A couple of months ago I was sitting talking with Heather in Deansgate Waterstones, the magic and conjuring books section right behind her, when she asked me was I serious about using Neuro-Linguistic Programming techniques to help myself. I said to her it offered useful techniques I thought might be helpful and was going to try them, but I didn't see it as the quasi-religious cure-all its founder and proponents promote it as.
I said there was a good brief and accurate description of NLP and its flaws in the mentalist Derren Brown's "
Tricks of the Mind" which should be on the shelves behind her. I got up and looked for it but it wasn't there.
A couple of weeks later I saw a second hand copy cheap in a local charity shop and bought it for her, but I haven't yet had the opportunity to give it to her.
This morning I was thumbing through the section on NLP when I came to these brief remarks of Brown's:
There is an NLP technique know as the "swish" pattern... ...it works not because it's a special technique, but rather because it apes very closely what would happen if you naturally felt self-confident in that situation, or if you just started to feel good there instead of bad. Plenty of people are fully able to make these shifts without recourse to a prescribed technique.
...
Self-help techniques can be enormously rewarding for some people, and self-evident for others. Gurus such as Tony Robbins make fortunes from motivational courses that are both amazing and sinister, but which boil down to an age-old and obvious adage: just get on with it. It's about do or don't do. In social life we are defined by our actions, not by our motives: our thoughts or intentions mean very little unless they lead to action. It's how we behave, or even sometimes how much we make the effort to be nice, that makes the difference. An obvious but much-missed point.
Reading this really drove it home to me how very little I have actually done, actually initiated in my adult life - and by adult I mean post-pubertal.
I'd managed to convince myself for a couple of decades that I'd not had the ambitions and drives of other people, for instance that I hadn't travelled because I didn't have the desire in me, that I was somehow lacking, but in the last few days I've remembered that in my late teens and early 20s I wanted to go to India, to Norway, to Germany, I specifically wanted to go to Russia, to Moscow and what was then Leningrad.
I didn't know how to arrange it, I didn't know anyone who did travel, outside of school trips, which I never went on because I assumed my parents were too poor to afford them. I had no idea how to travel, and later I was too skint, or so I thought - it never occurred to me that I could go abroad and work, which I now know I could have. I even decided that if I was going to go to Russia eventually I had better learn Russian. I remember writing a letter to Heather just after she got married with a line or two in Russian, although the only words I can remember from it are "moya padruga" which is "my [female] friend".
I also remembered my plans to leave home, my various plans, of what I must do should I get a place at Maidstone College of Art, my second choice, or Hull Poly, my absolute fall-back. I remembered my thoughts throughout my twenties of moving to London and house-sharing.
As Derren Brown noted above, intentions mean very little unless they lead to action. And in my case, out of timidity, out of fear, they didn't lead to action. But until this week I had forgotten that I had even entertained intentions. I had thought, what was lacking in me was that I didn't even have these longings.
Now I remember that I once did.
Two more painful realisations: last week, on being cornered into meeting Heather's boyfriend I found myself paradoxically encouraged and saddened. If she reads the following she will probably end up even more pissed off with me than I think she already is, but that's not to be helped if I'm to continue to be honest here.
I was encouraged because until I saw a photo of him a couple of weeks before, I had imagined - by default - a tall good-looking man with thick hair. On seeing him in the flesh I was shocked to see a very bald ectomorph who shared most of my facial faults, except more so. I saw someone who, were it not for my fatness, would be slightly my physical inferior. He was narrow and tall, but he was
too tall. I know I'm very bright, so this meant that my deficits in regard to his success were deficits of of motivation, of social status, of experience, and I realised that I could still address and improve some of these deficits.
And I was saddened because this meant that these deficits - which account for the gulf between everything this man has and what little I have - need not have come to be.
I realised that my whole adult life had been miserable for no good reason, that apart from being fat - which I could have changed had I had the willpower - what I looked like would not have mattered. If he has had a family and a successful career, I could also have had them, had I not had my confidence stripped out of me and replaced by fear and corrosive self-doubt by my father's many years of emotional Assault and Battery.
From what Heather has said and from my little personal experience of him, he has that only child quality of assuming that what he wishes is congruent with his entitlement and does not impact the situation and feelings of others. It's a big generalisation, but it's common to many only children and it fits.
That sense was taken from me as a child. The gifts of the only child, the gift of self-centred confidence, was taken from me by my mother, who was determined not to let me become a spoiled singleton. So I got the the social deficits of the only child, but not the self-confidence, self-reliance and cockiness.
Today I had a second realisation in regard to personal deficits and only-child status: I was loading a couple of photos of Berni from Tuesday into a facebook gallery, and having done so I decided to look at my cousin NataIie's many photo albums on Facebook: I saw hundreds of literal snapshots of her life, with her daughter, with her new man, with her dad my uncle, and with the many friends she has that I haven't met.
NataIie isn't thick, but she isn't outstandingly bright either. All my friends are bright and I struggle to talk to ordinary people because I find it hard to conceive how they can be interested in the nonsense they're interested in.
NataIie has her demons, some of which she's had since she was a little girl. But she functions well in the world, she springs back up from problems and tragedies, she has relationship and loves, she has a lovely daughter, she's had a series of good responsible jobs, she travels, she has fun.
Both Heather's boyfriend and NataIie are only children. But as far as I know they are social, functionally confident, and they are both in their own ways successful.
I am neither confident nor much good in social situations, and I am pessimistic to the point of paralysis and it has made a wasteland and a desolation of the last 30 years of my life, the best years, the years that should have been filled with children, wife, career, experience. Years that should have be filled with love, not an aching hole of need and despair.
Last year, in a series of conversations that finally led to her falling out with me, my friend Rh said that I had a very over-sensitive nature and that I should have been forced to socialise more as a young teenager so my edges would have got knocked off, and if my parents hadn't pushed me into it I should have sought itself out myself, gone to Youth Clubs and the like.
I felt ashamed and abashed hearing this, and it's only lately that I've thought not only did my parents not push me to socialise, to go to a Youth Club, but when I tried to initiate things myself, such as trying to join the Drama Club at Grammar School, I was inevitably rebuffed. As for Youth Clubs, I didn't even realise they existed outside old Cliff Richard films, until Natalie joined one when I was already past the age for them.
Natalie was encouraged by
her parents to join clubs, societies, the Brownies, the Guides.
As another instance I asked repeatedly as a child for my parents to let me join the Cubs, but they wouldn't let me, or just couldn't be arsed. They just idled away their lives watching TV, or should I say my dad did, while my mam sank into what I now recognise as depression, sleeping her evenings away on the Sofa, decade after decade. My dad didn't even go to the pub to drink with his mates. His mates, it turned out at the end of his life, were the other waster punters at the Bookies.
I was going to say my dad was a cunt, but a cunt brings life into the world, a cunt gives pleasure, a cunt is fecund, a cunt is warm and soft and strong. To call my idle, antisocial, weak, negative father a cunt is to insult women and the female genitals.
I found my way alone through education, secondary and higher, with no help or guidance from my parents. I went to clubs and discos and saw bands more or less as soon as I was old enough to, on my own mostly, without a gang to hang out with, again without much concern from my parents.
I was like the girl in the Beatles song "she's leaving home after living alone for so many years". I've only recently realised I've been on my own all my fucking life.
I did these things despite the idleness of my parents.
But it was always a struggle. And the struggle was against two inner feelings - that whatever I did, it would come to nothing, it would not work, and that whatever I did, it had to be done thoroughly and perfectly or it wasn't good enough, feelings my father had oppressed into me since I was a small child. I've written about this elsewhere so I'll say no more about it here.
So, I have remembered that I once did have the same desire to leave home, to go places, to have fun, that most people have, but it was squashed by a long indoctrination into negativity and unrealistic perfectionism.
I was shocked to read that line of Derren Brown's about naturally feeling good, feeling confident in a situation. It struck me powerfully that some people must be confident as a default, that they can have what they want, and if they're rebuffed or set back, it's temporary and they'll get it next go.
And most other people must feel like that sometimes.
I've been cornered into a narrow dark place where I feel that confidence
never. I'm going to have to fabricate using whatever I can, otherwise I'm stuck here.
So back to Derren Brown's "
Do or don't do".
I'm starting very late in life, from a position of disadvantage and poor health, and I'm still so afraid, but this is the only place I
can start from. I now know what I should have done when I was 18 or even 30 again, but I'm not 18, I'm 51 in a couple of months.
Given that I must start to
do, what are the things I
do? What do I
want to
do?
