Reflections on Bad Blood (Lorna Sage)

I really enjoyed Lorna Sage’s (2001) prize-winning memoir Bad Blood and there are several aspects to that enjoyment that I want to share with you.

Firstly, what a brilliant memory she had. To be able to describe her childhood in such photographic detail is an immensely valuable skill. Apparently Lorna Sage (LS) took almost ten years to write this memoir and was prompted in part by having such vivid memories of her growing-up years as well as finding her grandfather’s diaries. I’m not sure which I enjoyed more – the descriptions of grandfather’s wickedness and the disaster that was the marriage between him and grandma or Lorna’s account of her teenage years and her own disaster (which turned out in many ways to be a blessing in disguise).

But I’m jumping ahead. Here are the opening lines:

Grandfather’s skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the vestry, excuses for getting out of the vicarage (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn’t get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his.

I love the way she hooks her readers from the very start. I read this in bursts and the measure of its success is the fact that I want to go off and read a whole lot more memoirs.

The second aspect of my enjoyment is perhaps more of an academic one but I loved the way she captures the complex interplay of the individual and the social in making up identity. Here we have three generations, all extremely relevant to each other, and there’s a wonderful cultural richness in her accounts of what it was like to live in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Family, church, school, community, friends – they all work together to construct that complex subjectivity.

From the perspective of psychology, and psychodynamic psychotherapy in particular, the negotiation of identity and the social and individual construction of subjectivity is an immensely fascinating subject. The cultural imperatives of the time meant that grandfather and grandmother were both trapped in what we would stereotype as a loveless marriage unless he was prepared to give up his position at the vicarage and she was prepared to give up her relative comfort. He turned to his vices (women, smoking, drinking perhaps) while she made do with her own sacraments of ‘a toasted teacake and a cup of tea’ and blackmailing him to support her movie-watching habit.

The second generation, LS’s mom and dad, experience far greater freedom but are also constrained by class and opportunity and circumstances. Interestingly, Lorna’s mother tastes a bit of freedom and empowerment during the war years and then is forced back into a more subservient role behind Lorna’s dad, who is both admirable and slightly pathetic with his war record and his own struggling business and his attempts at being in control.

The third aspect of Bad Blood that I loved was the way she brought in her love of literature, and combined it with gender politics. To read, and to be intelligent, and to love books as a teenage girl at that time was to marginalise yourself and that marginal position was compounded by her own fall from grace. Falling pregnant at the age of sixteen (which still somehow manages to retain an air of innocence about it) makes her an outsider, from where she gets to observe herself and her surroundings with a wonderfully sharp (and witty) eye.

And it is LS’s very disgraced nature that allows her to identify with all the other rebels in the world of literature. LS lists Milton’s Paradise Lost as one of the works that influenced her the most.

Another theme that I would pick out is that of conforming and resistance. If identities are constructed in countless ways through families, schools, churches, peers, friendships, neighbourhoods and the broader culture, then here we see the actors play with these identities and wrestle with the limits of what is and is not allowed. Grandmother goes to the movies and the real story that interests her is the ongoing story of the actors themselves. Jean Harlow is now having it off with another man on screen and this confirms for her that men are fickle and not to be trusted. Schoolgirls are required to wear uniforms but spend endless hours accessorising and subverting them. When Lorna and her best friend Gail hold hands they are seen as lesbians in the eyes of the boys. (I was also interested in my own reaction here since I was sure somehow that LS was a lesbian and that the story would gradually reveal this to be the case. Perhaps it was the picture of her with Angela Carter at the back of the book, or it was her defiance of conventions.)

The last aspect of Bad Blood which I loved (and which forced me to take periodic breaks to recover and take it all in) was the way it returned me to my own childhood and adolescence in a new way. That brilliant description of her first school dance for example had me laughing as well as cringing with embarrassment at the memories of my own matric dance.

All in all, one of the reading highlights of the year for me. Thanks, fellow Slaves.

Mirror socks and giant vuvuzelas

Cape Town stadium as seen in the mirror

Yesterday was a good day, which makes the shock of Monday morning that much greater. This morning didn’t start well. I knew when my alarm went off at 5.45am that I needed to make a concerted effort to get to work in time for 7am rollcall. But when the electronic gate didn’t open and I had to find the key and then shoo the geckos out of the motor and then write a note for my neighbours and all this at 6 o’clock in the morning I was pretty sure that I would be late. And I hate being late, especially since I got some ‘feedback’ on Friday that I am often late.

Friday was a horror. Compulsory staff workshop in the afternoon at which I battled to stay awake and almost had to prop up my eyelids with matchsticks to avoid embarrassing snoring. I eventually settled on writing down random words which the presenter said (but which I couldn’t bring myself to attend to) and trying to stay awake that way. It wasn’t pleasant and I was partly to blame for having two slices of cake over lunch. But what got me rattled (and I seem to rattle easily these days) is that we were forced to give anonymous feedback to each other about our strengths and weaknesses.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Presenter C, ‘the feedback will be anonymous and I’ll find a way to use it creatively.’

That’s OK then, I thought, the Major won’t see that this feedback is from me. I can happily write away and perhaps the presenter will pool all the comments on a flipchart. What a relief.

‘But I don’t want to see ten strengths and only one weakness’, continued Presenter C sternly. And like a fool I complied, dutifully writing an almost equal-length list on both sides.

The idea of anonymity in a small sickbay like ours is a bit laughable though. With only one psychologist in the group, who else is going to use words like defensive, self-esteem and conflict management? And of course handwriting is pretty easy to decipher as well.

The ‘creative’ way that the presenter thought of to share this feedback was to simply walk over to each person and, with a small delay, hand them their ‘feedback’. Shock and horror. My piece of paper (in a handwriting I know well) said that I was temperamental and often late. Fair enough. There were positive comments too but it was the negative ones that stood out.

And then I was too mortified to see how the Major took my constructive comments that she was perhaps stubborn, defensive, avoids conflict and that she sometimes appears to lack self-confidence. The sugar and my resentment worked together (along with the boring content) and for the rest of the session I was away in my own world, trying to stay awake.

Fast forward to this morning and I’m trying to be on time in order to show that I’m addressing this weakness in my character. Although of course I didn’t have to. I could have happily agreed that I am often late and that I quite like it, since I get to miss standing to attention during the national anthem on a Monday for example. It’s no big deal. Oh, if only I was as laidback as that.

But on to other things. The picture above shows Cape Town stadium as reflected in my car mirror, decorated with mirror socks in the spirit of the World Cup. Quite a few cars have these mirror socks and also flags and the spirit is if not quite at fever pitch then well on the way.

To give you another idea of the football fever that is set to become seriously over-cooked in the next month or so, I give you … the giant vuvuzela.

This is like a giant kid’s toy which has been dropped on the uncompleted freeway near the Waterfront. Hyundai clearly spotted a gap in the market for such a toy and combined it with a giant electronic scoreboard so that we can all see how many days there are to the World Cup. Apparently the giant kids who will be operating this device promise to blow a big, loud blast of hot air whenever there is a goal scored at the Cape Town stadium.

Couchtripping

Kirstenbosch top gate waves the flag

There’s a general sense of expectation in the air as we count down the days to the Soccer World Cup in South Africa. Even Kirstenbosch top-gate is getting in the flag-waving spirit as we noticed on our walk yesterday. The World Cup also means that we (as military health personnel) are not allowed to take leave until the end of July, by which time I will probably need to deploy to Sudan for three months. I think I’m in denial about that and have done very little by way of preparation.

Today I also want to show you my new couch, which was delivered last week. I’m really pleased with it and also my ‘therapy chairs’ for when I finally get round to starting a private practice.

And then another exciting development has been the transformation of my garden. At the start of the year, this was what my front flower-bed looked like.

Now I don’t have a picture of what that bed looks like now (better, with living plants as opposed to dying ones) but I do have a picture of the side of my house, which has been transformed thanks to my mom. She organised the builder for the deck and the trellis and the paving-stones and her gardener planted some new plants (honeysuckle, clivia etc.)

The next transformation that will need to take place is that of me, from a reluctant gardener who associates watering of plants with teenage chores to a patient and enthusiastic nurturer of plants.

I’ll be back shortly with a review of “Bad Blood” by Lorna Sage, which I read for the Slaves discussion. The positive psychology follow-up will have to wait until I finish the Fredrickson book.

Some thoughts on Positive Psychology I

“I’ve spent my life working on extremely miserable people and I’ve asked the question, “How do extremely miserable people differ from the rest of you?” And starting about six years ago we asked about extremely happy people and how do they differ from the rest of us? And it turns out there’s one way, very surprising – they’re not more religious, they’re not in better shape, they don’t have more money, they’re not better looking. The one way they differ is they’re extremely social …” (Martin Seligman, TED Talk, 2004)

Martin Seligman is the founder of the Positive Psychology movement and the Director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. A respected, admired, successful, charismatic and inspirational figure in psychology, Seligman is also a bit of a showman. And I suspect that he is occasionally economical with the truth. It’s not strictly true for example that he’s spent his life working on extremely miserable people. It might be true to say that he has spent most of his career researching depression prior to Positive Psychology. But I was interested to find out one of the other things he was doing before he became the guru of positive emotion and positive psychology.

Seligman developed his theory of “learned helplessness” through experimenting on dogs. From around 1967, he and his colleagues would apply “intense electrical shocks to the dogs causing them to howl and involuntarily urinate. They [the dogs] were left with no options to avoid the pain and an understanding that it would continue with no relief” (Wikipedia). When the dogs were subsequently faced with an option to get away from the pain, their previous conditioning meant that they carried on enduring the shocks rather than seeking to avoid them. This form of “learned helplessness” could be seen to apply equally well to depressed humans. Seligman then addressed the flip-side of learned helplessness which is “learned optimism”, from where it was a relatively short step to focusing generally on a broader range of positive emotions.

Positive Psychology (PP) as a whole focuses on the empirical study of positive emotions, strengths-based character, and healthy institutions and positive psychologists seek not just to treat mental illness but “to make normal life more fulfilling” and “to find and nurture genius and talent”. To my mind, most of the focus appears to be on positive emotions and individual traits as a way of thriving and becoming happier, more satisfied and engaged with life (which is not necessarily the same as happiness).

As Dorothy pointed out in her review of Barbara Fredrickson’s book Positivity,

The term “positivity” is a better one than happiness, since it contains within it a whole list of positive emotions, including joy, love, curiosity, contentment, gratitude, amusement, hope, inspiration, wonder, and pride. Fredrickson has done lots of studies on the effects of these positive emotions on people, and … [...the basic argument is that we can increase our positivity ratios, then there will be] … a tipping point that can fundamentally change our experience of life. Once we reach that point, we become more open to life, more curious, more imaginative, and more resilient.

… The key to thriving, she argues, is to make a conscious effort to create positive emotions and to fully experience the ones we already have. A major part of the book is devoted to describing ways of doing this, and her recommendations … include things like making a conscious effort to savour the positive things that happen to us, to practice insight meditation or lovingkindness meditation in order to open the mind and heart, to find distractions that will get us out of negative ways of thinking, and lots of others.

I’ve yet to get past chapter two in Fredrickson’s book (since I’ve been caught up with other reading) but while I’m in favour of a positive approach, I’m mistrustful of the 3-to-1 ratio of positive to negative emotions. Nevertheless I like the idea of positive emotions undoing the stress of negative ones, and making a conscious effort to savour positive experiences as a way of opening our hearts and minds. It stands to reason that if the process of becoming depressed can be seen as going into a negative spiral, why shouldn’t the opposite of that process be an upward spiral? And what do we have to lose by accentuating the positive?

Well it turns out that two of the drawbacks of a positive focus I’ve found through my reading are the way that it tends to close down the space for expressing negative feelings, and also simplifies complexity. The more I read up on the subject, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that complexity is good and that positive emotions and negative ones can live side-by-side. Of course we have a huge need to simplify complex experiences. How much easier to say I hated that experience or I loved that one than to describe the complex mix of emotions that are evoked? And tagging along inevitably with a relentless positive focus is the opportunity to make money out of self-help books and lectures. It’s not coincidental that the word happy derives from the Old Norse word happ, which means luck or good fortune. People have been making money out of selling ways of increasing good fortune to others for centuries.

And the allure of a positive focus, it seems to me, is the promise of doing away largely with the negative. Just follow this advice and pain and suffering will be largely a thing of the past. Your relationships will be better, your work will be more fulfilling and you will generally thrive a lot more (and be healthy and have a better social life). But a lot of that kind of thinking is just wishful thinking, as we know. Both Polyanna and Norman Vincent Peale should serve to remind us of that.

A Polyanna is “a person who is constantly or excessively optimistic” and the name comes from the 1913 novel by the US writer Eleanor Porter.

The title character is Pollyanna Whittier, a young orphan who goes to live in Vermont with her wealthy but stern Aunt Polly. Pollyanna’s philosophy of life centres on what she calls “The Glad Game”, an optimistic attitude she learned from her father. The game consists of finding something to be glad about in every situation. It originated in an incident one Christmas when Pollyanna, who was hoping for a doll in the missionary barrel, found only a pair of crutches inside. Making up the game on the spot, Pollyanna’s father taught her to look at the good side of things — in this case, to be glad about the crutches because “we don’t need ‘em!”

With this philosophy, and her own sunny personality and sincere, sympathetic soul, Pollyanna brings so much gladness to her aunt’s dispirited New England town that she transforms it into a pleasant place to live. [...]

Eventually, however, even Pollyanna’s robust optimism is put to the test when she is struck down by a motorcar while crossing a street and loses the use of her legs. At first she doesn’t realize the seriousness of her situation, but her spirits plummet when she accidentally overhears an eminent specialist say that she’ll never walk again. After that, she lies in bed, unable to find anything to be glad about. Then the townspeople begin calling at Aunt Polly’s house, eager to let Pollyanna know how much her encouragement has improved their lives; and Pollyanna decides she can still be glad that she had legs. The novel ends with Aunt Polly marrying her former lover Dr. Chilton and Pollyanna being sent to a hospital where she learns to walk again and is able to appreciate the use of her legs far more as a result of being temporarily disabled. (Wikipedia)

The message that this story illustrates for me is that if you just think positively enough, then you can do away with traumatic things such as injuries. Of course some people do learn to walk again after apparently being crippled in car accidents. But there’s a fine balance between being optimistic in the face of tough setbacks and denying or repressing losses and so preventing yourself from mourning those losses.

Next time: Norman Vincent Peale and the importance of embracing complexity

Life is good (and other points)

1. Time is even more precious than usual these days as my ‘practice’ at the military hots up. Even with all the public holidays last month, I still had 51 scheduled sessions with 35 people and it felt that my attention was spread very thinly at times. Quite a few of those were no-shows (all too common here) but I still block off the time and then work half-heartedly in case they arrive late.

2. Winter has arrived, which means howling wind and rain and cold temperatures. This happens every year and so you would think that I would manage to keep an umbrella from one year to the next.

3. It’s been “Men at Work” at my house for the past two weeks and I’m sick of it. First it was the window guys (replacing wooden windows with powdered aluminium). I’m happy with the windows but less happy that the burglar bars have now gone. So of course the alarm people came to put in contact points. And then there were the painters. Mr D has been painting for my parents for 20 years and he is a dear but I still rush home from work in a state of mild anxiety to check whether the workmen are OK and are managing to do their work without destroying anything they shouldn’t be destroying. This week the builders are putting in the world’s smallest deck outside the dining room and putting up trellises and laying paving along the side of the house. In the driving rain, nogal! Not pleasant.

4. In preparation for my talk on ‘Positive Psychology’ tomorrow I’ve been watching a clip on YouTube which features Bette Midler and Bing Crosby singing ‘You’ve got to ac-cent-tchuate the positive’. It’s a cute song but it got stuck in my brain and started annoying me with the lyrics about eliminating the negative and not messing with Mr In-Between. Of course you must mess with Mr In-between. The middle-ground is what it’s all about. But I was also fascinated by the body language between the two – Midler young and flirtatious and Crosby slick and charming but a little intimidated by Midler’s flirtatiousness. At one point she punches him in the stomach and I wasn’t sure how to analyse that!

5. L is attending a laparoscopy course in Germany for two weeks and I got a text message yesterday to say she had just done a laparoscopic hysterectomy on a pig. I’m happy for her that she’s getting the training but I feel sorry for the poor pig. Who asked her whether she wanted to have a hysterectomy? And what kind of after-care do they get after their ops? I know the reality of Science is that animals get operated on for the greater good of humanity. I just don’t like it.

6. I’m feeling anxious but also a little excited about my talk tomorrow. I’m basically presenting it as a “Journey through Positive Psychology”. I became interested in PP as a result of my blog-reading. Lilian mentioned it first and then Dorothy got me interested in reading Barbara Fredrickson’s book ‘Positivity’. From there the reading just mushroomed.

7. For example I’ve learned a lot about positive and negative emotions in the last few days. I will share these thoughts here in due course, once I’ve managed to formulate them properly. But it’s interesting how intertwined and yet how different the two sets of emotions can be. The negative emotions are more important to understand but the positive emotions are what we aim for.

8. I finished Kate Atkinson’s When will there be good news? which I found riveting. She has a very refreshing narrative voice and I loved the way she subverts gender stereotypes. In this book Jackson Brodie spends much of the story injured and basically a bit on the ropes while 16-year old Reggie Chase (Famous Girl Detective) does most of the sleuth work. And as for the ending, well that just wasn’t terribly realistic was it? But does it matter? I doubt it.

9. My latest book order arrived from the internet book suppliers and I was very happy. To add to the growing TBR pile we have: The Boat by Nam Le; Touched with Fire by Kay Redfield-Jamison; Writing through the Darkness (on writing as a healing process for depression); Positivity by Barbara Fredrickson; and a textbook on Psychology and Law. Life is good, right?

10. And while we’re on the subject of life being good, on Saturday we celebrated my older brother’s birthday at Delaire restaurant in the Stellenbosch winelands. The weather was perfect, the view was exquisite and the food was sublime. I will start sounding like a Western Cape Tourism public relations officer with these adjectives but they’re definitely justified. The autumn light on the vines across the valley, the soft blue haze of the mountains in the distance, the succulent roast beef (yes I did feel guilty) with whatever fancy vegetable stuff they added to it, the red wine from Rupert and Rothschild, the melt-in-your-mouth chocolate dessert and the sinful coffee to end off. Not the kind of restaurant that I can afford to go to regularly on my salary, which makes it doubly good I suppose.