Other People
The story so far….
Everyone is born with the idea that there is somehow, something wrong with them, that they are worse than other people.[i] That is about the most persistent, fundamental idea we have about ourselves, and it gets everywhere. Love and money owe their success to their ability to overcome this idea and make people feel good about themselves.
Even when we manage to not be aware of it, and to forget we ever were, this idea is still exerting pressure and colouring everything we do precisely because one of the key motivations behind the choices we make, and the things we do, is to keep this idea away.
The idea gets closest to the surface when people feel things aren’t going their way and the idea that it’s their fault presents itself. And it does always present itself: the mind is ruthless and, at some level, if you lose your job, your marriage or your legs in a landmine, it’s down to decisions you made which haven’t worked out well for you and the idea that it’s your fault is always available. You get upset with yourself when you miss the train or leave the house without your keys; imagine the ideas injured military veterans have to contend with.
The extent to which people are going to feel things are going against them will depend on how they expected things to be. If your expectations of the world and the people around you are wildly unrealistic, you’re going to encounter a consistent diet of disappointment and frustration. Expectations are more realistic the more people are able to come to terms with other people’s separateness and independence, which means the more they’re able to dial down the intensity of their own internal experience and the better equipped they are to meet the world outside them halfway.
And these ideas are all connected: unrealistic expectations lead to an experiences of things going against you, which stimulates ideas of fault and inadequacy, which creates a very vivid internal experience (anxiety, aggression and self-dislike), which in turn makes it harder to form realistic expectations and meet the world halfway and on it goes. If it goes on long and deeply enough, people can become stuck and they can become ill. The illness can take many forms, but they all have this in common – difficulties in coming to terms with the idea of getting things wrong, of not doing a good enough job of meeting the world outside you halfway.[ii]
When these ideas get out of control, there is a powerful antidote available in the form of the idea of doing better.[iii] If people can look long enough and honestly enough at the harm they have caused themselves and other people (which they have, because we all do, and they do know they have, because that’s precisely what the problem is and it’s just that thing in psychology again of not being able to look at what you don’t want to see), something a little magical happens. They know what’s happened, they know what’s gone wrong and they feel remorse and the desire to try to put things right, make good, to do better.
If people can start to acquire enough trust in their capacity to do better, it becomes easier to come to terms with their capacity to cause harm. The problem is being able to tolerate the idea of your own fault and the damage that’s been caused long enough to get to the other side of remorse. And that’s down to that original idea that you’re somehow not good enough, worse than other people, making it very hard to accept that you’re implicated in everything that’s gone wrong (even though you sense that at some level you are and dislike yourself for it).
∞
What this piece adds to the picture, and it’s immensely helpful to be able to see, is the fact that that idea of defectiveness, which feels so intensely personal, is universal - everyone else has that too, everyone. The reason that’s so helpful is because it is the essence of ideas about worthlessness or inadequacy that you are somehow worse than other people. So, if you can see that, in fact, everyone around you has the same idea about themselves, and it’s affecting them in the same kinds of way it affects you, it loses a great deal of its power.
And then it becomes easier for people to come to terms with their own capacity to cause harm, to experience remorse and to take consolation from the idea of doing better. And as the intensity of their internal experience diminishes (the anxiety, aggression and self-dislike abate), it becomes more possible to see things differently, for expectations to shift, to become more realistic, to do a better job of meeting the world outside your head halfway. The logjam breaks, something fundamental about people’s relationship with themselves and the world around them has changed, and anything becomes possible.
So, it seems perverse that when people are in trouble and come for help, therapy takes them into a dimly lit room and subjects them to a process of talking exclusively about themselves and their problems. And that the dominant motifs coming out of mental healthcare and encountered across the media, education and the well-being industry are all about the self (boundaries, saying no, self-assertion, self-acceptance, self-compassion, loving yourself).[iv] It’s all taking people in the opposite direction. Other people don’t come into it.
When people talk about stigma in connection with mental health what they’re really talking about is the idea that you’re on your own, that other people are unaffected. That’s what really hurts: it’s the same idea of being worse than other people. The distinction is crucial: what’s shared doesn’t involve stigma, what’s different can and often does. Efforts to counter stigma around mental illness or to promote difference and divergence over the normative, really aren’t very effective, in terms of helping people who are suffering. Phrases like ‘we all have mental health’ or ‘it’s OK not to be OK’ are sort of beside the point when all around you people are getting on with each other, making it work, being productive, taking quiet care of themselves and others and finding what they need in order to lead effective, contented enough lives.
What is valuable, is to understand how much the ideas and experiences that underlie mental health (not the illness itself but the ideas and reactions to them that can lead to mental health issues), are natural, universal and are how you are ‘meant’ to feel. It’s the problems people have coming to terms with their own ‘normal’ experiences (the fact that you have behaved in a weak, cowardly, insincere, dishonest, spiteful or maybe downright vicious manner, for example) that causes trouble. So, anxiety disorders are effectively anxiety about feeling anxious, OCD is an attempt to ward off frightening ideas in your own head and depression is an exaggerated feeling of worthlessness in reaction to the unpleasant and difficult ideas and emotions people find inside themselves. Everybody thinks and does shitty things from time to time. It’s OK, you can do better.
Less stigma about mental illness isn’t really the priority – people should be motivated to avoid mental illness,[v] it is miserable, people should try very hard to keep things together – what is needed more is better understanding of other people’s predicaments, a better sense of shared experience. There shouldn’t be any stigma about the ideas to do with the self that underlie mental health but succumbing to those ideas to the point that you can’t function properly because you’re so overwhelmed with anxiety, aggression and self-hatred, obviously isn’t a good thing. Removing stigma around those universal ideas about the self, making it easier for people to recognise them in themselves and other people, is a good way of helping people to avoid succumbing to them.
∞
Mental health is being able to deal with not getting what you want from other people. Mental illness is people hating themselves because they can’t get on (in their heads) with other people. Perspective is better ideas about other people. The thing that hurts people is the idea that there’s something special (worse) about them. For these purposes all the focus on the individual, difference and divergence isn’t helpful: exceptionalism is the disease.
And none of this requires anything very new, it’s what people are already doing: comparing themselves, measuring themselves against other people, wanting to be better but most are doing it with an idea that they’re uniquely awful, worse than other people. This is about recognising that that idea is something that people have in common: in an epidemic of loneliness, it’s about recognising something absolutely fundamental about shared experience, about community, about connection.
What’s needed is more looking outwards at other people and looking for what you should expect to find, which are the same things you find in yourself, including the things you dislike most about yourself. Thinking about other people - the new self-care.
[i] https://jonathancoppin.substack.com/p/the-great-secret-shame-game?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
[v] Which isn’t to argue for stigma but the explosion in mental health issues doesn’t need to be bolstered by associations with celebrity, glamour, or victimhood or conflating it with appealing notions of legitimate divergent experience.