At The Water's Edge
Families And How To Survive Them By John Cleese & Robin Skynner
Families And How To Survive Them is another book which I bought in the late nineties and quite enjoyed it then but when I read it again recently it started to make a lot more sense. What I think is most memorable for me is the description of what is called the Family Systems Exercise which is where a group of stangers pick out eachother on the basis of being reminded of one of their family (non of the participants were related) without talking. The striking result is that nearly all of the couples and then the larger groups that were formed subsequently (by couples selecting eachother without talking) all had fundamental things in common with respect to their childhoods and family. Even those that couldn't pick or were not picked had in common the fact that they had been rejected early on in their lives. Invariably in my life, I have been drawn to people who have had similar experiences to me in their childhoods (i.e. lost a parent when young) and they have usually become good friends.
The book goes on to say that if because of some trauma a developmental stage is missed then the individual can feel unbalanced about certain emotions and will screen them off (I think this is analgous to what Jung referred to as the shadow. And similarly people are drawn to eachother because they have "similar shadows" actually specificaly they're drawn to what is on show (i.e. human nature minus their individual shadows which amounts to the same). The same can result when families have a certain emotion which is taboo such as anger or affection: people will be drawn to eachother because they recognise the other has that emotion screened off.
There is much else that I like about this book. Although it is a very "matter of fact", empirical and clinically-based it also seems to corroborate the other books in Clues. Some examples:
- "... although we all want to be loved by our families and not display feelings that upset them, we also have a keen hunger to be whole, to be complete."
- "... because of the danger we somehow sense that the feelings behind it (the screen in front of the "shadow") - anger, jealousy, fear or whatever - may slip out if we're not on guard. So a bit of you is always keeping a sharp look-out for an enemy you can't see. Even though you don't know why, you can never completely relax, and that makes you tense and tired. The feelings are always lurking there behind the screen, and the effort to keep them out of sight, out of mind, is connected with all sorts of psychomatic illnesses - headaches, stomach-aches and indigestion, high blood pressure, some kinds of rheumatism, and so on."
- "...people like this use their opponents as dustbins, somewhere they can dump all of the bits of themselves that they can't accept..... while they're hating they can keep their screens down and avoid seeing their own faults."
