Sometimes it does help to put people into boxes, to see how they fit into recognised categories. It helps if it informs your understanding and enables you to see people objectively rather than being flooded by your subjective experience of them, negative or positive.

Take me.  I like being with people, but after a while I need time alone. Conversely if I spend too much time alone, I become unhappy. Once I spent a week alone in Greece and I thought I might go mad, so uncomfortable was the loneliness of the same small rocky cove where I had delighted in the solitude, the previous summer, of a few moments of quiet wrestled from my busy family. I enjoy chatting with people, including people I have only just met. I talk to supermarket till operators and road sweepers and relish almost every experience with my clients at the advice centre where I work. I really enjoy going out with another couple for a meal or to see a film or a play or a concert. I like going out with groups of girl friends a great deal and usually come home skipping with happiness. I enjoy dinner parties where I have a proper opportunity to talk to those next to me. I am not that keen on big parties - having them or going to them - but I love putting people together and entertaining a dozen or so people at home. I am not very clubbable. I know my friends very well, and have usually met their parents and their siblings. I do not like superficial conversations and have a built in litmus test for inauthenticity. I think I am a moderate extrovert.

I tend to make snap judgments about people based on a gut feeling. I thrive on fairly abstract conversations about ideas. I am not great at remembering facts. I see the woods rather than the trees. I see things in shades of gray rather than black and white. I am very sensitive and experience highs and lows of emotion and everything in between.

If you want to put me in a pigeonhole, the category described by Myers Briggs as ENFP seems the most natural, comfortable place for me to be.

The Intrepid Explorer would probably like the arm chairs in the ISTJ lounge though I think he increasingly prefers the ESTJ atmosphere. So, between us, we have all possibilities and letters covered, but we need very good communication in order to understand each other. With love, endless good will, and years of practice, this becomes increasingly easy, and gives us an added benefit of being able to relate more easily to those of our opposite type. It is far more interesting than if we both liked to hang out in exactly the same place.

However, ISTJs are my “opposite” type and those that are particularly introverted pose the greatest challenge for me. The Relate website has an on-line personality report (not free, but well worth it, link below) that includes a section with hints on how to deal with your opposite type.  Apparently, I should:

1) Talk quietly
2) Be thoroughly prepared
3) Allow her/him time to consider all the information
4) Respect her/his role in the relationship/friendship
5) Respect her privacy
6) Let her know the unique contribution she is making

And I should NOT

1) Question her/his motives or competence
2) Invade her/his privacy
3) Try to control the conversation
4) Show impatience with, or annoyance of, her/his calm exterior
5) Ramble or become emotional
6) Substitute rhetoric for accuracy

I have just spent ten days with an extremely introverted person and it has almost driven me mad. More than anything else it has made me anxious. I wanted to make this person happy, but this person showed little or no pleasure in anything that I did or arranged or made possible. This person preferred to sit in her room with the door closed and only asked one question throughout the whole period. She would reply “I don’t know” or “I don’t mind” to every question I asked. She did not enjoy eating anything as far as I could see. Nor did she respond to television or films that she watched. She didn’t appear to enjoy anything that we saw in London when I took her there one evening last week. She did not seem to enjoy riding my favourite pony through heavenly swards of wildflowered grass in the summer sunshine. I saw almost no expression on her face. She stared a lot at us when we were looking elsewhere, but she would not make eye contact. She gave us no feedback, and no praise. I heard her say “thank you” once - when I gave her a present of a photograph album of her visit (no photos of her, of course) as we said goodbye. She like visiting Top Shops in lots of different towns. She has watched the latest Harry Potter film twenty five times. She liked Wolf and he slept on her bed one night.

I found myself in a double bind. On the one hand everything I tried to do for her failed to reach its mark and did not appear to amuse or entertain her. This made me frustrated, angry and fairly hopeless. On the other hand, I felt wracked with guilt and anxiety and sadness if I ignored her and just left her sitting in her room for hours on end.

I do not think she needed to talk. I think she preferred to be alone with herself. I do not think it occurred to her to give gifts or praise. She appeared to need nothing at all from us and to have nothing that she wanted to give us.

I tried to do all the things in the first list above, and I tried desperately not to do any of the things in the second list. But inside I wanted to scream with frustration. I checked out my reaction to her with two other sources and found that we agreed on how she made us feel, down to the murderous rages.  I think this was an extreme mismatching, but I have met other people like this person and will continue to meet similar people in the future.

Confusingly extreme introverts are sometimes capable of behaving like extroverts when they first latch on to a person that they admire, often an extrovert. The naive extrovert will be likely to misconstrue this attention as liking, but it is “admiration” not liking since most introverts aspire to be extroverts. Admiration is a colder emotion than liking, and places the admired object on a freezing cold pedestal. When the wind starts to blow around her ankles, the extrovert may eventually wake up to this truth, usually at the same time as the introvert reverts to type.  

I watched our young introvert’s behaviour with an extrovert that she coveted and it was a remarkable switch from her normal uncommunicative behaviour to almost frenzied puppy dog adoration.

I am quite happy to argue endlessly that it takes all sorts of people to make a world, and that each and every one of us can make a unique contribution, but I cannot easily deal with the anxiety that very close proximity with an extreme introvert creates in me.

How on earth do you know whether or not somebody likes or loves you when they behave in such a fashion? And why is it always me that makes the effort to cope with them, rather than the reverse?  Or do I just fail to notice the superhuman efforts they make to meet me halfway?

I remembered something I read a couple of years ago which read that things that were worth doing were often difficult, but that not everything that was difficult was worth doing. I have trouble remembering that and have a tendency to keep on struggling with things that are difficult, borne on by my hope that things will improve. It is taking me a long time to learn that some people will always find me as impossible as I find them and that I am better off not trying to make something work that was never meant to function. Some of my friendships with introverts, that began well, fall into this category. I find it easy to love, to extend myself towards people, to be friendly, and am bemused by people who do not not what love is, who shy away from people and prefer to be alone.   Try as I might to emphathise with them, I find it so hard, and when I do manage, I feel so sick and depressed and hopeless that I wonder how I am going to survive.

I think Nietzsche is a good, documented, example of an extreme introvert who needed to learn to love just as he learned how to read music.

“One must learn to love.— This is what happens to us in music: first one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life; then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity:—finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing: and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.— But that is what happens to us not only in music: that is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty:—that is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way: for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned.”

Nietzsche, Gay Science, 334

Portrait of an ENFP

Portrait of an ISTJ

Library of portraits of other personality types

Relate “Reveal” Personality Test

Big thanks to Xanthippa for giving me a good laugh, and, boy, after the last ten days, did I need one. Here’s what she posted on her blog. Visit her blog to find more along similar lines …

Occasionally I wish that my blog was more anonymous than it is.  As it is, it is sometimes read by friends who live in my town and elsewhere, by relatives, by work colleagues both of myself and the Intrepid Explorer, by my daughters and their friends, and even - on occasions - by their teachers.

I posted an ugly piece about a prolonged encounter with an extreme introvert, which is no longer available for all to see in its horribleness.  I was hugely disappointed by my own reaction to this person.  I found myself in a double bind: attempts to please the person failed miserably, but I felt equally bad if I allowed the person to languish ignored.   I wanted them to have a good experience, a happy time.  I think it is likely that these patterns felt all too familiar (historical stuff) and my reaction was so strong as a result.  It was never the fault of the introvert.  Nor, being forgiving of myself, was it my fault.  We were just worlds apart, with brains wired differently and very different needs.  In a different environment it would have been much easier - several of my best friends are introverts - but up close and uncomfortable, it was difficult and painful for both of us.  My writing was an attempt to express my emotions with brutal honesty, but, as I wrote only last week in response to another comment, truth is sometimes over-rated.  I will try to write something different, more positive, later.

A friend bought two copies of a book subtitled “A down-to-earth guide to parenting teenagers”, and gave me one copy.  It’s good - or at least what I’ve read so far has been full of good advice well put.  There are lots of practical exercises which you might like to try with your teenager (I’ll share the fruits of our efforts in another post).  Here’s a snippet - relating to self image and how a teenager’s self image is often defined by a self-imposed heirarchy of desirable attributes or possessions - which struck a chord:

“Having this sense of heirarchy has many functions.  It helps groups of young people to bond, creates society and to some degree keeps things ticking alone nicely.  However, it can be limiting and even damaging if it is the only way a young person relates to the world around them.  If a young person believes they are worth more or less than others in their way, they may make choices about their behaviour in relation to this information.  At an extreme level we see this manifest as “isms”.  Racism supposes that race determines a person’s worth and that some people are of more value than others from birth.  Likewise sexism determines that the qualities and behaviours associated with one sex are of less value or worth in the world than those of the other.  Hierarchical thinking is also strongly ingrained in those young people who are likely to bully or use power tactics over others as it allows whatever qualities are deemed desirable by the group to be more important than broader concepts of fairness or value.

A more healthy view of the self in relation to others is to see it as recipe that contains the same “ingredients” as everybody else but in differing quantities and mixtures.  We are all unique but all made up of the same bits and pieces.  Some of us have tremendous skills in some areas, some of us don’t.  Some of have one kind of motivation in life, some of us have many and we change motivations as we develop - perhaps a love of music is supplanted by a love of amateur dramatics after coming across an enthusiastic local group.  We are all different but we share a broad cloak of humanity and common experience.  We are therefore able to empathise with people we have never met and whose lives are very different from our own.

I’ve often heard it said that everyone is good at something.  I’m not sure I completely agree.  I think many people are average at most things and they are still unique, worthy and valuable.  It’s not being good at something that matters; it’s being somebody.  And it is entirely by encouraging your young person to understand and share this view that parents can influence their child’s lifelong self-esteem.”

The authors make the point that self esteem often runs in families.  I wonder if racism - that is, an over-developed sense of ethnic pride - is not something that children pick up from their parents who, for whatever reason, choose to emphasise their own ethnic identity to counter their feelings of inferiority.  As with racism, so with sexism and extreme religious supremacy.  First generation immigrants often feel an understandable anxiety in relation to the indigenous majority and, not unnaturally, respond by vaunting the very thing that makes them different.  Sons smothered by their mothers may grow up to brandish their masculinity in a hierarchical way. 

In their children, however, this defence mechanism may take on a more dangerous hue as it is expressed as unthinking, immoveable prejudice learnt at an esteemed parent’s knee.  The book, then, offers advice to parents as well.  To value themselves.  To offer themselves the unconditional love that means being somebody - a person worthy of love even when all the achievements and badges are stripped away.

Gill Hines and Alison Baverstock, Whatever! A down-to-earth guide to parenting teenagers, Piatkus, 2005

I spend a fair amount of time wondering whether I am mad.  Usually when people disagree with me vehemently, or when I wonder whether I am imagining the aggressive undercurrents that I sense in another person.  Wondering whether one is mad seems inescapably normal to me.  After all, none of us know what it’s like to live in someone else’s head and so we all have a funny idea of what not being mad feels like. 

I usually conclude that I am not mad, but only after a lot of very anxious soul searching.  Only very occasionally do I get sweet, objective, external confirmation that I am not mad.  A friend who knows me very well gave me this card today which makes me smile whenever I read it.  She saw it and thought of me, and bought it for me.  I’ll pin it above my computer, I think, next to a lump of the Berlin Wall.  I can cope with being Nice Mad.

(card from a brilliant series by Edward Monkton)

Someone gave me these as a “thank you” present at the weekend.  She bought them from a bucket at the roadside.  I had never seen these flowers before - they look like agapanthus flowers but grow singley and have too long stems.  I think they are brodeaia laxa or triteleia laxa “Queen Fabiola” (nobody seems quite sure which), commonly known as Fool’s Onion or Ithuriel’s Spear.  The Hidcote lavender matches its periwinkle blue colour exactly. Brodeaia laxa is native to northern California where the wild form grows up to 20″ tall.

Queen Fabiola is the Spanish aristocrat and widow of the Belgian King Baudouin I.  She was named after the Catholic saint, Saint Fabiola, a twice divorced Roman woman who lived in the 4th Century and was a friend of St Jerome   After the death of her second husband, she renounced all her worldly goods and thereafter devoted herself to the care of the poor and sick. 

Five litres of cider he’d drunk, and it was only 9.30am. He was quite coherent, considering. He had not had a bath for three weeks and he sleeps in his clothes, so he didn’t smell too pleasant. But you get used to the smell after a while, though it hangs around in your lungs for several hours afterwards. You almost notice it more when he’s gone.   The whiffs of poverty and dirt and self-loathing.

He’d made an appointment to have some help filling in a long application form for a disability benefit. The application form is about fifty pages long, full of very precise questions about toilet habits and washing and cooking and ability to walk. It’s very clearly set out, but it’s almost mandatory to puff out a deep sigh when you see one. You need stamina just to fill the form in, and most people who will qualify for the benefit need help, just to get through it.

The benefit is called Disability Living Allowance and is a non-means tested benefit, which means that Christopher Reeve would have qualified. I see it as a sign of the civilised society we live in, that we acknowledge that “shit happens” and that there is no rhyme or reason to disabilities. It is all of us saying that life is not fair. Money will not make things fair, but it will go some way to providing care for those who need it, or for providing respite for exhausted relatives. It is payable based on what you need, care-wise or mobility-wise, and is not based on what you actually receive in terms of care.

Many people who live alone don’t get their care needs met, but they survive by sitting in a chair all day, eating microwave meals, washing with a flannel, and wearing clothes with elastic and no difficult fastenings.  It is payable under special rules to people who are terminally ill.  That is, to those whose death might reasonably be expected in the following six months.  It is awfully difficult to get round to broaching that subject with clients.  There are special rules, too, for children with development disorders such as autism. 

The thresholds are pretty high.  For instance, it is not enough to have lost both your legs in order to qualify for the top rate mobility element.  You actually have to be unable to walk, and that means that if you wear prosthetic limbs and can walk with those then you will not qualify.  People in a coma don’t qualify either… Top rate care and mobility will pay over £110.00 a week.

My man this morning was in his mid-thirties, accompanied by a slightly older friend of his with whom he occasionally kips when he is not sleeping rough.  He’d been sent to the Citizens’ Advice Bureau by the Job Centre for help completing the application form for a benefit that would potentially double his income.  His medical condition was described in a doctor’s certificate as “anxiety attacks” and he suffered several that morning, frequently having to leave the room to recover, and preferring the whole waiting room to hear his toilet habits rather than close the door on the three of us.  I asked how long he suffered these anxiety attacks and he told me how his stepfather used to beat him, and how there was nowhere to get away, and how he was frightened in closed spaces because he couldn’t get away, and that he was frightened in the street, too, that somebody would come and get him.

His friend wasn’t keen to hear all the gory details, but neither was my client keen to be left alone.  Smoke-breaks for his friend left us short snatches of time to deal with the really difficult bits.  He mentioned his dog, and I asked about it, and asked some more, letting him talk and cry.  It turned out the dog had had a massive tumour and the vet had had to put it down.  He hadn’t been able to watch the injection going into his paw, and he sobbed as he told me that he’d carried the dog’s body down to his beloved river to bury it, and how he’d lit a candle on the mound of earth and said a prayer and how his drugged up friend had been hysterical and he’d had to comfort him rather than being able to be quiet in the moment.  I wondered if his dog had made him feel safer than he felt now.

I had to get him to write something, and he wasn’t keen.  I asked him how he’d got on at school and he replied “Sharks”.  He’d loved natural history, and knew everything about sharks.  He reeled off the name of several teachers he’d liked. He liked fishing too, and used to go to the mud flats on the estuary to dig bait.  He said he’d really enjoyed helping people when he was younger too.  It had given him a buzz.  I said if you put all that together, wasn’t it easy to imagine a life better than now, that he could aim towards, where he had a small flat, and a dog, and went fishing and digging for bait, and did some voluntary work to help people.  He said he could imagine that.  I gave him the number of Alcoholics Anonymous and he folded it up with his doctor’s note and put it away in his wallet.

His friend said he wanted to ask me out.  But I gestured to my wedding ring and he gallantly declined, saying just “Respect”.  Later he said that his goal was to find a woman to take to his sister’s wedding in the Caribbean in October, but that he could never take me “because I was not wearing proper shoes”.  I was wearing plimsolls - trendy French Bensimon tennis shoes that went wonderfully with my grey linen skirt, but plimsolls none the less.  I said that I’d had a lucky escape and must wear plimsolls more often.  It was all good humoured and kind.

As finally my client turned his back to leave, all I could see was the twelve-year old boy who loved sharks and digging for bait, and who loved his dog more than himself, and who had been beaten by someone he should have been able to trust.

Afterwards, I sat at my desk writing it all up and breathed heavy sighs.  The supervisor asked me if I was OK.  I was, but it’s a lot to soak up in a morning, twenty odd years of unhappiness laid out before you.

 Another related, similarly depressing post …

Faith and Hope and Not a Lot Else

More:

Stuart: A Life Backwards

Will this man make you happy?

Stuart Jeffries
Tuesday June 24, 2008

Then, in the late 1990s, something happened that revolutionised Layard’s career. Happiness became a new science. Or at least Layard, despite wails of derision from sceptics, says it did. Psychological researchers found a close correlation between reported happiness and activity in the cerebral cortex. As a result, Layard insisted, lots of the scepticism about reported happiness was misplaced.”I have been so struck with the sophistication of the science in this area,” he says. “It’s really impressive.” It gave Layard hope that he could both define happiness objectively, measure it accurately and then set about creating more of it.

What is happiness, Layard asked in his 2003 lecture series Happiness: Has Social Science a Clue? His answer was simple: “By happiness I mean feeling good - enjoying life and feeling it is wonderful. And by unhappiness I mean feeling bad and wishing things were different.” To his satisfaction, he had cut through a philosophical Gordian knot. Yes, many philosophers didn’t think the matter was so simple. And true, Nietzsche did write derisively in Twilight of the Idols: “Mankind does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.”

No matter. Layard was reclaiming an Englishman’s birthright - the intellectual heritage of utilitarianism handed down by Jeremy Bentham, the 19th-century philosopher who argued that what was really important in ethics was “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. But Bentham was not advocating that each person should acquire more and more happiness in the way Imelda Marcos bought shoes. Just before he died Bentham wrote to the daughter of a friend: “Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove … And for every grain of enjoyment you sow in the bosom of another, you shall find a harvest in your own bosom.”

Stirring stuff. Only one problem, identified by John Stuart Mill: “Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.” Everyone from Socrates to the Dalai Lama argued that happiness was a recalcitrant little bugger: you couldn’t create it, particularly not in someone else’s bosom. And so to set happiness as the overarching goal of social policy might seem to be a terrible error.

Layard discounts Mill, Socrates and everybody else’s views on this. He thinks happiness is something one can create by working on one’s dispositions towards well-being - or getting someone else to show you how. Layard has no doubt there are some of us who are predisposed, perhaps genetically, to being happy. Many of the rest of us, though, need help.

Last year, Layard visited Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom where government pursues the goal of gross national happiness (GNH). “Bhutan seems much happier than countries that have a materialist rather than moral ethos. Relationships are rather equal, there’s very little status anxiety.” He was impressed by the four pillars of Bhutan’s GNH: the promotion of equitable and sustainable socioeconomic development; preservation and promotion of cultural values; conservation of the natural environment; and establishment of good governance. “What really struck me is that as a matter of policy, there is very little extreme poverty. Bhutan realises that a redistribution of wealth that favours the poor most is better for producing happiness.”

Layard’s mission now is to make Britain a bit more like Bhutan. It is a mission that has revivified him intellectually and politically late in a distinguished career. He is 74, and has been married since 1991 to Molly Meacher, a social worker who specialised in mental health and now sits as a crossbencher. In his bestselling 2005 book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, he cited his wife as a key influence on his thinking.

In 2005, such was his access to government, that he presented a paper called Mental Health: Britain’s Biggest Social Problem? to the No 10 Strategy Unit. There he argued that the scourge of unemployment had been replaced by that of depression. He pointed out that more mentally ill people were drawing incapacity benefits than there were unemployed people on Jobseeker’s Allowance. Depression was thus bad for both GDP and GNH. One in six people suffered from depression or chronic anxiety, but only a quarter of sufferers were receiving treatment - mostly drugs. Layard recommended that CBT was as effective as drugs and was preferred by most patients.

In his subsequent The Depression Report he recommended scaling up CBT for people suffering from depression and anxiety through training an additional 10,000 clinical psychologists and psychological therapists. The report seemed to promise a great leap forward in British happiness: a national service of 250 local treatment centres, with 40 new services opening each year till 2013, would offer courses of therapy costing £750. Each course would pay for itself in money saved on incapacity benefits and lost tax receipts. Everybody - including the Treasury - would be happy.

But CBT, and Layard’s support of it, has been derided. Typical was the GP, Mike Fitzpatrick who, writing in the British Journal of General Practice, charged that Layard was committing a fallacy similar to that of his LSE predecessor William Beveridge, whose 1942 report predicted that improvements in health resulting from better health services would rapidly result in a reduced demand for health and welfare services and hence in a declining burden on the exchequer. It did not. “The notion that a few weeks of CBT will transform miserable people languishing in idleness and dependency into happy shiny productive workers is embarrassing in its absurdity,” added Fitzpatrick.

What does Layard make of such criticisms? “Nobody claims that CBT is going to cure everybody. There will still remain roles for medication, family therapy. And for some personality disorders it won’t be relevant either. But for many people currently suffering depression it will.” Isn’t CBT overrated? “No. CBT takes great trouble to evaluate itself. Other forms of treatment such as psychodynamic ones haven’t evaluated their methods.”

What are the success rates of these courses? “Something like 50%. Which is not bad. The main problem now is that not enough therapists have been trained.”

But it is not only depressives on incapacity benefit who need to be helped to become happy. British children need it too, Layard insists. A 2006 University of York survey found that UK children are the unhappiest of any wealthy European country. At the time, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said: “The selling of lifestyles to children creates a culture of material competitiveness and promotes acquisitive individualism at the expense of the principles of community and cooperation.” “He’s right,” says Layard. “We need better role models than Britney - for our children as much as for ourselves.”

But how? Layard hands me a book. It’s called A Quiet Revolution and it chronicles an initiative at West Kidlington primary school, north of Oxford. There, head teacher Neil Hawkes has sought to instil emotional intelligence in his children by devising a positive value lexicon. This consists of a series of 22 words devised by parents and teachers that have positive values. The lexicon includes trust, respect, love, friendship, humility, hope, simplicity, tolerance and (Gordon Brown’s favourite) courage.

Each of these words is dramatised in assemblies, and used throughout the school day - in the playground and in dedicated values lessons. “Deep understanding of the positive concepts gradually permeates the layers of individual consciousness by a kind of osmosis,” writes the book’s author Frances Farrer, “and ultimately is internalised to the point where the concepts govern action.”

Isn’t this the nanny state gone mad, I ask Layard. He replies that learning such values is about instilling character, which is the only way children can become strong, secure and autonomous. “So it’s not nannying. It’s the opposite. Any happy society is one in which people feel in control of their own lives. The government can develop a school system that encourages self-determining agents to flourish.”

Why should such inculcation of values be important? Partly, Layard argues, because we live in a mostly secular society. “I had an education that included a religious component and, even though I’ve become agnostic since then, I recognise that those with religious beliefs tend to be happier.” Layard contends that there has been a catastrophic “failure to develop a secular morality. People find it hard to talk about moral issues. A moral vocabulary is what is lacking for many children.”

In this, Layard claims popular support. He chairs the Good Childhood Inquiry set up by the Children’s Society. Its aim is to work out what might be good values to instil in children. His inquiry will report early next year, but he already has some ideas. “We need to get different people into teaching.” He wants to encourage more psychology graduates to become teachers, not least because they will appreciate the behavioural psychology that underpins Layard’s happiness philosophy. “We must use time in the school day devoted to values in a more distilled way. Again, the problem is that there aren’t teachers trained to do such things, so classes given over to values can be waffly.

“We need some people going into schools with missionary intent. Before I became an economist in my 30s, I was a schoolteacher, and at that time the missionaries were the ‘use of English’ people who, under the aegis of FR Leavis, believed that teaching great literature could provide a moral education. Like the Matthew Arnolds of the Victorian era, we need intelligent missionaries in our schools.”

He tells me about the Local Well-Being Project, a new three-year trial involving three local authorities (South Tyneside, Manchester and Hertfordshire) which has the goal of increasing happiness and which, if successful, could be replicated nationwide. The aim is to wean children from binge drinking, adolescent suicide, anxiety and depression into happier, more wholesome futures. Fingers crossed.

This new politics of well-being is one of the greatest experiments in British social policy for generations. It could be a wonderful thing, steering us away from the Scylla of materialism and the Charybdis of selfish individualism, just when we thought we were doomed.

Or maybe Layard’s happiness agenda is misplaced. It’s too soon to be certain. The revolution is still under way, and there are problems. There are waiting lists for CBT, and positive psychology classes have not yet delivered compelling results. But there’s a bigger concern. Aren’t you worried, I ask the happiness tsar, that this whole agenda is based on an imposture, and that happiness is neither a desirable nor an achievable political goal? “You’ll be happy to learn,” says Layard, as he kindly shows me to the lift, “that I’m not”.

Interesting article which raises lots of questions:

1.  Is it fair to blame America for our nation’s unhappiness?

2.  Isn’t it more likely that Nietzsche is to blame, if he killed God?

3.  If America is to blame, who imported her ideas into the UK?

4.  May I blame Margaret Thatcher?  I’d like to.

5.  Is happiness even a goal we should be pursuing?

6.  Isn’t happiness just a by-product of a good life? 

7.  Does happiness as a constant state, lasting more than a few weeks, only exist in retrospect?

8.  Are happiness and autonomy inextricably linked?

9.  Do unhappy people try harder and therefore achieve more?

10. Why is my dog always happy?

 

 

 

 

 

… doesn’t work.  It just doesn’t satisfy. 

I’m reading a book called Siblings without Rivalry.  The chapter dealing with fairness between brothers and sisters is entitled “Fair is Less”.  In it parents discuss with the two authors how it never seems to work when you tell children that you love them both or all the same.  That is because children do not want everything to be the same, but want to be loved differently for who they are:

“It was a difficult concept to explain.  I told them all the story of the young wife who suddenly turned on her husband and asked, “Who do you love more?  Your mother or me?”  Had he answered, “I love you both the same,” he would have been in big trouble.  But instead he said, “My mother is my mother.  You’re the fascinating, sexy woman that I want to spend the rest of my life with.”

   “To be loved equally,” I continued, “is somehow to be loved less.  To be loved uniquely - for one’s own special self - is to be loved as much as we need to be loved.”

Had I been the young wife, the husband’s comments would have hit the spot.  I’ll try to make sure I give the same individual attention to my daughters.  I think it works with friends too.  Friends want to know they are loved for who they are.  It is true of spouses, siblings and friends: if you are loved for who you are, then you do not have to worry about competition since you are unique.

The chapter goes on to deal with the difficult subject of parents who actually do prefer one child over another.  The mere thought of that turns my stomach over.  Some of the parents in the book declare clear favourites.  This passage begins with one man admitting that he prefers his daughter to his sons:

“I thought that’s one of the things we’ve been saying here, that we don’t have to worry about convincing the kids we love them all equally.  It is not even humanly possible to love them the same.  I’ll bet each person here has a favourite.  I’m the first to admit that my boys are good kids, but my daughter is the light of my life.”

All my alarms went off.  He sounded much too comfortable about a situation that was potentially dangerous.  Did he have any idea what pain he could inflict upon all his children with that attitude, including the “light of his life”?

“As I see it,” I said, “the problem is not one of having a favourite.  We all experience feelings of partiality towards one child or another, at one time or another.  The problem is how to make sure we don’t show favouritism.  We all know that Cain slew Abel when the Lord showed more “respect” for Abel’s offering.  And we also know that Joseph’s brethren threw him into a pit in the wilderness because their father loved Joseph more and gave him a coat of many colours.  That was a long time ago, but the feelings that provoked those violent acts are eternal and universal.

“Even here in this room today,” I continued, nodding towards the woman who had told the story of “The Haircut”, “we heard about a little girl who cut off her sister’s hair because her father was enchanted with it.”

“Rapunzel’s sister” looked at me intently.  “The truth is he was enchanted with everything about her.  He was never enchanted with me.”  Her eyes filled.  “I can’t believe it still hurts,” she said.

I wanted to weep for her.  And for all the other children who had to watch the glow in their parent’s eyes and know that it would never be for them.

“This is going to be a tough one,” I said.  “How do we protect the other children in the family from our enthusiasm for that one child who speaks to our heart?”

There was a heavy silence … [then several parents recounted their stories]

“What I hear all of you saying,” I said, “is that if we want to stop showing favouritism, we firts have to be aware that we feel it.  We need to be honest enough to admit the truth to ourselves.  Knowing our bias immediately puts us in a better position to protect our “less favoured children”; and it helps us protect our favoured child, as well, from the pressure of having to maintain his position and from the inevitable hostility of his siblings.”

   The woman who had spoken last wasn’t satisfied.  “What do we do about our guilt?” she asked.  “I can admit that I am partial, but I feel terrible about it.”

“Would it help,” I answered, “to tell yourself that it isn’t necessary to respond to each child with equal passion, and that it’s perfectly normal and natural to have different feelings towards different children?  The only thing that is necessary is that we take another looke at the less favoured child, seek our her specialness, then reflect the wonder of it back to her.  That’s all we can ask of ourselves, and all the children need of us.  By valuing and being partial to each child’s individuality, we make sure that each of our children feels like a number one child.”

Reading this threw up all sorts of emotions in me.  Not about my own daughters (whose picture I’m looking at now, and which makes me smile) because they are very different from each other, and it is easy to love each of them for their uniqueness.  They are physically, temperamentally and emotionally very different.   Both do continually challenge me to reassure them that I do not love the other more, and I do not think I am very good at satisfying them, though I could not bear to choose between them.

I think preferences are fairly rare.  Apparent (not real) preferences are less rare.  Especially where the siblings are different sexes, it is fairly common to see a father doting on his daughter, or a mother who declares she is in love with her son.  It is often easier, less complicated, to love an opposite gender child because they never threaten your own identity, nor do they need to overcome you before they can become adults themselves. 

In another situation one child might be very effective at claiming all the attention, and so appear to be the favourite, but the quieter, less demanding child in the background may pull the mother’s heart strings equally hard as she tries to bring her to the fore.

This was part of an email yesterday from a girl friend of mine who is thoughtfully doing her very best.  I am very proud of her.

I had two letters yesterday from W…  School.  B … (her daughter) is getting the 
Year 6 music prize at Speech day, and your godson is getting the Year  
4 effort prize!  I spoke to his teacher at sports day yesterday and 
she said he really deserves it as he has a fabulous report with all 16 
effort grades being A’s.  He might be an attention seeking little 
whatsit at home, but at least at school he is an angel.  I was so 
proud of them I cried when I read the letters, especially as B
gets so overlooked with D as a brother.

The book is excellent.

I saw this at the weekend, and liked the advice. 

Aunt Sally: I can’t forgive my mother but the anger is eating away at me

“Forgiveness” is such a big word. I prefer “acceptance”. If we accept that somebody is the way they are, and they are behaving in that way not to offend us, but simply because that is the way they feel and think, then we may find space for forgiveness. In other words, we forgive them for being who they are. We may as well, because if there is one single truth, it is that we cannot make other people behave in ways we would like. The only person we have the power to change is ourselves.

So, if we accept that people are themselves, what is there to forgive? Their bad behaviour, perhaps? That takes us back to a point of nonacceptance. If we don’t accept them as they are, we believe they should behave in a certain way, according to our criteria of what we believe is correct. In other words, I’m right and you’re wrong. Sure, we could go down that road, but really, there is no point. Trying to make somebody agree that they are wrong and you are right is like banging your head against a brick wall. If you keep it up, the only person you hurt is yourself.

So, give it up. Let it go. Accept that your mother is not the person you wanted her to be. She is the person, for whatever reason, she wanted to be or thought it was right to be or did not know there was any other way to be. Letting her live rent-free in your head is not going to change that. There is a saying about parents: “Shame on them for what they did to me as a child. Shame on me for what I am doing to myself now.” Yes, it was bad. No, it shouldn’t have happened. But it did, and now it’s over and you’re an adult in control of your own life. Or you would be, if only you would stop handing the responsibility for it over to everyone else. Just like your mother, the rest of the world is not responsible for the way you feel, and making them responsible (they went to university, they believe in themselves, they had mothers who loved them) is not going to change anything.

Nor is anger, which could be seen as an aggressive form of self-pity. Life is not fair, but why we believe that something as abstract and impersonal as life should be fair, I have never understood. It’s like ascribing human emotions to a tree and saying a tree should be fair. A tree is a tree. It is what it is.

You could go on hating your mother (and yourself) or you could try to make friends with yourself. Yes, I know being kind to yourself is a novel idea, but if you could find some compassion for your own difficult emotions, you might understand that everyone suffers from them, too — including your mother.

Here are three practical suggestions you might like to try. The first is to count your blessings. Write them down, every night. And please don’t say you have nothing to be grateful for. You have a roof over your head. You are able to work. It doesn’t matter how rubbish you think that work is: the truth is, you have choices. You are healthy, which is not to be underestimated. Challenge yourself to see the good in your life and, eventually, you will come to believe it.

The second suggestion is to help others. It will stop you concentrating so exclusively on yourself. You are not the only person in this world who feels bad. Reach out to others and you will feel less alone.

Third, pray for five minutes every morning. Set your intention for the day. I don’t mean that in the sense of organised religion — although it may be that you embrace it. Simply pray to your higher self. Pray for the willingness to let go of anger, to enjoy your life, for self-hatred to leave you. Pray for compassion for yourself and others.

Finally, remember this: living well is the best revenge.