In the next section, Robin and John talk about the stages of childhood
development. Robin explains that a child needs reliable love and care
(so we learn how to love and care for others), loving firmness and
control (to learn self discipline and how to exert authority
correctly), brothers, sisters or friends to play with (so we learn how
to share and to cope with the rough and tumble of life, and how to
stand up for ourselves), and they need to learn about the opposite sex
(so they know how to deal with them later on). Then we need to learn
how to become independant of our parents.

If you miss a stage you can go through it later, and are often drawn
to situations where we can catch up and learn what we've missed, but
John raises the question that if that's the case - why do any of us
have any real problems?

Hiding a missing stage

Robin: If we miss out a stage, we can catch up on the lessons by
seeking a substitute experience, right?

John: Right.

Robin: Now there's something that can stop us making up the lost
ground. And that is pretending that we haven't missed the stage -
hiding the fact that we've failed to grow up in some way.

John: Because we're embarrassed about it?

Robin: Yes. As we grow up, we become ashamed that we've missed an
earlier stage. And the older we get, of course, the more ashamed we
feel about showing that we haven't coped with something basic -
something that would make us feel silly and childish if it was
revealed.

John: So we try to hide it from other people.

Robin: Well, we start off by hiding it from others, but after a time
that becomes such a habit that we end up hiding it from ourselves.

John: From ourselves? You mean we now don't even realise that the
problem's there?

Robin: Yes. And once you deny to yourself that you've missed out on
some basic experience, you're not going to look for a substitute
experience. Which is, of course, what you need to solve the problem.

John: Yes, but I don't understand how hiding the problem from other
people causes us to finish up being unaware of it ourselves.

Robin: The feeling embarrasses us, right?

John: Yes.

Robin: We'd rather not have it. Well, in the world outside us, we can
pay attention to something or ignore it as we choose. We can do the
same thing inside our head, with our thoughts or feelings. We can
avoid certain kinds of ideas or emotions, and learn to look away
quickly if we glimpse them. If we do this often enough, the habit of
avoiding noticing some kind of feeling becomes so firmly established,
so instinctive, that we hardly know we're doing it. It's a process
that the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan called 'selective
inattention'.

John: So if we hardly know we're avoiding noticing a particular
feeling ...

Robin: The next step is that we succeed in forgetting it's there at
all. It's as though we've pulled a blind down inside our heads to
screen off the emotion that we don't want to look at, the one we feel
we should hide.

John: Because it feels shameful - like a weakness.

Robin: Yes, and also because it makes us feel bad.

John: Bad in what sense? Morally?

Robin: Well, it will come to feel morally bad eventually. But much
more important it gives us very bad, painful and uncomfortable
feelings, as if we are unacceptable, unlovable.

John: The emotion makes us feel 'bad' even if it's only revealed to
ourselves. So we screen it off.

Robin: Right.

John: Can you take a specific emotion - say, anger - and show how a
child learns to put it behind the screen?

Robin: Well, in a healthy, normal family, everyone will get angry at
times and that won't be regarded as a hanging offence. The child will
be expected to control it within reason, but the parents won't make a
federal case out of it each time. The child will see that this is a
normal emotion; that it can be expressed; that it is not destructive
and deadly. If his parents have this relaxed attitude to anger, he can
feel safe to experience his own and, through being supported and
helped to cope with it, he learns to exercise the normal control over
it that's required socially.

John: So how does all that go wrong?

Robin: Actually, there are two ways it can happen. First, let's take
the traditional explanation that Freud and the early analysts
originally came up with. They said that a feeling got screened off -
repressed - because of a 'trauma'....



Robin:...nowadays we realise the same screening-off can happen in a
much less obvious and dramatic way. It can be a much more gradual
process arising from fear or awkwardness about that particular emotion
on the part of the child's family. So our toddler will gradually pick
up the idea that anger is 'bad', because all the rest of his family
are very uneasy and uncomfortable and embarrassed about anger.

John: The whole family feels 'bad' about it?

Robin: Yes. So the child gets the message over and over and over
again. He sees too how greatly anger upsets his parents, how they just
can't cope with it, and how they ignore him or isolate him or even
attack him whenever he hies to express it. Pretty soon, he's feeling
very bad about anger too. He sees that they can't love him when he's
cross, and since all children want to be loved by their parents and to
love them in return and make them happy, he tries to hide any feelings
of anger from them.

John: So he's associated anger with fears of rejection by his parents,
which must be the worst possible threat for a child.

Robin: Yes, that's what I was talking about just now when I said how
bad one feels. Of course, the child now feels deceitful too, because
he can't be his true self. He'll feel rather cut off from his parents
because he's not fully accepted - he has to pretend he doesn't feel
anger. But feeling deceitful isn't as bad as the threat of total
rejection, so he'll probably choose to be false and loved, rather than
be his true self and get rejected.

John: So from now on, when something happens that would make a normal
child angry, this child will bottle his anger up.

Robin: To hide it from his parents. But next, he learns to hide it
from himself, as that's the only way he can feel he's lovable. Anger
is so 'bad', he mustn't admit to having any, even to himself. So he
acquires the habit of not noticing his own - he learns to screen it
off - and finishes up by thinking that it isn't even there.

John: Well I can see how he learns to do that, but I'm still
struggling with the idea that whole families screen off the same
things.

Robin: They tend to, yes. You find that in each family some emotions
are regarded as 'good' and some as 'bad'. The bad ones get put behind
the screen and the entire family has a kind of unspoken but very
powerful agreement that the feelings behind the screen mustn't be
noticed. Everyone in the family pretends they're not there. So each
new child learns to put the same things behind the screen too. The
habit of screening them off gets passed on, like the measles, quite
unintentionally, without anyone knowing that it's happening.

John: I have no problem seeing how the children follow the family
pattern. But I don't see how the pattern gets established in the first
place. Why should the parents be screening off the same things? After
all, they're not from the same family.

Robin: You're right. But do you remember my saying that people were
attracted to each other because they had missed out at the same stage
of development?

John: Yes. In fact, I have the feeling that all this present chat is
part of the explanation of why that's so.

Robin: That's right. This is why a husband and wife will tend to
screen off the same things. But I can't explain that yet because there
are some missing pieces of the jigsaw that I'm going to give you in a
moment. So will you just take it on trust for the time being and shut
up.

John: ... This wouldn't wash with Sir Robin Day.

Robin: I agree. Fortunately he was too busy.

John: Thank you. Well ... if the parents do tend to screen off the
same things, then I can see why the children will learn to do that
too. With the result that the whole family will screen off the same
thing. They'll all have the same blind spot.

Robin: Or blind spots. There may be more than one emotion screened
off.

John: All right. And different families have different blind spots?

Robin: Yes. Each family will screen off different emotions, or a
different combination of emotions.

John: How can a therapist tell which emotions a family has screened
off? How do you recognise a blind spot?

Robin: One simple give-away is that they'll all deny having the
feeling that they've screened off. If they say, 'Oh, we're never
jealous in our family', then you know jealousy's a family problem -
that with them, jealousy's taboo.

John: It's that simple?

Robin: That's the best single clue. But there will be many others. The
therapist soon begins to see how the family avoids the blind spot,
skipping over it, changing the subject - just not noticing it. And
what's fascinating about the blind spot, the taboo, is that it gets
passed on from generation to generation to generation.

John: Without anyone knowing?

Robin: Yes, because if they knew, whatever it is that's behind the
screen wouldn't be behind the screen, would it?

John: How do you know it gets passed on?

Robin: Family therapists see it again and again when we explore
patients' backgrounds to understand what their families were like, or
when we see several generations of the same family together, or begin
to look more closely at our own families. There's also research
supporting this.

John: All right. Let me see if I've got this so far. As we grow, we go
through various stages of development and learn different lessons at
each stage. The lessons are fundamentally to do with handling
emotions. For example, we learn how to handle those aroused by dealing
with authority; or we learn how to cope with the feelings aroused by
the opposite sex; or we learn how to cope with emotions that come from
being more independent and separate from our parents.
However, we may miss out a stage. But if we do so, we can still pick
up the lessons later on by seeking out a substitute experience. That
will enable us to get back on schedule, as it were.

But something can go wrong. If we miss out a stage and don't go
through a substitute experience, the emotions that we haven't learned
to handle will feel very awkward to us. So we're likely to start by
trying to hide them from others, and end up by concealing them even
from ourselves. We 'screen them off and then we don't even realise
they're there.

Now, there are two main reasons why we fail to learn how to handle an
emotion and are forced to stick it behind the screen. The first is
that we suffer a sudden trauma - a single, dramatic, very painful
event. The second, and the more common, is that we gradually learn to
put the emotion behind the screen because there's a taboo on it in our
family.

Every family regards some emotions as bad and screens those off. The
child learns to follow suit, because he risks parental rejection if he
displays the taboo emotions; they feel 'bad'. So the pattern gets
handed on down the family.

Robin: And from generation to generation, too. Don't forget that.
Because if the children haven't learned to handle an emotion, they
won't be able to help their children to handle it either.

John: Right. So what's wrong with this taboo business?

Robin: ... What do you mean?

John: Well, if you've got a nasty emotion that you haven't learned to
handle and which makes you feel very bad, why not stick it safely
behind the screen and get rid of it?

Robin: Ah! Because the screen doesn't work very well, and often ends
up producing more problems than it solves.

[Next - 1.3 The Faulty Screen]