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Copyright © 1993 Robin Skynner and John Cleese have asserted their moral right to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
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First published in the United Kingdom 1993 by Methuen London.
First paperback edition published 1994 by Mandarin paperbacks.
Cedar edition published 1996 by Mandarin paperbacks.
First published by Vermilion in 1997.
14
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 1997 by Vermilion an imprint of Ebury Press
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Cover
About the Authors
Also by Robin Skynner & John Cleese
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
1 Anyone for Health?
Afterthought: You’ve Got to Laugh
2 Look Mummy, I’m Chairman of International Consolidated
Afterthought: All Work and No Play
3 Let Me Go Forward: Together, by Myself …
Afterthought: Money Makes the World Go Round
4 The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing
Afterthought: The End?
5 All Change Please
Further Reading
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
To Josh and Ding
Following the phenomenal worldwide success of Families and how to survive them, Robin Skynner and John Cleese broaden their theme in another innovative and thought-provoking book, in which they apply to their investigation of what really constitutes healthy behaviour in the different aspects of life the principles of the most modern research, from all kinds of wide-ranging sources. Presented in the same simple, lively and entertaining style as Families, this book extends the study beyond the family circle to relationships and group interaction in life outside it. As with Families, the subject is approached with lucidity and lightness of touch, and is enlivened by Bud Handelsman’s cartoons.
Robin Skynner qualified in medicine at University College Hospital, London. He has been a pioneer in group and family techniques of treatment, and one of the founders of both the Institute of Group Analysis and Institute of Family Therapy (London). He has applied the ideas developed there to a range of group situations, including companies, schools, hospitals, the social services and the clergy. As well as being co-author with John Cleese of Families and how to survive them, he is the author of One Flesh: Separate Persons; Principles of Family and Marital Psychotherapy; Explorations with Families: Group Analysis and Family Therapy and Institutes and how to survive them: Mental Health Training and Consultation.
John Cleese was born in 1939 in Weston-super-Mare. He took science ‘A’ levels at the Clifton College Sports Academy, taught history and geography for two years and then studied Law at Cambridge. He then became a comic. In 1972, he co-founded Video Arts, a management- and sales-training film company, which he helped to run for twenty years. In the mid-seventies, he attended one of Robin Skynner’s therapy groups. Subsequently, he suggested that some of the knowledge and techniques of family therapy, which he had found so fascinating and helpful, should be made available to a wider public. This resulted in the publication of Families and how to survive them in 1983.
Also by Robin Skynner and John Cleese and available from Vermilion
FAMILIES
and how to survive them
We would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for sparing time to read and comment on parts of the manuscript, or for providing information and advice; however, responsibility for the views expressed, and for any errors and omissions, remains of course entirely our own:
Douglas Bennett, Eddie Canfor-Dumas, Roger Clark, Cynthia Cleese, John Crook, James Crowden, Alyce Faye Eichelberger, Ron Eyre, Patrick Gaffney, Merete Gardiner, Peter Haynes, Alan Hutchinson, Iain Johnstone, Peter Kellner, Jerry Lewis, Peter Luff, Jacob Needleman, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Josh Partridge, Philip Philippou, Monty Python, Sogyal Rinpoche, Win Roberts, Denis Robinson, Margaret Robinson, Becky Salter, Andy Sargent, Michael Shamberg, David Skynner, Jane Skynner, Prue Skynner, Ian Stevenson, Takeshi Tamura, Stephen Verney, Nick Wapshott, Tom Wilkinson, Charlotte Wood, John Wood and Irene Young.
We would like to acknowledge the valuable editorial contributions of Ann Mansbridge and David Watson, and in particular of Christopher Falkus, whose creative suggestions were once again immensely helpful. We are also most grateful to June Ansell, Henrietta Williams, Melanie Bowker and Garry Scott-Irvine for their tireles work in typing the original conversations and the many drafts or the text.
We also thank the Mount Nelson Hotel, Capetown, for facilities provided.
When we wrote Families and how to survive them ten years ago, we wanted to make intelligible and accessible the psychological aspects of how families behave and function; what makes some work and others fail; and how families can move up the scale towards greater health and happiness. We looked at such things as how our own family backgrounds dictate not only our choice of a partner but how the new family relationships then created tend to perpetuate those backgrounds with their good and bad characteristics. We looked at family taboos, repressed emotions, and explored the destructive nature of feelings shut away ‘behind the screen’ and not acknowledged even by ourselves. We explained how these feelings can be ‘projected’ onto others, our partner or another scapegoat within the family, who thus acquire from us and automatically enact the forbidden emotion we unconsciously deny in ourselves. We explored the make-up of our own personality [-] the ‘child’ within us all which, if it dominates us, can lead to that distorted view in which we see the world only in terms of ourselves and our own needs; and the ‘parental’ part of us which, if it denies our childlike aspects, can distort our relationships in equally harmful ways.
These ideas were well received, so much so that Families, gratifyingly, has become established as a virtual text-book not only in many of the mental health professions but for the non-professional audience for whom it was written. Life and how to survive it carries the study further. It begins by focusing on the factors which make for health in individuals and families, going beyond clinical observation to include the recent and little-known research now available about exceptionally healthy families, and then extends and develops the ideas outside the family context: thus it analyses our behaviour at work; the behaviour of companies and organisations; the conduct of societies and social groups; and beyond even that, the secular and spiritual values by which we connect to each other and the world. It is a book about the mental health of individuals and groups operating from the smallest to the largest of scales.
In the ‘Afterthoughts’ between the main sections we also study some related topics, including the connection of humour and laughter with health; the changing family relationships now that so many women as well as men go out to work; the basis of the widening rich[-]poor divide; and the place of death in life.
Families and how to survive them and Life and how to survive it are two parts of a project on which we began work in the spring of 1980. We wanted to make available to the general public, in a way that was easy to absorb, those aspects of psychological knowledge we had found most helpful ourselves towards making life more understandable, meaningful and enjoyable. While we know that no definitive statement can be made about such a wide range of ideas, at this point they do seem to us to fit together at least enough to clarify many important questions and to stimulate discussion. We therefore offer this book, like Families before it, as part of a continuing process of exploration which we hope others will be interested to share. We look forward to the discussions that Life may spark off, and though we cannot hope to communicate personally with all those who join in, we have already made arrangements to coordinate any feedback received with the intention of eventually producing an improved version. In any case, we hope that many readers will share some of the great enjoyment we have found in our search for a better understanding of these issues.
Robin Skynner/John Cleese – November 1992
For the paperback edition, we have slightly revised some of the text, as a result of the ‘feedback received’ (see Introduction above). These changes have been made to clarify the ideas, which have not been revised themselves. Yet.
Robin Skynner/John Cleese – May 1994
JOHN WHEN WE were writing Families and how to survive them you mentioned something that particularly interested me, but which we never followed up in that book. It was about some research that’s been done on families that are unusually mentally healthy.
Robin That’s right. These are families that are quite exceptional – the Olympic gold medal winners, as it were.
John Well, I’d like to know more about them. Especially as I’ve never heard anyone talk about them.
Robin No, that’s right, the research is hardly mentioned.
John I wonder why. You’d think everyone would want to learn about exceptionally well adjusted people and find out what they know that we don’t. Yet even the other shrinks I know don’t seem familiar with this research. But then, the odd thing about psychiatry is that it’s based upon the study of people who aren’t doing very well – people who have more ‘problems’ than normal.
Robin Yes, that’s basically true.
John And the more you think about that, the stranger it seems. I mean, if you wanted to write a book about how to paint, or play chess, or be a good manager you’d start by studying people who are good at those things. And you wouldn’t expect heavy sales of a book called Play Championship Golf by Learning the Secrets of the Worst 20 Players in the World.
Robin True. Doctors do at least study normal physical functions – anatomy, physiology – before going on the wards to study disease. Psychiatrists seem interested almost entirely in people who are abnormal.
John And when I’ve mentioned the topic of unusually mentally healthy families to some of my friends, they’ve turned me out pretty sharpish. I’m wondering, do you think this might be something to do with envy?
Robin Go on.
John Well, what I mean is this. I know I feel envious of anyone who just sails through life easily, doing all the things they find enjoyable and satisfying, without constantly getting sidetracked by lots of personal difficulties and problems; and I guess a lot of people would react like me. Which brings me to the question: why do you know about this research?
Robin I really took up psychiatry in the first place because I was interested in mental health, rather than in mental illness.
John Why was that, do you think?
Robin As far back as I can remember, I felt I didn’t really understand other people. Their behaviour so often didn’t make sense to me. At first I assumed it was just because there was something wrong with me, that I wasn’t normal. So I became curious about what real ‘normality’ was.
John I’m sure now that’s exactly why I got so fascinated by psychology as a teenager; except that my awareness of the highly self-interested nature of my curiosity about ‘normality’ was completely submerged beneath a solid public school belief that I was myself record-breakingly normal, an illusion that you are largely responsible for prising out of my fevered grasp.
Robin When you were in group therapy, you mean?
John Yes. Still that was in the mid-seventies, so I like to pretend that I’m back to normal now. Almost, anyway; I sometimes think I’ll call my autobiography 48 Hours from Normal.
Robin 72?
John I’d settle for that. But the trouble with discussing ‘normal’ is this: when you’re young, you assume that most grown-ups are pretty normal. It’s only as you get a lot older that you become disabused of that notion. In fact, I’d say that the only thing that is normal about 90 per cent of my friends is the façade that they present, which is pretty good – good enough to fool many distant acquaintances and the vast majority of children. But as I see it, the truth of the matter is that the vast majority of people do not find life particularly easy, even if their material circumstances are pretty good. And that’s probably even more true of the rich and the powerful and the famous – it’s just that some people get taken in by their façades simply because those who are powerful often seem so impressive.
Robin That’s right.
John So, if we mean ‘reasonably mentally healthy’ when we call someone ‘normal’, even though it’s not normal to find life particularly easy … where does that leave us?
Robin Puzzled. So when I started my training, I looked for information about really mentally healthy people and was surprised to find the subject had been almost completely ignored. There were just a couple of minor articles, both anecdotal and highly speculative. But much later I discovered two significant projects in America, one at Timberlawn in Dallas, which I visited several times, and one which had looked at a sample of healthy and successful Harvard graduates over a long period.
John So what you’re going to tell me at vast length is based on those projects?
Robin Only partly. The ideas I have are really my own attempt to put together everything I’ve learned from many different sources: the research studies, amost 40 years of working to help individuals and families improve their level of health, as well as experience and discussion with colleagues and friends, the family I grew up in, and the family I’ve been part of as a father. And, of course, what I have understood through my own struggle to become more healthy.
John OK. So can you start out by giving me an overview of your ideas about unusually good mental health? Are they surprising, or obvious, or what?
Robin They’re a mixture. Of course, the more familiar you get with them, the more it all begins to fit together, but at the start some of it is even a bit shocking.
John Is there a general principle underlying unusually healthy behaviour?
Robin Actually, probably not! In fact, the book on the first Timberlawn research was called No Single Thread just because the researchers couldn’t really find a way of expressing, in simple language, what it was that unified all their different findings about these unusual families. So we’ll just have to take the different aspects one by one.
John So where do we start?
Robin Well, I want to add a couple more things before we get underway. One is this: in trying to describe excellent mental health, and compare it with ill-health, and with the ‘average’ health in between that most of us enjoy most of the time … it’s difficult not to talk as if they are quite different from one another, and inhabited by different people. But, in fact, our level of health is changing all the time. We all feel more healthy in our better moments, when we are ‘in a good mood’, when things are going well, when we feel loved and valued, when we have done our best. And we can all feel less healthy under stress, when our usual sources of support are removed, when we have ‘let ourselves down’, when we ‘get out of bed on the wrong side’. Also, our level of health is not the same in all areas of our functioning. A person who is ‘average’ overall may be outstandingly healthy in some respects, even though functioning poorly in others.
John And obviously the overall level can change over time, too. Otherwise you’d be out of a job. I mean people can get more mentally healthy, can’t they?
Robin That’s been my experience, certainly. Now, there’s one other point. The key studies are about quite privileged groups comprising white, middle-class people who are at least comfortable materially speaking (although another study is about black, working-class people in a deprived inner-city area). I must add that a high level of mental health can only be of interest to people once they’re physically safe, have enough to eat, a roof over their heads, and a degree of comfort.
John Understood. Any other caveats?
Robin Not at the moment.
John OK. Tell me about these more healthy people and their families. What’s the most striking thing we can learn about them?
Robin These particularly healthy families are unusually positive in their attitude to life and other people. In general, they give the impression of enjoying themselves, enjoying each other, and especially of reaching out and being friendly to the people around them.
John So they tend not to be British journalists.
Robin Watching videotapes of such families, I’ve found myself thinking how enjoyable it would be to live next door to them. You can’t help feeling warm and friendly in response to the way they behave. And, in fact, the research shows that they are particularly valued members of their communities.
John Does this mean they get ripped off easily? I mean the world can be a very tough place. Being too open, too optimistic about people can be unrealistic.
Robin Optimistic isn’t really the right word because an optimist, or a pessimist, is someone who sees the world in a one-sided way. But one measure of health is the extent to which people see the world as it is, without distorting it to suit their own imaginations, and members of healthy families are in fact very realistic. They know people can be good and bad, so they’re not easily deceived. But they accept people as they are, taking the rough with the smooth. And they’ll tend to give the benefit of the doubt to people who appear unfriendly at first. They’ll reach out to strangers in an open and accepting way and won’t immediately withdraw if they don’t get a warm response back.
John So, if the seemingly unfriendly neighbour is just a bit shy, or has had bad experiences in the past and is just being extra careful … that shyness or caution will be overcome by the friendly attitude being offered.
Robin Yes. As a result, these families get positive responses from everyone because their behaviour brings out the best in people.
John But what’s special about that? We all know that if we approach other people positively, they’re more likely to be pleasant back. That’s ‘How to Make Friends and Influence People’.
Robin That’s true, but you’re talking about making a special effort to be nice. The important thing about these healthy people is not that they’re doing something completely different from us, but that they’re able to do it so easily and so consistently. What’s unusual about them is the extent to which they’re open and friendly, and also how natural it seems to be for them to behave in this way.
John You mean, they’re not trying especially hard to be friendly or well mannered?
Robin Exactly, it just doesn’t seem like an effort for them. You don’t get the impression that they’re putting on an act in order to get a rewarding response, as you sometimes do with people who’ve done courses like the Dale Carnegie training, or who are ‘religious’ in the sense of trying to be good people by sticking to the rules, by following the book. Really healthy people don’t behave as if they’re giving goodwill away in the hope of getting it back again – although of course they do get it back. It’s much more as if they have such an abundance of well-being and enjoyment that they can just afford to be generous, like some very rich people who give large sums to charity knowing that they’ll always have enough for themselves anyway so they can scatter it around a bit. It can be described as a ‘philosophy of plenty’.
John And of course the reason for a lot of ‘good behaviour’ is that we want to gain people’s approval and hang on to it. These people sound confident enough not to need to seek other people’s approval much – their friendliness isn’t manipulative.
Robin No, it seems more spontaneous. They’ll enjoy the approval of others, of course, but they don’t have to set out to get it.
John So how does this very open, spontaneous and friendly behaviour compare with how other people behave at different levels of mental health?
Robin Well, first, take the worst case. In very unhealthy families, relationships with other people tend to be very bad indeed. It’s my experience – and most psychiatrists who are interested in looking below the surface and don’t take everything that they are told at face value would agree – that where one or more members of the family are very sick in a psychological sense, that whole family often turns out to have a high level of negative emotions, both towards each other and towards outsiders.
John And where does that leave average people? Which I’m assuming includes us, is that right?
Robin Indeed. Well taking ‘average’ families to be the vast majority of people in the middle of the range, as opposed to the few at the ‘very healthy’ or ‘very unhealthy’ ends of it, you won’t see the extreme negative emotions I’ve just described – except perhaps occasionally under unusual stress or provocation. But you won’t find the extraordinary positive attitudes of the very healthy families either – although ordinary families may be like that sometimes, when they’re in a good mood, or on a particular day when things are going well, or when they ‘rise to the occasion’ in an emergency.
John So what does that mean? What are average families really like?
Robin They have an attitude to other people which is basically a bit mistrustful. Of course, this is carefully disguised most of the time. But, underlying the outward expression of politeness or friendliness, there’s nearly always a somewhat cautious, guarded, calculating attitude. It’s as if we feel that the supply of good things is quite limited, so we have to be constantly on the look-out to see no one else takes our share. There’s more of a ‘what’s in it for me’ attitude, even with a spouse or a child, let alone a neighbour or a stranger. Relationships are fundamentally viewed almost as if they are business arrangements, with the people involved watching to make sure they’re getting exactly as much out as they put in, or even hoping they might get a bit more, make a little profit.
John Yes, well it’s not particularly pleasant to admit, but I’ve begun to realise that that’s how I operate most of the time – unless I’m in a very good mood. Most days I try to be reasonably friendly and encouraging to other people, but if I don’t fairly rapidly get some positive feedback, I have no inclination to continue being ‘nice’. I just switch off and preserve a minimal courtesy. And again, as you describe, when I’m under a lot of stress, I notice I get very ‘business-like’ in my personal relationships: ‘Now I’ve done this for you, and this, and that, what have you done?’ Still, I suppose these attitudes just get handed down the generations. Most people I know can remember their parents saying: ‘After all I’ve done for you …’ or ‘You’ll appreciate me when I’ve gone …’ But you’re saying the really healthy families just don’t do this.
Robin They don’t seem to keep score, make accounts, or keep an eye on the emotional books to make sure they balance. As I said, they behave as if they have such an abundance of goodwill and enjoyment that they can give freely just because they feel like doing so, without any element of calculation.
John So … that’s the first characteristic of these extremely healthy families. What’s the second?
Robin The second important feature is a lot more surprising. I remember that when I first read about it, it gave me quite a shock, and it was a while before I got used to the idea. The ‘love’ these families have in such abundance is rather different from what the rest of us mean by the word.
John How so?
Robin Well, one meaning of ‘love’ is a desire for closeness. But closeness can mean two things. It can mean enjoyment of intimacy or it can mean dependency, feelings of being attached to another person in such a way that we find it quite hard to do without them. Indeed, for some people, it can even mean clinging, needing each other badly all the time, with a lot of suffering when the other person isn’t around – which, of course, causes possessiveness and jealousy.
John So what’s so surprising about the ‘love’ of the healthy families?
Robin It involves closeness and distance. They’re capable of great intimacy and affection; but they also feel self-sufficient and confident and free, so they don’t need each other desperately. When they’re apart, they can cope perfectly well; indeed, they can enjoy themselves thoroughly!
John They don’t ‘miss’ each other?
Robin Well, it all depends what you mean by ‘miss’. They’ll certainly remember the partner warmly; they’ll enjoy thinking about them and the good feelings that arouses. But they won’t ‘miss’ them in the sense of feeling miserable, of not being able to enjoy the other good things which are there in front of them at the moment.
John So to what extent are they really emotionally independent, in the sense of not ‘needing’ each other?
Robin The happiness the relationship brings is a luxury, a bonus. So the rest of their life isn’t spoiled by fear it might go wrong, by worry about how they would manage if they lost their partner. And of course, the more you can enjoy life and feel confident when you’re on your own, the more interesting a person you become, and the more you have available to share with the partner when you meet up again.
John And again, if a couple are emotionally independent, when they’re together they won’t feel constricted by each other’s needs – they won’t have to be careful what they say or do in case it threatens those needs – so they’ll be freer to be themselves.
Robin And that’s the same as giving the other members of the family the space to do their own thing too, so they don’t hang around each other like dogs around a dinner table, worried they might miss something.
John Right. So what effect does this have on intimacy?
Robin Well, just because they can take space for themselves when they feel like it, without their loved ones trying to cling to them or make them feel guilty, it feels safe to give themselves to great closeness and intimacy at other times.
John You mean there’s no fear that if they get too close, they won’t be able to separate again, and get their independence back afterwards.
Robin Exactly. It looks paradoxical at first, but really it’s obvious that the more ‘separateness’ you put on one side of the scales, the more ‘togetherness’ you can put on the other side.
John Whereas the more you ‘need’ other people, the more you have to control them?
Robin Inevitably. By contrast, the more confident you are in your ability to cope on your own, the less you need to control your partner. You can enjoy each other, instead of just feeling needy and worrying they won’t give you what you want! And then all this enjoyment will sustain you both, and give you even more confidence when you’re apart. An upward spiral, instead of a downward one, a ‘vicious circle’ based on clinging dependence.
John Can you describe this dependence spiral a bit more?
Robin Well, when a relationship is based on anxious need, each partner will be trying to hold onto the other by showing they can’t do without them. For this to be convincing, they mustn’t appear to enjoy themselves much when they’re apart. So they give up more and more of their separate interests and friends, which gradually makes them more needy and helpless!
John Giving up their independent activities increasingly paralyses them?
Robin And the relationship itself becomes more and more constricted and boring.
John I remember encountering this idea of emotional independence when I was first in your group in 1975 and being, well … almost appalled that needing someone desperately was not considered the touchstone of true love!
Robin Do you remember what appalled you?
John Well, first of all, the equation of true love with deep emotional need seemed almost sacred. I had a huge emotional commitment to the idea. And yet it had never been taught to me, never spelled out. It was part of the conditioning that I’d received from my lower middle-class English background. Then, the alternative – a more separate and emotionally self-confident attitude – seemed positively callous. Nothing to do with ‘love’ at all!
Robin That’s what I meant when I said some of this stuff seems shocking. It’s how I felt when I read the very first study of exceptional health that I ever came across when I was still a student thirty-five years ago. To illustrate the point, the article mentioned that when a husband or wife in one of these families died, the other partner would mourn the loss very deeply for a time, but would then recover well … and would build new relationships and continue life without much difficulty. I remember I found the thought painful; it struck a chill into me. I sensed that it must be true; but it took me a long time to come round to the idea that it was actually very healthy.
John It all strikes at the idea of romantic love, doesn’t it? Being ‘made for each other’, ‘I’d die without you’, ‘You’re the only one in the world for me’ … all that kind of thing.
Robin Yes. Some couples in therapy will bitterly resist, for years even, this idea that it’s possible to be really independent and also deeply involved with one another, because they find it so hard to accept that the two aspects can go together.
John Well now, what implications does ‘emotional independence’ have for fidelity? Do people who need each other less, play around more?
Robin My experience of more healthy couples is that they are more committed – but from choice. They don’t play around because they don’t want to, and one reason for that is that they could if they wanted to. But they value the partner to whom they have committed themselves more than the opportunity to play around. The research findings support this. They show a pattern of long-term marital fidelity in the healthiest couples.
John Really.
Robin Which compares with one 1992 estimate of infidelity in the British population as a whole – most of whom will be mid-range – of at least 40 per cent for women and 75 per cent for men …
John I know you think fidelity is important. But why? Is it because infidelity inevitably leads to lying, which destroys trust and intimacy?
Robin Lying means you can’t be open, can’t be fully yourself, and that obviously makes real intimacy impossible. If people are really healthy, they will therefore be straight about other attractions they may feel. And because they aren’t possessive and clinging, there would be no reason why feeling ‘turned on’ by members of the opposite sex other than their partner should cause problems; indeed, I would expect it to enhance the relationship, make them more aware of, and turned on by each other. But actually having another sexual relationship is another matter, because this would prevent either relationship from reaching its full possibility. I would expect more healthy couples to make a choice, not out of guilt or fear of the partner’s reaction, but because the existing relationship is so rich and they want to preserve it and make it richer.
John Interesting. Well I’m not going to try to argue the merits of emotional dependence, because I’ve been so completely converted to your point of view, that all I seem to observe now is how much unhappiness the idealisation of dependence brings. Just take the Great Love Stories – Romeo and Juliet, La Traviata, Anna Karenina, Carmen, Antony and Cleopatra, Aida, Doctor Zhivago, Tristan and Isolde, Brief Encounter. Mention them to people and a dreamy radiance passes across their face and they say: ‘Oh, they’re wonderful aren’t they, so romantic.’ Well, they’re not wonderful. They are tales of almost unmitigated misery. There’s not ten minutes of good, everyday happiness and fun in any of them. The lovers usually get one dollop of over-the-top ecstasy and apart from that it’s wall-to-wall suffering. They get stabbed, walled up in tombs, they throw themselves under trains, or commit suicide with asps, they poison themselves and die of consumption or renounce each other in agony. They’re convinced they can only find happiness with one other person, whom they deliberately choose on grounds of unavailability. So why do you think all this dependence and its consequent suffering is equated with true love?
Robin Well, after all, the first love we experience, for our mothers, is like that. At the beginning of our lives we are completely dependent, so we do suffer badly if mother isn’t there when we need her. And though we’ll naturally always need love and support, if we don’t grow out of this kind of childish demand we’ll go on treating our lovers in the same way, trying to make them care for us like parents and feeling threatened when they don’t.
John And this kind of love makes us feel ‘special’, doesn’t it? As babies do, with all that exclusive attention. But really healthy families obviously don’t believe that suffering adds significance to their lives.
Robin No. As they’re not so needy, they won’t need to justify childish demands by suffering terribly when they aren’t met.
John Now, let me ask you something that has puzzled me a lot. Even the healthiest people are occasionally going to need emotional support to get through some particularly difficult period. And being healthy they won’t have any problem about asking for it when they do need it, and their partner, being healthy, won’t have any problem about giving it to them. So what’s the difference between this, and people ‘clinging’ to each other?
Robin If they’re healthy, both partners can ask straightforwardly for support when they need it, and can accept a refusal with good grace when the partner sometimes can’t provide it. The relationship isn’t based on pretence, on imagination. There isn’t a struggle going on – as there is with less healthy people – where each is trying to manipulate the partner into meeting their own demands, while avoiding feeling obliged to give anything back by each trying to show that they are the most needy. Most of the time, healthy people will be able to get support, and give it back, whenever it’s required. That’s precisely why they don’t have to cling and demonstrate desperate need to get their requirements met.
John This is why they seem to get over a bereavement and remarry quicker than less healthy people?
Robin Basically, yes. But there are several factors at work here. First, because of their warmth and friendliness, they’ll have a wide circle of friends, a big emotional support-system, so they won’t feel suddenly marooned with all their supplies of love cut off. Second, the grief they suffer is more likely to be due to compassion for the partner, rather than concern about themselves, because they already have the confidence of knowing that they can manage well on their own.
John Yes, but surely they’ll feel an even deeper grief, just because the relationship has been so exceptionally happy.
Robin Well there’s an odd paradox here. It’s often easier to accept the loss of a relationship or an experience that has been very good than it is to recover from an unsatisfactory one.
John Ah! I think I know what you mean. In the past I’ve sometimes found it difficult to let go of relationships which have never really worked because … it’s as though there’s been a compulsion to return to them again and again just to prove that they could work!
Robin Exactly. Whereas, if something has been good, and you feel happy and fulfilled even thinking about it, it can be easier to accept that you can’t go on having it forever. Because you’ve had so much already, and the good memory of that sustains you! For example, when my wife, Prue, died five years ago, I found that the sorrow I felt about losing her also had a joyful quality in it when I remembered the good life that we had had together. It not only made the sorrow bearable, but in some ways it was like another good experience of her.
John … You know, when Graham Chapman died, I found myself reviewing my Monty Python days and realising, much more clearly than I had for years, just how enjoyable they’d been.
Robin Indeed. Paradoxically it’s easier to let go of a relationship that’s been really good, because the memory of it is positive; so you don’t feel guilty about it not working and you’re not still trying to put it right. And again very healthy people find it easier to grieve than those in the mid-range. Indeed, they may feel an even deeper grief just because they can go unreservedly down into the emotions to do with loss … and of course, that will mean that they will recover more quickly and be up and off again, getting on with life and enjoying it much sooner than average people might think seemly. Because, as we said in Families, it’s by mourning a loss that you recover from it.
John Whereas people who are very frightened of sadness may use all their defences to avoid feeling it, and therefore take years and years to get over the loss?
Robin If indeed they ever do at all.
John Could you tell me how far you feel you’ve recovered from Prue’s death?
Robin About two years after her death I felt a big increase in liveliness and enjoyment and realised that, as the books on bereavement tell you to expect, the shock had led to a temporary depression of my energy in a physical sense. But as you know, we tried together to face the likelihood of her death, without shrinking from the pain of it, right from the beginning of her illness two years earlier. Because of this I seemed prepared psychologically when it came and coped with it much better than I had expected. As I said, the pleasure of the good life we had experienced together seemed to counteract the grief. Sometimes I would feel myself sliding towards very negative feelings, but then I’d realise that these were all really forms of self-pity, and therefore completely destructive. They were all about myself and nothing to do with her. So I didn’t give them any encouragement.
John But hang on a minute Robin. If grieving is the natural human reaction to loss and the way of recovering from it, how do you distinguish between this kind of sadness … and self-pity?
Robin Grief is when you accept the loss. You don’t shrink from the natural suffering it causes you and you’re concerned more about the person who has died than about yourself. You let the pain act on you, let it change you. Then it forces you to let go. By contrast, self-pity is what you feel when you don’t accept the loss. Instead of letting the experience change you you’re wanting the world to be different; you want the clock to be put back as if the loss hadn’t happened. Unfortunately, a lot of books on bereavement don’t make that difference clear; they can make it appear as if self-pity is a virtue.
John This may seem an odd question, but … did you ever feel that you should have been suffering more?
Robin I think I might have done if I hadn’t been so familiar with the idea that you don’t have to be endlessly incapacitated by grief. But I think some people were a bit shocked that I seemed to be suffering less than they’d expected.
John You mean, they thought you were being callous because you weren’t making more fuss?
Robin Yes, and I’m pretty sure their disapproval would have affected me – perhaps made me feel guilty – and pushed me towards wallowing in self-pity, thinking it was the right thing to do.
John Did many people disapprove of your lack of suffering?
Robin I remember you certainly didn’t. In fact most people were pleased for me, even if they were a bit surprised. Perhaps it helped them feel they might be able to cope when they came to face a similar loss themselves. And I felt these people cared about me rather than about themselves and about justifying their beliefs.
John Why do you think some people didn’t approve?
Robin Those who were shocked that I wasn’t suffering more – the ones I knew well that is – were people I already knew to be rather cut off from their feelings, scared of facing up to their own death, or of losing their partner, so my situation put the wind up them. If I’d been more upset, I think they would have felt better … because they would have been able to keep all the feelings of loss focused on me and away from themselves … and then they could concentrate on feeling sorry for me instead of worried about how they would cope when they came to it.
John Ah. Feelings of loss were so frightening to them, that they wanted you to carry all such feelings for them?
Robin Yes. In fact, when I was with these people, I tended to feel worse. They clearly thought they were ‘supporting’ me by talking about how terrible it must be, and feeling sorry for me … but I experienced it as if they were ‘laying a trip on me’. So being with them was a real struggle. In fact, if I resisted their ‘support’, it seemed to make them very uncomfortable. Because then they had to deal with the uncomfortable feelings I wouldn’t carry for them, and they couldn’t avoid noticing they couldn’t handle them.
John So there was a kind of struggle between you to see who was going to carry the uncomfortable feelings – and they felt bad if you wouldn’t shoulder them all.
Robin That’s how it appeared.
John OK. Now, where are we? Prue’s death came up because you said that the second characteristic of the extremely healthy families is that they love each other in an unusually independent way. Now, what’s the next characteristic of these lucky people?
Robin Well, the next two features are connected, and we should deal with them together. They’re both to do with how decisions are taken in the family.
John How the power is distributed?
Robin In a sense, yes. Now the first of these features is the position of very clear authority that the parents take in the family. There’s no question about the fact that they’re in charge, that they’re responsible for the children, and that the children have to do what they’re told, ultimately.
John I’m surprised. It sounds very old-fashioned.
Robin Now listen to the second half of it. In these families, it’s anything but ‘children must be seen and not heard’. The children are always consulted very fully – even the youngest one – before the parents take a decision. Everyone in the family is encouraged to have their say. In fact, the children are free to discuss not just the decisions, but even how the parents use their authority in taking them! So, as you guess, children in these families have pretty outspoken views, and the parents enjoy and approve of that. It’s the way they want the family to be.
John But if the whole family can’t work out an agreement …
Robin … or if there’s an emergency, the children are expected to shut up and do what they’re told when it comes to the crunch.
John How do the children feel about those occasions?
Robin The striking thing is that, perhaps just because they’re normally so fully consulted, they are prepared to accept the parents’ authority. Even when it really goes against their wishes.
John But I bet they have to learn that. It’s not a kid’s instinctive response, is it?
Robin No, that’s right. When children are very young, they’ll do their best to manipulate their parents if they can get away with it. They’ll try to get one parent on their side. But with these very healthy families the coalition between the parents is so strong that the children can’t divide them. Manipulation doesn’t work, so the kids can relax in the knowledge that they can give their opinion but must hand over the responsibility of the final decision to their parents. Even working with families I saw professionally, the children would always accept the parents’ authority once I had helped them to take charge in this way, and appeared happy that they now knew where they stood. Indeed, when asked what they thought the parents should do to solve the family problem they had all come about, they would often request this stronger alliance themselves.
John So, the children can express exactly how they feel, but they aren’t given too much power.
Robin Not more than they are ready for. And that’s one reason why they grow up healthy in a psychological sense. Children who can ‘divide and conquer’ by playing one parent off against the other get frightened, not only of the power it gives them, but also of the damage they might be allowed to do to their parents’ relationship and to the family’s stability. So they end up insecure and anxious, while the fact they’ve not experienced consistent control makes it hard for them to develop self-discipline.
John Well, let me ask you more about this strong parental coalition. How is the power distributed between the man and the woman?
Robin One of the most interesting findings is that in very healthy families nowadays, Mum and Dad share power pretty equally. The Timberlawn research team has found big changes in male and female roles and relationships as time has passed. In their first book, back in 1976, they reported that there wasn’t one couple which didn’t show the traditional pattern of very different male and female gender roles, with the man but not the woman as the wage-earner. But in their most recent report on very healthy families, studying couples born in the early sixties, they found that two-thirds of the women were working and some took the more executive role in the partnership.
John In that case, answer this point, Dr Skynner. I’ve heard you say in the past that you’ve noticed that it’s best when the father takes the main responsibility for good order and discipline in the family.
Robin Yes, for a long time I seemed to believe contradictory things about this! Sometimes I would treat family problems as if I believed the father should be in charge – in the sense of his having the casting vote when there was no other way of settling a disagreement. I reached that conclusion because, when we began treating the whole family by seeing them all together, almost half the problems they came with were quickly solved once we got the father to take over the main responsibility for control and discipline from the mother, but couldn’t be solved unless we brought that change about. Yet with some families, I’d act as if I believed the parents should share the power equally.
John So, intuitively you handled different families differently, but you couldn’t explain why?
Robin Yes, and it was the research on the exceptionally healthy families which cleared up my confusion. It explained that both of these apparently contradictory approaches could be right. Which one worked best depended on the level of mental health of the family. The research made it clear that even a rigid military-style hierarchy, with either the father or the mother as a kind of dictator, is at least an improvement on the terrible chaos and confusion that reigns in the most unhealthy families – the ones professionals call ‘borderline’ or ‘multi-problem’.
John Because you’ve got to have some kind of order before you can sort anything out.
Robin Yes. But of course that authoritarian behaviour should only be a half-way stage to something better. I realised that the families where I got good results from putting the father in charge were the more disorganised, sicker ones which, for example, I had encountered frequently in my work in poor districts of the East End of London.
John You say ‘frequently’. Did there seem to be a lot of such families there?
Robin Yes. As you’ll see later, the odds against becoming mentally healthy are far higher in conditions of extreme poverty. Though, of course, affluence is by no means a guarantee of mental health. I treated some professional families of this kind too …
John Newspaper owners, dictators, film directors …
Robin