Why It Can Take Us So Long to Understand How Unwell We Are

A lot about our behaviour doesn’t make sense until we can take on board a basic idea about the way we humans are built: that our biology privileges survival over self-awareness. In other words, the most important priority for members of our species is to live and to keep going, not to pause, understand and take stock. 

Place any new human in a terrible circumstance – let’s say, in a home with a violent or alcoholic parent, or an abusive or depressed one – and it won’t, as one might imagine it could, be able to focus clearly on what has gone wrong or mourn its condition. It will simply – as we’ve ascertained it must – keep going.

In order to do this, it will call upon a range of innate survival techniques. It may start to think surprisingly well of its parents, declaring them justified in their beatings, selfishness and humiliation. It might assiduously blame itself rather than sparing any pity for its own deprivations. Let’s remember that a sense of self-compassion can be a very dangerous thing indeed when one is five years old and no one would listen even if one yelled. Or else it will ward off despair through activity: it will over-achieve at school. Or break windows. Or become obsessed with drugs or sport or politics; anything not to have to listen to the buzz inside. The benighted child can’t look back, it can’t glance down. It must simply stare ahead at the main goal: survival.

This priority can last for a very long time indeed. After all, a sense of external security isn’t remotely assured for most of us until we have settled in a career, built up some capital, bought a home, found a spouse, maybe had some children. By which time we might in our 40s or 50s.

Yet our excellence at survival doesn’t take away from the basic fact of our situation. We have been born into a mess. We have the ingredients of madness inside us. We have been unmoored by cruelty. We are (quietly, in the recesses of our soul) close to insanity at points, the ineluctable result of too much suffering encountered too soon.

But as the external world gets ever safer for us, the internal world has a chance to feel as troubled as it always has been. We may feel stranger inside at forty than at twenty – even though the causes of our disturbances lie in events far closer to the latter date than the former.

Eventually, the pent up fear and sadness are liable to find a way through. We’ll start to do something odd: write long letters to strangers or crash the car or sob in public. Or develop a certainty that the government is following us. The legacy of the unkindness of which we’ve been the recipients begins to emerge.

With any luck, we may soon enough wind up in a clinic – or the consulting room of an experienced therapist. And here have a chance to find out more about the sadness and loss that have been inside us since the start. 

We may finally feel safe enough to let out a very long scream – and meet with the love and understanding that were our due from the start.