Tragedy can be funny, but only sometimes

“My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have to potential to be the comic stories the next.” Nora Ephron.

   Laughing in the face of adversity ain’t easy. Though oddly it comes more naturally if the disaster is personal, once the initial meltdown is over obviously. The unsolvable tragedies of others’ lives are a different matter. In a week filled with heart-wrenching stories of refugees fleeing one repression to end up in worse - in the USA, Italy, Hungary, Australia - there seems precious little to smile about. 

   First-worlders have a twinge of conscience, speak out against injustice, write letters to newspapers. But since some problems are unfixable, in time they avert their gaze and go back to complaining about their family angst, relationship woes, rubbish collection and bank charges. All of which can be turned into jokes to ease the irritation. 

   Comedians are generally tortured souls, who learnt they can attract attention by wisecracking about their anguish. Happy optimists get by ignoring all the negativity and, with a gambler’s instinct, assume life is guaranteed to get better round the next corner. They wear a permanent smile knowing their lucky guardian angel will wave them through.

  “Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing.” Georges Bataille. Which says it all. It’s an escape valve when the pressure cooker threatens to blow. A rueful admission of a personal foul-up turned into an amusing party piece dilutes the shame and invites sympathy from the hearers, relieved to know they’re not the only imperfect ones. 

   Wit, a shape-shifting trickster roped in when feelings threaten to overload, isn’t only a defence and a connector. It can also be an act of aggression, highlighting another’s misfortune and putting them down. Leaving the recipient in the impossible position of fending off the attack without being accused of a sense of humour deficit. 

                      “Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.” Michael Chabon. 

  The fates (for the irreligious) do have a sense of black farce. At least that’s my way of coping with the random chaos of a life where carefully laid strategies are made redundant as the path ahead takes an unexpected turn. Shrug, laugh, cope. 

     Laughter cuts me down to size, makes me realize most of the time I’m not in control of the big decisions or even of me at times. Humility and humiliation sit side by side in the land of whimsy. But only at a personal level. In the face of major disasters affecting others, there’s little room for banter. 

  The cartoonists are having a field day exposing Trump’s banal cruelty in caging children. In a sense that’s an easy target. Not that he isn’t beyond appalling and utterly shameless, but he’s only one of many leaders who are stonewalling refugees. And truthfully wholly open borders are not a sane option for any country.

  

 Humour can’t encompass or deflect misery on this scale. So the thought that life would be tragic if it wasn’t funny only extends so far.

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Gaslighting - a malaise of our time

Gaslighting – the attempt to destroy another’s sanity and grasp on reality – has come back under scrutiny with coercive relationships openly discussed and dramatized in The Girl on a Train and in Helen’s domestic abuse in BBC radio’s The Archers. Add on top a US President who routinely accuses others of transgressions he is more guilty of himself and it begins to look like a malaise of our time.

   Being on the receiving end of blatant misrepresentation, a twisting of facts to make the gaslighter appear saintly and the victim at fault, is head-screwing. Partly I suspect since initially you can’t believe that anyone could be so overt and shameless. Confrontations brew up a storm of rage so the unwilling recipient withdraws into a frightened acquiescence. There’s only room for one reality and it isn’t the real one.

   I survived one such prolonged psychic assault until eventually baling with the steely thought that ‘no one destroys me’. Others aren’t so lucky, are more dependent, feel they have no choices. Women especially are conditioned to take guilt on board too easily though it’s not really gender specific.

   Understanding the underlying psychological mechanism that drives such behaviour won’t solve the problem, but it can help to make an intolerable situation bearable or open up the possibility of escape.

  Which returns to the subject of last week’s blog – that we are abysmally unaware of how the mind develops and works, or in this case gets road-blocked early on. This isn’t stuff that tinkering with thinking habits will straighten out. 

   In the chaos and turmoil of a baby turned toddler’s inner life, there is an understandable drive to build solid self-esteem. What happens to the bad feelings of shame and anger that threaten to undermine the fragile edifice? Give them to someone else. I’m wonderful, you’re at fault. Rather than integrating the great and not so great characteristics into a whole person.  What develops is a false self-image, dependent on others, essential as carriers of the what-I-can’t-face-about-myself bits.

  It can also work the other way round as the I’m-perfect part is projected onto an ideal hero, leaving the individual feeling constantly inferior; and the figure on the pedestal inflated way beyond their worth.

   Both are ways of handling the toxic package that is shame, the earliest and most corrosive of emotions. Feeling guilty about an action or a thought is uncomfortable.  I’m ashamed of being me is a whole different ball game, eroding self-worth out of existence. 

  The narcissist gaslighter and victim have problems with humiliation and self-disgust. One disavows it completely, the other accepts it as proof positive of what they’ve always suspected. Neither sees themselves are they really are  - individual human beings with pluses and minuses.

   Brainwashing to impose a distorted reality is a fascist dictator or cult chief’s modus operandi. The susceptible are swept up in the idealised delusion that the great leader knows all, even in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Naysayers have to be discredited by smears, slander or more extreme methods. There can be no room for doubt and uncertainty. Group-think rules, with no variation from the accepted one, to prop up the ruler’s grandiosity and to give the subjects a sense of belonging and identity.

   Christopher Bollas, the London analyst, talks of the ‘empty heart’ of such personalities who project their ‘dead core self’ onto the victim who then becomes ‘a disposable nonentity.’ And behind it all there is overwhelming rage which threatens to obliterate the leader’s personality altogether if they were to face their inner desolation. The split between the I’m-the-greatest self and the I’m-nothing is too immense to be bridged. 

   A compelling and helpful analogy was drawn between such personalities and artists by French analyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. Her take was that both recreate reality to suit themselves. Not that narcissists and perverts are necessarily creative except in this regard – they shy away from an unbearable world to invent their own fantasy land with themselves on the throne. 

   In the original 1944 Gas Light movie, based on Patrick Hamilton’s play, the beleaguered wife eventually shops her husband to the police but not before she tortures him by doing as she was done unto. A taste of his own medicine.  What prevents some downtrodden, manipulated spouses from taking revenge is a sense deep down that they are dealing with an incapable and damaged infant in an adult body. Pity as well as fear holds them in place. They also start from a place of low self-esteem which the narcissist homes in on like a wasp to a jam-jar. 

    As an inter-personal dilemma there are no simple choices. The narcissist is the least likely to seek treatment. Their false sense of superiority prevents them admitting to any imperfection. Below that lies an empty chasm which threatens to devour them and has to be avoided at all costs. The coerced one, their trash receptacle, is left with making what feels like a selfish choice to put themselves first or stay imprisoned as a pawn on a malign chess board. 

   Out in the political and cultural world? All of us are guilty of assuming someone else has THE answer or is leading the perfect life to which we can never aspire, shutting our ears and eyes to anything that might topple our idol from their pedestal. Truthfully it’s our pedestal. We put them there. Cut them down to human size and life seems duller without celeb glitz and harder work having to find our own answers.  We all project what we don’t like or refuse to own about ourselves. There’s a tiny part of everyone wrapped up in the better and worse tangle. 

  Every week I think I must find a funny blog topic to sparkle up the week.  Next week, I promise – to myself.

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Minds need care as much as bodies

  The ‘why’ question hung ominously over a week with two headline suicides of high-achievers. That they strived and succeeded while pursued by inner demons isn’t mysterious. Twas ever thus. Desperation can be an effective engine. What is perplexing in Kate Spade’s case is her fear of seeking treatment lest it upset her happy-face brand image. 

   She wasn’t alone in her resistance. Despite all the media hype about mental health awareness, there is a shame about admitting to what are seen as psychological flaws.  Bodies suffer from a multiplicity of congenital ailments – diabetes, heart, digestive and skin conditions. Few arrive perfectly formed so why should the synapses and neurological structure of the brain be the exception?

   The stigma about madness increases and prolongs the suffering of former soldiers, blighted by PTSD. It’s seen as weakness in a way that a physical injury is not. Drop a hundred-pound weight on your foot and bones will break. Why should the mind be any different? Life can drive people mad if conditions are extreme enough. 

   I’ve never suffered from catatonic depression, suicidal impulses or manic highs so why did I embark on a long and at times painful psychological journey? When I was 20 I thought I was the sanest person I knew. By my mid-thirties, despite being professionally successful, I could see myself locked into recurring patterns of behaviour and relationships, which weren’t exactly my fault but clearly had some baffling connection to me. Once is bad luck, twice a coincidence, more than that it was down to me. 

   What made it easier was moving to London, which was awash with a rainbow array of guides into the deeper recesses of the psyche. Being away from home also helped, since there was no need for embarrassing explanations.   My first counsellor was a truly lovely man, spiritual and transpersonal in inclination. He disliked coping with depression and all matters sexual which would have had the Freudians rolling their eyes in dismay. But he was a gentle introduction into a vast new world I never knew existed.

   A Jungian psychotherapy training followed, of which the less said the better, since the analyst was less than useful. Though my peers were an encouraging support group as we struggled to cope with training cases whose problems weren’t covered in the literature. 

  Along the way I tripped serendipitously into Esalen on the Big Sur coast of California, a former hippie haunt which had fostered many of the alternative greats – Gestalt Fritz Perles, Aldous Huxley, deep-tissue massage Ida Rolfe, Stanislav Grof.  A fabulous setting above the Pacific on old Native American grounds with hot sulphur spring baths, it was (and probably still is) known as heaven and hell. Intense five day emotional-process workshops opened up gut-wrenching stories. What made the experience (personal and other) bearable were the best masseurs on the planet and hours in a hot tub watching the otters play amongst the kelp in the sea below or staring up at the Milky Way at midnight. Mind and body are seen as inextricably linked there and both need care.

  Esalen saved my sanity as I extricated myself from a damaging therapist and failing marriage. But clearly not all problems had been ironed out so a five-day-a-week independent Freudian analysis followed. Two years, I reckoned at the outset. Seven years later I left. 

   In parallel to gruelling years on the couch, I fell into a media child abuse campaign, partly by accident, which turned into a science argument about the effects of trauma – sexual abuse, war, Holocaust. My knowledge base expanded at speed as it turned out most of the psychological theories taught in trainings were tosh when it came to coping with the ‘black hole’ of trauma. 

   My journey has been an individual one, spurred on by dissatisfaction with my life but also by curiosity. Nina Coltart (Slouching Towards Bethlehem), a wise old bird of an analyst, once said to me in a consultation that studying the mind in depth is a privilege. Difficult to remember when you’re sinking into the pit of misery which lies way below everyone’s happy face. But the intellect alone won’t find the answers. 

   The old rule of thumb in the therapy world was that patients/clients had to be at the last gasp of desperation before treatment would work. Only when inner turmoil had gone beyond the point of tolerance would there be sufficient motivation to plunge into a confrontation with the unconscious. Concerned friends and family pushing aren’t enough. 

  I’m still conflicted about that advice since I know how extraordinarily helpful the process has been for me in later life; and wish others stuck in a life of recycling dilemmas had been persuaded into their own inner exploration. Depth analysis isn’t everyone’s path but there’s now a wide range of choices from the cognitive (change thinking habits), short-term CAT, to ongoing relationship-oriented counselling and therapy. 

    Carl Jung, to whose ideas I’ve returned after a jaundiced separation from my training, thought the mid life crisis in the late 30s and early forties was a crucial turning point. Make that transition successfully by going on an inner journey and the second half of life has meaning. Ignoring it and continuing along a life of outer striving – success, possessions, social status -  leads to stagnation and a sense of inner emptiness. 

   Seeking psychological help isn’t only about admitting to being mad. Truthfully at one level everyone is mad; some are just better admitting it than others. Major glitches need to be fixed as far as is possible and an acceptance reached about what can’t. But there are add-on benefits on the road less travelled from finding a new way of looking at oneself and fellow human beings.

 

   Teaching relationship psychology in schools to shine a light on underlying motivations as well as family dynamics would be a giant step forward. We are abysmally unaware of how the human heart and psyche operate. Starting young might help to get over later hurdles.    

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