Self-help for sceptics

Yesterday I began to try to explain to a good friend what I meant by using science to sort myself out. I didn't get far. It's not hard to explain but it's not something I can encapsulate in a few sentences drinking coffee outside a cafe in Shoreham. This isn't helped by the fact that most people don't really know how science works. They maybe remember what they learned at school about repeatable experiments, and later they read the often controversial and mind-blowing claims about climate change and vaccination, cosmology and subatomic particles. At best they maybe watch documentaries or read popular science but most people know very little about the process of ordinary everyday science.

I’ve made some immense improvements to how I deal with my life over the last few years, after 50 years of struggling and being very unhappy, and frankly I’m as amazed about that as anybody. As it stands I’m pretty much the only person I know who has suffered from debilitating low self-esteem, depression and anxiety all his life that has succeeded in working his way out of it, mainly by thinking it through. I’ve been a little surprised and disappointed that nobody’s wanted to know how I did that, considering so many of them suffer similar problems. You’d think they’d want all the ideas they could get.

I certainly spent a lot of time asking people how they manage – hoping for some sort of useful insight but instead I’ve been told I’m obsessing, over-thinking and being paranoid, navel-gazing, being self-indulgent or self-involved. If I feel unhappy I should simply be more positive they say. If I’m struggling to get on in life I’ve been told I should just believe in myself – ‘just do it’. People who’ve given me advice have been exasperated with me for not simply doing what they say. I’ve been told I don’t really want to be happy – that I’m just wallowing or attention-seeking.

These people are of course expressing their own impatience with my unhappiness rather than trying to help, and that means I’ve almost never had a constructive conversation with anyone about it and have had to work it out for myself. Furthermore, I’ve never found the idea of Gods, spirits or souls, or any ‘consciousness’ beyond our own (and perhaps a few other animals) made much sense, so I’ve had to work it out without being able to fall back on any of that. I can’t put my trust in a higher power or ask the universe because nothing about my experience suggests that makes any sense. I can’t simply put intangible things down to ‘energy’ or ‘spirit’ because I have no idea what those things mean (I know what energy is in a pure physics sort of way, but not in the way New-Agers talk about it, which seems very muddled)

Of course, none of our experiences are completely objective. Science goes to enormous lengths to minimise the effects of personal perception and interpretation by making the process as open and impersonal and disinterested as possible. Peer review is about laying your work open to people who don’t necessarily agree with you and want to find fault. But this is impossible with introspection. Psychoanalysis has made a lot of money out of our ability to delude ourselves about what’s really going on in our own minds, but I think it’s possible to achieve a useful amount of objectivity if two things are true:-
1. If you genuinely want to get better. If you use the wrong information the treatment won’t work, or it’ll only work superficially but won’t tackle the deeper causes, so the problems will re-emerge in a different way. If you really want to get better you need the best possible information about what’s happening or there’s simply no point. There’s no point pretending – you’ll only be fooling yourself. Even so the information you gather will always be incomplete and any conclusions you reach will be uncertain. All you can do is make as coherent a theory as the evidence allows, and be ready to revise it when new evidence comes along.
When you come up with a hypothesis you have to test it to destruction – you have to try to think of anything that might disprove it. You learn to spot that nagging feeling that something about your new hypothesis isn’t quite right – that it’s too easy or too generic. You need to be ruthless – no comforting half-truths or convenient rationalisations.
With a bit of experience you’ll know when you hit the right explanation because you can feel it fit, and the change happens like that - whether you try or not. It simply works. You don’t have to practice or say something over and over or believe in something. If it’s right it works, in exactly the same way as using the right component fixes an engine.  If it doesn’t work you try something else.

2. If you can take an inquisitive and fearless view of whatever you find. Simply be interested in the contents of your mind - in whatever comes up. Don’t cherry-pick evidence to support a preferred story. In science, there is no wrong answer. The evidence you uncover might lead in a completely unexpected direction. Go with it – see it as interesting rather than disturbing, exciting rather than unacceptable (after all – nobody else needs to know). I suspect many people stop when they come across something they don’t want to know, or that they think reflects badly on them and instead of exploring further, just pretend it’s not there, or cap it off with a lie. I understand that if you’ve been through something deeply traumatic this might not be easy (none of this is easy) but it might be doubly good – debriding the wound – getting in there and clearing the junk out so it can heal properly.

Another thing you must be prepared for is for it to take a long time and to involve a lot of going around in circles (this is when people think you’re obsessing and wallowing). The first part of any scientific project is the collection of data. You’ll need to really get into the feelings that come up on a daily basis, in order to see what they consist of – to unpack them and trace the components back to their origins. As a scientist, I assume that things are not random - that causality applies - so I’m looking for connections and patterns. I’m not going to go into the details here, but the fact is, unless you find the workings of your mind intrinsically interesting, you won’t be able to do this, because it’s time-consuming. Personally I think minds are fascinating (not mine especially – it’s just that mine is the one I happen to have handy and which is giving me trouble). Looking at other people’s minds, just by talking and observing and/or by taking in a little psychology and neurology really helps. A bit of anthropology and philosophy helps too but none of this is essential - an ability to think critically and a ruthless honesty are really all you need.

Where to start? I begin with the time-honoured idea that how we are for the most part comes from our childhoods. Traumatic experiences can over-write that but for most of us, who we are is based in the time before we were able to make conscious choices about how to be and life just was whatever it was. If I understand it correctly, the research tells us that we’re more or less 50:50 nature/nurture, but in any case we take after our parents genetically and form our characters mainly in response to the behaviour of the people we spent most time with in those early years. Probably the amount we change after that gets smaller and smaller the older we get with a small peak at adolescence.

I think it’s crucial to understand what your early years were like as much as possible – not just the events, but how your parents felt and behaved, and not just in terms of how it was good or bad for you (this is not about blame). You can’t avoid being very much like your parents, so it’s best to get to know them as well as you can. You may have taken after them or rebelled against them, or a bit of both but you need to know. It might be worth doing a bit of history – see what the world was like when they grew up – what the dominant culture was then (mine grew up in WW2 but were too young to remember much about it, but they remember the post war austerity and were just too old to enjoy the 60s, unlike some of their friends who had their children only a few years later) Find out how their parents treated them and what their early memories are (my dad did his best to be nothing like his own father, who was a very angry man) Observing other people’s children, it is obvious that their basic characters are already well developed by the time they’re 2 – whether they’re withdrawn, adventurous, curious, fearful, dominant, sensitive, confident, proud, caring, or mischievous – it’s all there. It gets added to and modified over the years but in many ways, once it’s set it takes an enormous amount of deliberate effort (and possibly therapy) to change and generally it’s not really possible. It would be like changing the foundations without dismantling the house.

I’ve found the Freudian Id/Superego/Ego model very handy – especially as transformed into the Child/Parent/Adult model in transactional analysis (the Ego/Adult in this case is a rational, mature, disinterested person – not a selfish authoritarian one. The Parent/Superego is the authoritarian). I think this makes sense because of what we know from child psychology about how children’s minds develop. Those early Child /Parent interactions aren’t rational, whatever the actual real-life parent may intend. To the child, life is all emotions and instincts and conditioning. It is what it is – natural, common sense, normal, obvious. You do as you’re told or you get into trouble (or you get away with it). And of course, much of the time adults are no more rational than their children. Only later can we think about fairness and whether doing things another way makes sense but by then it’s too late - the deep feelings are set. We can (with a lot of effort) change our behaviour superficially (wear a smile, force ourselves to get up in the morning, repress our rage) but the deep feelings are there, and if the behaviour and the feelings are at odds there’s going to be a struggle.

For those of us who are struggling, this all sounds a bit hopeless but the iota of hope in all this is that the foundation is, as I said, never completely coherent – it is made up of lots of misc bits and pieces and the number of permutations, even among a small number of components, is large. We can’t be anything we want, but we can find a way of combining them to make a foundation that works better and allows the house to be improved. Some of the old components can be reused or they may become redundant (they’ll always be there but not actually doing anything, except maybe getting in the way.)

For me, locating a whole load of components that had been ignored was the key – things from my Child that had been dismissed as useless but which were undoubtedly there, and strong, from the start. I had gone through life viewing my Child the way my Parent did, which at its worst, was with contempt and exasperation – an unrealistic, immature, lazy, and somewhat stupid child. I’d somehow dismissed all the other things I was, and which I still am. I had to go in and see all the different ways I was back then, what I did, what I wanted, and also how other people responded. More than anything I had to look at my Child not as my Parent did, but as my Adult, with understanding and compassion and curiosity (because that tends to be how I look at other people) and I found a creative, conscientious, imaginative and enthusiastic child with a good heart. And as I said above – when I found the right components they fitted and my new way of doing things simply worked. It’s almost like I can’t see myself the old way now (or at least, only sometimes when I’m very tired). As a bonus I learned to look at my actual parents that way too, and to let them off.

It’s taken a very long time but maybe if I hadn’t had to work it all out from scratch it might have happened sooner. I don’t know. No doubt this ‘method’ is not original. I’m sure it’s been thought of before. I’m not a fan of self-help books or self-improvement courses so it’s probably out there. That said all those I’ve come across do seem to rely on either some form of spiritual belief or some sort of rigorous practice to keep it going, so if you’re a sceptic or don’t have that kind of self-discipline but really enjoy thinking, maybe this could help.

Good Fortune

A while back, a friend suggested I write something about Fruition - something about clarifying the purpose of the book, or my intentions, or something. Anyway, here goes.

First up - Fruition is all about that classic question –
'If you could live your life over again, knowing what you know now, what would you change?'
I've thought about that a lot. Unlike Piaf I think I can honestly say I regret almost everything. One period in my life especially that I've wished and wished I could go back to and do again is my late teens and early twenties. What a mess!
It’s a period that still haunts me. I could so easily have become one of those sad individuals in his thirties, still living with his parents, with his fish tanks or his model soldiers, unemployable and spurned by women. But I am aware that, under slightly different circumstances, with a less tolerant family, things could have been much worse. I don't think I would ever have killed myself (I didn't have the will and I was always oddly hopeful) but events could have spiralled. I was never into dangerous behaviour, drink or drugs, but I could have just let things fall apart. I could have had an accident, or, without a home to go back to, I could have simply failed to hold down a job, to make friends, to pay the rent. I could imagine that happening to me. In Fruition, this is where Gabriel Fortune’s story starts.
One thing I didn't want the book to be was autobiographical. If I found myself trying to faithfully describe something that actually happened, or a place or person that actually existed, I'd have to chuck in some occurrence or characteristic from somewhere else, just to force myself to create something new. Trying to describe what actually happened to me sounds like an awful chore and what I've written above about it is as far as I want to go with that here. The themes though - of how a person can get into such a mess without resorting to the predictable narrative devices of violence or addiction interests me. It happens all the time - people simply fail to thrive. Without any dramatic gestures they simply fall away and hardly anyone even notices they’re gone. I was very influenced in this by a book called Stuart: A Life Backwards - not so much because of the character (who's life included plenty of violence and addiction) but because its reverse narrative put his earliest experiences (and hence the explanations for what happened) at the end of the book and hence provide a thrilling conclusion. I'm not sure how well I've achieved it, but a question I'd like the reader to be asking almost from the beginning is How on earth does a person end up like this? What has happened to him? The usual suspects - childhood neglect and abuse are hinted at from early on but again I wanted to avoid the usual. Sometimes it is something far less obvious - something that seems ordinary, or at least unexceptional, but which, under certain circumstances can contaminate everything. The full explanation, in as far as there ever is such a thing, is not revealed until book 4.

Books 1 and 2 are basically alternative versions of the same lost life. Books 3 and 4 are about how he changes that. The overall story is not about perfectibility but about the possibility of change. In many ways it is a long meditation on another classic question – ‘What is The Good Life?’ This inevitably (to me) raises all sorts of exciting philosophical and political questions and I give Gabriel plenty of opportunity to debate with the various characters he meets, especially on the boat. On the other hand I’ve (perhaps surprisingly) hardly touched on questions of God and spirituality. The fact that when they die everyone suddenly discovers that the afterlife is nothing like what they expected makes the whole subject somewhat moot and that’s quite subversive enough in my opinion. Ultimately though, Gabriel’s real preoccupations are far less cerebral. Mainly he wants to know how to make a living without selling out (the quaint old 20th Century notion that doing as well as possible and making as much money as possible aren't the same thing), and in particular he wants to find a woman to love. Fruition is very much a love story, although this doesn’t become obvious until book 2 and it is not resolved until the very end. Childhood and parenting are also major themes throughout the book. Remaining anti-autobiographical though, the events in his early life - the descriptions of his family and home, are completely different to mine. I wanted to see what it would be like to have sisters instead of a brother, and to be much younger than everybody else in the family (an unplanned late pregnancy) as my mother was in her family. I couldn't resist using the house we lived in though because it was just such an amazingly ugly old place. Gabriel wants to become a painter where I wanted to be an ecologist. We both like gardening though.

My warped idea of reincarnation is of course just a narrative device, not a belief system of mine (although it seems no less plausible than the alternatives. Who's to tell?) I'm always intrigued by the things people come to believe in and I made this system up partly as a sort of mischievous 'See? I can play that game too'. I also wanted The Afterlife to be a whole huge other world – one that would involve an immense journey overland, alone or with just a few companions. This had two purposes - one was to provide a place where Gabriel could think about and talk about his lives through a sort of quasi-therapeutic conversation. (I like books that use therapy as a device to tell us what our hero thinks is going on.) The other purpose was to give Gabriel an enormous and extraordinary landscape to travel through – and one that doesn't work by the usual rules. Having this apparently limitless new world to play with meant I could set my characters in the landscapes I'd had swimming about in my brain for decades - places I'd been to and stories I'd told myself to stop the 'real world' colonising my mind completely. As Gabriel says in book 1:
“Everybody said I ... was always ‘off in my own little world’, but they were wrong. It wasn’t a little world at all. It was enormous. There were landscapes and characters they wouldn’t even have come across in their weirdest dreams. I spent a lot of time getting it all down on paper – writing about it or drawing and painting. I did some huge scenes – part map, part landscape, with gargantuan shaggy beasts and archaic birds, engaged in incomprehensible behaviours among misshapen trees and alien fungi. Offshore, vast dead-eyed fish and primitive whales turned among forests of coral and kelp. I don’t know where it all came from. Nobody ever asked me about it. Dad and mum just shook their heads and tutted and went away. In my world there were settlements too, some of exquisite architecture and peopled by gentle and tolerant souls. Others bristled with armaments and dripped with pollution. And always there was a woman, and she looked past all the crap and saw me as I really was, and we’d be happy together.”
It’s difficult to pin-point any direct literary influences here but one unlikely source was Peter Jackson’s three films of The Lord of the Rings (I find the books unreadable.) They have just this sense of the tiny figure moving through a huge and ancient landscape. There’s a lot of ecology in Fruition too. The animals and plants we find there are all real or plausible, though they might not appear so to the non-biologist.

At the same time I hope my book doesn’t fall into the standard genres of 'fantasy' or 'science fiction' or 'horror'. I have trouble with these sorts of books because often they don't seem to feel the need to be even a bit rooted in real experiences and emotions, hence they can have anything happen and I’m left not caring. To really feel the otherness of these strange places, I think we need to be regularly reminded of what it’s like to live in normal everyday life. I always liked the wardrobe device in the Narnia books but I felt they should have gone back and forth more, to refresh the feeling of wonder. Doctor Who seems to amaze someone with the Tardis every other episode.
On the other hand, I find the entirely 'realistic' novel - historical or contemporary, just too pedestrian for words. They say that the difference between fact and fiction is that fiction must make sense, but I’m not so sure. Life does not always make sense, and fiction should be able to reflect that. I hope any books I write (I have two more on the way - one almost complete, the other still in my head) will always feel as if they could be partly dreamed or hallucinated but always set alongside everyday life. The novelist should not feel the need to explain every incongruity. Children's books don't seem to feel this need to tie up every loose end. (I sometimes like to think of Fruition as a children’s book for adults. Is it just me or do modern authors seem very reluctant to make stuff up?) ‘Magic realism’ always seemed too self-consciously clever. Something’s missing... Perhaps I don't read as much as writers are supposed to but I so rarely find anything I want to read these days, unless you count non-fiction, which I read a lot. That feels like a terrible thing to have to admit. Mind you, I don't like most of the music I come across either but I can usually find something new to listen to. Perhaps I'm just out of the loop.
I think I'm a very 'visual' person, and very affected by music too - Fruition seems very connected in my mind to the Fauré Requiem (which will definitely be the record I'll be running into the waves to save when they have me on Desert Island Discs. Gabriel Fortune - Gabriel Faure? I hadn't noticed that before. How curious.) TV and film seem more free to invent things without going all post-modern on us (I particularly like the work of Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, and Jos Whedon.) On reflection, I think the books that have had the most (subconscious) influence on Fruition would probably be Cider With Rosie, The Time Traveller's Wife and Moominland Midwinter.

I've also become discouraged from reading other people’s books by the fact that so many seem to have such a knowing, world-weary take on the human condition, where nobody really seems to like anyone very much and there's nothing anyone can do to change anything. (I'd love some recommendations to prove me wrong on all this by the way.) I really wanted to give Gabriel not exactly a happy ending, but something hopeful – something redemptive. I wanted him to find himself among friends in a way he never did in life. Although personally I’ve always found people difficult I do believe in generosity and humanity when I think a lot of writers don’t. Apart from anything I actually don’t think their pessimism is very realistic. It feels lazy and smug – why bother to try when everything will probably go badly anyway? Better to just enjoy the spectacle. So I also wanted to avoid what I suspect would be the normal cynical ending where he would find that no matter how he tries to change, something new inevitably springs up to thwart him. How drab. How very predictable. At the same time of course there can be no simple, clean happy-ever-after, but those aren't the only two options.
In short, what I wanted to write was the book that I’d always wanted to read but could never find.

So there came a time when my embryonic career in ecology was aborted and I was about forty years old and I had all this in my head. I looked at my life and realised that although I wasn't exactly old, I really was at the end of my main attempt at life. I didn't know what I was going to do next - I was single, homeless and unemployed again.  Although I guessed it was some way off I had a very strong sense of the end of my life being out there somewhere. It wasn't a bad feeling. I just knew it was there in a way that I hadn't before. So this book is also about death, but not in a morbid way (or only in the literal sense.) I don't believe in any Afterlife but I'd quite like to think that when death comes I'll find myself in a sleeping bag in a deck chair on a boat heading out into a frozen ocean...

An Only Child - part 1

Kingston Beach at low tide

I don't dislike children - contrary to what some may think.
I do dislike it when people are loud and selfish and don't put things away after they've finished with them, and when they insist they know what's going on when in fact they don't. I also have problems with people who make a huge fuss when things don't go their way. The fact that this describes a large proportion of most 'normal' childhood behaviour doesn't seem to bother most people but it's always struck me as odd. Indeed, most adults seem to see it as typical or even healthy and hardly worthy of comment. Why do I feel so differently about it?

I had a pretty good childhood back in the sixties and seventies by most standards. I was pretty content as long as I had some paper and pencils or plasticine or Lego to play with. I was mostly into dinosaurs. I had full and complex relationships with my cuddly toys. I spent hours hunting wildlife (mostly slugs and beetles), digging holes and building camps in the garden - a wilderness of nettles, brambles and raspberry canes and other miscellaneous junk. The soil was full of broken glass from a wrecked greenhouse but I hardly ever cut myself and never seriously. I never played on the lawn. Both the house and the garden were pretty immense by today's standards so it was easy to stay out of sight. I had collections of stamps, seashells, Airfix models, and then tropical fish and house plants (which got me into gardening just before I left home). I spent hours down on Kingston Beach hunting marine life. It was just across from the end of the road. I knew all the little twittens and wasteland around the town and then as I grew I spent a lot of time over the harbour and I walked and cycled as far as Steyning and Ashington. I looked at my dad's books (non-fiction - mostly wildlife) and listened to his music (from Louis Armstrong to Holst, from Westside Story to Tubular Bells). We had cheap camping holidays and big family Christmases. We didn't have a telly for years.
Don't assume from this that I come from a posh background. My dad was an electrical fitter and shop steward at the power station, like my mum's dad before. My dad's dad was a lorry driver amongst other things, and they were all from around Shoreham. Mum did home help and bar work. The big house on Victoria Road, Southwick was cheap because it was a mess. At the time it was cold and dusty and decidedly eerie at night. It was not an attractive house. Back then there was no housing shortage and everyone wanted the new bungalows on the Downs behind Shoreham. Dad fixed the whole thing up himself (with help from friends and relatives) because we couldn't afford to pay plumbers and electricians and carpenters. He learned to do everything himself. Today a three storey, four bedroom house with a lounge and a dining room and a conservatory and probably a third of an acre at the back would be a different matter. Nowadays you'd pay the better part of half a million for it, pull it down and start again.
And don't imagine that Southwick was a picturesque idyll. It has a rather impressive village green and some very venerable buildings near by, but the bulk of the town is fairly anonymous. Travelling from Brighton to Worthing along the coast road you'd hardly know it from all the other places along there - Hove, Portslade, Fishersgate, Shoreham and Lancing. Kingston Beach, which lies within Shoreham Harbour, is a mud flat at low tide with only shallow muddy pools among the pebbles and rubble. There was a remarkable variety of life down there none the less. Back then, without a property boom, demolition sites could sit empty and grow weeds for decades. I hunted grasshoppers and lizards among the rubble and played jungles in the Buddleia and Japanese Knotweed.
It's unimaginable now that a child as young as seven or eight would be let loose in that environment, but I was. I don't think I ever had a major accident. I was very careful. I knew my limitations. One day a man stopped his car near me in Southwick Square and asked me to get in. I simply said no and walked away. Mum had told me, if a stranger spoke to me to go into a shop.
Most of the time I remember I was left to my own devices. I don't remember particularly being lonely or feeling neglected. Sometimes I envied my younger brother because he always had friends around, but then, if he didn't have company he didn't really know what to do with himself. I on the other hand rather resented people interrupting and interfering.
I don't ever remember being deliberately naughty or mischievous. With my family there would have been little point in pushing it so I didn't try. They were not nasty about it - just firm. There would have been no point arguing. I did not live in fear though. I learned to be sneaky. My mum was somewhat anxious and controlling so it was best simply not to ask permission. She preferred not to be distracted from doing what she had to do so it worked both ways. My brother and I never really felt the need to fight and my parents never rowed so we weren't used to raised voices in our house and I still hate to hear people arguing. When we visited friends and relatives their children always seemed to be throwing tantrums or sulking. Everything seemed to be a battle for them and I stayed out of their way. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I was the eldest by many years of all the children in our family circle. My brother wasn't born until I was three and we  therefore had very little in common. All our friend's children came along after that. There was no child care or nursery school so I didn't meet another child my own age until I went to school aged five. That's probably why meeting 'normal' kids was such a shock and something I've never really come to terms with.