Dealing with people
Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. – Aristotle, Politics
So said Aristotle. In my previous articles I said there were four areas that cause stress for human beings. They are loss, change of role, dilemmas and finally people. At the root of a majority of my patients who come to me with depression or anxiety, lies a relationship problem. We cannot live without other people but yet most of our problems too are caused by other people. As so succinctly pointed out by Aristotle, a person who likes to live in isolation and does not need the company of people, is either ill, inhuman or a god.
Man against man: World War 2 claimed nearly 100 million people. Pic courtesy AFP
Aristotle is right. It is indeed because man is a social animal that we have been able to dominate the world. Compared to some animals, man is a puny creature but, by banding and working as a group, man has been able to overcome nature. Also human beings spend, relative to other animal species, a long period of time being dependent on their parents.
Polish scientist Jacob Bronowski, best remembered for his BBC television series ‘Ascent of Man’ titled the last chapter of the accompanying book, ‘The Long Childhood’. Here he writes, that relative to our lifespan human beings spend a long period of time dependent on other human beings. Humans learn more from their culture and environment than other animals whose behaviours are determined from genetic information pre-wired into their nervous system. This gives a rich opportunity for human beings to overcome their nature and learn a range of new behaviours in a much shorter time scale than genetic evolution.
Even though man is a social animal he is also capable of a great degree of violence against other human beings on a scale not seen among other animals. Around 37 million people were killed in the First World War and 60 million in the Second World War, a total of nearly 100 million people, five times the population of Sri Lanka. Sigmund Freud writing soon after the First World War postulated that humans have an innate drive towards destruction or a death wish. But Freud is possibly not correct. The human instinct, as with other animals, is survival. The rest is extra genetic or what we have learnt from our long childhood.
How do we manage our relationships? Perhaps we can find some answers in research findings on attachment, families and emotions. In his bestselling book ‘Families and How to Survive Them’ published in 1983, Robin Skynner says that though there is extensive research on dysfunctional families there was very little on healthy families.
What makes healthy families healthy? Studies have identified several common characteristics of these super families. Most of this work has been done on middle class white families in the United States and the UK, but probably the findings are valid for families the world over.
One such finding was that these families had an unusually positive attitude to life and other people. They enjoyed each other’s company as well that of others, were friendly and reached out to other people. Did that mean that they were unrealistically optimistic about other people? Not really. In fact they had a more realistic view of the world than less healthy families. They understood that people could be good or bad, accepted people as they were but were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to people who initially did not behave nicely. They reached out to strangers in a positive manner even though the initial response was not friendly. As a result they had a good relationship with their neighbours and were valued members of the communities in which they lived. This positive behaviour came naturally to these families. It was not a Dale Carnegie act where people gave out goodwill in the hope of getting it back. They had the confidence to not deliberately seek the approval of others.
The second important characteristic is the love they have for each other. Not a dependent clingy sort of love that is present in less healthy families which often leads to possessiveness and jealousy, but a healthy love which involves closeness as well as distance. They have great affection for each other but not a desperate need of each other. They can still enjoy themselves even when they are apart. As the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran wrote so beautifully in his poem on marriage, “…let there be spaces in your togetherness, Love one another, but make not a bond of love:Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.…stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart..”.
Another characteristic of these families is the way decisions are taken within the family. The parents have clear authority but everyone in the family including the children is allowed to have their say. They are free to discuss the decisions and the parents’ use of their authority but when the occasion demands, the children are expected to accept their parents’ authority without question. Because they are normally fully consulted, children in such families are prepared to accept the wishes of their parents even if they don’t like it. So children can express how they feel but are not given too much power.
A fourth characteristic of a healthy family is that they manage to resolve conflicts as they arise. There are no chronic lingering resentments bottled up over the years perhaps exploding into uncontrolled rage after a minor provocation. In these families people know where they stand, there are no hidden agendas. They know exactly when and why individuals in the family are happy or unhappy. After years of living in such an environment members of such families become expert at understanding people and are able to accurately judge the feelings of others. In other words they become more empathic.
Perhaps most of us do not come from such super families but by studying their characteristics we can learn. As Bronowski said, most of our behaviour is not from our genes but by what we learn from other human beings after we are born. It is never too late for change.
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