CHAPTER 1 SETTING THE SCENE

All we need is love.


As adults we seek to make sense of our worlds based on how our lives have gone on before. Our memories of our childhoods, our experiences as adolescents, our early adult life.

If we are very lucky, and our experiences on the whole have been safe and secure ones, then we grow up as just that. But, how many of us have had perfect lives? Not many I think. So in this book I want to try and make sense of those experiences and how we use them to shape us as adults and not always in a good way!

We can by not looking at our histories in certain ways, become victims of our histories, rather than learning from them. It is easy to see this all around us, with many people not being happy as adults, and if we bother to ask, we can find ‘stuff’ going all the way back to their childhoods, that they are still holding on to as a belief system.

Now there is nothing wrong with having belief systems, we need them to be able to make sense of what is right and wrong/ good or bad /happy or sad or whatever.
We need then to be able to know that it is wrong for example- to bottle somebody! But is it so wrong to have a few envelopes from work?

It is not my job to judge anyone else here, it is merely my job to know my belief systems, and for me to remain as ethical a human being as that works for me, and yes I have had envelopes from work…. But I promise never again boss, promise, promise!
Course if you believe that promise then just check out of the window to see if any pigs are flying past right now!

So how do we get to this place where we feel insecure, lonely, unlovable, needy to name but a few of the words I hear again and again from my clients , and if I’m honest have used a fair few times myself.

It is of course a slow evolution to this place, from when we are born onwards and to make sense of today we will have to go all the way back to the start.
So are you sitting comfortably , then I will begin….

All we want is a basically need to be loved, cherished, cared for, safe and warm. That is what we enter the world needing. It is our fundamental human need that we carry through out our lives.

Initially we get this need met through our first encounters with our mothers, especially from her breast. New born babies do not have clear vision, but very soon after birth they are able to focus on the breast (or bottle), as a source not only of life giving nourishment, but as a place of warmth and safety. The next place a new born baby learns to see his/her mothers face.

For the sake of convenience here I will use the term his, not because I’m being sexist, more to do with as I’m typing this I’m thinking of my own experiences, and I have two sons, so it feels more natural for me to think in that way. So just as well I had two of the same sex, or I d be very confused right now!

I digress, so this little baby can only communicate in the first few weeks and months of life by crying to make the people around him know that he has needs. Of course initially these needs are pretty basic, feeding, changing , burping. But what the baby also needs is to feel loved, and the other needs that I have spoken about. These needs are supplied by the people who care for the baby, with every interaction they have. The soft words of endearment, the tickling toes games, the blowing raspberries on tummies, the singing of lullabies to help get of to sleep and many more interactions performed throughout the day with the baby.

It is these actions rather than the feeding and changing that make a baby start to feel secure. Though obviously they need the others too here, just in case it wasn’t clear!
The baby starts to build up the bond with his mother. To turn his head at the sound of her voice. To smile as she interacts with him.

This stage, can by the way be very stressful for the father, as up until the birth of the baby he has been potentially the most important person in the woman’s life, and suddenly he doesn’t get a look in. As the new mum is totally preoccupied with her baby.

This happened to me, and I remember vividly my then husband getting really cross with me and our baby cause we didn’t seem to need him. I had to explain that this wasn’t about us as individuals, this was about the mother and baby’s primal instincts for survival. It wasn’t a reflection on our son loving me more, although of course he did! it was his instinctive knowledge that I was the person who was keeping him alive with breast milk. And I was very definitely the person up in the middle of the night pacing the floor trying to get him to sleep! Once my husband understood that he was able to relax a lot more and let go of his jealousy, as it wasn’t, as I said, anything to do with our individual personalities.

So to begin with this little baby is a mass of emotional and physical needs. And in the first two years of life it’s development is phenomenal, learning how to communicate with firstly baby language, which as any proud dad will tell you it’s thanks to him, as the first word a baby says is Dada. I don’t want to dampen their spirits here, but I will, it’s just easier for the baby to say D as opposed to M when they first start trying to speak!

They learn massive motor skills, no, not in how to strip down a car! In their coordination in rolling, crawling and finally walking skills.

They become more versatile in what they eat, and sometimes just plain fussy! They try and develop their hand coordination in terms of feeding themselves. And who hasn’t got fond memories of those first yoghurts that were all around the face, on the high chair, on the floor, on the dog and absolutely none in the mouth! But the joy of the toddler in having achieved something so spectacular as doing it themselves… what a milestone!

The insatiable curiosity, the need to touch everything, to taste it, to stick in ears, nose and mouth. Just exactly how did my eldest son get the ball bearing up his nose!!

Whilst all of this wonderful motor actively is going on the now toddler remains an emotional ball of needs. You cannot reason with a child under the age of two it simply isn’t going to work, however much you might want him to go to sleep!!

But at the age of two a sea change occurs, in the same way as when a woman is pregnant in the first fourteen weeks the baby is developing bits and is not a complete entity till after then. Then when everything is in place the baby needs to spend the rest of the pregnancy growing. The excitement of knowing, at week ,whatever it was, that my baby now had ears or a nose was wonderful.

So it is the same with the two year old, all their motor coordination is in place and now they have the time to start developing in another way. And this is in learning logical rational thought. And this is where the fun really starts, it’s the terrible twos!!

So baby and someone are doing the supermarket shop, and baby espies a packet of sweeties or whatever, and starts having the most amazing strop known, to have his emotional needs met and have the bloody sweets right now! No wonder we want to potentially murder our little darlings at this stage. When they first do this it takes all our emotional energy not to garrotte them, but also to get them to calm down long enough to hear us.

This is what we say, “If you are good and stop screaming/ carrying on/ throwing yourself round the floor ,then I will give you sweeties for being good.” And this is where life starts going wrong!! Cause for the first time ever the child starts to get told the value of logical rational thought.

Life changes out of all recognition, as ‘good’ behaviour becomes something to aspire too. In the same way dogs are trained, we start praising the good behaviour and trying our best to ignore the bad. After all, thumping a dog when it’s peed on the carpet when we were out, is utterly useless, the dog doesn’t understand why it’s getting hit. But if we make a big fuss of the dog when it performs in the garden, then the dog who only wants to please us learns very quickly how to ‘behave’. So it is with children, they want approval from their parents it makes them feel secure, which in turn makes them feel loved. So they start to behave in the ways of the society they life in….. How to say please and thank you, which knife and fork to use, if these are important issues for the parents.

This is the start of conditioning behaviour which here in Britain is valued particularly for the none showing of emotion, Stiff upper lip and all that!!

Now we are taught the value of not showing our feelings, something which for the last two years has been the only way we have managed to live. We start getting messages, “Don’t be a cry baby” “ Act your age” “Boys don’t cry” “ Girls don’t swear” - I must admit that last one passed me by totally. I find swearing a valuable release, just muttering Fuck under my breathe at regular intervals, works. I do have a lot more to say about swearing. and no doubt do some of it later on!

These vile messages are given to us by exasperated parents, by teachers, and by our peer group. I distinctly remember both my boys when they were both around 5/6 coming out of school and telling me of an incident at school that had upset them. And then telling me that of course they couldn’t cry. When I questioned why not, they informed me they weren’t allowed to cry. Why I asked again., the answer was, that if they cried they would be thought of as less than their mates, being a sissy, or a baby or whatever. Of course, both being still little when they got to the safety of home they were both able to cry, as I had no such rules.

It is this tyranny then we start to live by. The showing of feelings becomes more and more difficult as we get older. And yet despite our best efforts not to show them they are still there! We get to a stage where we don’t need anyone else telling us we, have our own very puritanical police force working day and night not to let anyone know what we feel.

This means that when feelings escape we despise ourselves for being weak. Unless the feelings are ones of love. We live in a world were seeing other people’s feelings is also hard. Imagine walking down the street and seeing a couple of 15 year olds necking, we’d just think - oh daft kids, we might even remember the day! Walk further down the street and see people older that ourselves snogging, or worse a same sex couple, and we are horrified at the display between them.

Now all that these people are doing is, showing the person they are with, that they care, in whatever way grabs them in the moment. We the observers are not able to cope easily with such displays of love and affection between people. “They should go that somewhere private” That’s disgusting kissing in the street at their age” We bristle with indignation at the perceived coarseness of these kissing people.

Why? Is love only something that can be shown elsewhere? Is there an age limit on being in love, a gender limit , a ethnicity issue? Answer NO, there isn’t. We are free to love who we want, when we want, and it works even better if the person we love loves us straight back!

That however is not the issue here. This is about our attitudes as observers, how it makes us feel, that level of embarrassment at witnessing something as wonderful as love or sexual attraction between others.

As human beings all we want is to be able to feel loved, and the difference between us and small babies is that over the years of our development we have learnt how to give love back. We are taught, hopefully, by our parents the value of giving and sharing with others around us.

We forget that wonder of a new relationship, the need to just touch endlessly, to kiss, to whisper endearments at whatever moment, oblivious to anyone else around us. So our feelings of love go underground, we may still love our partners but we have got over that first flush of feeling and settled down into a comfortable existence together.

Of course these feelings get blown out of the water when we have children! I can honestly say that the love I have for my sons is bigger than any other feeling in my life. I remember when my Mother tried to tell me this about me, I just used to scoff. I’m only glad that she lived long enough to see me fall in love with my baby, so that she knew that I got it too. Without hesitation, I would lay my life down for my sons. There is no-one else on the planet who will ever come close to that feeling- partners however much I love them, won’t, my sister who I adore and my niece and nephew they come pretty close, but don’t quite make that grade!

So unless you’re falling in love with a partner, or a baby then we mooch around not being in touch with those profound feelings. And even when we are experiencing those stomach turning emotions we can’t explain them.

Just try explaining what love is; is it a collection of physical symptoms, is it an emotional state…. Who knows, and who cares it’s just great to feel! Poets, playwrights, singers, story tellers have tried, and although someone may come close to describing that feeling they never totally succeed. And that’s fine cause it should be felt and not understood like a mathematical equation. So when any of us is in love we listen endlessly to love songs, that seem to be talking straight to us, to our hearts about our relationship. Equally that is true at the end of a relationship ,we get hooked into sad songs that echo our pain.

Because just like love we can not easily deal with our sadness. Whether that’s the end of a relationship or worse a death to deal with. It doesn’t matter who has died, family, friends, lovers, or even pets, the pain is terrible. I will have more to say on this later, but just wanted at this point to briefly look at it.

When we are sad, we want to let it out, to escape from it, to escape from ourselves even. And guess what we can’t, we cart ourselves around wherever we go! So we either hold our feelings in or we talk. And if we talk there comes a point were we feel that we can’t talk anymore cause no one wants to listen to us. Not that of course we ever check that out! And despite the people around us telling us they are there for us day and night we feel guilty about being needy and so we stop talking.

Then there is the third member of this triad, and the one that nowadays is seen publicly the most, and that’s anger. We use anger to protect us from feeling our pain.

It is now these combinations of feelings that govern our behaviour, as without the first we feel lost, lonely, scared, needy and all other ‘nasty’ words that we desperately try not to feel. If we’re sad then we, as said, may hide that behind anger or we may use another way to deal with the pain that we don’t want to feel, and have no choice about.

This then is what this book is about, what we feel, whether it’s the healthiest way to be, what we can do to feel differently, and how we stop running from ourselves. Therefore in so doing can find a healthier way to live a more integrated approach to the whole of us. Not just the one where we keep our feelings in a trunk under the bed wrapped in chains terrified that they will escape at any moment and frighten us!

This is about anyone of us learning that we are actually okay, even if sometimes we are needy, scared and lonely. That to be like that is human, and actually that’s what we all are, and that is very defiantly fine!