saying that this is a youthful belief that most of us outgrow. Most of us come to realise that the world is imperfect and to accept these imperfections as best we can. But not you. You will not forgive the world for not living up to your expectations, for not being perfect the way you want it to be. You have suffered, and in striving to be good you’ve sacrificed much. In a just world goodness is rewarded, and your reward must be a perfect world. You won’t settle for less.
Because you are frightened of other people, and because you are not sure just how to make the world perfect (that is, to get everyone to do what you want, and to abolish death, old age, suffering and natural disasters like earthquakes and blizzards) you concentrate on making your family perfect. You can reject the world for failing to live up to your standards but, unfortunately, the world is unimpressed with your rejection. You can, though, make your family very aware that you will reject them if they do not live up to your standards. You can make your love conditional on their good behaviour, and if they accept this, you have them in your power. So you demand that they be perfect parents and children and spouses, that they keep their bedroom perfectly tidy, be in at your stated hour, get their hair cut a decent length, cook food as it should be cooked, never have friends of whom you do not approve, keep to your routine and so on. They do try – at least, sometimes – but they fail, because children cannot help but be their age, and parents get tired of adolescent demands, and wives get tired of mothering their husbands, and husbands get confused by conflicting demands. Sometimes you feel confused yourself about the demands you hear yourself making. You find yourself wanting to do something in an easy fashion, or to stop, or to rest, or not to be so demanding of others, but there is a voice within you that drives you on. You obey because if you do not you will be overwhelmed by guilt. Jackie described to me how she and her husband Ron decided that on Saturday mornings she would lie in while he minded the children, but every Saturday morning she would get out of bed soon after him and follow him around, telling him where he was not doing things properly. ‘I can’t stay in bed’ said Jackie, ‘when I was a child it was a rule that the girls had to get up and
do the housework. I feel guilty if I stay in bed. I know Ron knows how to look after the children but I can’t let things be.’
Not letting things be, constantly carping over faults, impatiently wanting things to be done, being resentful and unforgiving when your standards are not maintained, all adds up to what Jung called ‘the well- known bad moods and irritability of the over-virtuous’.2 Since your
family soon come to fear your bad moods, irritability and constant criticism, it is no wonder that you sometimes feel that they do not love you.
As much as you rail at your family, you criticise yourself even more. It is as if you are two people, your wicked self and a harsh, punitive critic whose standards can never be met.
What is this self inside us, this silent observer, Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorise us And urge us on to futile activity,
And in the end, judge us still more severely
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us.3
Carol’s mother had taught her that ‘The easy way is never the best way’4 and now the critic in her head was scornful if she looked for ways
of making her housework easier. Chalky said, ‘If I don’t feel tired at the end of the day I don’t feel I’ve worked hard enough.’
Who sets these crazy standards? Is a floor more virtuously clean because it was scrubbed by hand, not a machine? Does a child’s knowledge increase proportionately to his teacher’s increasing exhaustion? But there is no arguing with these kinds of rules. I might joke about them and you might smile in sheepish acceptance of my jokes, but, if underneath you still hope that there is a book of immutable laws from an infallible source, and that this source or power will protect you if you keep these laws, then there is nothing I can say or do that will help you take life easier. Your mother or father might be many years dead, but if you still scurry to obey the parental voice when it speaks in your head, giving orders applicable in another time and place
but not here and now, and if you still hope that your obedience will secure your parents’ protection and love, then you have sentenced yourself to a lifetime’s hard labour, and much good will it do you.
Sometimes the parents you obey are not your earthly parents but the ideal parents in your head. When Tracy was nine years old her mother left the family. Tracy was very upset by her mother’s desertion, even though she had not been, in Tracy’s eyes, much of a mother. ‘I’d go into her bedroom when Dad was at work,’ Tracy told me, ‘and she’d be in bed and I’d see a man’s head coming up from under the covers. And I never had any clean knickers.’ Tracy vowed that she should never forgive her mother, and she constructed a picture of an ideal mother, someone who never deserted her family, who looked after her children and her home perfectly. By the time she was nineteen Tracy had a house, a husband and a baby. She rarely left the house because she had to keep it perfectly clean all the time; she had to keep the baby clean, dry, neat and tidy in good clothes and healthy and properly fed. Her husband would have to ask permission before he touched anything in the kitchen, and usually he complied, but sometimes he would grow so exasperated with her he would hit her. ‘I ask for it,’ she told me, ‘I say dreadful things to him. I get so panicky. I get this tight feeling in my chest and I think I’m going to explode. I can’t stand going to my friend’s house – she lets it get so mucky. I don’t think she’s a fit mother. I’m worrying now what my house is like while I’m here talking to you. I don’t want people to think that I’m like my mother.’
However, no matter how much we try to be good and to obey our parents, or our ideal parents, and our conscience, no amount of good behaviour will make our life secure and save us from our death. We are all fallible mortals. We all die. But for you death is the Great Imperfection. You come to believe that you can attain perfect security if you can have complete control over yourself and your relationships with other people. You set high standards in your relationships. You want your loved ones to be completely truthful and open with you and always loyal and trustworthy. You want to be sure that the love and care you bestow on them is not wasted but responded to in what you consider
the proper manner. (i.e., ‘If you really loved me you wouldn’t upset me by coming home late/tramping mud across my clean floor/expect me to go visiting with you, etc., etc.’) You expect your loved ones to be perfectly self-controlled, but this is no more than what you expect of yourself. You set yourself the standard of perfect, composed self-control, and when rage or misery or even joy pours through some small chink in your armour you berate yourself and fear that you are going to pieces, going out of your mind. Even when the self-control appears, at least outwardly, to be perfect, inside you are angry and frightened, since, as Alan Watts said, ‘Any system approaching perfect self-control is also approaching perfect self-frustration . . . I cannot throw a ball as long as I am holding on to it so as to maintain perfect control of its movement . . . . This desire for perfect control, of the environment and of oneself, is based on a profound mistrust of the controller.’5 Because
you see yourself as bad, you cannot trust yourself to be. Because you cannot trust yourself to be, you cannot trust yourself to become, to allow yourself to grow as a plant grows. Rather you have to make yourself, like you make a box. A box can be made just as you want it, perfectly symmetrical, whereas a plant grows by unfolding itself in its own asymmetries. In regarding yourself as a manufactured box rather than a growing plant you see yourself as an object, not as a living being.
In making yourself do all the things that your high standards demand, you turn everything you do into joyless work rather than pleasurable activities. You expect that other people have the same high standards as you (or even higher) and so you can be constantly trying to reach these standards and constantly feeling exhausted, and frustrated and angry at your failure. You encourage others to depend on you (after all, you know better than they do how to be the perfect mother, father, son, daughter, student, boss, counsellor and comforter), and when the burden of these dependencies begins to weigh you down you start to be angry and resentful, and then guilty, because being angry and resentful does not meet your high standard of being the Perfect Comforter and Friend, the one who is responsible for the well-being and happiness of all those around you. Not for one minute will you
allow yourself justified anger with the people who lean on you rather than be responsible for themselves. After all, they do not have to be responsible for themselves while you are there looking after them and knowing what is best for them. Left to themselves they could make mistakes and that would never do.
Some people who get depressed have set themselves the rule Never Complain. No matter what happens they Say Nothing. Not for them the pleasure and relief of complaining. But then those people who get depressed and who do complain do not find that complaining produces any pleasure and relief. It can never be a relief, since no matter how much you complain the feeling of anger and frustration never goes away. You cannot find complaining in any way pleasurable, since you are trying to keep your anger in check. Moreover, when you do complain, the people you complain to either take no notice or else they give you stupid advice like, ‘You work too hard. You ought to take things easier’, or ‘You do too much for your family. You ought to go out more. When did you last have a holiday?’, or ‘You worry over things that are never going to happen. What’s the point? Take each day as it comes, I always say.’ How could you possibly take such advice? You must keep up the high standard of your work. Who will look after your family if you don’t? And you know quite well that the only way to stop terrible disasters from overwhelming you suddenly is to identify all the possibilities and to worry about them. Not being able to maintain your high standards is something that you can always worry about.
You have to maintain your high standards because you cannot bear the thought of being mediocre and ordinary. You want to be the Most Perfect, Wonderful, Intelligent, Beautiful, Successful, Admired and Loved Person the World Has Ever Seen (don’t we all!) and if that does not work out you are not going to be mediocre and ordinary like the rest of us. You would rather be the Worst, Most Despised, Confused, Evil, Failure and Outcast the World Has Ever Seen. You hate yourself, but like those people who discover that notoriety can bring the same rewards as fame, you come to take a secret pride in your very badness. There is, you are sure, nobody in the world like you. You might find
your essential badness, as you see it, quite unacceptable, but there are aspects of yourself which you deplore but which, viewed from another angle, fill you with pride.
Some of you suffer painful loneliness but take a pride in keeping yourself to yourself. At school you felt an outcast, but secretly you despised the other children who were rough, common, or snooty, or stupid. You grew up regarding everyone outside the family as foreigners. Now neighbours rarely cross your threshold and you rarely cross theirs, and you can be certain that this is the correct way to behave. People should know their place. You are as formal in your dealings with a bus conductor as you would be with the Queen. You do not join sporting and social clubs because you have better things to do with your time. You cannot spend time just chatting to people when there are all those important things that you have to do. (Concentrating on the virtue of not wasting time banishes the recollection of the breathtaking, paralysing fear you feel when you have to join a group of people.)
Your fear of other people and your pride in being independent may be so strong that you want to remain alone all your life. If this is unbearable you may risk a close relationship with one other person, but you can come to see this relationship threatened by your inability to share a joyous sexual union. To deal with this you may pretend to enjoy sex, and you achieve a good performance, but the pretence is wearying and makes you feel that what should be the most important relationship is nothing but a hollow sham. Since sex can be a metaphor for all kinds of power struggles among men and women there is no single explanation why things go wrong in bed, but there is one idea still around, despite Freud and the sexual revolution, that lays its chill hand on a loving couple. It is the belief that sex is disgusting. A virtuous woman does not like sex but endures it for the sake of the family. A virtuous man worships his wife, a virtuous woman. He has sex with bad women. There are still many men who can see women only as sex objects or as sexless good women. Such a man cannot relate to his wife as a good, sexual person but can only alternate between seeing her as bad and sexual, and good and asexual. (Seeing women as either a sex object
(that is, stupid, of little value, discardable without guilt) or wholly good (that is, submissive, unaggressive, non-competitive) is an excellent way of dealing with your fear that women are more powerful than you.) Knowing that her husband has never actually met her, much less accepted her, the wife feels very lonely.
If a woman believes that a virtuous woman does not like sex, she is torn between trying to please her husband (if she does not he will reject her) or maintaining her virtue (if she takes part in sexual activities, or worse, enjoys them, her mother will reject her), and always there is the fear that if suddenly she loses control and acts spontaneously and joyously, her husband (and her mother in her head) will turn on her and berate and reject her for being dirty and evil. (Here I have used the words ‘wife’ and ‘husband’, but the terms for all sexual partners are applicable.) If you have been brought up to believe that sexual desire is evidence of the evil inside you, and that you must strive to hide and to control this evil, then no matter what pain and despair you feel in your loving relationships, you will take a certain pride in your virtue. You take great pride in your self-control.
Requiring such self-control of yourself, believing that you know best at least in all matters concerning yourself, and wanting to do everything perfectly, you find it very difficult to admit that you have made a mistake. In the face of all evidence to the contrary you go on and on, making the same mistake, keeping yourself in an unfulfilling job or a barren marriage, rather than let the world see that you are capable of failure like everyone else. Sometimes you will not even admit to yourself that you have made a mistake. You berate yourself for not doing things well enough, but you never question your basic assumptions about how you should live your life. However, while it is possible to lie successfully to other people, lying to oneself is never a good idea. Deceiving oneself is as life-enhancing as feeding oneself chocolate-coated cyanide pills.
Easy for me to say that. You know that if you look too closely at yourself and your life, if you discard your childhood dreams of perfection, then the despair you feel now will be as nothing compared
to the despair that would overwhelm you. I make it sound all too easy. Buck up your ideas and everything will be all right. I know it is not like that, as Jean reminded me when she wrote to me. She said,
I have managed to re-acquire all my depression and bitterness . . . and am having an indulgent time . . . My overriding feeling is that it isn’t really fair to write to you like this. I want to write letters of blue skies and birdsong. I think I get close to the pain sometimes. I can remember it as a child, the tightness in my chest when I was alone and I didn’t know what to do with myself. Always waiting for stage directions. God, I hope I’m not doing the same to Emily. I wonder if living in an isolated situation intensifies the feeling, as I can always remember taking long, solitary, painful walks. I wonder what mother was doing at the time – probably wondering what her mother had been doing when she was spending solitary hours. Anyway, I know the pain is there, and that I want someone to make it better and tell me what to do to stop it coming back again – and guess what – I’m going to have to start all over again. I know vaguely where the path is. Is it common to step back onto the