Something of Jonathan Smitherson, the hero of the book, resides within each of us. Like us, he would have denied vehemently that any similarity existed between him and behavioural patterns and emotional defences brought to light in the book. He would have maintained that they did not reflect the way he had conducted his life, either as a child or an adult.
It took a traumatic threat to his life at the age of 62 that made him wonder if he had misjudged himself and his family.
This book relates his experiences through his eyes during one short week and how he came late in life to begin to shed more and more of his inhibiting behaviours.
As with Jonathan and other characters in the book, what happens in our childhood for most of us is largely forgotten by the time we reach early middle age. We forget, either because we just do, or because we screen it out.
Fortunately, it is now better understood how as children we learn to pattern ourselves mentally and emotionally from an early age. The way individual children achieve this varies widely. Many of us are unaware of how we form patterns of behaviour and set up emotional defences to enable us to cope with life in our family. Jonathan’s personal experiences give hope to those wanting to emulate them.
The stimuli for this patterning process can occur early in life. Jonathan realises how it can stem from shocking abuse as well as from constant undermining parental behaviour towards us which can seem innocuous to outsiders. More than that, the dysfunction can be unintentional in our parents and can result from patterns they formed in their own childhood.
As Jonathan discovers, it can involve the ways our parents handled domestic interaction. This can be manifest in feelings of affection between them or the lack of them, or the resolution of disputes within the family, or their attitudes to certain behaviours of other people or how they relate together socially as a group.
It can, of course, result from more serious and obvious cases of physical, mental and emotional abuse.
These are just some of the ways the characters in the book as children could have felt bound to create their own patterning processes. Clearly cases of severe physical, mental and emotional abuse set up the reactions in the child which can initiate more rigid patterning and defence strategies.
Despite the parental threat having gone when they leave home, Jonathan is not alone in that all too often the affected child continues to carry these inappropriate patterns and defences forward into their adult life. There they can be re-enforced and perpetuated sub-consciously, impacting for good or ill on their sense of personal well-being and spirituality. Worse, the adopted strategies can have adverse influence on relationships with partners, siblings, children and friends. They can also be applied naively to deal with other problems despite their unsuitability as response mechanisms.
Perhaps one of the strange features of such a process occurs, whether children were brought up in merely dysfunctional families, or whether they were severely abused physically or mentally or emotionally. In such cases, very often those who suffered as children reveal an understandable and marked reluctance to recall their childhood experiences.
What Jonathan finds though is perhaps more extraordinary, yet it is by no means unusual. It is what can happen once we are better equipped emotionally to recall our childhood. To admit to ourselves what we endured, we find deeply disloyal to our very parents who subjected us to the dysfunction or the abuse!
One myth with far wider ramifications is being systematically dismembered by cognitive research and is reflected in Jonathan’s story.
Historically, the unique behavioural patterns and defences of an individual have been interpreted as the sum total of what that person is. Yet, truth to tell, they were mere strategies adopted by that person as an immature, inexperienced child to protect him or herself from the worst effects of historical dysfunction or abuse. These can mask a very different person trapped behind them and one capable of being released.
Jonathan’s story, while fictitious, is disturbingly common.
Gerry Neale Author
The book is available in paperback by ordering online from Waterstones, WH Smith and from
http://www.amazon.co.uk or the publishers at
www.pearlpress.co.uk or independent bookshops
