It Is What It Is
A kind of memoir
Ellen Margrethe Henningsen
Edited and translated by Grok.
Part 1
Chapter 1. The scene is set
A boundless frustration
Like an inner tension. Something suppressed, shut in, down below. Excess pressure felt from within. You cannot move forward, break through, force your way. Sometimes the lid lifts and a little of the frustration escapes. The content underneath does not. Or perhaps there is only frustration without content. Frustration without a cause. In that case there is no solution. The frustration is simply meant to vanish by magic, and all will be well. Sometimes I believe that.
I remember once, when I was very small, fighting all day to get my mother’s attention. It was impossible. She twisted and turned in a thousand ways to avoid acknowledging that I was there.
When Father came home, he had her full attention. It was like a transformation from one second to the next. He had been out with some customers and came home late. The rest of us had eaten. Father was served food and talked. Mother was all interest. I ate again and got a stomachache from too much food. I discovered that I was not scolded for it. Not in that situation. I was allowed to sit there in peace, near the company.
A feeling of futility
Of not getting anywhere. The same exercises over and over, leading nowhere. Day in and day out. Repetition upon repetition. Restlessness, but nowhere to direct the energy except into the same meaningless act. Standstill.
Everything is held down. Every sign of life is tormented to death. With belittling, ridicule, scorn, and contempt.
My sister had some friends visiting. The rest of the family was not there. We may have eaten at the living-room table. I wanted to put the table runner back.
“Don’t,” she said, in her own peculiar way. “It’s not worth it on that dirty table.”
I felt completely annihilated. The strangest thing was that the friends looked at me and not at her.
Another time I showed her a drawing I had made.
“It’s very good,” she said, in that same way. “For someone your age.”
On another occasion we were lined up and were to be scolded for something or other.
“Who did it?” Mother and Father asked.
“Little sister did,” my sister said.
The scolding was a bit half-hearted. It must have been about something even they could see I could not possibly have done.
Once, very briefly, I was in an attic room with my sister. I sat looking at a small table with a glass-mosaic top and saw that there was a crack.
“There’s a crack,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “You made it, and now I’m going downstairs to tell Mother and Father.” Then she laughed, scornfully, inwardly. She had no plans to go downstairs. I had not made the crack either. That was beside the point. It was a demonstration of power. We both knew I had not made it, and we both knew that if she went down and said I had, I would get the blame, the scolding, and another mark in the black book. I was terrified. There was nothing I could do. Everything was already settled. She no longer even needed to say anything. She had total power, and the whole family played along.
Many years later my sister had been an exchange student in Canada through Rotary, arranged by the neighbor, who co-owned a furniture factory and was a member of Rotary. The whole family was gathered around the dining table. I came home a little later, greeted her cautiously from a distance, and was about to sit down.
“Aren’t you going to greet your sister properly!” my father said angrily.
I went over and shook her hand, shyly.
“Well,” my father said, in a tone that indicated I had once again behaved improperly, had been corrected, and could now go and sit down.
My little cousin, who lived at the other end of the village, and with whom we otherwise had nothing to do, knocked one day and stood in the doorway to the kitchen.
“I just want to say that I think it’s poor of Ellen Margrethe to have ruined my big brother’s labyrinth.” Then she turned and ran.
My mother said nothing. The episode was simply allowed to pass.
It was an ice winter. The cousin’s big brother had shoveled a labyrinth in the snow. Someone had ruined it, and I was blamed. I was a cowed, hemmed-in, and very frightened child, without much physical strength, who would never in her life have thought of doing such a thing. The strange part was that the scapegoat role did not come only from the immediate family.
Years later, on yet another meaningless course at the job center, a participant talked about how stressed she became by middle-aged female office managers, overefficient, tight in the gaze, wearing black glasses. Then she looked straight at me and said, “Yes, sorry.” And went on talking.
I understood that I belonged to the category, and that in this way she had both smeared me and disclaimed responsibility. The strangest thing was that the whole class, including the teacher, afterward looked at me and not at her. On a later occasion she called me “madam.” I understood that it was meant to be disparaging, or rather condemning. It was bizarre.
Two small scenes that were not supposed to mean anything
I once saw a program about a pair of twins who made models of prehistoric human heads. The work went on for months. In the end the models looked like themselves. Shortly afterward I read that a large study had shown that people who eat healthily live longer. I mention it only because both were served up as news. The first was a craft that ended by mirroring its own makers. The second was a banality elevated to a finding. Knowledge can look like that too: either a faithful copy of the one who is looking, or a sentence everyone already knows.
Sadness
From somewhere far down it rises and envelops you. Not much to be done about it. Just let it pass.
I was once in the neighbor’s stable with my older brother and the farmer’s old father. He had a box of licorice and offered me a piece. I put it in my mouth, let out a wild howl, and ran out crying. It was chewing tobacco. The old man was sorry. My brother thought it was a shame for the old man.
Another time I came with my brother into a football game on the neighboring field. I was hit in the head by a hard ball and ran off crying. I caught a glimpse of his face. There was no compassion. His eyes looked straight at me, his face did not move, his gaze was hard. His whole person radiated a kind of righteousness in hardness. He was almost high on it.
I understood later that he had found a strength there. Precisely that experience, of being able to identify with a righteous hardness, has been his lifeline. It gave him distance from the misery. As a child it allowed him to ward off compassion for the conditions his mother and four sisters lived under, and with it the shame and guilt that came attached. As an adult it became a generalized trait of self-righteousness and rigidity. Women became “the guilty ones” in his universe. Men could be excused. Even Father.
Some thirty years later I was a new mother, still large after pregnancy and birth, visiting my brother and his girlfriend. I stood with my back to him. For some reason I looked back and saw that he was regarding my backside with contempt. Contempt and gaze were pulled back into him the moment I unexpectedly looked.
Certain reactions lie deep in us. Pulling your hand away from something too hot. Closing your eye when something is about to hit it. Turning from a smell or a taste that turns your stomach. Disgust can, once it has a story and a group to belong to, become revulsion and contempt for those one has singled out as dangerous and wrong. My brother had grouped women as carriers of the danger. Contempt was a way of putting still more distance between himself and it. The scene above was an example.
Care that applied to others
I once drove with Mother and Father to Svendborg. It was winter, toward evening, dark. Somewhere along the way we passed an adult and a child walking at the edge of the road, the child on the outside. They railed against it at some length. It puzzled me that they could be so caring toward this unknown child. They had, after all, left me out in the middle of a heavily trafficked road, with no way to go either right or left.
Another time I had spent a week with my mother’s sister. Mother asked whether I had bathed. I had not. She found that somehow outrageous. I did not understand. I did not bathe at home either.
One of my parents’ neighbors said one day that my hair looked so nicely shiny. “Have you just had a bath?” he asked. “No,” I answered. “It’s more than a fortnight since.” For some reason he got angry. As if I had lied, or said something improper. I had only said what was the case. Then I understood that I was not to answer like that another time.
Shame and guilt
Shame can be seen as a bodily and unpleasant sensation that arises when you are stopped in your unfolding. It is a shutdown. It has a facial expression to match, and it is laid deep in us. Attached to the beginning sense of a self, it becomes a discomfort attached to that self. With a little more language it becomes a mechanism that can regulate one’s own and others’ behavior and help you find your bearings socially.
You feel shame over what you are, and guilt over what you do. Experienced in moderation in childhood, you learn to avoid these feelings by seeking the places where they rarely arise: recognized tasks, jobs, and ways of being. They are defined by a norm. The norm can shift from decade to decade and from culture to culture, but it is still a norm. The feeling of being free of shame and guilt when you follow it merges with it. Then the norm is experienced as right, true, and good, and the one who follows it as right, guiltless, and good.
If everything from an early age is freighted with shame and guilt, it becomes unusually hard to find your bearings. There is nowhere free of the feelings, and the end result is that there is no real place to do and no place to be without shame and guilt at the same time. However closely the norms for correct conduct are followed, the feeling follows along.
Once that scene is set and the trauma established, there is no end to the repetitions, and almost no way out along the road the others took. The suffering that comes with it is abysmal.
I once went to the doctor.
“It isn’t so easy being me,” I said, “when my siblings keep putting me down like that.”
“We all sometimes want to be a little bird sitting on a branch, chirping,” the doctor replied.
Another time I tried to tell my mother that I was not doing so well.
“You’re just spoiled,” she said, and left.
On a third occasion I tried to tell my father and mother, who were sitting at the kitchen table, about the problem with the sister who was responsible for most of the active bullying, and who at the same time staged the scenes in which I was blamed for concrete things, pointed out, cast in a bad light, and appointed the problem.
“You surely don’t mean to blame your sister for how you are,” Father said, angry and condemning.
Then it was shut down. Nothing more was said about that. Never again. Talking about it was not a possibility.
At some point I accepted my scapegoat role. My role as the problem. It was long before the attempts to get help. I gave in and sold out. From then on the nightmare lost some of its violent character. My sister no longer hit me, and the constant hostility took on more the character of ridicule, belittling, and exclusion. Everyone in that family was better than me. There was, in some inexplicable way, something wrong with me, and I was inexplicably guilty. But with my function as everyone’s dustbin I could survive within the family’s frame.
With the sellout I lost any possibility, and any ability, at any present or future moment, of standing up for myself.
At eighteen I tried to take my life. I had fled from Funen to Copenhagen to start a higher preparatory course, hoping to find peace there and the place where I could do and be. The family ghost came along. The attempt was a reaction to that recognition.
I remember lying in the hospital, and my sister visiting me with a book about the Gyldenkål family.
“You’ll probably just have to accept that you’re not academic,” she said, in her peculiar intonation. “But now you can lie here and relax a bit.”
She was very pleased that I was lying there. It confirmed once again that she was better than me. My intelligence lies a good deal above hers, and if there was anything I was, it was academic. The possibility of ever relaxing was vanishingly small. Hence the attempt.
In my early twenties I made another attempt. The scene was a course of study I was in the middle of. The trigger was the same recognition: that there would never be a place to do and be without a paralyzing guilt and shame. That the ghost would always move with me.
On a later occasion my brother said that if I thought I ought to kill myself, then I would just have to. There was nothing to be done about it. He washed his hands of it.
He had at one point been to a healer who advised him to seek out Father and say that he forgave him. So he did.
“I’ve never done anything to anybody,” Father said.
It made a certain impression on my brother. That he himself applied the same principle to me, he did not see.
My sister said at one point, “We’ve all had a difficult childhood.” She meant that we belonged in the same category. No difference. She gave the example that as a result she sometimes stammered a little. “You just have to ignore how Mother and Father are with each other.”
That Mother and Father had never been my main problem, but rather my siblings, and overwhelmingly her, there was no recognition of at all. So firmly established was the story that I was the problem.
Besides the neglect we all experienced from our shared parents, I had the weight of four older siblings’ frustrations, projections, and manipulations to carry, as the bearer of the collective guilt. It is a tragic story.
Chapter 2. What shame is, and what it is not
I have previously tried to explain shame in terms of energy. That what is stopped in the child is a free flow of energy, and that the extent of suffering is directly proportional to the blockage. The image helped me. It is not an explanation that can carry as science, and I leave it as an image.
What can be said plainly is this. When a small child is stopped in its unfolding, a bodily discomfort arises. If that discomfort is again and again attached to the child itself, and not to an action that can be changed, it becomes shame over what one is. Guilt is laid on top as an explanation: there must be something I have done, since it feels like this. The Bible’s talk of guilt makes sense, in that reading, as an old insight that freedom from shame is experienced as being able to inhabit one’s body without having to defend it. I use it as an image, not as proof.
Later in life that freedom is hard to reach, because the shame is bound to a long series of experiences, remembered or not, which have shaped the personality. They make up the foundation of what one takes oneself to be. The saying that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God makes sense on that understanding. Once the well-functioning personality has been built, distance has been put between it and the original experiences. The better the personality works in the world, the less reason there is to look at the foundation.
To experience freedom from shame and guilt one must, in a sense, give up the identity built on top. No person in their right mind, with a minimum of success, wants that. Everything is going well, after all. The whole field of psychology is in practice about supporting the personality, making it function and sit securely. The understanding that a personality can also be founded on shame and guilt barely exists, and there is not a line in the course of study about the possibility of dissolving one’s identification with the personality. In the spiritual literature there is talk of ego-death. Of dying while still going on living. Of being in the world but not of it. That is where it lies for me. Not that I am there. But that it is the only road a person with the experiences I have had can take, if she is to go on living without being identical with the role.
Neuroscience imagines that consciousness arises in the brain. The brain reaches a certain stage of development, and there consciousness is. The infant is not unconscious, but neither is it self-aware. That complicates the picture. No one knows how consciousness arises. It is the hard problem. I do not claim to have solved it, and I do not claim that consciousness “is” energy. What I can say is that an explanation that knows only matter and diagnoses has no language for the experience this book is about.
A lecturer said, in an introductory course in the bachelor’s program in psychology, to a full auditorium, that guilt is probably just a basic condition one has to accept. Meaning: there is nothing to be done, and it is not something we should concern ourselves with further.
It was a shocking statement. A field of study that does not see it as its task to concern itself with a basic condition of its own subject. As if physics decided that atoms were simply the basic condition and not something to be talked about. In none of the many modules was guilt a theme. Neither in the bachelor’s nor in the master’s program. In order still to be able to claim scientific status, the program leaned on the methods of natural science and founded itself on them. When it rains on the priest, it drips on the clerk. A narrow view of nature drips down as a narrow study of psychology.
Chapter 3. Norm-based reality
If you subscribe to the norm, you are right, guiltless, and good. The norm is not the same for everyone. Some norms seem self-evident and recur: do not kill, do not steal. Other things are debated before they perhaps become norms. Correct conduct varies from culture to culture, from workplace to workplace, from decade to decade. The norm defines how one is to be and act in order to avoid shame and guilt. It follows that others in the same group who do not live up to it are shameful and guilty, and that other norm-groups are wrong. The norm is what you adapt to when you adapt to the world.
One subordinate form is consensus. If many have arrived at the same result, agreement can arise that this is the right one. Others can join it, and would be wise to. Within the sciences there is broad agreement about the scientific method. Within medicine there is a special form: only the sufferings described in a diagnostic system exist. If you go to the doctor with something that does not fit, there is in principle nothing wrong with you.
That may not be strange. That is how it works. So long as you do not go to the doctor with the idea that the doctor understands suffering as such, there is no problem in the system. The problem arises in the encounter. Doctors know which symptoms can fit under which syndromes, which tests are appropriate, which referrals, which diagnoses, which medicines. Psychiatry works in the same way, with other symptoms and other diagnoses.
I wonder whether part of the suicide rate in the medical profession has to do with the mismatch between what people go to the doctor for and what doctors treat. Access to the means explains a large part. But the patient sees the doctor as an authority with an overarching understanding of the suffering. If you have even a little insight as a doctor, you know the mismatch is there. Besides pay and status — and medicine belongs squarely under the norm for recognized jobs — the young student may have had an idea that the overarching understanding was part of the training, and a wish to relieve suffering. When it is discovered that the profession is about fitting symptoms into systems and prescribing medicine, and you are at the same time daily immersed in misery, it can take the wind out of anyone. A misery that in the individual patient can be seen as one long downward spiral, until in the end there is almost no limit to the symptoms and diagnoses at once.
You need a great many blinkers to function as a doctor without feeling that mismatch. For a while I had a general practitioner who ran his practice like a packing and distribution center. This in that box, that in that box, pretreated this way, labeled that way, sent there. He had great knowledge of boxes, labels, and procedures. He was efficient, there was never a wait, and he was a kind and humane person. His approach can only be described as healthy, in the system’s sense. He may be the most well-functioning person I have ever met. I could not talk to him. It became pure nonsense. His brain was a sorting machine. The categories were predefined, and the blinkers covered everything.
Chapter 4. Psychologists
Practicing psychologists do not treat with medicine but with therapy, and otherwise work in the same way. They have their own diagnostic system, assess, find a suitable category and a suitable therapy. All therapy therefore starts from the premise that there is a fault to be corrected, or a suffering attached to the fault to be relieved. Whether the form is supportive, accepting, confronting, or containing.
What diagnosis is there for a person weighed down by guilt and shame? It does not exist. Nor any therapy built for it.
Can you go to a psychologist and have the fault of feeling guilt-ridden and ashamed corrected? No.
The psychologist can assess and clarify. Together we can arrive at guilt and shame being the overarching problem. We can divide the experiences into those I could not possibly have been to blame for, and those that might justify a feeling. We can conclude that I have no guilt in the first category, and that the second followed from a miserable upbringing, a lack of insight at the time, and the fact that most people have done something they would later have done differently, without their lives being dictated by shame. All reality-testing says that I have nothing to be ashamed of. I am quite all right.
We can also skip that part and do cognitive therapy, in which the problem is accepted and the gaze turned forward. That is the main idea of many newer forms. It would be like ignoring the elephant in the room.
Implicit is the idea that everything is at bottom an attitude problem. Mindfulness and positive psychology are built in, but in distorted form. Mindfulness properly used is about seeing things as they are without reacting to them. You stay in the suffering while you see what it consists of. Some of the pain can in time lose its hold. Wrongly used, it becomes the instruction simply to accept things as they are and get on.
Whatever the form, the feeling of guilt and shame remains unchanged. Because as a small child I gave in and took the scapegoat role upon myself — unlike a development in which one takes the norms on and learns to seek the places where guilt and shame rarely arise — shame and guilt became part of my personality and thus of my identity. I am identified with it. Where others feel guilt over what they do, I feel guilt both over what I am and what I do. There is, in some unclear way, something wrong with me that produces a chronic feeling of guilt. It is preverbal. No mental knowledge that it is groundless changes the relation, unless the identification itself is dissolved. Actively identifying with a group later in life belongs to another, verbal level. I can be fully aware that the feeling is groundless, and it does not make a damn bit of difference. On the contrary. When everything has been assessed, gone through, and clarified, and nothing has changed, it can only be me who is inexplicably wrong. The stigmatization is complete. You leave in a deeper dread than the one you came with.
The problem with the therapy is that the psychologist starts from norm-based reality and never moves from it. She assumes that this is all there is, that our starting points are the same, and that I merely have a problem adapting. She will, with the best of hearts, adapt me to a reality I am not part of, and she does not understand that I do not exist inside it.
She imagines that she is uncovering the problem and helping me onward. What she is in fact doing, with all her might, is trying to help me cover it up. If you are to be part of normal reality, shame and guilt have to be covered over from an early age. Later it is not an option. The only option is to understand the basic condition, and thereby set yourself outside it, because you see that it is a basic condition and not a personal fault. If there is a fault anywhere, it lies in the missing ability to cover it over. And that fault exists only if you see it from the truth of norm-based reality. That is the truth the field subscribes to.
The field’s relation to guilt and shame is about how best to cover them over. The one who is best at ignoring the basic condition has the best-functioning personality and the best chance of getting on. And that is how it is. It is what it is. It is a fact.
Chapter 5. Working other people out
The false-belief test exists in several forms. In one, the child is shown a candy tin, clearly recognizable. The child is asked what it thinks the tin contains, and answers candy. The lid is taken off. The tin contains pencils. Another child comes in, and the first is asked what it thinks the newcomer will think is in the tin. Children under about four typically answer pencils. Children of four and a half and older typically answer candy.
The test is used as a sign of whether the child has developed a theory of mind, the ability to understand others’ actions, feelings, and motives. If an older child answers wrong, suspicion of autism can arise. But the test in itself says only something about the ability to keep two perspectives apart and to understand what is being asked. It does not in itself say anything about feelings and motives. It is a cross-section, not the whole ability.
It illustrates something else that matters here. You can fool other people. Make them believe something. Achieve, if nothing else, the feeling of being cleverer and more right than the one you fool. The wrong answer about the tin’s contents is the right answer to the question. My sister had grasped the point long before any test. Already as a small child she had worked out the family system and worked out how it could be used to her own advantage. As an adult she had perfected the style. If people let themselves be fooled, she was by definition better than them. In the same way that my brother found a lifeline in feeling righteously hard, she found a lifeline in being better than others by fooling them.
There is a difference worth holding on to. If you follow the prevailing norms, you are right and good. If you work out the system you are subject to and use it to your own advantage, you are better than others. Both strategies are ways of surviving a closed system. Neither is a morality.
Mirroring is the fact that we come to know our emotional states by seeing them mirrored in others. The process starts when we are newborn. If you have feelings that are not mirrored, you will as a young person and as an adult have feelings that are not recognized. You can go on feeling something without knowing what, or not really feel anything. The feelings can lie like a black box. Because they are not known as oneself, they can become the source of projections.
Projection is attributing to others one’s own feelings and motives. The feelings one has not learned to know as oneself are laid onto others, together with the motives that fit them. It is not far from a deficient theory of mind to projection. First you recognize yourself through mirroring. Then you recognize others by generalizing from yourself. That generalization requires a level of abstraction that seems to be reached around the age of four and a half. The child assumes that others are like itself. If self-recognition is deficient, what one lays onto others will be deficient too. At the same time it can serve as a defense. It is the other person who feels guilt and shame, and she does so because she is guilty and shameful. Pure logic, inside the system.
The Emperor’s New Clothes is a picture of the same manipulation, lifted to a public scale. The emperor is an already established system with power over money and status. The tailors are those who can use the system to their own advantage by supporting the structure itself, regardless of whether what is made makes sense in relation to the system’s task. The crowd are those who fit themselves in and thereby manage to survive, and in graded order gain safety, a self-image, money, status. The boy shows that we do not care what it is we are adapting to, or whether the system has anything on at all. We want to be part of it. The two strategies, the good and the better-than-others, exist at every level.
Chapter 6. It is what it is
It is what it is. How else would it be?
My brother once said that one should not occupy oneself with psychology. “If you aren’t crazy in the head already, you will be if you start occupying yourself with psychology.” Now he was of course already crazy in the head, like the rest of the family, so nothing much would have happened in his case. For me it would have made a world of difference if someone from outside had bothered to take an interest in the dynamics of the family. I might even have been able to have a life in the ordinary sense.
But it is what it is, and it was what it was, and nothing can change that. Nothing I have written makes any difference to what happened. I have established what is, as it is.
So why write?
Buddhist literature speaks of disidentifying. The concept makes sense if one understands it as seeing clearly what one is made of, and along the way releasing the emotional ballast attached to concrete experiences. In reality one does not disidentify from anything. What is, is as it is. But the weight disappears when one has seen how the personality and the identity were built, and what they consist of. One is no longer in the same way defined by what one has experienced. A more generalized level arises. A certain peace falls.
There is something interesting here. When as a child you first give in and then subscribe to the norms of the setting you are part of — or in my case to the scapegoat role — it is with the recognition: it is what it is. It cannot be changed. Either you give in, accept the frame, and make the best of it, or you cannot go on living under those frames, and nothing else exists for a child. And now it is here again. It is what it is.
In terms of recognition, nothing has changed. It is the same recognition. It just does not hurt as much, and it is no longer in the same way defining of either life or identity.
Part 2
Chapter 7. Stress
Something that frightens us more than anything else is the experience of being shut out. The danger feels close, and we will do almost anything to belong. We do not feel the fear of death in daily life. Everyone behaves as if they intend to live forever, and death comes as a shock after a life in which one has succeeded in ignoring it. But the fear reveals itself in behavior as a constant orientation toward belonging.
There is another reason. Being shut out is bound up with shame and guilt. Prison punishes by exclusion. In school, children were put in the corner or outside the door. People say “shut out of good society” and “not fit for company.” Being shut out is something to be ashamed of, or it is shameful in itself. Exclusion is bullying’s best tool. My sister and another sister, close to her in age, used that tool on me to the point of unconsciousness.
For the infant it is crucial to belong. Left to itself, it dies. Attachment theory, which is very well supported, shows that the quality of attachment to the primary caregivers is decisive for how a child develops physically, cognitively, and psychologically, and for how it later relates to its surroundings. There is biology in attachment. Oxytocin is released at birth, in nursing, in touch, in calm, and in close company, and helps bind us to the people we have that company with. It is not an explanation of all growth and all healing. It is a signal that other people are central to survival, first for the infant, then throughout childhood.
At separation from caregivers, at divorce, at the loss of a job, we experience grief and loss, and also danger. Being separated from the group is experienced as danger.
The course of danger has two parts. The reaction to the danger, and the recovery afterward. Fight or flight, set against calm and connection. The body reacts to experienced danger by releasing substances, especially adrenaline, that make us ready to fight or flee. The mechanism makes sense if the danger is a bear. When the danger is over, the alertness drops, and other systems, among them the oxytocin-related one, get room. We become hungry and tired, eat and sleep, and return toward baseline.
Stress is what happens when the danger reaction becomes prolonged and does not come to an end. The danger can be unclear. Not a bear, but the experience of being shut out, of not being part of the workplace or the group, of losing access to one’s close people. In a concrete work setting it can be a pile of case files that grows, with nothing to be done about it. You can neither fight the pile nor run from it, not without losing the job. The body reacts as if the danger were concrete, and the reaction does not end, because there is no ending.
Worry is experienced danger at a low level. Because people almost always worry about something, and because the body reacts to danger with a particular reaction, many of us are stressed at a low level most of the time.
Prolonged stress can develop into high blood pressure, disturbed sleep, cognitive difficulties, and cardiovascular disease. Too much cortisol for too long affects memory and executive function, and in severe cases some of the damage can be hard to reverse. Besides the fact that the reaction is itself a burden, we increase the damage by damping it with too much food, alcohol, and smoking. We eat, drink, and smoke both as a reaction and as a substitute for the calm we never reach. Stress over a long period, together with the attempt to manage it, underlies a large part of what are called lifestyle diseases. It does not explain everything, and it does not explain every trip to the doctor. It explains a great deal.
If what stresses you is a constant fear of being shut out, through losing your job or through already being unemployed, it can be hard to find a practical solution to the experience of danger. Otherwise the obvious thing is to remove what stresses. Get better working conditions, if the problem is a growing pile of case files. That is not quite how it works. The individual has limited influence, not least in the public sector, where a service has to be delivered within a financial frame.
It does not look good for the public sector, which is supposed to do good things for citizens, that it does bad things to its own employees. After stress came onto the agenda, the public sector acquired a problem. The jubilation was therefore almost endless when mindfulness was introduced as the solution. Responsibility is shifted onto the individual, and management is spared having to do anything about the conditions that cause the stress. It is unsympathetic. When mindfulness is mixed up with positive psychology, there is almost no end to it. I read an interview with a municipally employed environmental consultant. “We don’t listen to the complainers,” he said. There was a world of meaning in the statement. He was the system’s man.
Mindfulness and positive psychology are mixed into a mush, perhaps because both can be used to move responsibility from the conditions onto the employee. The employees are not positive enough or robust enough, and therefore become too disengaged or too easily stressed. The wish for productivity is mixed with a story of kindheartedness: management helps the employee become more positive and teaches him meditation.
I cannot say it strongly enough. Mindfulness meditation is effective against the stress reaction. It does nothing about the stressors. When workplaces use it as a means of combating stress, it is a disclaimer of responsibility for the conditions that cause the stress. I read an interview with a manager in a trade journal. “We have a proactive attitude to stress,” he said. “As soon as an employee falls ill with stress, we make sure the employee gets a CD with a mindfulness meditation.” That fixed it.
Robustness is another concept from positive psychology. Robust people are less susceptible to stress. For the employer it is a double-edged sword. The robust employee is not so easy to manipulate into taking positive responsibility for unreasonable conditions. He leaves alone what he cannot get done, or what does not make sense. He floats on top. So one would quite like one’s employees to be a little stressed. They just must not fall ill from it while they are still in the labor market. That costs.
As a management tool, positive psychology is unfit. Instead of making employees feel like unreasonable children who do too little, or like negative complainers when they make reasonable demands, the manager should clarify the tasks in relation to the core task, and when the employee can be said, on a given day, to have reached the goal. The manager’s task is then to remove irrelevant problems and make sure the employee has what she needs. That gives a more manageable day, and it gives safety, because someone takes responsibility and sets clear frames. The employee becomes less afraid of falling out, less stressed, and works better.
Chapter 8. Positivity
One thing is to be glad. Children up to a certain age can jump around for no other reason than that. For adults it often takes a purpose. Something else entirely is to be positive. In “positive” there is an undercurrent of something that at bottom feels like rubbish, but we choose to make the best of it.
I once saw a street interview. One of the people they asked was a vagrant. I do not remember the question. I remember the answer. “I only count the bright hours,” he said. His nose was blue-violet, and I thought that that required a good deal of alcohol.
It has become normatively correct to be positive. Positive people are more right than negative ones. It follows that negative people ought to be ashamed, and that it is their own fault if things go badly for them. Seen from a system, for example a public workplace, the good thing about positive employees is that they do not complain, but accept the state of things. The complainers think they have claims to make, and are irritating. Because positivity has become the norm, one can, with right on one’s side, decline to listen to them and perhaps fire them.
The unemployed, in that view, are negative hangdogs, many of whom simply cannot be bothered to work. If they were more positive, they would long since have found something. The courses therefore set out to find where the negativity lies, so that it can be corrected.
It may be the self-image. It may be the manner in the application and at the interview. It may be that one searches too narrowly by geography, or has too many demands of the job, or too few, because one does not understand one’s competences. It may be that one sits at home instead of ringing round, driving round, attending fairs, taking a placement at Netto, taking temp work. All of this can be summed up as the unemployed person not having the right attitude and flexibility, and being on the whole negative toward work itself. He does not live up to the norm, ought to be ashamed, and is himself to blame for his fate.
The job center coaches according to that recipe and calls it the motorway to a job. The internal statistic that comes with it says that nine out of ten get work as a result of the measures. I do not believe that figure as knowledge about the effect of the courses. Courses with that content are misplaced positive psychology. They serve first and foremost to shame the unemployed person. The only courses that should be offered are those that qualify people with concrete skills for a job already secured afterward.
Chapter 9. Applied psychology
Applied psychology runs parallel to every variety of the field. As soon as one believes one has new knowledge, one wants it put to use. It often ends up far from its basic research, even though the basic research itself sprang from the norm-based reality that later puts it to use. That reality always has a goal for the application. Classical psychology arose in a rigid society and tended to maintain positions of power more than to free the client by uncovering reality, which was presumably the point of, for example, Freud’s basic work. That can be seen in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The film is about how psychiatry committed and commits abuses against the mentally ill, and against the healthy. At bottom it is about power relations and about the importance, for the system, of maintaining the rules of the game, and the individual’s place within them. The protagonist has a little trouble accepting it. In the end the system tires of him and gives him a lobotomy.
I was on a mindfulness course with a view to further training as an MBSR instructor. The course was a requirement for admission. As a result of it I gave up the training. If that was the type of teacher being produced, something was wrong.
The course had elements of the Cuckoo’s Nest. On the first day we were taken in one by one to the teacher, who was a psychologist working in psychiatry and who was at the same time in the final phase of the instructor training. There we were assessed from a questionnaire taken from her clinical practice. Medical history. Alcohol. All the participants were ordinary citizens who had voluntarily signed up to learn a technique for relaxing from stress.
After that the course was set up with a presentation, an exercise, and a follow-up. At the follow-up she invariably put on the psychologist mask. She experienced herself as actively listening. She was listening for whether there was something psychotherapeutic to seize on. The point was that she should give feedback on the experience of the exercise. There was none of that. She did not understand what she was teaching, and therefore had no feedback to give. She did not know anything about stress either. The presentation that was supposed to have been an account of the concept she skipped, and contented herself with asking where in the body we could feel stress. I thought I could feel something in my toes. But that may just have been because they were curling.
Positive psychology arose as a countertrend to the classical kind, in which the focus is on what is wrong. It focuses instead on what works, on what makes people glad, strong, healthy. The approach is not without qualities. The problem arises in the application.
Today’s norm-based reality requires us to be self-propelled, flexible, quick to adapt, good at relationships, and outgoing. It is the concrete situation more than a fixed role that decides the correct action. That is hard to steer from outside. Where clear roles once regulated us, we are now to regulate ourselves from within, so that we can fit into many kinds of demand. The inner regulation easily becomes a manipulation of reality, because we must have a picture of aims and purposes to steer by, and adjust reality to them. At the same time we are to be self-motivating.
It goes wrong when the approach is used for denial of reality, for disclaiming responsibility, and for sweeping problems under the carpet. That is how it is widely used. The same goes for mindfulness. The approach has great qualities as a means of self-knowledge. As a tool for making employees and the unemployed carry the responsibility for conditions they do not control, it has no business.
Chapter 10. Mindfulness
Mindfulness meditation is a matter of sitting or lying still and regarding what appears, without doing anything about it. Feelings. Thoughts. Bodily sensations. Sounds from outside. If nothing appears, you follow the breath. The technique takes practice. The difficulty lies in letting what arises pass without hooking onto it. It is unfamiliar not to follow thoughts to their conclusion, and unfamiliar not to react to a feeling. The breath is used as an anchor. A double attention arises. Primarily on the breath, and in the background on what is passing.
The technique has a good effect on the stress reaction, and on pain as well. Body and thoughts settle, and the automatic reaction to danger, which is in part mediated by thoughts, gets a pause. I do not need to claim that oxytocin is released for that to be true. What can be said is that a deliberately achieved calm need not come only from others. The psychological warmth we think we can get only from outside, we can to some extent give ourselves. That is the good news, and it is limited.
The primary quality, and the way it ought to be used, is as a means of self-knowledge. Mindfulness is a way of stepping out of innate and learned automatic reactions. With the relaxation comes a distance from feelings and reactions, when one regards them without doing anything about them. With the distance comes insight.
We go through life with a fear of falling out, and only a close attachment to others, to a love relationship, to a reasonably secure job, and to the prevailing norm can dampen that fear and the underlying shame. Meditation does not control biology. It gives a pause in the reaction, and a place to see it from.
Chapter 11. A right to life
It feels good to win. From “good” it is not far to “right.” The winner is the most right, and has right on their side. A great many sick things can come of that in a sick system. I do not need a particular signaling substance to explain it. It is enough that systems reward the one who takes the place, and punish the one who does not.
No society celebrates the right of the strongest in full, because then there is no society, only individuals played off against one another. The principle exists in modified form. There is a perpetual debate about how far those who cannot win within the frame should share in what the others have won. That is a political debate, and it does not belong here as proof. What belongs here is the question: what if one cannot really win? If no one can win within the system’s frame, or if some can win only because others lose?
Where resources are lacking, one can, by removing some of those who have access to the same resources, arrange that there is more for those who remain. Bullying is often based on that logic in workplaces, and it was in my family. Bullying aims to remove perceived competitors for the same perceived, limited resources.
My sister and another sister, close to her in age, did everything they could to remove me. Either by harassing me so much that I disappeared of my own accord. Or, while I was small, simply by running away when my mother again and again threw me into their arms. Later by ignoring me and silencing me to death. For years they did not answer if I spoke to them, and if we were in the room together they spent an enormous amount of energy pretending I was not there, in such a way that I at the same time understood they were doing it on purpose. My sister took a distinct pleasure in it.
Together with everything else, this established an experience of being wrong and guilty, and of having no right to be part of the family, and later no claim to make on life in general.
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest a way out of the absurdities is opened. To find it one has to be a very large, superhumanly strong, and silent Indian. It is not possible to manipulate a person who cannot hear, and such a person is not perceived as dangerous, because he cannot speak. By that alone he has a looser attachment to the system and a head start in getting out. At the end, after the protagonist has been lobotomized, the Indian kills his friend, rips a kitchen unit from the floor, smashes it through a window, and escapes.
The moral the film sets out, and which I recognize, is that you cannot fight something you yourself are part of. The more you try, the harder the system strikes back. You can instead step out.
Afterword
I am a pensioner now, and as such have stepped out of the system.
I had never really stepped in.
The feeling of being wrong, and of having no right to be in the world in the same way as others, was and remained an insurmountable block, both then and throughout life. To this day it is completely incomprehensible to me that no one intervened with my family.
But it was what it was, and it is what it is.