This Time it's Personal ~ part 12

The point I have made over and again in these postings is that all this has to come from somewhere. All that abuse and loathing - the contempt and derision, the fury, the tears, come from somewhere.
Now, as I said some way back now, we can talk about nature and nurture here, and souls and free will. I don't want to rehash all that. To summarise, we're actually saying here that either I am genetically predisposed to do that to myself (and to O), or I learned to do it (not as in lessons, but by example - the way small children learn to do most things), or I am just somehow intrinsically like that, or I chose to be this way, or some chaotic combination of the above. Vincent you are right in saying I have not proved anything, and perhaps it is not possible to prove anything beyond all doubt here, but some things are more likely than others, given what we know. As I said, even at its best psychology is not like physics. You can't do repeatable experiments on children keeping all other factors constant. It's all about trends and probabilities and it is all but impossible to make predictions except in the most generalised way. People tend to look at this and say that it's not worth even trying then but I don't agree. You can come up with plausible stories. As Einstein would say - you can do thought experiments. As Greg House would say, you can see if the symptoms fit. In House they often test their hypothesis by treating. If the treatment works, they were probably right about the diagnosis.

I've been trying to think about genetics and I wish I knew more. As a plant ecologist, with all the recent advances in DNA analysis, I had to know more than the average person about how genetics works but frankly I am still far from expert. There is so much new stuff coming along all the time. Trying to visualise how DNA might influence psychology in any definitive way is way beyond me. What I do know is that genes don't determine behaviour in a simple one to one way. They don't even determine anatomy that way. They interact with the environment all the time and in the case of us humans that means other people and what they say and do.
Coming at it from the other end, from what I do know, genes directly affect hormones and neurology. This means it is not hard to imagine how genes might affect the production of adrenaline for example, so some people might be more aggressive, more quick to take fright or less risk averse for example. Other hormones like oxytocin and serotonin affect how we respond to other people for example, or to stress, while testosterone and oestrogen influence how competitive we are and how much we want sex/children. More straight forward physiological effects of our DNA affect how well our ears work (which affects communication), how much energy we have (which affects fulfilment), how tall we get (which affects status), and what medical conditions we are prone to (which affect everything), all of which could influence how we get on in life. From this sort of thing it is easy to imagine, even for the non specialist, that DNA might affect how bright and attentive we are, how well we bond with other people, and how preoccupied we are with our status. So far so basic - note the use of the words 'might affect' and 'could influence', as opposed to 'determines' or 'causes'. As I mentioned before, the average ratio is about 50:50 nature/nurture and it is not a simple matter of genes laying the foundations and the environment building on that. The two influence each other all through life, adjusting and reinforcing or counteracting in feedback loops and synergies. At its most complex it is pure chaos theory - one tiny flutter over here causing a tsunami over there, but that's not the same as saying it's random or intrinsically unknowable. It's just very complex.

A couple of things spring to mind to illustrate this. One is a pair of kittens one of my ex girlfriends got. They were tiny when they arrived and could not have learned anything by example from their mother but within weeks they were in the garden stalking and pouncing on things like any other cat. How does DNA do that?
I was also struck by some examples of identical twins, separated at birth, sharing some bizarre quirks and peccadilloes, such as a predilection for farting in elevators and running away. How can that be in the genes? These questions, in case they be interpreted as doubts about the entire fabric of psychology and genetics and science in general, are exactly the kinds of questions scientists ask when they are thinking about research projects, so don't get too excited, you people of faith. Simply saying 'well it's got to be the soul hasn't it' is not good enough. Just because we don't know the answer doesn't make it legitimate to insert some unknowable entity into the conversation. What is this 'soul' of which you speak? What is it made of? How does it work? How does it have its effect on us as physical beings? Now who's doing the arm waving?

Anyway, enough about that. I look at my family and I think about where I got the way I am from. I look for general trends.
On my dad's side there's a lot of anger, that's for sure. My dad suppressed his because he didn't want to be like his father, my grandpa Fred, but he still had it and we were all well aware of it. Maybe it would have been better if he'd just exploded once in a while. I'm more like Fred in that I have a lot of anger at the way the world is set up, and a lot of frustrations. He came over as this embittered and paranoid old man, ranting on about the council and the government and whoever else had pissed him off lately. He genuinely thought the world was out to get him. I like to think I have a more political/philosophical, less personal take on the problem, but the feeling is the same - one of impotent rage. Dad on the other hand believed in order, in democracy and trades unions and not just complaining but doing something constructive about it. He was mostly frustrated with people because they didn't do what was right. He was afraid of chaos and had no time for people who did not do their bit. My brother Ian also it turns out has a lot of anger in him. It's mostly expressed itself in a rather punk sort of way - a kind of cocky exuberance, which can be quite entertaining but I think there is more to it than that. He keeps it down as our dad did. He doesn't freak out like I do.
What else? Grandpa I know would have liked nothing better than to be marooned on a desert island. Perhaps it was the demands of a loveless marriage and two unplanned children, but I know he would rather have just been able to take himself off somewhere to do what he wanted and not to have to always be keeping up appearances to someone else. He thought back to the war with nostalgia - not because he wanted to kill people or be macho but because it gave him the chance to travel and to have a clear and justifiable purpose in life. But failing that he was a shed man when it came down to it, as I and my dad and my bro are/were. Dad again tried not to be like his father and I suspect pretty much made himself join clubs and sports teams and to not be an outcast and a misfit. I don't know if it came naturally, but my bro has always been very gregarious. He's become more self-sufficient with age. In fact we've become much more alike with age, though I think he is more like dad than I am. He is more laddish, better with people, more into games, but also less emotionally open.
I'm more like my mum in a lot of ways. She's quite insular although she has made friends of her own since dad died. We talk a lot more about people and how they behave, though my mum is incredibly private about her self - very reserved and unaffectionate. She also went into explosive rages and deep sulks when we were kids. The rest of her family - her brothers and her father were much more business-like people than my dad's - more pragmatic - more interested in getting on in the world as it is, rather than wishing it was different. We were all working class but mum's family were more conservative and had much more of a problem with foreigners and other minorities and granddad Joe was a well-known contrarian bigot, though he mellowed with age and I genuinely liked him more than any of the others by the end.
I've not mentioned the two grandmas. That's because I honestly don't have much to say about them. Mum's mum, Dora, died when I was little, dad's only a couple of years ago. Both were old-fashioned chubby mumsy types, completely unlike my own mother. Dad's mum, Kay, 'suffered with her nerves' which may have been a result of her abusive husband or or she might have been like that before, and of course worrying was part of a woman's duties back then, as was being looked down on by the men, but my dad was huge worrier too (it might be what finished him off) and Ian and I both suffer from anxiety. I just about remember grandma's parents, Pop and Nanny Peters, and they were salt of the earth. Everybody liked them.

I'm going to stop there. I don't think it's very helpful because the more I think about it the harder it is to come up with any useful generalisations. It would take a great deal more analysis and a far bigger data set (I know almost nothing about the wider family) to even attempt to identify a strong signal. There's just too much noise.
In any case 'heredity' does not just mean genetics. I could have got my anger due to the over-production of some hormone which is linked to a specific gene, or simply by living with my dad and seeing how he was, or a bit of both. The aim of the exercise here has been more to demonstrate the difficulties (if that needed demonstrating) than to come up with some conclusions.
What I'm left with then is this state of affairs - the Naturalist part of the investigation that simply says 'look at all this stuff' without getting too ahead of itself and jumping to a conclusion. To wit - I have all this anger and panic and shame. This is how it plays out day to day. This is what my childhood was like. This is what the people I grew up with were like. This is the period in history and the place in the world I grew up in. As I have said over and over - and I really want to drive this point home - this stuff comes from somewhere. To simply say it comes from some unknowable place as the people of faith do, or that I simply chose to be this way out of my own free will as the existentialists say is not good enough. Even if we can't identify the precise chain of events we can posit a story and see if the symptoms fit. If possible we then treat it and see if the treatment works.

To recap - I have this way of talking to myself when things go badly and I used it on O when he didn't do things the way I thought they should be done. I use it on the imaginary tekkies who design my PC and my car and even on inanimate objects like the hose at the nursery when they fail to cooperate, and on the slugs and other natural events.The feeling and the reaction is the same. The same contempt, the same impotent rage, the same shame.
Probably there are some straight forward physiological/genetic factors. My energy levels seem to fluctuate wildly. I get tired easily. I sweat profusely, but even these could be effects rather than causes. The sweat gets in my eyes, attracts flies and makes my skin itch (maybe connected to the allergic rashes I used to get?) I experience hunger as anger and force myself on when I should stop and eat. I experience tiredness as a nagging to get things over with. I tend to get a migraine the next day if I force myself on.

Given that some of this is probably innate (by which I mean genetic) is it possible to imagine having the same physiological symptoms but reacting in another way? Of course it is. I could have been easier on myself. Even if the tiredness and the allergies and the sweating are purely physiological, as opposed to reactions to stress I could have rested more, taken my time, let myself off more. What stops me?
What stops me is the driving myself on - the anxiety and the nagging, the sneering and the derision, the loathing and the contempt. Now is that a genetic thing or is it something I've learned? It could be a hormone thing, or a neurological thing that tends to wind me up when I'm under pressure rather than take things steadily. It might be that I have some innate difficulty with socialising that means that when things don't go according to plan that I expect contempt, derision etc.
I'm trying to give the genetics the benefit of the doubt here, but I can't help feeling that whatever the genetic bedrock of the problem, the reactions to it could be more constructive at every level. In short, I can't really bring myself to believe that all the levels of my reactions to trouble are simply expressions of genes. Perhaps I don't know enough about what genes can make us do. Perhaps the twins' farting in elevators does have some explicable atavistic root? Perhaps they're marking their territory somehow. Perhaps evolution worked in such a way that making a smell in a crowded but enclosed space somehow increased the breeding success of some individuals. There are stranger behaviours in the world of nature.

But no, I think for now anyway, I'm just going to have to go for the hypothesis that the story is about something that I experienced and learned to emulate. It strikes me as the most parsimonious explanation apart from anything. Someone treated people that way (with contempt and derision when they made mistakes) and I absorbed it and carried it on.
So, knowing what I know, how might that story go?
And more importantly, how can I treat it?

to be continued...

This Time it's Personal ~ part 11

Cut to the chase - I don't think anyone really thinks much about how much damage is done by parents who don't like their children. Of course nobody will admit it except perhaps in a jokey sort of way, and who would? You'd have to be a monster. Of course we know about the obvious monsters who actually attack and mutilate their children, but they're just freaks. Nothing to do with us. We all love our children, whatever that means.
Love is one of those odd words that seems meaningful but which ultimately could mean anything. You can be having a miserable time with the people you love - your wife, husband, parents, children - always arguing, picking up on the slightest thing, giving them the silent treatment, but you love them - of course you do. S&M couples love each other. Abusive partners love each other. Of course they do. It's the easiest thing in the world to say and who can prove otherwise?

As I said before, I never wanted children of my own. I remember arguing this with relatives when I could only have been 10 or 12. They insisted they knew better with that patronising look grown-ups give children when they use that unfalsifiable old gambit 'Wait 'til you're grown up. You'll see...' and what can the child say? But I knew even then - there were so many other things I wanted to do. I just couldn't imagine devoting that amount of time and energy to a person, so dependent, so needy, so irritating. And in particular I couldn't imagine wasting all those hours at a job I hated, to be able to afford all those little things... No matter what they said, I just couldn't do that. It sounded like a prison sentence, like a trap. And time has proved I was right. I have no children (unless you count the sperm donations) and I've never missed them. Those grown-ups would presumably just smirk and say something about my not having grown up. As far as they're concerned there's no way it could have been a rational decision. My mother-in-law last Christmas was 'subtly' suggesting I might want to have kids of my own now. (She just can't get enough grand children.) She said of course I'd love them once I had them. I told her I didn't want to take the risk. My mum was there. I'm not sure what she thought.

But now I have step-children, and they're ok aren't they? Doesn't that prove something?
No it doesn't. I like them a lot now they're teenagers but the feeling is not so different to living in a shared house with other students, which is how I lived up until I was in my early 40s. I always lived with mature students and post-grads, but most were nevertheless only in their twenties and I can honestly say I loved it. I had almost no bad experiences.
And in any case I was a bloody awful dad. I've sort of glossed over the extent to which they used to wind me up - almost to breaking point. Sometimes (quite often) I was so completely furious with them, O especially, I could have... As I said, I rang the Samaritans once because I just didn't know what to do. I was not completely out of control. There was a line I wouldn't cross - physical violence of course, but I also managed to stop myself calling them all the idiotic miserable morons and useless little shits I could think of. I never insulted them, but I did more than my fair share of shouting - furious, nasty shouting. Frightening shouting. But more than that it was my silence - the cold, contemptuous, dismissive silences. When I restrained myself from yelling I still made sure they knew how I felt.
To be fair they never demanded much of me. Their mother told me at the beginning 'They have a perfectly good father (two actually). They don't need another one.' But that wasn't the issue. It wasn't that they came and demanded much of me. It was the endless passive yet unignorable demands - the 'attention seeking behaviour' - the endless pointless bickering, the sibling rivalry, Z losing it with O, and O bursting into tears at the injustice of it all. The fact that O seemed incapable of letting go of the day and contrived to somehow stay up until everyone was furious with him and he couldn't understand why. Z used to fly into a rage whenever things didn't go according to plan. Mostly I kept to myself - reverting to my shared house student days - retiring to the bedroom, which became my room. If I was at all tired or stressed they drove me nuts - leaving stuff out, not finishing jobs (or forgetting them altogether), wasting stuff, making a fuss when things weren't quite as they expected. To me they seemed to have no resilience, no adaptability, no ability to learn, to think through things, or to have any sense of how they might affect anyone else. It was all about getting attention and getting away with things. There was no 'love' on their part. They didn't care how they upset their mum.
Now you might well say 'That's kids. It's normal.' but that would be my point. Exactly. That's why I don't want kids. Why would anyone? They had their moments sure, but when you look at it, it nowhere near balances. There were just nowhere near enough 'moments' to balance the day to day slog. So I was nastily, quietly, sneering and sarcastic, dismissive and contemptuous. Not all the time, but too often. It made them uncomfortable in their own home and O especially afraid of getting things wrong, and it damaged the relationship between me and Emma.

It wasn't all bad. On the plus side, when I wasn't tired or stressed I could deal with them in a constructive and rational way that their actual parents usually could not, being too caught up in the hubbub and too afraid of saying something 'nasty'. I could arbitrate in disputes not only between the kids but also between them and their mother. Often I could see what was going on more from an outside point of view and to her credit, Emma accepted this. In many ways the situation worked because I was a counterbalance to their (Emma's and her ex's) being a bit too 'nice', but I am well aware that had I been their actual father or if their mother had been more like me it could have been horrible. O and Z have, I believe, turned out as well as they have because overwhelmingly they have a supportive generous family who do genuinely know what it means to love a child and for whom that balance of good and bad times I mentioned above has no real meaning. Chores are still often not properly finished (but they are almost always done nowadays) and things still do not get put back where they came from but I'm coming to the conclusion that that's one of the last stages of development. In any case, simply who they are now outweighs the shortcomings by a long way and so I can say at last that I do love them, although it is not a word we use in our family, and which I still have trouble saying now even when it's true. Emma's and her ex's families say it all the time.

The point I'm coming to here you might have guessed is that my responses to the children (and O in particular) are identical to my responses to myself when I get anything wrong, except without the restraint. I do call myself all the idiotic miserable morons and useless shits in the world. I am sneering and contemptuous and dismissive of myself. I call myself a waste of space, and, like O, I am tearful and anxious and resentful. I hate me. I loathe me. I have nothing but contempt for me - making excuses, failing to learn from the past, not thinking, doing the same stupid thing all over again, whinging, and I am furious because I am not being listened to. Even when there are good reasons for what I did I won't accept them because it is all excuses. I should have thought about it more, allowed more time. I am both me and O in these scenarios - swapping back and forth. I am the sneering parent glaring down at the tearful indignant child and also the child, almost in tears, trying to explain, trying to put things right, blaming something else, anything else, because I can't possibly take all that blame on myself. As I said way back in part 2 or 3, there is a parent and a child here in my one person (blessed trinity). I am me and O. I am me and... who?


to be continued...

This Time it's Personal ~ part 10

I've never had children of my own but I've had step-kids twice - B when I was in my late twenties for four years or so, and Z and O now and for the last 10 years. In both cases I've found the experience difficult to say the least. I even rang the Samaritans up once because I was just so beside myself. (I wasn't suicidal. I just needed to vent.) In both cases things improved enormously once they hit adolescence and I'd say I have a very good relationship with Z and O now and by the time we broke up I got on better with B than I did with her mum. I can relate to teenagers. Make of that what you will. Partly I think it's just too late to change anything much by that age but also I think they just have a way of thinking that small children just don't. Plus they are more aware of how ridiculous they look. I can communicate with teenagers. Children just leave me baffled and infuriated.

The causes of this infuriation are many and varied but are mostly about waste and thoughtlessness. I find an apple with just one bite out of it in the bin (not even in the compost bucket, which is right next to it!) We buy fruit. They ask us to buy fruit but presumably the apple did not taste quite the way they expected or wanted so in the bin it went and it drives me nuts. I was too young to be brought up in post-war austerity but I seem to have inherited a loathing of waste from my parents who did live through that time. O leaves the telly on pause for hours while he goes and does something else, as if he can't bear to turn it off, as if he is scared it might never turn on again. Electrical goods pack up and they just accept that you just chuck them out and get a new one (though not with their money of course). Dinners get wasted. They claim not to like them but I strongly suspect they don't really know what 'don't like' means. I had a couple of things I really couldn't eat when I was a child, swede for example, but basically I ate almost everything. What they mean is they don't happen to fancy it at that precise moment, or it wasn't quite what they expected. I enjoy cooking and am pretty good at it by all accounts, and making a meal from scratch is one of the few ways I have of showing I care so this rejection was a regular source of unhappiness.
This, I really must say, has changed enormously since I've known them. Nowadays they'll eat a very wide range of things with my veggie curry well up among their favourites but it still happens occasionally and it still upsets me. I'm not trying to justify any of this. I'm just saying this is how it is.

When they were younger (I've known them since they were 6 and 7 respectively) there were regular tantrums and freak outs. O used relate to people mainly by winding them up (especially his sister) and then burst into tears when they got fed up with him. Z used to take any opportunity to throw a wobbler, shouting and screaming whenever things didn't go the way she wanted. They bickered constantly, O trying to wind Z up, and was always hugely offended when she lost her temper with him. Happy days. They never got really violent but they had absolutely no sense of how much they were affecting other people and just kept on and on until somebody lost it or they wore themselves out.
I don't know how much impact I've had on how O and Z have grown up. Probably they'd have turned out fine without me, but I like to think I've had some effect. I remember a conversation with Emma back at the start about her children (luckily she's never taken the position some single mums do, that the new man can have no part in how her children are brought up. Add to this the fact that her ex and his partner are thoroughly decent blokes and we all generally get on remarkably well, and, suffice it to say, things could have been much much worse.) The gist of this conversation was that basically there was 'nasty' and there was 'nice'. Being helpful and encouraging and calm with your children was 'nice' and being angry and disapproving was 'nasty' and of course she didn't want to be nasty to them. I pointed out that there is a third option which is 'firm'. She just wouldn't say it like she meant it in case it came over as 'nasty'. No doubt her and her ex would have worked this out for themselves sooner or later but at the time they were almost powerless in the maelstrom. If you've got one person in a dispute who is trying to be calm and reasonable and generous and another who is prepared to scream and shout and doesn't care what anybody thinks or says it's obvious who will win, every time. Until somebody is prepared to say "That's it. I'm not listening until you talk to me properly" and sound like they mean it the child will always escalate because basically, it occasionally works and what has it got to lose? Certainly not its dignity. I'm not against smacking because violence is wrong (I got smacked occasionally and I don't think it did me any harm especially) but because it's not necessary. A firm (not shrill, and especially not pleading) voice is enough. If worst comes to worst I threaten them with a lecture, and nobody wants that.

I'm lucky I guess - I'm fairly articulate and I'm good at reasoning. Not everyone is, I understand, but the main thing it seems to me is for the parent to talk like they should be heard and the children should listen. I think that's the thing. I think that's what's missing with so many difficult child/parent relationships. The parents don't really believe deep down that they should be listened to. 'What right have I to tell anyone what to do?' they say. We post-sixties generation have grown up with the feeling, deep down, that parents are old fashioned, stuffy, out of touch, and that the children are somehow naturally better, more in tune with how things should be, if we'd just leave them to it. They should be teaching us, not vice-versa. But they're not. At best they're just like anyone else - sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not, and at worst they are amoral, selfish, unreasonable (in the strictest sense of the word) and ignorant.

They don't know much. It's not their fault, they just haven't been around that long. They haven't had that many experiences, they haven't thought about things that much, they haven't had that many conversations. It's not authoritarianism and pedantry that makes us authoritative and pedagogical, it's necessity and responsibility. It's become fashionable to say that the kids are so far ahead of us these days - look at all the technology - they run rings around us, but not that much has changed. Fruit is still better for you than sweets. The French still speak French. Bees still buzz and bombs still go boom. Some things are still ugly and brutal and other things are beautiful and pleasant. Talking to other people still involves broadly the same techniques. Fairness and honesty and generosity haven't changed their meanings and none of this is hard-wired into the developing child. It has to be learned.

And actually we're not as different from them as our parents were from us. For those of us who grew up in the sixties and seventies, our attitude to careers and education, technology, health and sex, race and religion, arts and science are much more like theirs than our parents were to ours. We're used to things changing all the time too, though not at quite such a rate. I don't think I have a problem with technology because of the generation I grew up in. It's just not my thing. Many of the people I grew up with love technology, and a lot of kids use it but are no more interested in it than I am. After all, I'm a bit of a luddite but I use Blogger, Flickr, excel, itunes, Lulu, Paypal, Google, Yahoo, Panda... I met my wife on line and have made more friends on line than I have in real life - real friends that I correspond with, visit and swap things with (seeds mostly). I don't do Skype, Twitter or Facebook but many people my age do - can't get them off the bloody thing. I don't do gaming either, but then I never did like games even when I was a kid, but most of the music I listen to is less than 10 years old and damn fine it is too.
So we parents (because I am one, whether I like it or not) should have the courage to stand up and say 'You have a lot to learn' and be proud of that. They know some stuff we don't (something my parents wouldn't admit) and we don't know everything but overall we know a lot more than they do and we should be able to share it. Take responsibility!

What does all this have to do with the rest of these essays?
Watch this space


to be continued...

This Time it's Personal ~ part 9

Another interesting statistic comes out of those twin studies I mentioned, which is that even identical twins raised together come out 50% different from each other. I don't know how they work out the maths but it seems plausible when you think about it. Identical twins are so obviously alike in many ways but once you get to know them they are obviously very different people - one is often more outgoing with a 'stronger' personality than the other for example. I emailed Steven Pinker - the main (or at least best known) exponent of these studies to ask him about it.
"I was particularly intrigued by something I think I heard you say (on Radio 4 - In Search of Ourselves) about accounting for the huge (50%?) difference between twins. The consensus seemed to be that it had to be put down to random events (chaos theory?) which it was agreed, is not very satisfactory. Nothing else was left. I think I have another explanation, which is that it seems to me that any pair of people who spend a large amount of time together (spouses, siblings, business partners, double acts?) tend to go to opposite poles in various ways - they take up opposite or complementary roles in the relationship. The identical twins, one of which is outgoing and assertive, the other retiring and passive is an obvious example, the active dominant selfish husband and passive self-sacrificing wife (which also happens in gay couples), good cop/bad cop, straight man/clown. It's all about how they react to each other. I'm sure you get the picture. Of course this doesn't work for twins raised apart (which we would expect, paradoxically, to be more alike)"

He wrote back "Dear Steve, It’s indeed a plausible hypothesis, and a testable one: compare siblings (particularly identical twins) who grow up together with those who grow up in different adopted families. According to the differentiation hypothesis, the ones who grow up together should be less correlated than the ones who grow up apart (an effect that is in the opposite direction to any similarity enforced by parental shaping, so it’s a particularly powerful prediction). Unfortunately, the bulk of the data suggest that there is no difference in the correlations, so it does not appear that the differentiation hypothesis is correct. For more discussion, see Judith Rich Harris’s No Two Alike, which is focused on exactly this question. Sincerely, Steve Pinker"

I've not got around to looking at the book but the whole conundrum does show up the amount of room for manouver (hate that word. The correct spelling is so idiotic so you'll have to put up with mine. Another stupid one is 'gauge'. Ech!) even between people who should be almost exactly the same. Maybe it is about souls and free will after all. The differences between me and my brother Ian were always very obvious. He always craved company and, left to his own devices, soon got very bored. When we moved to a more leafy suburban area with lots of kids down the street he immediately joined in. He had a lot of friends at school, was in the scouts and enjoyed games and sports. He was generally easier company. He was a likeable lad. Unsurprisingly there has always been this tacit comparison going on - Why can't you be more like your brother? and the feeling that really, if he can do it why can't I? I was just being difficult.

I gave this some thought very early on in my quest to find out what the heck's going on and it occurred to me quite quickly that of course, although we have the same parents (I assume) we were brought up under very different circumstances - two children, born one after the other, always are. Quite apart from obvious changes, like promotion and moving home, there is the simple fact that the first child is an only child for a time. Even if that's only for a year it's something the second child never experiences. But there's a lot more than that. Think of almost anything you do - changing a wheel, baking a cake, filling out your tax return - you are almost always better at it the second time and not just a little better - hugely better. Plus you've already got the equipment - you don't have to go out and buy a lot of stuff at a time when you may be very strapped for cash. And you know what to expect. Every child is different but broadly, if the first one is still alive you know that basically it's possible. You can do this. Of course there can be a down side. Two children costs more than one and may exacerbate an already desperate situation.
In my case I was an unplanned baby - a broken condom baby - and my family being what they are, they were worrying about everything. They'd wanted to save, get a nicer place to live, to get more security, and now here was I. Plus the birth was long and difficult and my mother was alone with me in that basement flat in Hove. My brother on the other hand was planned (to keep me company - Hah!) and popped out like a cork.

I recently heard the phrase 'Refrigerator Mums' on the radio in connection with autism and its causes. You can imagine what it means - mothers who are distant and undemonstrative (cold and hard and perhaps a bit angular and pale and a bit too clean) with their babies. The epithet has fallen into disrepute of late because it smacks too much of misogyny ('She's frigid') and its coiner said he wished he'd taken into account more of the troubles mothers have with their children and finding ways to help instead of simply blaming them. Certainly my father would admit (if he were still alive) that, confronted with the housework undone and an unresponsive wife, he was not very understanding and basically told her to snap out of it. Add to this the fact that my mother was far from stupid and had dreams of her own you can see it was a miserable situation. Other findings suggest that peri-natal depression, unwanted children and even 'not-yet' babies tend to lead to psychiatric problems later on for the child, and there is a whole realm of psychiatry called 'attachment theory' that is about what happens to people when they don't get enough affection as an infant. My mum still maintains that I pushed her away as a baby - literally - when she tried to hold me, which apparently is a classic symptom of attachment disorder (the fact that she blames me, even as a tiny infant is sort of tedious). We all know what happened to the orphans that were kept without care or attention in Romania's orphanages. Children die without love, but apparently there are measurable affects even with fairly normal and low level neglect. On top of all that apparently Dr Spock was saying you shouldn't go to a crying baby...
By the time Ian was born my dad had done a bit of reading and discovered my mum was not simply being lazy and he was by all accounts a lot more supportive.

What are we to make of all this in the light of the 50:40:10 (genetics (peer group : parent)) split mentioned before? Is it irrelevant? Can a person simply leave these early difficulties behind (it's only five years after all) or will they affect the rest of your life?


to be continued...

This Time it's Personal ~ part 8

So much for the hypothesis. What of this 'established knowledge' I'm supposed to be interpreting events in the light of?
My starting point is encapsulated in the question I keep asking - Where does this come from? All these anxieties and frustrations must come from somewhere. The fact that I was such a loner and had so much trouble with people must have a reason. This is not at all obvious though to some who would simply say 'he's just like that' or 'he's just made that way'. A lot of the time it doesn't matter and saying 'he's just made that way' can express an attitude of tolerance or broad-mindedness. 'It takes all sorts' is a phrase that often follows. Often though it implies some sort of judgement, albeit often a fairly benign one. 'It takes all sorts' we say as we smirk at other peoples' peculiarities, because of course, we are perfectly normal and what we do makes perfect sense.

Most people I suspect take this view pretty much for granted. We have some sort of essence that is just a given and can't be changed. People don't change. A leopard can't change its spots. If you asked the person what exactly it is that gives a person this basic character they might well say something about taking after their parents and some might mention genetics but I think a lot of people would say something about a soul or spirit. It won't surprise you to learn that I don't have a lot of time for this for the same reason I don't have a lot of time for the idea of god or the afterlife. If the idea of some sort of supernatural, possibly immortal soul is central to your thinking then the rest of this essay won't make a lot of sense to you but I don't want to get side-tracked. The fact is I'm just going to have to act like it's irrelevant. Maybe I'll come back to it later. Others, probably the majority, have a more woolly notion of what a soul is (or a god for that matter). They just believe there's... something. As such it explains nothing. We know nothing about it except that it answers all the questions. There is also Free Will of course but this also suffers from the problem of no one really knowing what it is, except that it seems to exist and it answers a lot of questions. I'm going to leave that on one side too.

A lot of people these days though would want to talk about genetics and psychology so I'm going to start there. Most people in the West at least know that genes exist, even if they don't know much about them, and we've all come across more or less scientific parenting advice, in self-help books, magazine articles, radio interviews and so on. Psychology is considered more of a 'soft science' which means it's a lot harder to do, not that it's just a matter of opinion. Like many of the life sciences (medicine, ecology, anthropology) it is a matter of probabilities and trends rather than the simple is/isn't answers you tend to get in chemistry and physics experiments. (Schrődinger's Cat notwithstanding). Traditionally this pair of explanations for why people turn out the way they do is summarised as the Nature/Nurture debate. Both positions can be taken to extremes (German Fascism and Soviet Communism most obviously) but lately the consensus seems to be that it's about 50:50. There have been studies done on twins to estimate their average difference in any number of characteristics - between identical twins raised separately (where all they have in common is genetics) and unrelated adopted children raised together (where all they have in common is their parenting) and the numbers come out at about 50:50, on average, and I suspect a lot of us liberal humanist, secular westerners who've thought about it at all will probably nod and say that sounds about right. All that old eugenic and behaviourist dogma goes out the window. It's a bit of both. Case closed.
Actually that's not quite what the evidence says. The surprising thing is that of that 50% nurture only 10% (on average) is parental. The rest is peer group and other social influences.

This slightly scuppers my hypothesis, and, I have to admit, put my back up a bit. As a scientist I should of course be indifferent to the results. I should simply want to know the answer but of course we all have an axe to grind. I'd been making up this story about my childhood that was mainly about my parents and now it turns out they were only minor players. It turns out it was indeed the kids at school and the telly and society at large that made up the other 40% of what I'm like.
And I've heard child psychologists, therapists and agony aunts express a similar outrage at this finding, because surely the childhood home and the family environment must play a huge role in how we turn out? On the one hand their whole careers are predicated on it but besides that, it just seems to make sense. 'Give me a boy until he is seven and I will give you back the man', or some such. Those early years are crucial, surely. Those psychologists and therapists also apparently have evidence on their sides to back up what they say, though I am in no position to critique any of it. I wish I was. So has it just become a dogma or is there a real question here?

I think I have an idea what the answer is. Remember - the original 50:40:10 hypothesis is an average, and the studies I understand are about 'normal' children and 'average' families. I'm not completely sure what either of those words mean in this context but I can imagine. I'm reminded of the term social workers use these days - the 'good-enough' parent. Instead of the old pejorative judgemental 'good' and 'bad' parenting (since most people are neither one nor t'other) they just look to see if parents are good enough - they function, they cope, generally, most of the time. Sometimes they are good, sometimes, not so much. Sometimes they get mad and do a lot of shouting, and sometimes they give the kids a big cuddle, but they hold it together. And the kids cope too, they keep it together, like their parents. They make friends, they get stuff done without too much drama, they make relationships, they find a job - they cope. With families like that the 50:40:10 makes sense. And remember, that's 60% parent altogether - the kids take after their parents (give or take a bit of rebellion here and there) because of their genes and from experience. They learn to get things done by example. They do stuff with their family, who they have a lot in common with and they use that as a stable reliable basis for dealing with all the other stuff they come across people doing in the wider world, modifying here and there as they go. Of course there are contradictions between home and outside but it is out of those contradictions that the new individual arises, making its own decisions (consciously or not) about how life should be.

But of course none of this says anything about abnormal childhoods and not good-enough parents, and that's where we're going next.
Cue credits...


to be continued...

This Time it's Personal ~ part 7

So, thinking about it, what I've tried to do over these last six postings is set out the problem. The first five were a bit chaotic but looking back on it, that's how scientific exploration works. There is a phase of observation to begin with - the explorer looks at how things appear and simply collects observations.
This stage can be summarised as 'Wow! Look at all this stuff!" It's the 'Naturalist' phase of the process.
The next stage is coming up with hypotheses - attempts at explanations of at least some of the observations - how it all fits together, what is the result of what. Ideally these are based on established knowledge - the hypotheses should be consistent with what we already know and not totally fanciful but often the established knowledge is itself tested by the new observations just as much as the new observations are illuminated by the established knowledge.
The third stage involves testing the hypotheses with experiments to see which fits best. This is always a problem in any science that studies people, and doubly so with anything psychological.

How is this relevant here? Well, that last (sixth) entry I think sets out an hypothesis - that the difficulties I still experience are a result of my unusual, almost Kaspar Hauser, infancy. I set out a story which is based on facts (I didn't meet any other children until I went to school) and which is at least plausible. It doesn't require any completely made up events (maybe I was sexually or physically abused. I don't remember anything like that but it's possible) and it fits with history - in particular - what roles boys and men were expected to fill back then, and how children were expected to behave. But it is just a story. I'm as aware as anyone of how our memories can trip us up. We are all biased. We unconsciously pick out the bits that suit our case and gloss over others, so obviously this can't have the scientific rigour of, say physics, or even ecology but I still think it's better than nothing.
I don't want to spend a lot of time here justifying myself but I think I have good reason to think that I am unusually honest with myself. I'm very aware of the limitations of my story for one very good reason. If my story is wrong, it won't work - it won't make me better. Often when people talk about psychoanalysis, which is essentially what this is, the whole language is about the subconscious trying to fool someone - be it the person whose mind is being analysed, the therapist or the concerned family and friends. We all fool ourselves some of the time, but it seems to me that most people need to fool themselves almost all the time just to survive. We tell ourselves all sorts of stories to justify our appetites, our priorities, our weaknesses, which is probably why so many people are so against personal questions or deep conversations. They don't want all that stuff unravelling. Most people I think - faced with the prospect of introspection, firstly dismiss the task as self-indulgent (some sort of Protestant work ethic type 'just bloody get on with life and stop making a fuss' kind of a thing). If they get past that they baulk at the mass of tangled emotions, impulses, motives, actions and ideas they find and just say it's all too complicated and it probably won't work anyway. Beyond that, if they try to get in there they shy at the first unpleasant revelation and prefer to go back to not knowing rather than face it.
I seem to have come out different. I seem to have an almost pathological openness. I don't seem to have a complacent view of myself to defend. My basic stance is that everything I do is questionable. Everything I do needs justification. I've spent a ridiculous amount of time wishing people would understand more and trying to explain myself to them. I also have the basic feeling that if my actions and motives are mistaken in any way, that it will be apparent to everyone and they will dismiss me with derision and contempt. My strategy therefore has always been to make my actions and motives as justified as possible, and when there is some flaw in what I have done (as there invariably is) to own up well before it is pointed out to me.

To use another engineering metaphor - if you are trying to sell someone some gadget (car, toaster, PC) it might pay you to use some shoddy parts and take some short cuts, if all you care about is taking their money and never seeing them again. But if you are making something for yourself there is no point in fooling yourself. You want it to work as well as possible for as long as possible. You use the best materials you can get hold of and do the job as well as you can, and if you can't afford the best, you want to be aware of where the weakness is so that you can allow for it and maybe put it right later. So it is with my self analysis. I really want to handle life better than I do. It's possible I could use some half-truth trick but it probably wouldn't work long term and may even cause more problems. A thought may be convenient or comforting but I know when it isn't quite right - when it is based on events that I can't really be sure happened (the physical abuse) or some quasi mystical truism ('It obviously wasn't meant to happen'). I can feel it, that niggle, and I know I'm going to have to go back and think again.

to be continued...

This Time it's Personal ~ part 6

I've been coming at this in a round about sort of a way, trying to set up the problem - get the reader intrigued by my predicament and wondering how all this could have happened. But reading back I find it's not that easy to read - even to me now a lot of what I've written seems like a disorganised rant.

So I'm going to cut to the chase. I think I am as I am because I spent the first five years of my life effectively alone with my mum living in basement flats in Hove. When I first realised this - about fifteen years ago, I was astonished. I didn't know any other children until I went to school aged five. Ian, my brother was born when I was three, partly, my parents say, so I wouldn't be an only child, but a three year old has nothing in common with a baby. Nor does a five year old with a two year old. In short, he was no help. My aunts and uncles and my parents' friends only started having kids after Ian was born. I was effectively an only child all that time. My mother did not go out and make friends with other mums up the street and there were no nursery schools or day care back then.
Of course there were other adults about. Dad was there in the evenings and weekends although he did a lot of over-time and went out a lot (table tennis, fishing, union etc) The two sets of grandparents came over perhaps once a week each and my parent's friends came over to play cards. I don't remember any except my grandmas being especially interested in a small boy. My mum certainly didn't play with me or read to me or whatever. She just wasn't like that. She'd admit it herself. She was not a cuddly mum. There was no baby talk. Dad read me bedtime stories and sang me silly songs. We didn't really go out anywhere except to the shops.
Once again - I'm not blaming anyone especially. People did not take the time to be with children back then - they didn't try to communicate with them, far less listen to what they had to say. Certainly nobody thought children were interesting - far less likeable. They were a fact of life. A bit of a nuisance. They were kept clean and fed and warm, but they were not included or consulted in those days. They were kept under control - not exactly seen-but-not-heard, but that was what it amounted to. Children were just around, which would be fine if there were several of them to run about together and make their own little social life. I just don't think it occurred to anyone that that was not the case with me. Later, when there were young children running about they seemed out of control and spoilt to me.
I'm not even complaining about this. I don't remember being especially unhappy or bored. I became very good at entertaining myself with the minimum of props. Paper and pencils, or a blackboard and chalks, some plasticine, some mud and some plastic animals in the garden, my cuddly toys for friends, but mostly, just making things up in my head, talking to myself, singing or watching the sun shine through a coleus leaf or a kaleidoscope. I was quiet and self-contained. I avoided asking things of my mum as much as possible and she in turn did what had to be done. I think she was quite depressed a lot of the time, understandably, and my dad and the grandparents were not very understanding. In short it was best not to bother her if at all possible. I remember her crying a lot and my mum and dad not talking. There was a bad atmosphere a lot of the time.
Sometimes I think part of me still lives in that small, dim, subterranean space, free to potter about and make up stories and to stay out of everyone's way. All that would have been fine except that sooner or later I would be expected to grow up and face the world.

I coped with the first five years of school well enough. I was messy and forgetful but my art and writing and interest in nature were good. Maths bewildered me and I absolutely hated PE, as much as anything because only in PE are your failures public and the other kids judge you by them. Being good at football makes you popular in a way that being good at any other subject does not. Mainly I wanted to avoid attention. I had friends but I don't think I took it for granted that they would want to spend time with me. It was always something that might change at any time and I spent a lot of my play times on my own.
Things changed when I was ten because that was when we started to get home work. This had a profound meaning to me which has stayed with me ever since, which is that when you have homework, there is never a time even on holiday when you couldn't be doing some school work. There is no longer any such thing as free time. My parents told me to get it done straight away so I'd have spare time later but I never did. I put it off as long as possible (and sometimes longer) and dashed it off as quickly as possible, not looking back in case I had to do it all over again.
The other problem was the increasing sense that as I got older I should be 'joining in' more. Dad was a great believer in the Scouts and tried to get me interested in games and sports and joining clubs. I was spending all my time reading up on whatever my latest obsession was - prehistoric animals, Second World War armoured vehicles, aquariums, house plants. I made models and collected shells, built ponds and went down to Kingston Beach to hunt in the rock-pools. I went to the library and read everything they had on the subject. I made lists and drew pictures, diagrams and maps. I was almost never bored and almost always on my own. Increasingly I think they worried that I was not like the other boys. I did not behave the way they did. I was not interested in the things they were interested in. In fact, boys just made me uncomfortable. I was never really bullied but I was decidedly wary of boys. The men in the family especially - my uncles and my dad's friends didn't know what to make of me. I was still alone, playing with my models or watching my fish, or off walking alone in the country. They didn't know what I did or why I did it. They never asked. I'm sure my feeling of being viewed with incomprehension, exasperation and embarrassment, especially by men, comes from this. The fact that I was not interested in boys' things and that I was a quiet and sensitive child probably made them think I might be queer. Actually I really liked everything about girls, but there was no way of letting them know that.
On top of all this I had dreadful allergies which made me sneeze until my nose bled and gave me thick itching welts all over my body. I now recognise that the allergies sapped my energy and my concentration but everybody thought I was sort of slow. The Piriton probably didn't help.

When I hit my teens everything got worse because there was more homework and I really wanted a girlfriend. Plus the things I'd been good at at junior school - the creative writing and the art and the nature became irrelevant. Again, schools in those days were not places where a person's strengths could be discovered and nurtured. School then was simply about doing what you were told. I don't remember a single inspiring teacher, far less one who went out of their way to encourage me, or any of us for that matter. I was in the top 10% throughout, despite my difficulties getting things done and not checking my work but there was never any sense of being someone who might achieve anything. Both my parents and teachers simply assumed I was lazy. It was the only explanation available for why a person was not doing as well as they might. I on the other hand was panicking the whole time, worrying about not getting things done but at the same time unable to think what I might do to change that. The only advice I got was 'pull your socks up'.

I passed my O levels well enough in this state and even got as far as a C in my chemistry AO that first year of sixth form but by the time the second year ended and I took my A level Chemistry and Biology I failed completely. Partly I think this was due to being with Claire, my first girlfriend - an experience which left me feeling utterly rejected and lost, but otherwise I think I simply didn't know how to approach the volume of work and as I began to feel more and more left behind, the less and less I felt able to do anything about it. I spent all my time at Claire's house being ignored by her or walking over the Downs to get away from it all. Needless to say nobody knew what to say to me or even tried. Getting angry with teenagers who don't do what they're supposed to was the only strategy back then. As far as they were concerned I just couldn't be bothered. It was the only explanation.

After that it was worse. School was hard but work was harder. At school they couldn't kick you out even if you regularly did badly but at work you were always under suspicion. Reading the sits vac in the Thursday Argus was all about fulfilling some incomprehensible and arbitrary criteria for some bloody-minded boss - people like my uncles and my dad's friends whose only interest would be in making you do what you were told and put up with it. Even if I succeeded in getting a job, all I could see was a lifetime of meaningless drudgery for money that never really made a difference, to pay for things that didn't seem to make anyone happy, till the end of my life and then what? What would it all have been for? When I did get jobs - none of them for long, I was always aware of how I was wasting my time when I could have been doing... what? Back in that small place of mine, or alone on the beach or on the hills, alone with my thoughts and my dreams and my imaginary girlfriends. I just wanted to get out. I knew I wanted to do something with my life but I couldn't even begin to imagine what. Instead I had to face being home with my family again, and their incomprehension, exasperation and embarrassment. I couldn't even get it together to sign on some weeks. I think in retrospect I was very depressed pretty much that entire time.

I did move on. At twenty three I got a job that I could stand (a part time nursing orderly at St Dunstan's), I rented a room, got a place at Brighton Poly to be a teacher (the normal refuge for people who couldn't get into uni) and I got a girlfriend. As it turned out I had trouble with my landlady (too much like mum), I really didn't know how to deal with the school kids (unsurprisingly) and my girlfriend was nine years older than me and more like a good friend than a lover, but it got me out and saved me from being much more of a loser than I might have been.
Since then I've had a lot of jobs - mostly part time and some not too bad. I've lived in a lot of different places, travelled a bit, made something of a success of academia (I never missed a deadline and was a straight 2.1 student. I got a distinction for my MSc, but my Ecology Phd fell apart after a few months.) I still find people difficult and don't make friends easily but I've had quite a lot of girlfriends. I worked out how to deal with my allergies in my mid thirties and they've hardly bothered me since.
Most recently I've met a woman on line, married her and now live with her and her two (now teenage) kids and we all get on remarkably well. I work part time as a gardener for an excellent old lady, have my own (small, unprofitable) business running a nursery and have written a couple of (unpublished) novels. Dad died a while back but I'm friends with my mum and my brother. I've come through. Like I said, I have no good reason to be unhappy, and yet...

Still, when things begin to go wrong, when things don't go according to plan, when things start to get on top of me, I'm like that thirteen year old caught not doing his homework again, or that eighteen year old not getting on with his revision again, or I'm that twenty year old not looking for work again. The temptation is always to go back into that space where I can just be in my head or with just some basic materials, and not have to deal with the world...

to be continued...