Category: Behaviour

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Autobiography Behaviour

Edward Heath – ‘I was robbed!’

British Conservative leader Edward Heath at th...
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In all societies it is much easier to copy others than to be yourself. When I was a therapist I found that most of those who came to see me were not happy with their lives yet do not want to pay the price for learning how to make the best of themselves. Two common excuses were they wanted to find a partner “I would be fine if I had someone to come home to” and “just help me to get better by curing my phobias, anorexia, obesity, inability to make friends or whatever”. When I told them I do not do miracles they spent their time with me doing their best to avoid what they needed to understand. It was frustrating work. Some left after a while and a few eventually managed to work things out for themselves with my guidance.

Earlier in my life I ran my second-hand bookshop in the centre of Cambridge and it was amazingly successful. The day I opened there was a queue from the shop to the Round Church. My son and I spent a lot of time travelling looking for books and doing book fairs. We had many customers including some well-known people.

Saturday was the busiest day of the week. One afternoon at about 3 o’clock I looked out of the window and saw Edward Heath [ex British PM – ed], flanked on either side by two stalwart men dressed in black. I assumed they were bodyguards. He was looking straight at my shop window. This is a man I never liked. I hoped he would not come into the shop. But he did. Every inch of the floor space, including the basement, was packed with customers.

I was behind the counter. He came straight up to me with his usual expressionless face. I forced out a smile and said to him “Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Heath?”

“Yes” he said “Would you tell me how much I should pay for a Speede map of Kent?”

I said “For a first edition?”

“Yes” he said

“It would cost you about £700 pounds.”I replied.

He turned to his two men and said “I think I’ve been robbed!”

I couldn’t believe my ears. I reacted quickly from my high horse. By this time the voices of the customers had subdued somewhat as they noticed what was going on. With a sweet smile I said in a very loud voice “Oh I understand, Mr. Heath. What you want is a free valuation!”

Everyone was silent. Mr.Heath turned a bright puce and strode out of the door followed by his men. An explosion of laughter broke out and the customers clapped energetically. Clearly they disliked this man as much as I did.

Out of this event something very useful happened. One of my regular customers came up to the desk and congratulated me. Then he told me that an old aunt of his had died and would I like to come and have a look at her library. He said that he would usually have asked more than one bookseller for an offer but he was so impressed by the way I managed Mr. Heath that he would accept whatever I suggested. At that time the right kind of old books were getting very hard to find. I paid more money for them than I had ever paid before. It was just what I needed at that time. Here was a man who did not know how important it is to behave well to those who elected him.

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Categories
Behaviour Conversation Analysis Meaning of Words

Hello and Hello are different

We all have bits of talk that we have picked up from listening to the people around us. They are so familiar to us that we don’t have to think about them or their meaning. A lot of this phatic talk is to do with greetings and showing that you are pleased to meet people. If someone we know well fails to reply we at once ask ourselves “Have I done something to upset her or didn’t she hear me?” Which shows just how important greetings are. The tone of voice also matters.

A long time ago when I was at university our Spanish department room was very small and right at the top of a wide spiral staircase. One day, when it was time for my years’ lectures, a steady stream of us made our way up and passed another group coming down rather faster. I was saying “Hello” over and over again. When we got to the top of the stairs the girl just behind spoke to me.

“It’s easy to see who you like and who you don’t” she said. “What do you mean?” I replied. She laughed. “Every one of your “Hellos” was different. They varied from just above a whisper to a hearty laughing tone.

I learned two things. One, that I was not aware of this at all. I have always formed strong feelings for or against the people I meet but I had never realised how much I give away by the warmth or not of my greeting. The second thing I learned was that my friend was an acute observer of what was going on around her, especially people she liked. This made her one of a very small group of my friends. I also notice such minute things but I didn’t notice them in myself.

People who are sensitive to fine details are usually those who turn into writers. Without realising it they accumulate a wealth of small events with people and nature and they never forget them. When I began to work as a psychotherapist I had no difficulty at all in getting into a state of rapport with my clients. I thought that was normal in my profession. Other people who had trained with me began to ring me up after a few months to ask me how I was getting on. “Fine!” I said, They were amazed because they found it difficult to talk to complete strangers. Once again I realised that something I took for granted was quite rare. By the same token, when I first bought a computer when I was studying for my PhD, I found it very difficult indeed. My two sons and two grandsons kept telling me how easy it was much to my chagrin. I am now on my fourth computer and at last I have mastered all the basics I need for my work but I still quail when something goes wrong and I feel helpless.

I came to the conclusion that this sort of thing is part of why people do not get on together. Yet it can be overcome easily when both parties accept the simple fact that no two people are alike in everything. Like a lot of things that appear obvious, many people won’t accept them.

Categories
Behaviour Children

Let it be

The whole of this last century the study of the importance of conversation has been ignored except for the work of Harvey Sacks and those who followed him. Without Sacks’ work we haven’t been able to focus enough on helping people to think for themselves and to discover what are their own particular qualities that they can get enthusiastic about.

If you have had an excess of people telling you things, beliefs and attitudes and lists of rules that you must obey, most of them contrary to your well being, you can easily lose your enthusiasm and it is hard to retrieve. Enthusiasm is a Greek word and it means inspired by the gods. All creative people have this quality and there is plenty of room for many more if children were given enough freedom to focus on what they like doing best. I love the Indian word ‘namaste’ which means “I honour the god within you.”

All children are enthusiasts otherwise they wouldn’t want to do anything. I go to my favourite supermarket, Waitrose, at least three times a week, not only to shop but also to sit down with a cup of coffee and enjoy looking at all the people around me. It is a big part of my ongoing research, watching people and families. When children have good parents who care for them it is a joy to see them running around looking at and touching all sorts of things, enjoying themselves. It is inevitable that we all must learn to find a place for ourselves in whatever society we were born into. We don’t seem to be very good at it. Why do so many people lose their lust for life as they grow older?

I dislike the whole idea of gurus and experts because it doesn’t matter how much any of us know we never know it all. We can learn something new from a child or any person we happen to meet if we want to. We all have something to give and so when a psychotherapist and a client are working together they cannot help to learn something from each other regardless of the outcome. All transactions in conversations are, one way or another, educative.

Categories
Behaviour Psychotherapy

Yes But, No But…

One of the very best books about human relationships is called “The Games People Play”. It was first published by Dr Eric Berne in 1964. Dr Berne called his method of doing psychotherapy Transactional Analysis. It was enormously popular in the United States. Unlike most books about psychotherapy he became a best-seller. It is not surprising. You don’t have to know anything about psychology to read it. It is hilariously funny and at the same time very serious. It is amazing that his method has not become the most popular in Great Britain.

It is all about the devices we humans dream up to get our own way. We are all vulnerable to flattery though some of us are more so than others. If we want to get good results as a psychotherapist we need to know how to deal with all kinds of strategies that our clients try out on us. Here are two examples:

“Gee you’re wonderful professor!” Years ago when I was a bookseller and spent many happy week-ends with a group of friends in hotels in different cities in the UK looking for books and selling my own. I was very popular. I was always being asked to go for coffee with my male colleagues. A new friend was sardonically watching me. He said “Why does everyone like you? Haven’t you got any enemies?” Needless to say I didn’t know what to say. I was dumbstruck.

“Why does this happen?” I said. “Because you have a halo round your head and on it is written in large letters ‘MOTHER’.” Just what many men and women are looking for: only they don’t realise it. Nor did I.

I remembered what he said. I didn’t like everybody and I ought to behave accordingly. I soon collected a few enemies. I felt better. Thirty years on he is now an old friend.

When I began my work as a therapist I met several clients who responded to me as my bookseller friends did. But I knew what to do to take the attention away from me and get them to do the work for themselves.

After the first few visits, some clients, both men and women said “I love working with you. I can’t wait for the days to pass so I can come again.” This is an example of “Gee you’re wonderful professor!” It is vital that a therapist must deal with this, or you would never get anywhere with such a person. My response was “Don’t you believe it!” Once we got down to serious work some stopped coming early and a few stopped putting me on a pedestal, learned to take care of themselves and didn’t need Mummy any more.

The second example is “Yes but”. It is commonplace in psychotherapy. One client had been to me for 4/5 sessions. Usually people will take up something each time, go away and think about it.

There are people, believe it or not, who pay good money to psychotherapists to prove them wrong. This one went back to the beginning every time. When we got to the sixth session I challenged him. “You don’t really want to change, do you?”

“Yes I do!” So I went on offering him some alternatives, as I had done before and every time he rejected it with the words “Yes but”. Then I stopped. “I’m feeling very frustrated” I said. “Why should you feel frustrated? All you’ve got to do is sit and listen” he said. I replied “Let’s switch roles. You’re Jean and I’m you.” He found it very difficult. ”Go on then. You must know by now what I say.” So he started off and every time he made a suggestion I said “Yes but”. I could see he was getting angrier and angrier. At last I said “How do you feel?” “Very frustrated.” “Now you know that’s how I feel when someone says “yes but” over and over again.” He didn’t come back, to my relief. You can’t force people to respond. He wasn’t ready to face his problems. At least he had learned something about how other people feel.

Categories
Behaviour Children Education

Perfection is a Waste of Time

You won’t believe this but Ofsted has interfered so much in education, with pressure from the government, that at the beginning of each new academic year all teachers in comprehensive schools are obliged to attend the day before to be taught how to teach no matter how much or how little experience they have had. The result is that many of the best teachers feel very frustrated and look for another job or take the earliest retirement they can whilst the worst, who don’t mind being told what to do, stay on. The truth is that teaching, like writing, music and all kinds of creative activities are inherited abilities, just as we all have the mental capacity to be able to learn to speak and we all learn to do so in our own individual way.

So it follows that the the best teachers have their own methods learned from their own inherited talents and experiences. Three of the greatest in the field of language, Saussure, Wittgenstein and Harvey Sacks, were all innovators. They were from different countries: Saussure was Swiss, Wittgenstein was German and Sacks was American. Saussure discovered that words are signs and symbols that stand for all things, people and ideas. Wittgenstein taught us that the meaning of words depends on the contexts in which the words are used and Sacks agreed with Wittgenstein and contributed his work on Conversation Analysis in all social talk in many situations.

Could you imagine any of these great men allowing anyone to tell them what to do? Certainly not. We should show the same respect to our teachers as was the case before the 1950’s when I was at school. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Standards have dropped drastically. Useful subjects are largely left out, especially English grammar, Latin and foreign languages. Note these are all the humanities on which we build the foundations of our ability to think clearly and understand human nature and the bases of our own cultures.

We must not let ourselves be taken in by examination results. Anyone who wants to can rig them and they do. Who are making the judgements? Many of those whose education has suffered from the constantly lowering standards of the last few decades. They are the people who think they are right and that there is only one way of doing things according to their own prejudices.

More than ever standards are dropping in the fine arts.

However it is not all doom and gloom. For example, no-one tells conductors what to do yet they work in perfect harmony and this is recognised by the constantly filled Halls of the most popular music, including those from the past as well as the present.

Simon Rattle is, I think, one of the best. On the radio he was asked the question “How do you manage the orchestra?” His answer was “I’m constantly challenging the orchestra to do better. But they are also challenging me, so it’s a series of continual failures.”

This is a sharp reminder that nothing is perfect. All researchers have to bear this in mind. We learn more from our failures than from our successes. The more times we get something wrong the further we move towards success. What do we do when that is over? All who are worth their salt start to look for a further challenge.

Categories
Behaviour

Strangers

Some thirty years ago I opened a shop for prints and posters in Cambridge in King’s Parade. A wonderful site. Every now and then I held exhibitions for new artists whose works I liked. As a result the shop became enormously popular. My customers said “Why can’t I find such an interesting collection anywhere else?” The answer to that was clear. I only ever bought work that I liked myself. Whenever a rep came to show me his wares I would look through his books very quickly since I always knew at once when I liked something and when I didn’t. It got to the point when I badly wanted to paint again. I began to feel that I could paint well if I could find the right teacher.

Sadly, I had to give up my business for reasons that had nothing to do with me. However this,was one of those blessings in disguise that Jung called synchronicity. Much as I had enjoyed my three shops which enabled me to help bring up our three children, I felt it was time for a change. I had always wanted to be a psychotherapist and I set myself up in private practice.

Once again I had made a choice that I badly needed and I soon began to enjoy my new career and earn money. Now was the time for me to find a good art teacher. I saw an article in The Daily Telegraph about a man who had achieved remarkable results as Head of Art in a well-known public school in Wiltshire. He wanted to retire early to teach older people privately. I wrote off to him straight away and so did some 400 other people. I regularly went for art lessons with a remarkably able teacher. over a period of five years. I had always believed I could be an artist if I could ever find a good teacher. I was right.

Robin would sometimes run a weekly course away from his base. He chose to do one in Cambridge to give his students the chance to paint some beautiful views and architecture. Of course I went.

Our easels were set up in a room in one of the colleges. After a while I went out to get myself a drink. Outside in an adjacent smaller room than ours sat a solitary lady painting. Following my usual habit of wanting to know what was going on around me, I asked her if she was one of us. She looked up at me with a face that reminded me of a stuck-insider. She just said “Yes.” Curious as ever I said “Why aren’t you painting with us?” A pause. “Well I came in late.”

“You have a foreign accent. Would you mind telling me where you come from?”

She frowned and said “I come from Germany. “Why do you ask so many questions?” I felt that she didn’t want to tell me. After another pause I said “Why did you come to England?” Her face tightened up a few notches. “Well, I am Jewish”. Her words were delivered in as much of an aggressive way as she could manage.

Now I had got my answer and understood why she guarded her privacy. Like most of the rest of us she was old enough to have had to get away from Germany in time. “I am getting a cup of tea. May I get one for you too, or coffee if you prefer?” We drank together and she softened. We had a pleasant chat and her manner changed.

I was pleased that she opened up to me. It was worth the trouble. The more I start a conversation with one of these outsiders the more confident I feel. When you meet a stranger and speak to him or her first you never know what will happen and what locked doors may open. My research is not all reading and studying at home, I keep my eyes and ears open in all kinds of places I learn more and more about people and I know not to hold back when I see something interesting. Research isn’t only reading and thinking it is also learning from everyday experiences with other people.

Categories
Behaviour Meaning of Words Your Dark Side

Understand Your Dark Side

Dreams have always fascinated people because they feel that something is happening to them over which they have no control. There have always been people who will try to interpret other people’s dreams. The fact is that dreams are made by the people who dream them. They are the only ones who know what they mean but they don’t consciously know.

I have been trying to interpret my own dreams for many years. When I got it right I always knew and when I got it wrong I also knew, because there are many aspects of ourselves that remain unconscious until we work on them. Sometimes we can get help from a psychotherapist or someone who knows you very well, but if you can, it is better to find out for yourselves. It is a worthwhile task because the better we know ourselves the more power we have over our lives, especially in decision-making.

Freud was very interested in dreams. Quite a few of his ideas turned out to be wrong later: in particular, wishful thinking. It appears that we don’t dream for what we want but for who we are.

Here is a short list of some characteristics of dreams:

Everyone in our dreams is ourself, just as when we are awake we see others through our own lenses.

Our dreams are directly related to what we unconsciously noticed the day before. We all do this when we talk with other people. We don’t just talk but also may have deep emotions brought about by the talk. Have you noticed that you react very differently to different people? How we are affected teaches us more about ourselves. Dreams can do this, but it is all in a coded form. The unconscious won’t give up its secrets so easily.

Time and places get distorted. I once had a dream just like a story, about me of course. When I woke up I remembered everything vividly and I felt as though a year had gone by. I gleaned rich material from that dream.

Violent and frightening dreams are not uncommon. When we remember that most of us are taught to be ‘good’ one way or another it is hardly surprising that we tend to push our anger and hatred underground.

Dreams set them free. We all need to accept every aspect of ourselves. We are less likely to behave badly and criticise others if we have acknowledged our own dark side.

One of Freud’s best findings was how humour works in dreams, especially puns. Here is a short story:

Arthur, a gay man and Jane, a straight woman, very quickly became very good friends. They went out together and spent hours talking about music and books. One day Arthur said to Jane “This must be hard for you because you are attracted to men ad I am not attracted to women.”

Jane felt angry. That night she had a dream:

They were having dinner out together. Arthur chose plaice. Jane said she would like plaice too. “No” said the waiter “There is no plaice for you here.” The message of this dream is unusually clear.

Categories
Behaviour Friends

Where's my Dad?

Simple speech exchanges are easy to manage on the whole. None of us really want to be stuck-insiders. We are pack animals. We cannot come into our own as individuals without learning about how other people live. We have to have a benchmark against which we can find out who we are. After all, we are all in the same boat and have many things in common. Whenever I open a conversation with someone I’ve never met before I am very careful about what I say until I have begun to understand him or her better. I stick to small talk until then. When I was much younger and wanted to find friends of my own I relied on my first impressions and made lots of mistakes.

My judgements were not good and I didn’t know why. I wished I had had an identical twin. Why? Because what I most yearned for was to be able to share my thoughts and ideas with her. Looking back I realised how much better I understood myself. Would I have been able to be best friends with her? How would we deal with the dark side of our natures? That would not be something I could anticipate. One of the joys of a good friendship when both people have much in common, including the same kind of intelligence and attitudes to life, is to be able to learn from each other.

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I began to make friends. I was sitting in my bookshop in Bedford with my name over the window. The door flew open and a six foot four giant strode in. His personality was overwhelming, he had sparkling and penetrating brown eyes and a mass of black hair. He looked like my idea of a pirate. “Hello Jean Pain” he said. “I’m Jerry Planus. Put the kettle on and make us a cup of tea.” There was nothing conventional about him. He might have come out of a picture book. We talked non-stop for a good hour, exchanging a brief outline of each others’ lives. I felt as though I had known him for years.

That was the beginning, I made five more men friends, equally unusual, when I opened my shop in Cambridge. It felt like a band of brothers and I was treated as such. When I finally decided to get myself analysed with a Jungian analyst, I discovered something very important. One day he said to me “You tell me about your men friends but you never mention anything about a woman friend. Why is that?”

“I don’t know” I said. “I don’t understand. I am a normal woman in as much as I am married and have three children I love dearly.”

“Well” he said. “From what you have told me about your father and brother, it is clear that you had little respect for them.”

“That is quite right” I said. “Both are dead and it saddens me that I haven’t missed them. They played no real parts in my life.”

“So this looks as though you are trying to do some repair work by making men friends you do respect.”

I knew at once that he was quite right.

Categories
Behaviour Friends

Where’s my Dad?

Simple speech exchanges are easy to manage on the whole. None of us really want to be stuck-insiders. We are pack animals. We cannot come into our own as individuals without learning about how other people live. We have to have a benchmark against which we can find out who we are. After all, we are all in the same boat and have many things in common. Whenever I open a conversation with someone I’ve never met before I am very careful about what I say until I have begun to understand him or her better. I stick to small talk until then. When I was much younger and wanted to find friends of my own I relied on my first impressions and made lots of mistakes.

My judgements were not good and I didn’t know why. I wished I had had an identical twin. Why? Because what I most yearned for was to be able to share my thoughts and ideas with her. Looking back I realised how much better I understood myself. Would I have been able to be best friends with her? How would we deal with the dark side of our natures? That would not be something I could anticipate. One of the joys of a good friendship when both people have much in common, including the same kind of intelligence and attitudes to life, is to be able to learn from each other.

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I began to make friends. I was sitting in my bookshop in Bedford with my name over the window. The door flew open and a six foot four giant strode in. His personality was overwhelming, he had sparkling and penetrating brown eyes and a mass of black hair. He looked like my idea of a pirate. “Hello Jean Pain” he said. “I’m Jerry Planus. Put the kettle on and make us a cup of tea.” There was nothing conventional about him. He might have come out of a picture book. We talked non-stop for a good hour, exchanging a brief outline of each others’ lives. I felt as though I had known him for years.

That was the beginning, I made five more men friends, equally unusual, when I opened my shop in Cambridge. It felt like a band of brothers and I was treated as such. When I finally decided to get myself analysed with a Jungian analyst, I discovered something very important. One day he said to me “You tell me about your men friends but you never mention anything about a woman friend. Why is that?”

“I don’t know” I said. “I don’t understand. I am a normal woman in as much as I am married and have three children I love dearly.”

“Well” he said. “From what you have told me about your father and brother, it is clear that you had little respect for them.”

“That is quite right” I said. “Both are dead and it saddens me that I haven’t missed them. They played no real parts in my life.”

“So this looks as though you are trying to do some repair work by making men friends you do respect.”

I knew at once that he was quite right.

Categories
Behaviour Parents

Are You Afraid?

What should we be defending ourselves against? All the things that have happened to us that have caused us pain and unhappiness starting from the beginning of our lives. The earlier the experience the greater the effect on the rest of our lives. I have often been asked “How could something that happened such a long time ago still affect our lives by making us suffer?” The answer is simple. When we are born, all we bring with us are the genes we inherit from our ancestors: not just from our parents but all the rest of the people who came before them. Are you a musician and surprise your family because they have no interest at all in this art? If you could go back far enough you would find a musical antecedent.

I was so different from both my parents in so many ways that I was convinced that my real parents were somewhere else. From a very early age, say about three or four years old I discovered that my parents could not answer the myriad of questions I put to them. Decades later I was listening to an interview on the radio to celebrate the seventieth birthday of the pianist, Alfred Brendel, one of my favourites. To my delight he said that he had almost nothing in common with either of his parents. His experience was similar to my own. The only time his mother was delighted about his music was when he was presented to the Queen of England.

He said that he was fortunate enough to have managed to forget everything his parents had tried to teach him! My experience was identical. My interests meant nothing to my parents. I cannot remember any words of wisdom coming from either of them. Everything I learned was in the books I read. All my friends were therefore dead ones. I developed a powerful gift for self hypnosis that enabled me to go into another world of my own where I could cut off anything I found disagreeable. That was my defence mechanism, to work things out for myself and to question everything teachers tried to teach me, except for the ones that interested me.

Defence mechanisms can be positive or negative. The positive mechanism is much shorter than the negative one, which is much longer, laden down with phobias of all kinds. They are negative because they don’t give you something you can take away. For example, claustrophobia is a good excuse for getting out of any groups of people in restricted places, but that can cause you to lose something that might be useful to yourself.

There are effective ways in psychotherapy to deal with such things, but it takes courage and cooperation from the clients to overcome such useless fears.

My defence mechanism prevented me from talking and making friends from fear of having nothing in common with anyone else. I went into another world when I was studying and thus I developed from a very early age a very useful skill. I learned to concentrate deeply on everything that interested me. In addition, as I grew older, my curiosity about people and their strange ways led me into making myself meet people I could talk with about my work.

Since then my main interest is human behaviour and thought. Unwittingly, I learned to think logically and keep my strong feelings under control. Just the kind of temperament that makes a good psychotherapist.

The best thing I learned from my strange childhood was to be independent and to trust my own judgement, whilst at the same time I maintained an open mind. Difficulties in childhood, as long as we have parents who are basically kind and do not try to force their opinions on us, as my parents were, can be overcome by ourselves. The help I got was from books and not from people.