cover

Contents

Cover

Title page

Chapter 1: Protecting Yourself in an Unsafe World

The world is often not a safe place to be

The wisdom of protection

Chapter 2: The Power of ‘Negative’ Thinking

There is no such thing as negative thinking

Protective thinking rather than negative thinking

Types of protective thinking

Identifying your patterns of protective thinking

Chapter 3: The Power of ‘Positive’ Thinking

There is no such thing as positive thinking

Open thinking rather than positive thinking

Types of open thinking

Praise and affirmation

Chapter 4: The Power of ‘Negative’ Attitudes

Conscious thinking and preconscious attitudes

There is no such thing as a negative attitude

Protective attitudes rather than negative attitudes

Identifying your protective attitudes

Chapter 5: The Power of ‘Negative’ Feelings

There is no such thing as a negative feeling

Protective feelings rather than negative feelings

Identifying and understanding protective feelings

Levels of protective feeling

Chapter 6: The Power of ‘Negative’ Action

There is no such thing as negative action

Protective action rather than negative action

Types of protective action

Interpersonal conflict is creative and protective

Healing and protective action

Chapter 7: The Power of Stress and Illness

The body is always right

Language, stress and illness

The body as a protector

Chapter 8: Realising Your Power

The power of the psyche

Knowing your power

Using your power to protect

Using your power to grow

Chapter 9: The Power of Safety

Safety is the key to healing

Personal safety

Interpersonal safety

Therapeutic safety

Chapter 10: Healing and Moving On

Healing and relationships

Personal healing

Interpersonal healing

Therapeutic healing

Chapter 11: Stories of Healing and Moving On

Safety and the telling of your story

The stories

Endless journey

In Between You and I

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill & Macmillan

CHAPTER 1

PROTECTING YOURSELF IN AN UNSAFE WORLD

THE WORLD IS OFTEN NOT A SAFE PLACE TO BE

We live in a world of locks and bolts, guns, alarm systems, ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ systems, policing and insurance schemes to guard against all sorts of threats to our physical safety. It is no longer safe to walk alone on lonely country roads, remote forest paths or busy city streets. We are also aware of the risks to property. We are very alert to these threats to our physical safety and property, and we see the necessity and the creativity of developing behaviours and systems to protect ourselves. But what we are not so aware of are the multiple threats that exist to our emotional and social well-being. These emotional perils that children and adults face every day are, in many ways, an even greater threat to well-being than physical perils. Why? Because the prime need of people in our culture is to be loved, recognised, valued and accepted. Any threat to that emotional and social need poses great danger for people and so it is not surprising that, just as for physical threats, creative protections are developed to reduce or eliminate risks to emotional and social well-being. Where do these threats arise and what is their nature? They arise mainly in the following social systems:

 homes

 schools and classrooms

communities

workplaces.

The ways that an unsafe emotional atmosphere can develop in each of these systems are illustrated below.

Unsafe homes

The parental home is the first and most influential social system in our lives, while the second is the couple relationship. Most of us have been born into a family. As adults many of us are involved in a primary couple relationship. It is the nature of the relationships within these two systems that determines the level and intensity of the unsafety that can be experienced. Each family and couple relationship has its own unique culture and to truly understand a person’s present-day insecurity as an adult you need a detailed biographical history of that person.

Threats to the emotional well-being of family members or to partners in a couple relationship are posed by interactions that are of either a conditional or a totally neglectful nature.

FEATURES OF CONDITIONAL INTERACTIONS

 Withdrawal of love

 Domination

 Control

 Aggression

 Passivity

 Ridicule

 Scoldings

 Hostile criticism

 Violence

 Judgments

 Irritability

 Impatience

 Non-listening

 Dismissiveness

 Conformity

 Overinvolvement

In conditional interactions the unsafety that is created is due to the sad fact that you do not feel loved for yourself, and the only way you can gain love is by meeting certain conditions. What uncertainty this creates! There never can be a guarantee that you will be able to measure up and meet these conditions. Typical conditions for gaining love and recognition in families and couple relationships are: be good, be perfect, be clever, be beautiful, be like me, be the same, be kind, be the helper, be quiet. Unsafety arises with these expectations because love is withdrawn in the form of the kind of punishing behaviours listed above if you do not toe the line. When people – whether children or adults – experience these punishing reactions, their emotional world becomes very unsafe and they are forced into ways of protecting themselves from further hurt. In much the same way as they would protect their physical lives by any means, people learn ways of defending themselves against these emotional perils. Much of this book is devoted to illustrating the very many creative strategies that human beings adopt to protect themselves in the face of emotional perils.

FEATURES OF TOTALLY NEGLECTFUL INTERACTIONS

 No demonstrations of love

 Physical abuse

 Sexual abuse

 Verbal abuse

 Neglect of physical welfare

 Emotionless reactions

 Hostile silences

 Lack of involvement with each other

 Depression

 Hopelessness

 Apathy

 Extreme hostility

 Extreme withdrawal

 Alcoholism

 Lack of interest in each other’s lives

 Drug addiction

The level of emotional unsafety in homes where relationships are characterised by conditionality is always threatening, but is not as devastating as in homes where relationships are of a totally neglectful nature. This is so because conditionality provides some possibilities for gaining love and recognition, whereas total neglect provides no such possibilities.

It does not take much imagination to envisage the depth and intensity of unsafety that is created within homes characterised by total neglect. The protections needed in such an unsafe environment have to match the extremes of the neglectful behaviours experienced.

Unsafe schools and classrooms

The third most powerful social system of which we become members in the course of our lives is the school. There are many people who still rage at the humiliation they experienced during their time in school. I have made a deliberate distinction between schools and classrooms. We all have had teachers who were kind, understanding, caring and concerned, and others who were hostile, critical, violent, cynical and sarcastic. Clearly the emotional dangers experienced in the classrooms of the latter were great indeed.

The school itself also tends to have its own unique atmosphere. In the school that promotes an ethos of respect and valuing of all its members, you can sense intuitively the safety of the atmosphere. In schools where no such ethos has been developed, interactions that are of a threatening nature to students and teachers may go unnoticed and are certainly not confronted. Bullying, hostile teasing, stealing, drug trafficking, apathy and uncaring behaviour are some of the features of these schools. Students and teachers do not feel safe coming into this environment and all sorts of protective behaviours necessarily evolve: playing truant, absenteeism, aggression and withdrawal. Unsafety in schools and classrooms creates a variety of fears:

Fear of failure

Fear of criticism

Fear of humiliation

Fear of ridicule

Fear of scolding

Fear of not being good enough

Fear of appearing ‘foolish’ and ‘stupid’

Fear of showing weaknesses

Fear of cynicism and sarcasm

Fear of bullying

Fear of being compared to others

Fear of being teased

Fear of being ostracised

Fear of not being accepted and valued

It is no wonder that both students and teachers have to take refuge in behaviours that creatively protect them from the realisation of these fears. The nature and breadth of these necessary protective internal and external actions will emerge as you read this book.

Unsafe communities

We live in neighbourhoods of one kind or another. I live in a rural area not far from a village of two pubs, a shop, a church, a scattering of houses and a community hall. Generally speaking it is a safe place to be, although in the recent past there were some robberies with violence in the area which led to more cautiousness among people. What I like about my neighbourhood is that people seem to respect and value differences between one another and there is no strong push towards conformity, not even towards religious conformity, although the latter has been a strong feature of local community life. There is also a friendliness between people. As in all communities, you have the ‘rogue’, the ‘sharp operator’ and the overinquisitive person, but you learn, sometimes after some personal cost, to guard against the exploitative behaviours of these people.

There are communities that are not so benign, where hostility, snobbery, bigotry, rigidity, threats of violence, robberies and gossip create a very unsafe environment. Inevitably, protections against these threats are evolved: cliques, alienation, ostracisation. The ultimate protection is, of course, to leave the area.

Unsafe workplaces

The atmosphere in workplaces can be unsafe in very much the same way that homes can be emotionally unsafe. Staff relationships tend to be the chief source of job dissatisfaction. Employees may be in dread of redundancy; in dread of being ‘fired’, threatened, criticised, physically or sexually harassed, humiliated and overworked; in dread of unfair expectations, exposure to irritability, dismissiveness, aggression and intimidation. It is small wonder then that job dissatisfaction is the most reliable predictor of heart disease and that most heart attacks occur before 9.00 a.m. on a Monday. Absenteeism, illness, perfectionism, overeagerness to please, timidity and passivity are examples of some of the protective strategies people develop in order to cope with an unpredictable, unsafe and uncaring work environment.

THE WISDOM OF PROTECTION

Your psyche is always highly aware of the need for safety and protection, not only from risks to its physical life but even more so from risks to its emotional and social well-being. As already pointed out, the prime need in our culture is to be loved and valued and when there are any threats to that raison d’être your psyche will find ways to protect you. The protective measures your psyche produces are highly creative and effective. But the sad reality is that if you are regularly or continuously trying to protect yourself from the possibility of failure and rejection, you cannot grow beyond the necessary protective walls you have created for yourself. Nevertheless, you would be very unwise to let go of any of these protections until you have found a level of safety where you are ready to move out and take on the necessary challenges that bring about desired changes.

Not only do your protective strategies often save you from further experiences of hurt and humiliation but they have another wise function. They alert you to the presence of wounded areas within yourself and between yourself and others that require healing. For example, when you protectively avoid intimate contact with others, the alerting message may be to do with an emotional rejection of self arising from your experiences of being rejected by your parents when you were a child. Similarly, children who have been sexually abused frequently repress these traumatic experiences so that they have no memory of the events. But as adults their psychosexual protectors (for example, ‘hating sex’ or being promiscuous to the point of endangering themselves) are windows into their wounded sexual selves. When safety is created, people will take on the alerting message of their protective behaviours. They will pursue the necessary actions to heal the hidden wounds and progress to greater maturity in those areas. When it remains unsafe, they will need to cling dearly to their protectors. When the healing process is embarked on, the protectors that have served the person so well will gradually be dissolved.

People who have had the benefit of an unconditional upbringing – where the home has always been a safe place to be – have no need to build protective walls. They will have achieved the ultimate safety: an unconditional acceptance and love of self and others, an independence and a love of life. Naturally, in situations of physical, sexual or emotional peril people with high self-esteem will also automatically engage in protective actions. They will also seek means to further strengthen their security, but such people will rarely stay hidden behind the walls of their protective actions.

Children start out with openness and reach out to the world in full confidence that they will be loved, cherished and nurtured. It is when this innate trust is broken, and neglect, conditionality, hurt and rejection begin to occur, that children in their vast wisdom begin to evolve means of eliminating or at least reducing further painful experiences. The child’s world begins in the womb and there is growing evidence that the unsafety and uncertainty can arise there, when the mother is under considerable stress from her own insecurities and vulnerabilities.

The protective strategies children develop may persist into adulthood, even until death, unless it again becomes safe to venture forth with openness and trust in the world of parents, teachers, significant others, peers and employers. A major purpose of this book is to show how you can re-create safety for yourself as an adult and from that safe and open foundation take the emotional, social, occupational and spiritual risks that will enable you to move beyond your protective walls and bring you to a greater level of personal fulfilment.

The book is designed to take you on a journey of discovery of the amazing internal and external behaviours that your psyche creates in order to protect you from rejection, an emotional protection which, as earlier suggested, is akin to the protective means you develop in order to preserve your physical life. My belief is that the need for love and recognition is now greater than the need for preservation of physical life. Witness to this are people who have sacrificed their lives for others, for religious and political causes – all, I believe, to gain love, acceptance and recognition.

On this journey of the psyche’s means of protection, you will discover that protective behaviours operate at different levels: physical (stress and illness), conscious (what you feel, think, do and say), preconscious (deeper feelings and attitudes) and subconscious (repression of traumatic experiences and fear of abandonment). You will also see that the wisest part of your psyche – the unconscious – is constantly active on your behalf to heal your inner conflicts and help you to move on to a greater realisation of your being. Furthermore, you will see that thoughts, attitudes, behaviours, feelings and illnesses that are often labelled as ‘negative’ have, in reality, the creative function of protecting you from threats to your emotional and social well-being. Rather than suddenly trying to let go of those so-called ‘negative’ behaviours, you will be encouraged to hold on to them until sufficient safety has been created for you to become venturesome again.

The book strongly contends that it is not changing your thinking that is the basis for emotional and social transformation but changing directly how you feel about yourself, about others and about the world. How this emotional process can be brought about is discussed in the later chapters of the book. Creating safety is the first and essential step in this process. From this basis you can begin to take the appropriate actions that will set you on the road to greater maturity and fulfilment. Bon voyage!

CHAPTER 2

THE POWER OF ‘NEGATIVE’ THINKING

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS NEGATIVE THINKING

Is it true to say that there is no such thing as negative thinking? After all, many books have been written on the power of positive thinking and the detrimental nature of negative thinking. Writers who promote the practice of positive thinking suggest that the way you think determines what you feel.

I remember a time in my own life when, at social functions, I used to hide away in corners from people and on one particular occasion two young women invited me to come on out and join them. I remember clearly thinking: ‘They’re only saying that because they feel sorry for me and if I do accept their offer, they’ll probably get bored of me quite quickly.’ Had I gone to a cognitive therapist (who believes how you think determines how you feel) she would have said that my thought process was critical of myself and a misinterpretation of the invitation, leading to the continuation of the social avoidance – which is precisely what happened as I made some vague excuse to the two women and remained depressed and alone in my corner. It seems that the way I thought was indeed negative and prevented me from taking up the social opportunity. However, I find it very odd that any therapist should start out by criticising me! Furthermore, with such an approach I am given no credit for the function of the sequence of ‘negative’ thinking following the women’s request. I believe that that pattern of thinking served a very useful and creative purpose; one which proponents of positive thinking miss. The thinking sequence served a twofold purpose:

to project on to the women my emotional inability to respond to the request

to protect me from rejection.

How clever! Through my thinking I had managed to project my own doubts about myself on to the two women: ‘They’re only saying that because they feel sorry for me’ and ‘they’ll probably get bored of me quite quickly’. The hidden issues at the time were: ‘I am feeling sorry for myself and I lack any sense of myself in relationships with women.’ These are deep emotional problems – not cognitive ones. My hate of myself was very great at that time and my ‘negative thinking’ served the very wise purpose of protecting me from taking the risk of rejection by the two women.

My belief is that unless we resolve our own rejection of ourselves then we will continue to use the head (in the form of images and thoughts) to protect ourselves from hurt and rejection. The head protects the heart. It is not my thinking that determines how I feel, it is precisely the opposite. It is how I feel about myself, others, the world, the past, the future and the present that determines how I think. The key feeling is how I feel about myself since this colours how I feel about everything else. In the example given above, my hate of myself, primarily of my physical self, determined how I responded to the well-meant request by the two women. This hate of my physical self preceded the ‘negative’ thought sequence; it was not created by it. The sequence of ‘negative’ thoughts served as a weapon against the emotional threat of possible rejection by the two women. It is not wise to remove a weapon from someone and leave them defenceless against what they perceive as a painful and threatening world.

PROTECTIVE THINKING RATHER THAN NEGATIVE THINKING

I believe there is no such thing as negative thinking. Rather I believe that people creatively develop protective patterns of thinking to reduce the possibility of further hurt, humiliation and rejection. Let us take some typical examples of what has been considered negative thinking:

‘I know I’ll fail that exam.’

‘I wish we didn’t have to meet those people tonight.’

‘I hate going into work today.’

‘I look awful.’

‘Everybody else on the course will know more than I do.’

The student who dreads failure will think in protective ways about the examination because it represents a huge threat to her self-esteem. Failure can mean rejection by both self and parents. By expecting a failure, the student is attempting to dilute the huge need for success and also to prepare for the eventuality of failure. When the student voices the thought ‘I know I’m going to fail’, she is attempting to alter the expectations of those who put on pressure for high performance. One young man told me that he hated when his parents had high expectations of him. No wonder. When he failed to measure up to their demanding standards he was met with the inevitable criticism and rejection. He very cleverly pointed out to me that by expressing constant worry about examinations and difficulties with concentration, he managed to reduce his parents’ expectations of him. Hardly negative thinking or talking! It is more accurate to say that he had developed a cognitive strategy to protect himself from rejection by his parents.

The second example of so-called negative thinking is indicative of hidden emotional issues of social inadequacy. The ‘wish we didn’t have to meet these people’ (covert or voiced) serves to motivate avoidance of the situation and also to prepare the person for the dreaded likelihood of feeling uncomfortable in the situation. The fulfilment of the prophecy in turn becomes an additional rationale and a strengthened protection against further social excursions of a like kind. It is important to see that the person who is self-possessed and independent of others will not dread social situations in the way that a person who has poor self-esteem and is dependent on others will. Again, the so-called negative thought pattern not only reflects the person’s emotional doubts about self and consequent dependence on others, but also mobilises attempts to protect against social failure. Once again, the emotional vulnerability precedes the ‘negative’ thought pattern and gives rise to the necessity of a cognitive strategy to protect against the social threats to self-esteem. In this kind of situation, very often the protective thinking pattern precedes the verbalisation to another person of the reticence about the social outing. The verbalisation is a second line of protection and is designed to persuade others to forego the social invitation. Such a response would lead to the desired outcome of avoidance of the threatening social situation. There is a world of difference between an honest and open ‘no’ to a social invitation and the less obvious protective response to such an invitation given in the present example. The person who is dependent on others and feels vulnerable in the face of certain social situations will not readily admit to such vulnerability because this would mean ri I the true emsure. Clever, surely, and not at all neg

A common ‘negative’ thought pattern is ‘I hate going into work today’. Individuals who feel confident and competent do not think about their jobs in this way. When difficulties arise, they see them as challenges from which they can emerge more knowledgeable and, perhaps, wiser. The person who is unsure, afraid of the judgment of others and fearful of failure will view work in protective ways. The thought ‘I hate going into work’ is a projection of the person’s own doubts about self on to the job. People often say ‘it’s the job that gets me down’, not allowing themselves to see that it is their own vulnerability that makes the job so threatening. By projecting your emotional difficulties on to the job, you protect yourself from having to face your own low self-esteem (which is far too threatening to view) and when you voice your difficulties with work to others, you divert their attention away from you and on to your occupation. Again the subconscious wisdom of the psyche is apparent and it will be reluctant to let go of these protective cognitive strategies until the deeper emotional conflicts are resolved.

I can empathise deeply with the next example of ‘negative’ thinking: ‘I look awful.’ For years I struggled with a severe rejection of my physical self, seeing myself as unattractive and ugly, and avoiding contact with women. This pattern of thinking served to protect me from what I most feared – rejection. If I had followed the advice to practise positive thinking – ‘I am handsome’, ‘I accept myself as I am’, ‘I am unique’, ‘I am independent of how others see me’ – I do not feel that it would have altered my emotional conviction of my ugliness in any significant way. Furthermore, if I had dropped my protective thinking pattern and had gone ahead and asked a woman for a date and she had refused me, then the emotional reaction might indeed have been devastating. What if somebody had expressed attraction to me? Would this have resolved my self-esteem problem? This did happen a number of times but with little effect because, as an adult, emotional healing does not come about through another’s expression of love for you (even though it always helps) but through the deeper process of your own love and acceptance of yourself. The protection offered by ‘I look awful’ is that it provides justification for avoiding contact with others and that avoidance, in turn, protects against the feared criticism and rejection of others.

The final example of ‘negative’ thinking – ‘everybody else on the course will know more than I do’ – reflects the self-esteem problem of lack of confidence and the consequent fear of ‘being found out’ to be less competent than others. Your thought pattern prepares you to protect yourself during attendance of the course, and by seeing others as ‘superior’ you allow them to take the lead while you remain quietly in the background. Many people confuse confidence with competence and believe that when you are knowledgeable and skilled in a particular task you will then feel confident. Confidence which is dependent on competence is pseudo-confidence because you are always fearful of mistakes and failures, and anxiety accompanies your actions. Take the example of learning to drive a car. Many people approach this complex skill with the thought ‘I’ll never be able to do it’, reflecting a lack of confidence in their ability to learn. The pattern of thinking and its verbalisation serve the protective function of reducing the driving tutor’s expectations of you. You may believe that, once you have accomplished the task of driving independently, you will feel confident. Not so! Confidence precedes competence. Confidence is knowing that you have the potential to learn any task and that once you apply yourself persistently you will learn the targeted knowledge and/or skill. Confidence is also knowing that, yes, you will make mistakes, but these mistakes are simply pointers for further learning.

I have been attempting to show that there is no such thing as negative thinking because such thought patterns serve the important function of protection against failure, criticism, humiliation and rejection. It is vital that individuals are given credit for the creative nature of their so-called negative thinking patterns and that they are helped to resolve the hidden emotional conflicts that make them so vulnerable. By relabelling ‘negative’ thinking as ‘protective’ thinking, the person is no longer being criticised for the way she thinks but, on the contrary, is being given recognition for the need for protection and credit for the development of the cognitive means to do so.

TYPES OF PROTECTIVE THINKING

Books written on cognitive therapy tend to categorise negative thinking into faulty judgments that people make about themselves, the world and the future. Examples of such faulty judgments are:

Self – ‘I’m a fool.’

 The world – ‘Nobody loves me.’

The future – ‘Nothing will ever change.’

In cognitive therapy judgments such as these are seen as creating feelings of fear, anxiety, hate, depression, sadness, loneliness, hopelessness, despair, anger and jealousy. The duration, depth and frequency of these feelings are seen as being determined by the intensity of the faulty judgments made by the individual.

It is easy to see why a thought sequence such as ‘I’m a fool’ should be described as an inaccurate judgment of self. After all, you are not summed up by any one thing that you do or fail to do. A cognitive therapist would help you to see, for example, that yes, you did make an error because of lack of concentration, but that does not make you a fool. You would be encouraged to substitute the faulty judgment of ‘I’m a fool’ with the more realistic assessment that you made an error owing to a lapse in concentration. You can then learn from this by making a greater effort to hold your concentration on the task in hand. But with such an approach, no credit is given to the creator of the thought process and its important functions are not recognised. In fact, the thought ‘I’m a fool’ can have a number of protective functions.

It reduces your own expectations of yourself, so that mistakes and failures are not the hammer blows you experienced as a child.

When voiced, it reduces others’ expectations of you by leading them to believe that only failures and mistakes can be expected from you.

A further protection is that, given their low expectations, people may be agreeably surprised when you turn out to surpass their expectations. Remember that much of this process is subconscious; your psyche constantly works to protect you from pain and also creates opportunities for you to resolve your hidden emotional problems.

When a client tells me ‘I’m a fool’, my response is to say: ‘I can understand why you need to see yourself in that way; it is a necessary and clever means you have developed in order to protect yourself from a world that has become emotionally unsafe for you.’ I help the person to see that it is not stupid, nor irrational, to think in these ways. On the contrary, such protective ways of thinking have made it possible to survive in a world wherein, as a child, conditionality or outright neglect may have been part and parcel of everyday life.

An example of the type of ‘negative’ thinking that involves faulty judgment about the world is ‘nobody loves me’. A cognitive therapist would challenge your judgment and help you to see that there are, in reality, individuals who demonstrate caring behaviour towards you. Again, in this example it is easy to understand how it is concluded that your thinking is inaccurate and that the help needed is to correct such faulty judgments of how others see you. A cognitive therapist would see the thinking pattern as the problem, whereas I am suggesting that thoughts are both manifestations and protectors of deeper emotional issues. The thoughts are not the problem and the target of change must go behind the scenes of protective thinking patterns. When a person thinks or declares ‘nobody loves me’, the protective functions of this judgment process may include the following:

It projects your own lack of love of self on to others. Projection has the very intelligent purpose of taking the focus away from yourself and on to another so that you do not have to face your own emotional vulnerability.

It invites a sympathetic response from others, a protest that such is not the case and, sometimes, it provokes an increased effort on other people’s part to reassure you.

It reduces your own emotional expectations of others so that disappointment and hurt are reduced if affection is not forthcoming from others.

It provides a rationale for not taking the risk of expressing emotional needs.

I recall working with a young mother of four children who told me once that she ‘hated’ her children and her husband. She expressed deep guilt about these feelings. I reassured her that I had no doubt that there were very good reasons why she thought and felt in these ways about her children and partner. The protective function gradually began to emerge when she declared: ‘I don’t see how my children or husband could ever love me.’ By hating her children and husband, she protected herself from what she saw as their inevitable rejection of her. Other protective thinking present was that she saw herself as a ‘bad mother and wife’; this had the functions of not having to face into her deeply troubled self and the reduction of her own and others’ expectations of her as mother and spouse. Only when she learned to love and value herself did she let go of the protective cognitive and emotional behaviours she had displayed through most of her married life.

An example of the third type of ‘negative’ thinking, involving faulty judgments about the future, is ‘nothing will ever change’’‘’