The Babushkas
Our featured guest post is by Dr John Phillips, a retired General Practioner with a long time interest and experience in Mental Health
In many ways we resemble the Babushkas, the Russian dolls, one inside the other, each representing a different phase in our learning and growing.
You may have noticed on occasion how you can, at one moment, feel 6 ft tall and great. Yet, on hearing a single syllable from a voice on the telephone you feel very small as if you had suddenly shrunk to within a foot off the floor. Something coming from the phone has activated one of your earliest versions of you. All the mature versions of you seem to have suddenly become inaccessible, leaving you feeling inadequate to the situation and vulnerable. Similarly, you may notice that someone else makes heavy weather of a problem that you think is very minor. It might have been the facts that were communicated to you that achieved this feeling; but it is far more likely that a particular voice, or even a certain tone in one word, or in a real life situation just a raised eyebrow, has suddenly triggered a conditioned reflex laid down years ago.
What has happened is that one’s unconscious mind in activating a previously learned defence, programmed for this situation, has in order to access it, momentarily restored your psyche and emotional state to the time when you first learned it, and by default has at the same time cut you off from all that you have learned since.
Whether a problem seems overwhelming or minor has far more to so with the ‘size’ of the version of you that you bring to bear in dealing with it, than the size of the problem.
Our idea of who we are consists, apart from a set of personal values and beliefs, of a ragbag of past, largely out of date responses, along with more recent and, hopefully, more mature and relevant learning and understanding. Unfortunately, many of these more recent learnings are categorised by us as simple competences to be used in the specific contexts for which we learned them, e.g. for handling the public as part of a job, and have not yet been incorporated into our beliefs about who we have become. All too frequently we have retained the old outmoded responses, learnt in childhood as almost unconscious frames of references as to who we BELIEVE that we still are.
Habits of behaviour that were learnt long ago to deal with past events, while the best we could come up with at the time, are now inferior to newer learnings. The retention of the old beliefs that we ‘imagine’ to be an integral part of who we are now, and our failure to fully incorporate our more mature learnings into our belief systems, allows this regression to occur.
I was once told by a patient that they were painfully shy, to which I replied that I also was shy at heart. She looked at me in amazement and told me that she thought I was one of the most confident and outgoing people she had ever met. As I later reflected on this, it seemed to me that it was as if my young years were like a small one room cottage tinged with shyness, but later at primary school becoming surrounded by an extension, that then developed an upper story with secondary school, a new wing at university, another as a Doctor, and more as a parent. The patient saw only the magnificent edifice from the outside, and knew nothing about the little cottage now only accessible in the basement by unlocking a door going down a secret spiral staircase and then unlocking the door into the cottage.
"I still thought of that cottage being part of the real me"
Yet I still thought of that cottage being part of the real me, and all the other additions and attributes as mere competences that I had developed, but then realised that in order to access this shyness I had to time travel back into the past and pretend it was still me; and so although the patients view of me was incomplete, their view of me was in this respect more accurate than my own.