Attachment Theory for multiculturalism?

BOOK REVIEW : The Myth of Attachment Theory: a critical understanding for multicultural societies by Heidi Keller, pub: 2022, Routledge, Oxon

Discovering attachment theory as a student social worker in the year 2000 was like a flashing blinding light coming into my life. Suddenly so many of my experiences and those of my family and friends around me made sense. I was completely and utterly hooked. A devotee.

That was before I worked with people who grew up in different cultures, and, especially, before I travelled (as opposed to holidayed). Whilst I still wholeheartedly believed in attachment theory I was finding I was having to ‘apply’ attachment theory as I knew it to the ways in which other cultures functioned in their childrearing and parenting styles. I came to understand that the Eurocentric models of parenting were not the only successful ways for communities to support the raising of their next generations. And it was OK.

Until one particular fostering & adoption assessment broke my heart, and is probably what really drove me to accept that front line assessment work was no longer where I belonged. It showed me the impossibility, for me as an individual social worker, to break out of the barriers of what is in effect unintended institutionalised ignorance and racism embedded in some of our key theories that underpin so much of modern social work. So I was immediately interested when I came across Heidi Keller’s book.

The particular assessment I refer to involved an African woman who had moved to the UK as a young adult. Let’s call her Zena (obviously not her real name). She had been ambitious and determined to fit in with her new culture and in almost every way the way she lived her life was a model example of what anyone would expect of a future adoptive or foster parent. Although myself a white social worker, I had worked with many carers and families from both African and Caribbean backgrounds, and I had learned so much from them, starting with the language of cultural identity. Hardly surprising Zena identified as either from her native country or African (as well, I should add, as British), and throughout the assessment I used one of her own identified terms to describe her nationality and culture. The second thing about the assessment was I began with an attempt at a deeper understanding of her own childhood experiences and upbringing, so different to a child born in the UK, in order to provide a layer of context that doesn’t always seem so necessary for someone who was born and brought up in the culture in which they are being assessed and about which we make implicit assumptions.

In the second decade of the 21st century, not only did management remove much of the culturally relevant information that rounded out this applicant’s personality and life experiences, but, more devastatingly, changed all references to her identity from African to Afro-Caribbean, a culturally offensive term best described as white laziness for ‘blacks we can’t so easily tell apart’. I saw how that wounded her, as the full weight of institutionalised racism came down upon her head.

I have seen over the years how assessments on cultural and social assumptions rooted in the middle class experiences of the theories we depend on, and less on the lived experiences and their impact on the individual(s) involved, even within the same supposed culture. The richness of assessments, and the consequential understanding of the dynamics of families, that were written half a century ago, have been lost, ironically as “anti-discriminatory” practice became better understood, and, particularly with the development of greater openness in sharing what we think and write with those we think and write about. A negative consequence of what should only have been a positive change.

But, as always, I have strayed from my purpose!

In the forward to the English edition of Keller’s book Nandita Chaudhary introduces the reader to WEIRD people – Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic, and elsewhere the book reminds us that academia is the preserve of the educated middle classes, based on their experiences and perceived needs. Chaudhary also comments on the rise and normalisation of the nuclear family, adding “The shift from bigger to smaller and detached families led to a system that liberates the rich and marginalises the poor. Larger families had greater resilience, with a large group of people to fall back on in times of need.”

Keller begins with an overview of the origins of attachment theory and the vulnerabilities even in the very beginning of its development: Bowlby was warned, but did not heed, by Margaret Mead ‘not to over generalise from a monocultural perspective’. Concerns are raised on the over-dependence of Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Procedure as lacking comparisons to outcomes that might have been observed in a child’s natural environment. Where later research came up with different conclusions (such as the incidence of secure versus avoidant or ambivalent models of attachment), it seems that the research was deemed at fault rather than using it as an opportunity to challenge the theory itself, the very underpinning of the ethos of good research in the first place.

Regardless of these early flaws, the question now is, is the attachment theory of the academic middle classes of over half a century ago, still fit for purpose in a modern multicultural society. Or as Keller writes in her personal preface to the book, “The challenges of multicultural societies just cannot be met with one single doctrine.”

Criticism of attachment theory has not been welcomed and Keller observes that despite some apparent ‘mini attachment theories’, the ‘attachment theory of the 21st Century is largely identical to the attachment theory of the 1950s/60s’.

The world has changed in over 60 years. Our own WEIRD society has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, as my previous blogs discussing mental health and community have covered. Why then can’t the theory that underpins everything we believe in as a social work profession provide the evidence that it has kept up with changing society?

Keller’s quote of Ross Thompson that “While culturally oriented researchers ask for greater culturally informed attachment research, attachment researchers wonder where they can find greater attachment informed cultural studies” particularly struck me as reflecting my own dilemmas in undertaking assessments with Caribbean and African adults whose childhood experiences were so far outside the norms of attachment theory, and yet had still ended up as emotionally secure and stable adults, partners and parents, I was left with the sense of trying to fit the culture to the theory, or, in other words, writing attachment informed cultural assessments whereas what I really needed was a culturally informed attachment theory.

Keller provides a well-evidenced presentation that not only was Bowlby’s original attachment theory based on narrow set of assumptions of what constituted family and parenting, even for the 1950’s, but that criticisms since have not been taken on board and Bowlby’s attachment theory remains relevant to a culture that even the society to which it originally applied has largely moved away from. Leaving social worker assessors to continue to try to fit the evidence to the theory rather than having a theory that encompasses the evidence.

As a taster of some of the observations from the book – Cameroonian Nso mothers watching clips of German middle class mothers caring for their babies being surprised at what they considered to be the insensitivity of the German mothers; when the baby cries the Cameroonian Nso mothers first instinct is to feed the infant, while they saw the German mothers talking to the babies and checking if the baby had other needs to be met before finally offering feeding. And the one that surprised me: the phenomenon of the “terrible twos” occurs predominantly in Western middle class societies. First time parents in their 20’s or 30’s in Western cultures are more likely to have their first experience of caring for an infant when they have their own baby to care for, while in many other countries, particularly poorer rural countries, the new mother will have experience of parenting younger children since she herself was a very young child. Some cultural expectations of play being with others means that children will have no experience of manipulating and playing with any object while alone; this will affect the effectiveness and interpretation of a child from that culture in the Strange Situation test.

Further Reading

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1720325115?fbclid=IwAR0OoZUscOCvClXmonYrC_nASDIixMWcmnrOxV079SYYFW98-fr-VDAz4UQ

Heidi Keller is also the author of this 2018 paper, using different cultural examples than the book. It points out that as our Western countries become more culturally diverse this has potentially significant consequences for other cultures migrating to Western countries, and the Westernisation we also see going on. The conclusion is that the lack of cultural contextualisation means there is no validity in the claims for universality in attachment theory, and as it is the underpinning basis for the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, the UN Convention is also culturally flawed.

Overall, despite being from the same author, this paper is an easier read than the book, above.

Opening the door to: TA

Transactional Analysis (TA) is what it says on the tin. Analysing transactions, or communications. There are books and websites galore that will explain this in better and more detail. This post is intended to only offer enough for the layperson to get enough understanding to help them improve their own relationships, whether that be at work or at home or as part of a wider family or socially.

Basic principle: as individual humans we operate at any one time from one of three different bases. It doesn’t matter your sex, gender, age, sexual orientation, status in society, ethnicity, religion, gender role in a relationship. However, I will make a note about culture to say that in some cultures certain types of communication between people from different social strata, male/female, adult/child, boss/staff. The TA responses can still be seen and recognised but changing them is going to be far less likely and even, for the stability of that culture, possibly not even appropriate. What is being described here is therefore ways in which TA can be more easily analysed and changed in a more Westernised society.

Styles of Transaction

ADULT – we communicate to others on an adult to adult basis; we receive communications from others with an adult oriented mindset – we are adults and we expect to be treated as adults

PARENT – we communicate to others on the basis we are the ‘parent’, the responsible one who knows best, we expect others to communicate to us in a way that recognises this – PARENTS can be both critical and nurturing

CHILD – we tend to communicate to others from the perspective of a child – CHILD responses tend to be spontaneous or compliant

Within those descriptions there are a vast array of variations. But if you peel back the layers you will sooner or later come back to one of the above descriptions.

Transaction locations

There are three basic locations for our communications: WORK, HOME and FAMILY, SOCIALLY.

WORK – it would be nice to think that at work we are all behaving as adults, but that’s not always the case

HOME and FAMILY – this can include extended family, actual parent/child relationships as well as couple relationships – the extent of the family we relate to will be dependent to some extent our own sub-culture within our wider culture – it is in these environments we tend to develop our most complex interactions

SOCIALLY – the people we choose to spend time with, friends – again, it would be nice to think that in these situations we are mostly behaving and communicating adult to adult but that may not necessarily be the case

The easiest way to get to grips with this is to look at real life scenarios. The least complex of these are most likely to be at work.

AT WORK

You’ve got a lot of work on and your boss or supervisor dumps a pile of files on your desk, or sends you an email, with an urgent request to get something sorted by the end of the day. Panic rises in you as you know you have barely enough time to complete what’s on your desk already and you rush into the boss’s office whining that it can’t be done. You are responding in your CHILD state expecting your boss to be the PARENT and take the problem away. If your boss responds as a nurturing PARENT they could solve the problem for you by taking the work back or deciding for you which other job to postpone for another day, while you say thank you and go away as the grateful compliant CHILD. This doesn’t do much for your development as an employee and keeps you dependent on others for support and guidance.

Your boss could also respond as a critical PARENT and just tell you to get on with it and get it all done to which you may well go into full on CHILD response with feelings of anger and being upset. You cannot easily direct your anger at your boss but it affects your ability to work and your emotional imbalance caused by poor relationships at work are easily transferred to affecting relationships in other areas of your life, particularly at home.

It is also possible for you to respond to your boss from your own critical PARENT state telling your boss they are unreasonable and demand they take the work back. The boss could respond from the compliant CHILD state and do as they have been told, which long term negatively impacts on any respect their staff may have for them. Or they could object to having their authority challenged and respond from either the critical or nurturing PARENT state in order to try and move you back into a CHILD state (preferably compliant). This is a particularly important option because it illustrates how we can switch between states, even during one interaction.

Alternatively, the truly grounded boss could respond from their own ADULT state, remaining calm and working with you to prioritise your workload, resulting in you both operating in the ADULT state.

Alternatively you could respond to the additional work with your own ADULT state. Take a look at and prioritise the work you have to do based on your knowledge and experience in the job. Then, run it past the boss to confirm they are OK with you deferring one particular piece of work. The chances are they will respond to your ADULT state with their own ADULT state. They may change your recommendation, because they are aware of priorities in the pipeline you are not yet aware of, but your interactions will still be ADULT to ADULT.

The ADULT, CHILD and PARENT emotional states are not respective of boundaries of authority. They are rooted in how we emotionally process our interactions with others. And can changed throughout the day in different circumstances. For example, although teachers in a classroom might be in PARENT state whilst teaching children, they should be able to switch back into ADULT state when dealing with colleagues.

In businesses or organisations where the top tier of management are working from the PARENT state it can lead to less productivity or even failure and collapse of the business. If staff are kept in a CHILD state of fear by a controlling dictatorial management there will be a loss of innovation, nobody will have the confidence to experiment or try something new, or even suggest alternative more efficient ways of working. Professionally qualified and emotionally balanced staff will feel undermined and eventually leave, further reducing the quality of the working environment and likelihood of success.

In one office when the bosses were out the staff were relaxed, chatted but still got on with their work. When the bosses were around everyone was alert and wary, not actually working through fear of criticism, shuffling papers trying to look busy but really just waiting to being told off for some minor misdemeanour (which included asking or helping each other in how to do the job). Everyone had to have their own single office and no-one was allowed into anyone else’s office. Crazy but true story. This was an extreme example of PARENT state management.

SOCIAL

One would think friendships would be on an ADULT to ADULT basis, and generally they are. However there are some dynamics that can see PARENT/CHILD state relationships.

An unhealthy example would be where one person whose own emotional needs lead them to wanting to be in control, taking the PARENT state, striking up a friendship with someone who is vulnerable and prefers to be in a CHILD state (or vice versa).

A healthier example might be where one friend has times of vulnerability due to physical or mental health difficulties. Whilst the normal relationship would be ADULT to ADULT there can be an understanding that when a difficulty is experienced that makes one party vulnerable and in need of support then the other party would take on a PARENT state for as long as necessary, with the relationship reverting to ADULT to ADULT once the immediate crisis is over. 

FAMILY and HOME

This is where some of our most complex interactions occur. Whilst the principle of the way the interactions work are broadly the same as for family and home relationships as they are for work and social relationships, there are additional dependencies that can add layers of complications.

For a start, we can’t change our parents, or our siblings, or even our children. And whilst divorce might seem a solution for couple relationships that are not working, we often take our negative experiences and approaches into the next relationship without resolving the issues that troubled the previous relationship. Whilst there is greater pressure for these relationships to ‘work’, so there are underlying fears relating to what happens if they don’t work.

Changing family dynamics is normal as we all age, our health changes, our external relationships change. Some of these are worth looking at under this section.

Family flashpoints

As children reach their teens and adolescence their parenting needs are changing. They need to begin to learn and practice ADULT to ADULT state relationships. But too often parents remain in their PARENT state. The young person continues to respond in a CHILD state but less compliant and more through spontaneous high emotion. The young person also needs a parent who can adopt PARENT state when the young person needs to revert to CHILD as they process new learning and experiences.

Aging adults nearing the end of their lives struggling with the practical daily tasks may take on a more CHILD state in an effort to get their needs met. Adult children may struggle to come to terms with having to PARENT their parents in old age.

Unwelcome signs of aging living in a society obsessed with youth can affect our emotional and mental wellbeing. Children leaving home. Significant changes at work or changes in job. Unemployment. Retirement. All these and more affect our resilience and how we interact with others. As we feel less secure in ourselves and our futures we can try being more controlling leading us into PARENT state handling of relationships.

A diagnosis of a serious life threatening illness such as cancer can make us more prone to moving more towards PARENT or CHILD states where we weren’t before.

The ideal couple relationship would be in ADULT to ADULT state. However, social and family and work pressures, lack of understanding of one another’s needs, personal worries, etc, can all lead to a breakdown in communication. Illustrating this would be the stereotypical “nagging wife” (although it can also be a man who takes this role). When that happens the “nagging” is being done in PARENT state, the more it goes on the more the other partner is likely to respond from their CHILD state. 

RECOGNISING THE DIFFERENT STATES

One simple check is how you feel. Are you relaxed, calm and thinking straight, using analytical thinking and objective language free from emotional judgement. Chances are you are in ADULT state.

Are you taking a tone of authority, trying to impose rules or boundaries. Is your language judgmental: you should, you must, you ought, you’re wrong. Are you experiencing anger or frustration. Is your body language more rigid. Or are you being overly protective or caring when it’s not necessary. Chances are you are in PARENT state.

Are you experiencing strong emotions, including fear and anger as well as excitement or happiness. Are you making silly mistakes because you are acting impulsively. Or are you trying to appease, seek reassurance or validation. You might be acting carefree or compliant or rebellious. Whatever your responses they are being led by your emotions. Chances are you are acting and responding in CHILD state.

Sometimes the clues are small, they are not always very noticeable. However unless addressed early on, unhealthy states can become embedded and harder to change.

FINAL COMMENTS

Whilst it’s normal and OK to switch between ADULT, PARENT and CHILD states at different times and in different relationships, it should be normal that your adult to adult relationships are in ADULT to ADULT states most of the time.

A single conversation can see both parties switch between PARENT and CHILD as they each try to gain control but also find themselves subconsciously responding in the opposite state to how they are being treated. As this these states are about getting our needs met it is rare to see a CHILD to CHILD state exchange, and PARENT to PARENT states are not easily sustained except in argument.

It takes a lot of internal stability to respond from a different state, particularly to be the ADULT and bring someone else out of CHILD or PARENT into an ADULT state. 

Some people seem to spend little or no time in ADULT state, always coming from PARENT or CHILD or fluctuating between the two. It is quite likely this is the long term impact of their own childhood experiences and not having learned to work from an ADULT state.

The gender spectrum – a commentary

Perhaps I should start by saying this is not an authoritative piece of academic research. It’s a little bit of brought together experience and observation and learning. If the reader thinks I’m wrong, or missing the point, comments in the comments section below will be welcomed.

As a child growing up in the 60’s and 70’s I remember comedians in particular “cross dressing”, as it was called then, and seeing and hearing about (again, to use the word of the times) “transvestites”, mostly men who sometimes or always dressed as women. It wasn’t something women did. Or maybe they did, but they were just ‘invisible’. Despite the women’s emancipation (another word of the times) movement, it was still a man’s world, a patriarchal society, so of course women would want to emulate men, who were, after all, the holders of power and authority. Men, ‘real men’, couldn’t understand why any man would want to give up that power and authority to be a woman. And so transgender was largely seen by the majority as a one way traffic issue.

Homosexuality and, by extension, some form of transgenderism, has existed throughout history. From at least the Ancient Greeks, known for their homosexual practices, to what is now considered to be the myth of “Pope Joan”, elected Pope in AD.855, to the post-war women’s fashions of the 1920’s, and the expression of sexual and gender preferences through literature and arts, whether in the writings of Shakespeare (1564-1616) or children’s literature with Enid Blyton’s 1940’s Famous Five character George. The khwaja sira communities of Pakistan are a long standing community of transgender, homosexual and lesbian people rejected by their families, going back hundreds of years.

Susan Stryker in her book Transgender History (2008/2017, Seal Press, Hachette Book Group, New York) covers the development of the transgender movement, in particular from the mid 1800’s when the existence of transgender roles became much more apparent, in much more detail, albeit from a US perspective. 

One thing that is consistent across cultures is the consistency of certain social, political, industrial, medical and economical developments that have been important in the separation of understanding of homosexuality and transgender since the mid 1800’s. In particular industrialisation had brought more people together in towns and cities, away from their families and smaller communities, that allowed for more freedom of expression, just as industrialisation brought about improvements in printing, which was now easier, faster and more economical than it had been. It was now easier for people who, in their home town would be considered ‘different’, maybe even outcasts, to communicate and meet and find others they could better relate to. Better communication was already helping spread political and social change even before the internet.

Like teenagers who think they know more than their parents, it seems every generation is advancing the causes of society and civilisation, when in reality there is very little that is different today than there has been over millennia when it comes to human behaviour and relationships. Tolerance comes and goes. As do suppression and repression. Often in different places at different times. What is different in our generation is the globalisation of communication and our knowledge and understanding of what is happening not just in our small world but in the bigger world. Patterns of language change more quickly. 

Samantha Shannon, writing in the Guardian in early 2017, covers some of this in her article The literary tomboy is dead – or is she? The complexities of modern understanding of sex and gender no longer tolerate such stereotypes, or, as Shannon puts it: As language around gender has become more precise and nuanced, the tomboy seems more and more outdated. Shannon tells us: The word “tomboy” in the sense we understand it now – “girl who acts like a spirited boy” – was first used in 1592. Before that, it was a pejorative label for a “bold or immodest woman”. Earlier still, it described a “rude, boisterous boy”.

Shannon uses examples of characters from history to illustrate just how different a “tomboy” could be. Such as Enid Blyton’s character Master George featured in her Famous five books from the early 1940’s. And in 1928 Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness was published, with her female character, this time a lesbian. In the 1860’s novel Little Women the character Jo March could be described a “tomboy”, although she later married and had children. And Viola from Twelfth Night. From more modern literature Game of Thrones character Arya Stark. 

All these characters are very different, making it hard to see how one word, whether “tomboy” or transgender could cover them all. To cope with these differences the current modern transgender movement has come up with a whole new words, new descriptions, a more nuanced lexicon. 

In 1966 the medical community recognised and classified fledgling transgender identities through the sex orientation scale, before Gender Identity Disorder (later Gender Dysphoria) was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) III in 1980. (Wikipedia)

When I was a child growing up in a small town in England, it seemed that homosexuals and “transvestites” were largely seen as unusual and harmless. If we laughed at them it was because they seemed to invite us to from our television screens, with comedians such as Danny La Rue and Dick Emery, or Kenneth Williams in the blatantly ‘camp’ Carry On films. Quentin Crisp was a curious character, a man unto himself, who appeared from time to time in the news. And then glam rock filled our screens on Thursday night’s Top of the Pops, with rumours of sexual experimentation, led by stars such as David Bowie and Marc Bolan. Only with lyrics such as “and he was a she” in the darker hit Lola in 1970 was there a hint at a sub-culture not otherwise known out in suburbia. Transgender was not yet a ‘thing’.

But for all that there were tensions. In 1984, when one small Lesbian & Gay Rights group from London wanted to support the striking miners, they were met with fear and prejudice, but their determination to help, from one oppressed group to another, broke down barriers such that for the first time ever the powerful miners’ unions turned to support gay rights, changing political history. Their story brilliantly and heartbreakingly told in the 2014 film Pride. 

It was only in the mid to late 1980’s that transgender issues began to be included in the Lesbian & Gary Rights movement, and LGB became LGBT. Or as Susan Stryker says (presumably in the original manuscript in 2008), “Transgender is a word that has come into widespread use only in the past couple of decades, and its meaning is still under construction.” It’s not a new phenomenon, but it is still evolving.

Now, in 2023/24 it seems that transgender has in recent years moved to the forefront of the LGBTQ+ movement, that has inspired an aggressive explosion of counter-campaigning. Compassion seems to have gone out of the window. And with that a genuine understanding of what makes up this hugely complex sphere of humanity, met instead with aggressive ridicule. Ridicule of course is a fear response, but nobody seems to be saying that. As I write today it feels as if the whole debate has narrowed down to choice of pronoun, at least outside the transgender community.

The aggressive explosion of counter-campaigning is not without cause in some instances, and the transgender community is going to have to help counter those causes. Cis-gender women get worried by transgender women who behave in what appears to be an aggressively male manner in demanding women’s rights to use women only toilets. Those cis-gender women fear that these ‘men’ are seeking to gain access to what should be safe spaces for women in order to attack or rape them. Similarly, there have been cases of transgender sportswomen whose former male prowess is seen as giving them an unfair advantage in their sport, undermining the very existence of women’s sports. Whilst it might seem fairly extreme to go through changing gender identity, there are undoubtedly a small minority of people willing to take extreme measures to achieve their goals, whether that is power, wealth or fame, and the transgender community is not immune from infiltration. It may seem unlikely but it cannot be discounted. And so these are real concerns. The transgender community needs to be a part of helping the rest of society in dealing with these issues.

At this point, let me say a little about my own position. I was born a little girl, but I didn’t like girls much. They created exclusive little friendships, fell out, were nasty to each other, bullying, sending people they didn’t like to Coventry for no good reason, carried grievances and grudges and had silly little rules that made no sense. Boys just fought and got over it. I preferred boys. They made more sense. And I found boys to be nicer and more interesting people, and nicer company to be in. I would quite liked to have been a boy. My fear is that in today’s society I would have been labelled transgender and pushed down a path that would have been wrong for me. However, my experience does give me an empathy for those who are struggling with their gender identity. It also leaves me with a fear for the young people who are uncertain about their sexuality or gender. Uncertainty is a part of growing up. So too is the need to conform. And that may lead to conforming to someone else’s reality before you are fully confident of your own. It is the one point on which I support the anti-trans campaigners.

The reality is, transgender is not a modern phenomenon. It crosses millennia, race, culture and, whether some in the modern women’s movement like it or not, it is intersectional. And far from clear cut. What is modern is what appears to be an explosion of transgender identities. It is as if we can no longer live with natural human variance. The boundaries of ‘normal’ have been getting increasingly narrow. It is this apparent explosion of almost pandemic proportions in the incidences of young people identifying as transgender that I hope to explore a bit more in another blog later on.

Explanations of different gender identities can be found in numerous places. The obvious place to start is with the LGBTQ+ community, where there are numerous sites to be found and take as an example, reflecting what is still an evolving movement. Maybe not at the forefront of evolving language and terminology, medical websites such as Medical News Today, or healthline, along with that old favourite, Wikipedia, can be useful for the layperson to find lists of categories and sub-categories and related terms (such as AFAB, assigned female at birth), as long as the reader understands that no matter how long the list it cannot be definitive: the healthline description of “gender apathetic” is elsewhere called “graygender“, a term first coined in 2014. It’s an evolving language. Although it is also an evolving string of letters as the names and acronyms increase, giving rise to critics using the term ‘alphabet soup’ to further deride the movement. 

Yet to read much of our current social media, and even some of our mainstream media, it seems as if it has narrowed down to a choice of pronoun, something to be mocked. After all, if you don’t understand something, why not laugh at it. Easier than trying to understand it – easier than showing compassion and acceptance. Sexuality and gender identity are not the same.

Colonialism, Missionaries, and Small Boats: the power of the story

I was chatting with a couple of the security guards at the Okavango Delta campsite where I was staying in Botswana a few years ago (2013/14). They were telling me it was their ambition to move to England. The campsite where they were working was owned by a white man, I can’t remember where he was from: Australia or New Zealand. But it doesn’t matter much. His guests were predominantly white families, some Europeans but many white South Africans. It wasn’t particularly cheap (to us) but it was secure, with reasonably reliable wifi, running water, working toilets, and well maintained grounds surrounded by wildlife, and, as we were drawing towards the conclusion of 4.5 years of travel as what I termed international nomads, we needed somewhere secure to leave our vehicle while we visited England for a few weeks. We were by far the poorest of the guests when we were there. More often than not we had stayed in African ‘hotels’ (think ripped mosquito nets, pit toilets, a communal water tank with barely a dribble of water in the bottom, no electricity – and no white people). As poor as we were compared to our fellow ‘whites’, by African standards we were still rich: we had our own vehicle and we were travelling and not visibly working.

I was reminded of this ‘story’ when I was reading the Foreword by Nandita Chaudhary in The Myth of Attachment Theory by Heidi Keller, pub: 2022, Routledge, Oxon

Chaudhary writes: "As story-telling animals, human beings have been weaving tales from the earliest times. This capacity for creating narratives is unique to our species and sets us apart from all other forms of life. As a young girl growing up in Nigeria, Chimamanda Adichie was steeped in English literature about fair-skinned, blond-haired, and blue-eyed children. Her imagination was trapped in those stories.  In her writing, Adichie cautions us about the collapse of our imaginations into a single story: 'What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children...I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. This is the danger of the single story, it colonises your imagination to a point where you cannot think outside of the images you feed on...You are not successful unless you have attained the next thing, until you have reached the West, because that is the world that has filled your imagination." Adichie, 2009 

In my conversation with the Botswanan security guards I confirmed just what they might earn in the UK, and their eyes widened. Then I told them what it would cost them to rent a flat, pay in taxes, the cost of food and gas and water and electricity. They looked a bit more subdued. The reality is that whilst it is ‘cheap’ for me to live in Africa for a little while, with Western, developed world resources at my disposal, the reality for me to live and work in Africa (or any of the other mostly southern hemisphere developing countries) permanently is that I would be as poor as anyone else. It is no different in reverse for the African to live in England: wherever you go in the world the cost of living is nearly always going to take up all the poor person’s wages.

I doubt if my one short conversation with those security guards will have been enough to deter them from their dream of a better life in the West, with the streets paved as they are (not) with gold. Because the white Westerners and the white South Africans they see are those who can afford to travel to their country. They are not representative of the average poor working classes. The education they will have received, steeped in years of colonialism and well meaning missionaries will have sowed the seeds for these myths that West is Best.

The ‘story’ is being perpetuated but what can we do? Can we send missionaries to Africa and South America to tell the stories of being poor in our rich lands, to be honest about how it is our policies and practices of capitalism and consumerism that is helping to destroy our planet, of the gaping divide between rich and poor and how we have food banks because so many people cannot afford to buy enough food to eat, or people living on cold damp streets, sleeping among the gravestones in cemeteries because they cannot afford somewhere to live, or because their lives are so miserable they have resorted to alcohol and drugs to block out their misery, and the emotional and mental health crisis we have been increasingly facing for several years as a result of these situations? Would we be believed after the years of receiving such different ‘stories’?

Not so long ago I read of another country for whose children their ambition is not to be a fireman or a butcher or a builder or a doctor or an academic, but to become a refugee to a better life somewhere else.

We (in the UK) threaten to turn the boats away, let refugees drown at sea, send them to Rwanda if not actually back to their homeland, no matter how dangerous that might be. But it’s not enough to deter desperate people making dangerous sea crossings, risking their lives for the gold at the end of the rainbow. They don’t hear the fear (of them) and prejudice in ‘our’ words because the narrative, the single story, they and generations before them have grown up with is so much stronger. I doubt anyone seriously believes the Illegal Migrants Act will ‘solve’ the migrant ‘crisis’ (as we perceive it).

There is no doubt that whilst some are escaping life threatening wars and terrorism, others are escaping physical and economic hardships that seem overwhelming when there is something better other people are enjoying. Until they land on our shores by one means or another, they do not ‘hear’ or understand the fear and prejudice they will face, that higher wages doesn’t mean less poverty, just different poverty.

Years, decades, centuries, of colonialism by European nations, and including the United States, has brought us to where we are today.

Somehow we have to find ways to broaden the narrative. Ironically, probably the only way to achieve that is to allow migrants to experience their lives in their dreamland, so they can tell the alternative stories when they go home. Not an opportunity our UK government is willing to risk.

Failing back to happiness?

For my 21st birthday I received a card with the words:

Happiness is like a butterfly. You don’t notice it there until it flies away.

At least that’s how I remember it. Amongst all the butterfly quotes on the internet today, none quite matches. As I talked about in a recent blog “The Rising Fall in Mental Health (part 2 of 3)”, our modern world often focuses on happiness. Government social research measures happiness. And towns vie for the status of being the happiest in the country. We focus on the pursuit of happiness and we measure it in wealth, physical perfection, careers, achievements, influence. There’s no room for flaws.

But does pursuing happiness work? This is what Elizabeth Day addresses in her little book failosophy: a handbook for when things go wrong, 2020, Harper Collins, London, written off the back of her podcast How to fail with Elizabeth Day.

The pursuit of happiness, with being the perfect self, stems from the birth of the self-help and actualisation movement in the 1950’s. Doesn’t seem to have worked. We are in a worse state than ever. We’ve failed. Might just as well embrace that failure and see what happens.

SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF FAILURE

One – Failure just is – it exists, you can’t have success without failure. Nobody says that the baby that falls the first time it tries to walk has failed. Failure is part of growth and learning. How we feel about failure is another matter. Worrying about it is pointless.

Success is a personal perception.
Jessie Burton, Author

Reflection: genuine failure isn’t something you can actively pursue. I mean, if you set out to fail, and then you fail, you’ve actually achieved what you set out to do. You’ve succeeded, not failed. If that idea sounds bizarre, that’s good. It probably makes you normal. But as a child I didn’t like the attention that came with praise. I secretly enjoyed the disappointment of my parents. It made me smile inside. I got pretty successful at failure. And I carried that through into adult relationships. How much different my life might have been had I not been so successful at ‘failure’.

Two – You are not your worst thoughts – success is temporary, we always need to move on to the next success. Worrying about what we have done or not done or need to do takes up time and energy. How we choose to think about an event, as a success or failure, or neither, doesn’t change the facts of what happened. And especially, it doesn’t change who we are as a person. And ultimately, we are in control of our own brain: we can choose how we think about things.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.
Eckhart Tolle, Spiritual Teacher

Three – Almost everyone feels they’ve failed at their twenties – a consistent theme Day noticed in her podcasts was just how many of her guests felt their failures most in their twenties. As if, having left childhood and their teens behind, they should have grown out of failure. At a time when they were just beginning to really learn how to truly navigate the world of adulthood. In a world that suddenly has less structure and signposts than the familiar boundaries of families and education. Seems kinda daft when you look at it like that, but every generation we pass through is a learning process, bringing new experiences and new challenges. As Day puts it, “your twenties are when you forge your identity, and work out who you are”, something that is getting harder and harder under the glaring spotlight of the perfection of social media, whilst battling with the challenges of careers and a world that seems to lurch from one financial crisis to another.

My twenties were hard. I was jelly. I was unfinished and unmoulded, and carrying a lot baggage and expectation about how I should behave.
Meera Syal, Actor, Comedian, Playwright, Author

Reflection: At 18 I moved to a new town, 50 miles from where I was born and ‘grew up’. When I moved back to my home town following a divorce 10 years later it took me another 10 years to stop calling the district where I lived throughout most of my 20’s ‘home’. Even now, 35 years later, when I visit, or pass through or by on my travels, I look wistfully at the place where I felt I really grew up, away from the microscope of family, free to make mistakes, independent, looking after myself and surviving, forging new career paths, truly discovering who I was (although I’ve discovered new selves since). I recall my mother one day visiting me where I was living in a bedsit and saying, “I wouldn’t want to know what you get up to when I’m not around, would I?” I just replied, “no”. Perhaps I understood that I didn’t need someone else labelling my travails of growing up as failures on the road in life, while I just saw them as life.

Four – break ups are not a tragedy – relationships are not just the romantic one on one relationships, but can also include friends and even family relationships. Maybe the relationship just wasn’t a good fit. Maybe that friendship was just for a season where your lives passed through similar circumstances and then took different directions. Maybe blood might not always be thicker than water. Eventually, sometimes quicker than other times, we get to look back and realise we can and have survived without that person. As Day puts it, “break-ups give us a crash-course in who we really are because when a relationship fails, we have to look at what part we had to play in its demise”. I would only add to that: if we choose to.

I look back and I go, “What an idiot.” But it’s great because I’ve learned from it and I’ll never do it again.
Vicky McClure, Actor

Reflection: At the beginning of her book Day suggests that readers will find some sections more useful than others. Whilst I know from experience that there are toxic relationships that really do have to end, and out of every loss there can be growth and new learning, in reading this section of the book I struggled with how easily the author easily accepts these changing relationships without considering the alternative of perseverance in maintaining and working through differences, not just in romantic relationships but in friendships and family too. But perhaps that’s because, 20 years older than the author, I’m in a different generational experience. As a child I didn’t understand the words of the embroidery sampler (those were the days) I worked on: “Make new friends but keep the old. The new are silver, the old are gold.” Making new friends in my 20’s was easy. Making new friends in my 30’s was easy. Even in my 40’s. But as each decade goes by so our numbers get depleted, we become more entrenched in our ways, less willing to be flexible to adapting to new friendships and relationships, our life commitments become more onerous, we have less energy, and we often become more wary and risk averse. Until eventually, we experience the loneliness of old age as our friends die off around us, and we physically cannot get out and make new friends, as I have seen with my parents. There is, I believe, a loneliness in the shallowness of ‘new’ relationships and friendships that have not been honed and tested over time, that is, I believe, at least part of the root of our current mental health crisis. My parents generation pioneered the nuclear family. My generation pioneered the acceptability of divorce. The next generation pioneered single parenthood as the norm. We have, as a society, steadily moved away from long term stable relationships and friendships, and being willing to work at what it takes to maintain them (where possible).

Five – Failure is data acquisition – one of Day’s early surprises in recruiting guests for her podcast was the gender split: women saying they had failed in so many ways and so many times they couldn’t whittle it down to just three to talk about on the podcast; men, on the other hand, were more inclined to say they struggled to think of as many as three incidences of failure. Actually, it seems, men just see things differently. Or as Day puts it, if you are cis gender, white, middle class and male you are still being born into a society that is made in your image. You live in a world where you are more likely to see any failure as something that can be easily overcome.

This gender balance did shift over time, but raises the importance of how we perceive and respond to failure. Does failure just bounce off your confidence and privilege? Or does it get absorbed by your self-questioning insecurities? Day asks, “what if we all started to view failure not as something that sinks us, but as something that can help us rise: a necessary piece of information that will help us take our next step?” Maybe in data collection, failure is not something to be avoided but something to be pursued, like the scientist seeking a cure for a deadly disease.

There’s something very freeing about being willing to try something that doesn’t work.
Malcolm Gladwell, Author

Six – There is no such thing as a future you – plans are all very well but there’s no telling what can derail them along the way. That plan you wrote five years ago? Relationship changes, health changes, social changes, financial changes, national political changes, international disasters. Anything can change our perspective. What we want today may be very different from the vision we had five years ago. Not sticking to goals that are no longer relevant to our lives is not failure. Imagining what we should be doing and feeling in 5 or 10 years, is influenced by what is happening around us today, not what will happen in the intervening years. Pursue goals by all means, save for a house, buy a house, save for a pension, just be prepared to remain flexible.

What’s next is what’s happening right now, where you are in this moment. Your universe will just keep moving the way it moves.
Cush Jumbo, Actor

Seven – being open about our vulnerabilities is the source of true strength – face failure head on, process it, correct what you need and can, and find yourself living a more authentic life. Accepting your failings, your faults, being honest with yourself, takes away fear and stress of being ‘found out’. Imperfections are what make us human. Being able to be honest about our own struggles and failings can help others to see their own experiences in a different light, even normal sometimes. And Day gives several examples of this.

This is no so different to the popular “PostSecret” website, where people anonymously send their secrets on a postcard to the PostSecret address. These secrets are shared in emails, books, exhibitions, and attract many letters of thanks from others who find they are not so alone in the world as they thought they were.

The more you can be vulnerable around failure, the more time you’re going to save other people. It’s an act of singular generosity.
Alain de Botton, Philosopher

Reflection: I should have learned this lesson much younger. I had the opportunity! Arriving late for work one snowy day my supervisor sent me to the store manager. I told him why I was there and who had sent me and he said it was OK, lots of people were having trouble getting to work because of the snow. Completely lacking in guile, I replied, oh no, I only live up the road, I overslept. He looked at me and said he would still let me off for being honest. It took me a few more years of fighting off shame and embarrassment to truly appreciate the time saving effect of just putting your hands up to any mistake and getting it over and done with. And sometimes I succeed.

Endword: And so there it is. Failing is normal. Mediocrity is OK. Failing is essential for growth and development and learning. Failing is embarrassing and emotionally painful. But the real failure is letting lesser failures dominate our lives and hold us back from being the person we can and should be. Wasting time hiding and shielding the world from your imperfections, when you could be enjoying learning and achieving new things. You can fail and still be at peace. To be successful is not to be known by others, but to be known by ourselves.