotional disorder and gives a name to it. It is called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). We define MPD as an extremely rare mental condition in which two or more independent and distinct personalities develop in a single person. Each personality may alternately inhabit the person's conscious awareness to the exclusion of the other personalities.
These separate personalities are usually so much different from one another in behavior that we must recognize them as individuals. They even have different names. The classic story by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, takes a fictional look at this phenomena. The dramatized story Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber is a much more painful look at a real case history.
This extreme condition is very rare, but I will contend that all of us have a milder form of MPD. In the extreme case, the condition is all but hopeless. Recovery is very unlikely. This is not the case with most of us. Most of us can recoverer these personality fragments through effort. We can become, once again, the happy playful curious child, but with a twist. We can retain all of the knowledge and wisdom we acquired along the way.
In discussing ways to recover lost capacity and expand our personality, we confront another problem in language. There was a time when the words pathology and disease implied a physical anomaly. Unfortunately, those words have been extended to include emotional, mental anomalies. Thus, we have no easy way of even discussing these conditions without lumping them in with the physical. This is a large part of our dilemma. We don't even have a decent language to discuss personality problems, let alone address them.
Too often treatment becomes kind of an ad hoc affair and we find that anyone can hang out a shingle to do it. Theories abound, from the ravings of religious nuts to mystics, psychics, astrologers, and bartenders. This could worry us unless we realize there is no convincing evidence that these folks do any worse than the so called professionals. The rate of recovery and growth seems to be unrelated to the theory, the method of treatment or the absence of treatment.
One thing seems to stand out in all of this. There is considerable anecdotal evidence that many people will recover creative function if they get a great deal of loving support and space to act out their problems. No theory is even needed. Sadly enough, most of us do not find the time to create that space, even for the ones we love. It takes one large helping of commitment and personal courage. It requires a person who can give unconditional, non-judgmental support. This support creates the space for a person to begin a process of personal growth.
I briefly covered some of these tools in my essay number 30.
I have tried and used several of these methods for recovery and
I can report that they do work. Another thing I have discovered
is that some creative activities are effective in liberating our
suppressed personality fragments. In my next essay, I want to
get into how that happens. I discovered it quite by accident,
but I see now it can become a deliberate method.
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