NEGATIVITY is the Irish disease. This is a culture, after all, in which asserting one's inferiority isn't just a personality trait, it's a required social skill. Just as Americans tend to try to appear superior to everyone they meet, the Irish subtly compete to see who can be most self effacing. To pretend to be anything different is to risk being torn down.
Why are the Irish like this? Negativity is actually an ingenious protective mechanism, which the Irish developed over centuries of domination, believes. Dr Tony Humphreys, a psychologist and author of a new book, The Power of `Negative' Thinking.
Our "negative" culture is really a "protective" culture in which we avoid emotional hurt and rejection by refusing to take risks, he argues.
The predominant protective behaviour is passivity: in other words, whatever you say, say nothing. "The revelations we are now hearing about the abuses of children within institutions - we all knew about them. It's just that there was no safe forum in which to express them. That forum is now being created and people can speak out with safety," he says.
The disclosure is happening now, because it has taken several decades for the effects of the psychology and inner growth movement internationally to be felt here. "The psyche moves when the culture moves, as an adult we can separate from the outside culture but this is a great risk to take so it takes a while to show your cards. But once you do you become an agent of change within the culture and so the culture, begins to change around you.
There is no doubt that Dr Humphreys sees himself as an agent of change and that he sees his book as a potential tool of transformation for those who read it - like M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled and Gail Sheehy's Passages.
"Ten-15 years ago, one of the most difficult things to say in this country would have been `I love myself'. If I had written a book which told people to love themselves, I would have been dragged off by the men in white coats. To think such thoughts was sinful, bad and selfish when actually self love is the most unselfish act of all," he says.
Preaching self love in 183 overtly didactic pages, Dr Humphreys challenges some of the basic tools of psychiatry and psychology, including cognitive therapy and the need for psychiatric drugs.
He is convinced that there is no actual scientific evidence for the existence of endogenous, chemical depression and that anti depressant drugs like Prozac are only crutches that may ease symptoms but do not cure. Drug treatment of schizophrenia is also a stop gap and failure to treat the cause of the disease, he believes. Depression, schizophrenia and other mental illnesses are actually protective mechanisms by which the sufferers avoid the risk of rejection, he argues.
A depressed young mother who cannot handle the 24 hour a day closeness of her new baby may actually be protecting herself by avoiding the real issue: dealing emotionally with her own rejection as a child by her own mother. The young schizophrenic who turns up in a big city claiming that he is Jesus Christ may actually be protecting himself against the ultimate rejection: anonymity.
Dr Humphreys argues that any distressed person - whether they are clinically depressed, schizophrenic or simply stressed out and unhappy - can heal themselves if given the safety of unconditional love in which to explore their hurt, which has almost certainly been caused by emotional abandonment in childhood.
Unfortunately, unconditional love is often hard to find in the culture of many workplaces and indeed marriages, which are dominated by competition, judgmental criticism and strictly conditional acceptance. Those who are seriously distressed will need to seek the unconditional love of a therapist in order to find self healing, Dr Humphreys believes, although he hopes that as society grows more of us will be able to offer each other unconditional love - free of charge.
We have a long way to go. From childhood, he argues, we survive in a world which is often emotionally and physically unsafe and as a result we've developed creative protections which reduce or eliminate risks to our emotional and social well being.
These protections are "negative thoughts" such as "I'm stupid", "I'm lazy", "I'm ugly", "I'm bad." If we believe that we are bad, for example, then we are protected from rejection because nothing is expected of us and we therefore have justification for avoiding risk taking.
"The psyche is immensely clever at protecting itself from hurt in this world and it will use physical, conscious, preconscious and subconscious mechanisms to protect itself from further rejection," says Dr Humphreys.
Students who say, "I'm going to fail", are protecting themselves, against the pain of failing to meet their parents' expectations.
The man who says, "I'm a fool", only reduces others' expectations of him, but also reduces his own expectations of himself, so that his mistakes and failures are not the hammer blows he experienced as a child.
In cognitive therapy, the therapist guides the client towards rationalising why he is not a fool. But this is ineffective, Dr Humphreys argues, because it operates only on a superficial intellectual level, failing to address the core issue of the heart, which is that it is useful to the client to believe that he is a fool because it enables him to avoid the risks involved in being a wise, independent adult. No matter how convincing the client's intellectual reasoning that he is not a fool, he will not change his behaviour. It is not the thought that has power, but the feeling behind the thought, Dr Humphreys asserts.
LIKEWISE, there is no such thing as "positive thinking" - only "open thinking". To be positive, is simply to have such high self esteem and unconditional self love that you are willing to open yourself to risk taking - freely risking other's disapproval because you love yourself too much to care what they think. There is no point superficially saying "I can do it" if deep down you fear rejection so much that you will never take the risk of doing "it" - whatever it is.
In Dr Humphreys's view, the fear of rejection - a fear based in our earliest experiences of emotional abandonment by our parents - is what prevents most of us from becoming emotionally independent adults and from achieving our goals. There are no victims - just people whose lack of self love prevents them from escaping their tormentors. The battered wife who cannot love herself chooses to stay with her abusive husband rather than risk being unloved. The harassed worker allows himself to be bullied by his boss rather than take the risk of looking for another job. The worker suffering from stress related illness blames her own weakness, rather than realising that it's her lifestyle that's killing her and daring to change it.
Dr Humphreys teaches - and "teaches" is the word because this is a deliberately didactic book that many of the subconscious and pre conscious attitudes which drive our lives are apparent in the form of our projection onto others. For example, to say "nobody loves me" is to project your own lack of love of self onto others. "Projection has the very intelligent purpose of taking the focus away from yourself and on to another so that you do not have to face your own emotional vulnerability," he says.
Somebody once said that first you learn there is no Santa Claus, then you learn there is no God and then you learn that there are no adults. You could say that this has been the path of Tony Humphreys's life. He entered a semi enclosed religious order at the age of 18 and came out at the age of 25 in 1968, one month before he was to be ordained. It wasn't the celibacy issue that caused the spiritual crisis. He realised that he could not believe in God. The whole idea of it didn't make sense to him. He became, and remains to this day, an agnostic.
"Leaving was the hardest decision I ever made in my life," he says. "My mother said she'd die if I came out and my father said he'd never talk to me again.
When he got home, no one would talk to him and he overheard his invalid mother, whom he had helped to care for from the age of five, telling the neighbours that he was a "embarrassment".
Within the week he had left home and begun a struggle with a depression which was to last for many years, although he still functioned well and qualified as a teacher before going on to earn honours degrees in clinical psychology.
Twenty eight years after embarrassing his mother by daring to follow his heart, Tony Humphreys has become a secular priest: a psychologist and therapist. Working with people with a wide variety of psychological problems, he has concluded that "most adults are children hiding in adult bodies. And that's a very clever protective device. I'm saying that this is wonderful that we can hide ourselves in adult bodies, which we do because we so badly need the acceptance of others. The challenge for the adult is to find the wonder of his or her own being and to see it in others."
Not that he means to make it sound easy. The Power of `Negative' Thinking is not inspirational light reading. It is an immensely challenging book, as challenging, one suspects, as its author's own journey to self acceptance.
From the first page, Dr Humphreys dares readers to analyse their own negative thought patterns. This means teasing out their protective function, which inevitably has its source in some type of emotional abandonment. So in order to complete the task of each chapter, the reader must stir up painful childhood memories - an exhausting and dangerous risk.
To superficially read the book is to gain a lot of insight, but to actually assimilate the book's message into one's own life, would probably take about a year of slow reading and much reflection. Dr Humphreys suggests skimming the book first, then settling down to "the journey" which he intends the reader to undertake.
Throughout the book, he asks his wary readers whether they feel embarrassed or uncomfortable. If they cannot rehearse positive or "open" thoughts like, "I love and accept myself', or "I am deeply aware of my goodness and worth", without squirming, then he advises them to back off until they are ready.
Because much involves acknowledging childhood hurts, many people will want to protect themselves by avoiding it altogether. They may even treat the book and this very feature" article about the book with the utmost cynicism.
Burying the past is tempting, and even necessary at times, but deny it at your peril, Dr Humphreys warns, it will still be the engine behind your every action.
We are part of a continuum of behaviour which each generation inflicts upon the next, which is why - he thinks - we should not seek to blame the bullies in all our pasts. It is not inevitable that abused children become abusers but all abusers - 100 per cent - were themselves abused as children, Dr Humphreys believes. If they say they weren't, they are "in denial", he asserts.
Therefore, there is no point in punishing or in forgiving them, he advises, just move through and past the pain and take responsibility for your own behaviour.
By the way, child neglect does not necessarily take the form of battering or hunger, in Dr Humphreys's view. Withdrawal of love, impatience, dismissiveness, over involvement, ridicule, control, scoldings and hostile criticism are also threats to children's emotional well being. Even parents'
overprotectiveness (perhaps because the parents themselves were abandoned or abused) is a type of "neglect" because it prevents the child from becoming emotionally independent, he argues.
There is no parent, by these standards, who has not abused or neglected their children in some way and there are very few of us who were not abused to some degree. And so there are very few who will not be helped in some way by this book, even if it's only to gain a little more compassion for each other and ourselves.
