Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life (15 page)

DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE REVISITED

Dr Jekyll is down on his luck. His latest experiments have been a bit controversial and his funding is up for review.

‘Really, Hyde,’ he says. ‘I feel I’m wasting my time in that laboratory. I want something big.’.

‘You want some big scare about people’s ’ealf. Convince ’em they’re about to drop dead or they’re ready for the Rubber Ramada. Then you cures it, makes your pot, and retires to Brighton.’

‘You mean something psychological – voodoo perhaps?’

‘Voodoo could come into it, yerst. What you really want is a lurgie. You want people to have this lurgie, and then you turns round and cures it.’

‘But, my good man, I can’t invent a disease. You can’t convince people they’ve got a disease if they haven’t got a disease. They’re going to want to see some symptoms.’

At this point, Mr Hyde becomes quite subdued. He scratches his very low forehead. Suddenly his ratty eyes brighten.

‘What you do is, you pick something that the body does already, and you turn it into a disease! You say, “Them’s yer symptoms!”’

‘You mean like temperature? Every time somebody’s temperature goes up, they have this condition?’

‘Yerst. But you can do better than that.’

‘Hmmmmm. There is actually a mechanism, Hyde, that people experience every day. A survival mechanism, the response to threat. It’s not very pleasant either, so that would add to its charm,
hwa hwa.
’

“Assit, guvnor! You tell ’em every time they get that mechanism, they’ve got our disease. Then you just comes across with the cure.’

‘But how would I cure a natural mechanism that’s designed to galvanise them into action? I suppose I could tell them to calm down. That would dampen it down a bit. But I’d need some kind of scientific backing – the medical community would never buy this.’

Hyde, deep in thought, runs his fingers through his face.

‘I got it. I know how you get the scientific backing. You pay ’em. You pay some researchers. They’ll prove whatever you tell ’em to prove.’

‘Good lord, Hyde: you might be right. We could set up experiments using animals. They can’t talk – you can prove whatever you like with them, and we could expose them to various tortures, which would inevitably have a bad effect on the little wretches. And then we could say this research proves that our lurgie is very dangerous, and every time people feel the signs, they had better look sharp and call us for help!’

‘Well, what’s the name of this here mechanism?’

‘Actually it’s called “the stress response”.’

‘Right. You could say you’re “stress-doctoring”, or “stress-boshing”, summink like that, couldn’t yer?’

‘I like that. I do. Mr Hyde, I do believe I’m going to mix you a drink.’

And thus was created a monster!

LIFE SKILLS

So calling the natural response to threat by the medical-sounding name ‘stress’ makes people think that, every time they face a threat, they have this new disease. That sure would make life tough. But how
should
you equip someone with skills to enable them to handle life’s problems? There are two key theories of emotional education, and they are opposites.

Theory one

The first theory, which we might call the ‘stress management’ method, is to offer protection and teach people to relax. Then when they meet life’s crises, they will hopefully remain calm and not get upset. If possible the upsetting crises themselves must be avoided, or reduced by health and safety legislation, by social organisations and charities, by lawyers, by doctors using prescription medication, by employers, teachers and carers, and if all these fail, by government.

Theory two

The second method is to teach people coping skills and show them how to master their negative emotions by being exposed to hard training and challenges. Then they can deal with whatever life may throw at them – and it will throw a lot.

Where do you stand on these two?

Suppose you believe the first ‘stress management’ theory is right. Ask yourself this: how did past generations manage to cope with famine, plague, child mortality, imprisonment for debt, execution for beliefs, war, want and workhouses? Were they trained using the ‘protective’ approach? Of course not.

Whether you were

•
a Roman
 

•
a Spartan
 

•
a bachelor knight
 

•
an American Indian
 

•
a Sumo wrestler
 

•
an Australian settler
 

•
an American prospector
 

•
a Russian peasant
 

•
a British ‘Tommy’
 

•
a London civilian during the Blitz
 

•
an army or navy cadet
 

•
a schoolchild

your training would have been most severe. The ideology behind it was based not on
avoiding
negative emotions, which would have struck our forebears as weird and unnatural, but on
rehearsing
them and thereby gaining mastery. All of our leisure pursuits, as well as rites of passage, are still based on this principle of going through fear, tension and tears, and then out the other side a little older and wiser, having possibly had a peak experience or self-discovery on the way.

MENTAL STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS

In all likelihood, what we call ‘strength’ and weakness’ are not fixed personality traits at all. Whether we show courage or cower in the corner is a matter of choice. It depends on how much negative emotion we are prepared to put up with. Small children can know what it feels like to be a hero. This may explain why they occasionally jump off high walls, climb trees and eat worms (oh, yes). Decorated adult heroes may actually feel terror when they do what they do, as Susan Jeffers phrased it in her bestselling book, they
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
.
¹
It is other people who perceive the strength or the weakness, not those who do the scary things.

Champion sportsmen may feel ‘pressure’ – unpleasant feelings of tension and fear at the height of competition – but steel themselves and go through the winning barrier anyhow. On the other hand also-rans experience the pressure, succumb to their fears, make mistakes and lose – even from supremely winning positions. In the sporting parlance they are said to have ‘choked’ or ‘bottled it’. The difference is in the training: the harder and scarier the dress rehearsals, the tougher the competitor.

The Roman Army endured from 750 BC until the Siege of Constantinople in 1453. Its success was down to training. The legions’ exercises, according to the historian Josephus, ‘were like battles without the blood, so their battles were like exercises with blood’.

Winston Churchill’s ‘lion-hearted nation’ (as the British were then called) referred to all this as ‘character training’ because it was meant to equip people with the spirit or
character
to cope with life’s serious challenges. Call it unkind if you like, but in those days it was
do or die
. The good news is that, since we are all descended from those tough survivors, we should have in our genes some residue of that dour survival spirit and can all master coping skills if we are prepared to try.

‘HARDENING’

The mechanism behind character-training is called inurement or hardening. How does it work? When you walk along the pavement by a busy road with fast cars and heavy lorries rumbling past your elbows, are you, as a rule, scared? Probably not. Because you have done it so many hundreds of times, the danger hardly registers. It is still there: a car could conceivably mount the footpath, but over time your brain has weighed up the statistics and decided that almost certainly nothing much will happen to you. When we are regularly and repeatedly exposed to a danger, our awareness of that danger reduces until we hardly notice it at all.

Examples of the
decreasing fear
curve:

•
Learning to drive.
On our first driving lesson, our knees may be knocking under the dashboard. Yet after lots of exposure at the wheel, we may end up falling asleep on the motorway because we are bored.
 

•
Watching a horror film.
When we watch a horror film for the first time, we may be shocked and scared. Yet if we see it again and again, we find the ‘scares’ dull and comical. The effect even happens across generations. Movies that frightened people half to death in the 1960s look pretty silly now.
 

•
Taming.
Laboratory animals may be timid during an initial experiment, and yet, exposed to the same stimulus again and again, they become progressively hardened to it and show little response. Researchers recognise ‘taming’ as a predictable effect. The word ‘taming’ is used to refer to any reducing response to stimuli.

NOW I’D LIKE YOU TO MEET ESMERALDA!

How does one put this ‘gradual reduction of fear’ principle into practice? Well, supposing you were, let’s say,
arachnophobic
. OK, I want you to imagine the biggest, blackest, longest-legged spider you could ever encounter. I know the one. She is called ‘Esmeralda’, she is made of metal, and she sits on my desk and sometimes in on my classes. Why?

When I moved to the country, I was paralysed with fear of spiders, even little ones. If I encountered an ‘S’ in my house, I had to phone for help. Late one night I was even reduced to shutting one in a bedroom and taping a warning notice on the door to remind me in the morning in case I wandered in there half asleep and had a heart attack.

Eventually I thought:
I cannot live like this. I’ve got to shape up.
Yes, I know there are desensitisation programmes and therapies on the market, but I wanted to help myself. So I had Esmeralda made by a metal sculptor, and I deliberately placed her in my line of sight every day while I was working. At first she scared the pants off me, but gradually I got used to her proportions. She was quite beautiful really. And
these days, when even your economy-sized black bulbous arachnid scampers towards me I think,
Oh, look at that diddie
. I might, if I can be bothered, get a tumbler and card and chuck him or her outside. Problem solved.

I have loaned Esmeralda to trainees occasionally. She is a marvellous teaching assistant and costs little to run.

BRAIN TRAINING MADE EASY

Now, here is an intriguing idea for you to consider. What if the brain
rewarded
us for courage and
punished
us for cowardice? Surely that couldn’t be true. Or could it? Consider these two scenarios.

The well-fed brain

Your brain consumes data, and it is hungry. It has a huge appetite for information and for electrochemically forging connections at its synapses that make sense of reality. We can surmise that it would therefore like you to go out and experience things, so that it can receive and store data about the world. This after all is what it was designed to do.

When we experiment, experience and say ‘yes’ to challenges, the brain ‘rewards’ us with highs and buzzes. Whether or not we succeed in our endeavours, we feel the benefit of showing courage because we get

•
an adrenalin rush beforehand

•
exhilaration during and

•
huge satisfaction after

from having had the audacity to try. Even small children love dares. It brings a flush to their cheeks to put themselves in unusual, exciting and scary situations. They will challenge themselves whether you like it or not, and if you lock them in their bedrooms with only a computer for company, they will play dangerous games upon it!

The starved brain

The converse is also true. If we avoid experiences and quail from challenges, the brain ‘punishes’ us with fear. If we run from a situation, we become more leery and perceive it to be more terrifying at the next encounter. If we avoid it altogether, we may become frightened and anxious even in our hiding places. The brain is perhaps telling us:
This is not normal. I need you to go out and let me process information about reality – otherwise how can I possibly learn? How can I make sense of the world if you do not let me at it?

Those who avoid life’s thrills and spills end up afraid of life. Some can’t even open their own front doors any more because of the volume of fear that has accumulated in their heads. The way for them to overcome that terror is gradually to increase their exposure to the world outside, so that their sense-starved brains can function normally again.

INSIDE THE BLACKENED ROOM