As I’ve said in an earlier post, I was asked if I had prepared an account of how I came to join the Bahá’í community. I’ve now completed the story at least in draft. I was planning only to send it quietly to the Bahá’í Histories website and leave it at that, in the hope that very few would read it outside the Bahá’í community. But then I wondered why I should be so quiet about it. Yes, I think it’s a fairly ordinary story about a fairly ordinary person, and to that extent, why go public? But then also it is just about the most important thing that ever happened to me and connects very closely to two of the other most important events in my life. So, I thought, ‘Share it and see what happens.’ It might do some good and probably won’t do any harm. So here goes for part two. Part One stopped with me on the way to Hendon Library during a period of unemployment post-qualification as a clinical psychologist, completely unaware of what was in store.
It took me a while to twig, after some good advice, that I was applying for jobs for which I was perceived as too-experienced, having done five years of responsible mental health work pre-qualification. So, I did not finally land a job till the January after I had qualified that Autumn. Even so, I never seriously doubted that I’d done the right thing to leave teaching.
I had fled the teaching profession in 1975, after my dissatisfaction with the work led me to a weekend encounter group. In that group, I’d experienced a dramatic breakthrough into a previously unconscious well of pain whose exact causes and parameters are still unclear. As a result I had the first of my three most significant blindfold leaps of intuition to date: I had applied for something like 25 jobs in helping professions. I knew I wanted to make people the syllabus not books as had been the case as a teacher, but wasn’t quite sure how to do so. I applied for jobs with the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, probation, and social services amongst others.
Then, one afternoon, I went for an informal visit to a day centre for what they termed ‘the mentally ill.’ I cannot fully explain what followed. After only two hours in the building talking to staff and clients I just knew this was the work that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Very strange, especially as that feeling turned out to be completely right. It took another seven years before I finally qualified but neither then nor later did I ever doubt the correctness of my purely intuitive decision – that leap in the dark that seemed to defy reason completely. This was not to be my only such decision as time was to tell.
With hindsight this period of unemployment after I qualified was probably a Godsend.
By this stage memories of my snow-bound prayer had faded, the situation was sorted, and I was almost back to my normal state of complacent scepticism.
Consequently I was totally unprepared for my own imminent experience of conversion as I ambled towards the library in Hendon that triggered it one late November day in 1982. I had no sense that history was about to repeat itself, that my affinity with my maternal grandfather, whose life my mother had described in loving detail many times, was about to expand from a shared love of books to a life-changing encounter with a new religion.
It was my love of poetry that in fact paved the way to my encounter with the book that changed my world. As a result of my enforced idleness I had re-read T S Eliot’s The Wasteland whose footnotes somewhat misleadingly draw the reader’s attention to Frazer’s The Golden Bough. As I had long ago lost my copy of that book, which I had never got round to reading, I decided to go to the library and take out a copy just to see if it helped my understanding of Eliot’s poem.
Once in the library, I checked the catalogue and found the reference number for the book. I located the shelf. To my disappointment the book I wanted wasn’t there. In fact, there was, in this library containing thousands of books, only one book on the shelf with that category number: The Message of the Masters by Robert Scrutton. I took one look at it and immediately put it back on the shelf. Why would I want to read another book on religion? I’d just been through all that nonsense all too recently.
I stomped off round the library. Generally half an hour in this well-stocked bookaholic’s paradise used to provide me with my maximum entitlement of six books after several difficult decisions had been made to reject at least another three. For some reason, that day, the philosophy, psychology, sociology, fiction, poetry, drama and biography sections yielded absolutely nothing of interest. I went up the stairs to the record section, another usually reliable source of entertainment: not a single thing attracted me.
Having walked to the library on a cold day I was reluctant to feel it was a completely wasted visit, so I went back to the first shelf I had visited and picked up the book I had rejected. I grudgingly felt that I might as well borrow this one rather than leave the library empty handed.
When I got home I threw it dismissively onto the sofa, went off to make a cup of coffee, and turned on the radio. Nothing. The television: nothing. Flicked through my record collection: nothing seemed to fit my mood of the moment. The discarded book was lying next to me. I picked it up. I might as well read it, I thought, really disgruntled by this stage. What a pointless way to end the day!
Having picked it up I came very close to putting it right back down again. It clearly had quite a lot about spiritualism in it, something that my scepticism regarded as blind superstition.
What caused me to read on was that a religion I had never heard of, but which matched almost all my long-standing preoccupations, was described in compelling detail in its pages. There were many quotations from people with strange names I couldn’t pronounce, but I was drawn to the ideas and the evocative language in which these were expressed.
I skipped the stuff that would have put me off and homed in on the sections most concerned with Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
It was impossible for me to believe that this could be real. It was claimed that an exile and a prisoner, enduring innumerable hardships over many decades and without the access to scholars and massive libraries Karl Marx had enjoyed, had unfolded to humanity’s gaze what seemed to perfectly combine compelling spiritual principles with credible social action. This activism was apparently rooted in a nonviolent honest process called consultation that underpinned what seemed to me would be a truly beautiful system of administration, if it existed. All this was presented in such a powerful way that I was sure, given my constant scanning of the landscape of ideas, that I would have met with it already if it were real. After all I had been actively searching for something like that for as long as I could remember, without knowing exactly what it was I was hoping to find. Even the God-problem was probably solved because the Faith did not believe in the God I didn’t believe in, as far as I could tell.
When I look back at my whole life trajectory from the moment I shocked my mother by saying I was not a Catholic anymore to when I made the declaration of intent we shorthand as becoming a Baha’i, I realize now I had always been on a quest. In fact in some ways of course I still am. I was unconsciously searching for something then with rather more desperation than I am searching now, when I feel I am at least pointing in the right direction or digging in the right place.
The quest had its roots partly in suffering. Two of the most important people in my childhood had been dead for several years.
One was my grandfather, the convert to Catholicism, whom I have already mentioned. His later life had been marred by an accident that caused him to lose his leg and become unable to work any longer as a railway signalman. The family had to regroup with my Aunt Anne leaving school at 14 to get a job, as did my Uncle Harold, the eldest. My mother was the youngest sibling but had been deeply affected by this testing turn of events which left her with a constant state of anxiety about what drastic twists and turns of fate life might bring in its wake. It was therefore deeply saddening for both my parents, but perhaps especially for her, to lose my sister, Mary, in 1939 just before the start of the war.
My parents’ grief as a result of Mary’s early death at twelve years old, four years before I was born in 1943, and the pain of a world recently at war, overshadowed my childhood and seemed partly responsible for triggering this intense quest, both for understanding and some kind of resolution of my disquiet, that drove most of my waking hours and many of my dreams as well.
So, I was being driven, even at that early age, by an intense craving to understand, and to understand in ways that made real sense to me, not in the incredible doctrinal terms that people were trying to placate me with, and which contradicted my own experience in the ways I have touched on earlier. The credibility gap widened as puberty took hold and the sceptic came out victorious. My spiritual side, it would seem to me now, was quietly biding its time but was by no means defeated.
So, having shut the door of the Catholic Church behind me and stepped into the back lanes of agnosticism, it wasn’t long before I was on the beach of atheism watching the tide of faith go out beyond eye-shot.
It seems though that this was about to change.
Thanks so much for sharing this link with me.
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You’re welcome. Of course, it’s typical of me that I should be flung into a crucible of transformation by a book.
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Do you know today, Pete, what that well of pain was?
And how did you end up going on an informal visit to a center for mentally ill?
I hope you don’t mind my questions. There are many parallels between your story and mine.
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I don’t mind your questions at all. I am out most of the day to day so I hope to respond to them later, but the well of pain is still a bit of a mystery. I have several explanations but none of them definite!
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That well of pain begs to be explored, I believe. I have it too, and I do not fully understand where it comes from as it appears to go beyond past traumas (at least those I know of).
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The easy question is that I had left teaching and only knew that I wanted a job that involved placing people at its centre. I applied for 25 jobs and one of them was the one at the Day Centre. After my visit there I just knew the work that I wanted to do.
As for the well of pain, that’s difficult. Anyhow, here goes.
I’ve searched in a number of places for the spring that feeds this well in order to try and reduce its pressure.
After my first encounter with the force of it, the obvious possibilities that occurred to me were all located in my family of origin. I worked beyond grief at my father’s death in 1967 to the pain located around my sister Mary’s death four years before I was born, the grief for which overshadowed my childhood.
This didn’t really defuse the problem and a likelier candidate seemed to be my two experiences of hospitalisation one year apart before starting school. According to the wisdom of the times my parents were not allowed to stay in the hospital with me during either stay. The impact of such trauma on children causes them to lock their softer self away from harm deep inside and out of sight, unfortunately still traumatised but inaccessible to the warmth, love and understanding that would heal the wound. I was no exception I think.
I have done a lot of work on that issue. I worked to reintegrate the terrifying frozen giant who strode out of the freezer in a nightmare, and the TA groupwork and the breathwork seemed to finally ease that part of my inner pain.
It didn’t stop the well of tears of effect though.
A more recent and quite promising possibility was explored by a few of us, I think on Brenda Brabinski’s blog. The feeling was shared that we do not express our routine accumulation of sadness as we go and it builds up until a trigger releases it in a flood. It is better to allow music, song or whatever else works, to bring any sadness to the surface and allow the tears to flow.
I’ve tested this out since then by comparing on the one hand plodding on as usual and on the other regularly using sad songs (they always work for me) to release the tears. If I use sad songs regularly the tears are fewer in number and the pressure is less. I can also sometimes locate recent mundane pains to explain them. Whereas if I do not use this method for a while, when I start the tears are stronger and last longer.
That’s about the best I can do right now. But you’re right. It is a problem that begs to be addressed and it should not be ignored.
My least probable fantasy about a possible cause was the image I once had of myself as a native South American standing on a hillside with my heart breaking as I looked down on the valley where my home and all my tribe had been destroyed. Tears come to my eyes as I write. At the very least this is an image that represents something still unresolved, possibly.
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Thank you so very kindly for this response, Pete.
Yes. I can see the cumulative traumas of your sister’s and father’s deaths as profound losses (even before your birth, as with your sister) shaping your childhood, along with the two hospitalizations that separated you from your parents.
It is my opinion, borne from experience, that such separations are never as benign as people used to believe (I hope they no longer do, but I’m not sure).
My guess is also that you were a highly sensitive child (see Dabrowski’s overexcitability,-ies), prone to feel deeply and thus easily wounded.
When I try to locate that pain, I too am taken back to my childhood and hours spent alone, waiting for my parents to come back from work.
I was very little when they started to leave me home alone, at 2-ish (poor working class, and I “did not take” to daycare) — and although the period of that aloneness was just a couple of hours, it was excruciating and felt, for some reason, as utter abandonment.
From an adult perspective, it does not make sense (and my parents never knew nor realized how I felt), which is why I cannot quite place that well of sadness and woundedness there. It is almost as though it has a super (supra?) natural dimension, but that’s no explanation, of course. It did affect my development in various ways, however, severing my ties with religion, for example, as I felt as utterly abandoned by God as I did by my parents then, as a little tyke. Neither was/is true, of course, but feelings have their own logic.
Maybe it’s a genetic predisposition to sadness and psychic pain that sensitizes some people to these experiences and their emotional consequences.
If they can bear it, and express and transform it, this burden helps them become good therapists and writers sometimes.
There is a mystery to it, as to much of life.
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I will be blogging soon about a book I have just finished called ‘Boarding School Syndrome’ by Joy Schaverian. It relates strongly to what you wrote: ‘It is my opinion, borne from experience, that such separations are never as benign as people used to believe (I hope they no longer do, but I’m not sure).’ Her book strongly suggests that, while things have moved forward somewhat, it is still far too often the case that parents do not recognise the harm that such separations do, and eventually their children cannot recognise the harm that has been done to them either, so contagious is the consensus trance in certain circles.
From your story, I sense that we might be sharing similar origins, in my case in the northwest of England. My grandfather’s leg amputation stopped him working and his two eldest children had to leave school immediately and find work. My dad began somewhat better off until he went bust in the Depression.
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Boarding school syndrome! I did not know it has a name, but I can well imagine what torments it produces, in those directly afflicted and their close ones, later in life.
The trauma involved there is that of disrupted — or sometimes entirely severed — attachment, and I am strongly convinced that most of our diagnosable psychiatric maladies, from attention deficit to personality disorders, stem from it.
One of the most memorable, for me, “prisoners” of a boarding school, and a military one at that, was Rilke. Sending a boy like Rilke to a military boarding school equals child abuse. Any child, really, but especially one who is so sensitive, introverted, and artistically gifted. This had to have something to do with his narcissism in adulthood, no doubt. Although one could question whether staying home, where he was growing up “in nothingness,” as he said, would have been all that much better.
For someone as allergic to group life as I am, the sheer thought of living in a group setting away from home is excruciating. Yet this is how we house the most vulnerable members of our society, those who most need individual attention, warmth and love: children, disabled, and elderly; and hardly anyone stops to notice the inhumanity of it.
I was born in Poland, in 1964. In 1987, we emigrated to America. When I was 15, I came upon Dabrowski’s writings and KNEW I wanted to do what he did — so I went to study clinical psychology (still in Poland, under Communism).
Both my parents were children of war, personally affected by the Nazi occupation which displaced and dis-membered their families.
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Emma, many thanks indeed for sharing these insights into your life. Although I know that my dad had trauma in his life, fighting as he did in the trenches of the First World War, as we Eurocentrically refer to it, as well as living through the Great Depression and working in Civil Defence in the Second World War, I also recognise that the duration and severity of the hardship endured by people living under the tyranny of Hitler and later of Stalin was far worse.
Interestingly, there is a strong Polish link with Hereford, where I live. During and after the War, when they had fought alongside us, many people emigrated into the area, where they were welcomed and helped to resettle by the local community, and since then, first as seasonal workers and later as permanent residents, many Polish people have come to live here.
Also I need to say how much I appreciate the gems of insight about matters of great importance to me you are sharing in these comments. Not just about psychology and Dabrowski, but also for example about Rilke, a poet I keep going back to in the various translations I own. I am not sure whether I could say I ‘like’ him as a poet – there is a dark disconnection that I sense somewhere at the heart of them which repels as well as interests me – but his poems, especially the Duino Elegies, are a powerful and compelling read. You have shed light on at least one possible cause of the darkness that makes me uneasy, and helped explain the isolated existence he chose to imprison himself in – or perhaps ‘chose’ is the wrong word.
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Ha! We Poles are everywhere.
I’m glad to have come upon your blog, Pete. Kindred souls are brought together these days much faster, thanks to those marvelous internet thingies.
Rilke has tormented me as well, probably for very similar reasons. So much so that I wrote a (very bad) paper about his development, pointing out along the way (or so I thought) some limitations of Dabrowski’s theory. I may need to revisit and rewrite that paper some day.
Rilke may have been doomed to narcissism. Many gifted people are by virtue (?) of their talents, overexcitability.-ies, and the hostile or indifferent environment in which they grow and live. But there are also mysterious forces at work there, which make such fates perhaps necessary. We do not understand them, and maybe by design.
I’m convinced that narcissism is a manifestation of death instinct — this is not a new thought, as the analysts who explored narcissism way back when, in the early 20th c., said as much.
But it took me a while to see it, and I’m grappling with the implications of this understanding.
Because, for one, I do not believe death instinct is natural. If children / people were loved and cherished — by other people, and specifically their parents — they would not become prey, so to speak, to death instinct. This instinct seems to arise in people with history of disrupted / severed attachment. Freud did not see this, blind as he was to reality of abuse and suffering it created, so he misattributed self-destructive drives and behaviors arising as a reaction to abuse, neglect, and abandonment to an independently existing “instinct.” Narcissism, for one, appears to be such a reaction.
But death instinct can be a powerful, though limited, creative force in some circumstances. Its creative aspect comes in a need to destroy what’s inauthentic, artificial and stifling; and when combined with special talents, this drive can lead to significant — but limited — artistic and maybe even other (not sure about it, though) achievement.
It is limited, however, because if it is not met with even stronger forces of love and compassion, and self-transcendence built on both, it constrains development and causes much misery all around.
This is what happened with Rilke. His narcissism (powerful manifestation of death instinct) made it impossible for him to transcend his weaknesses and limitations, locking him in a glass box, as it were, of his talent and creativity, without a genuine connection with the world and others that can only be forged through love. He wrote beautifully about love, but was really incapable of it, beyond the superficial.
This is, by the way, the fate of many creative people. Unsurprisingly, there is even recent research showing a “puzzling” preponderance of narcissism and psychopathy (yes) among creatives.
And this is also where Dabrowski’s thoughts are helpful again. He warned about dangers (for individuals and society) of one-sided development, where one special talent, or a set of talents combined with high intelligence, but with an underdeveloped emotional sphere, leads to a lopsided existence and much trouble, for the affected individual and even more so for those around him or her.
OK, I should probably write all this on my own blog, instead of colonizing yours in such an unceremonious manner. Some people. Sigh.
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“After my visit there I just knew the work that I wanted to do.”
Serendipity. 🙂 A.k.a the invisible hand of fate / the Universe.
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