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Izzie's favorite Wise Woman
01/08/2004 11:22 pmIf Izzie came up with a list of the ten most influential people in her life, this lady would easily make it into the top five
Dorothy Rowe
Iz liked this so much that she has copied and pasted the entire interview
( Wisdom Interviews: Dorothy Rowe )
Dorothy Rowe: Well...my grandmother had had a very difficult life and my mother was the fourth of her children, and she was—I don't know what she was like as a child, but as an adult, she wanted the world to be exactly what she wanted it to be. And when it wasn't, she got very angry.
Peter Thompson: Why was that?
Dorothy Rowe: I thought this was peculiar to my mother, but when I went to England and started —just had the opportunity to talk with people who were depressed; just listen to them tell their story or talk to me about anything—I found I kept meeting my mother. And I came to realise that the less you value and accept yourself; the more uncertain you feel about yourself, then the less you can handle uncertainty. And so you want everything to be the way that will suit you. And you try to force the world to be what you want it to be. And of course the world will never be what any of us want it to be; it goes its own way. And so if you're trying to force the world into what you want, then you're going to suffer and other people will suffer. It's not just the people who get depressed who want that, but this is what we see in Israel and Palestine. There's Ariel Sharon trying to force the world to be what he wants it to be. You see it in the Muslim fundamentalists, who are acting in acts of terror, trying to force the world to be what they want it to be. And of course that won't happen.
Peter Thompson: It's an exercise of power.
Dorothy Rowe: It's an exercise of attempted power. Because in essence, power is getting other people to accept your interpretation of things. And this is what politicians, leaders, are trying to do all the time. And they're telling us that their way of seeing things is right. In a democracy we take various points of view about that, but under a dictatorship people have to, at least pretend to, accept the dictator's point of view.
( ....... )
Dorothy Rowe: One of the great difficulties a lot of people have is actually then growing up and taking responsibility for themselves. They continue to think of themselves in relationship to their parents. They always think that, if I please my parent, then I'll be looked after and I'll be safe. And they might extend that to a religious belief; if I'm good and please God, then God will keep me safe.
Peter Thompson: Or if I please a marriage partner.
Dorothy Rowe: Or if I please a marriage partner. It's this constant notion that you can't look after yourself; you've got to please this more powerful person in order to survive. And we don't really grow up until we realise that that doesn't work. You have to take responsibility for yourself. And until you do that, you're still in a childish relationship.
Peter Thompson: It's very interesting to hear you talk about this now, because you're doing so with quite a bit of objectivity and dispassion, and seemingly no residual bitterness about it.
Dorothy Rowe: That's somewhere where we all need to get in our lives. Nobody has a happy childhood.
Peter Thompson: Really?
Dorothy Rowe: Yes
Peter Thompson: I've had many people tell me that they have had happy childhoods, and that they realised in their adult lives how precious that was.
Dorothy Rowe: Some people have happier childhoods than others. but even if your parents are kind and loving and extremely skilled at meeting your needs and wishes—parents can be kind and loving and absolutely hopeless at understanding your point of view—that even if you've got all that, you then have to go to school. And so…
Peter Thompson: Oh yes, I forgot about that.
Dorothy Rowe: Yes, don't forget about school. And then there are just the other adults that you meet. Adults can be very unkind to children.
Peter Thompson: We all have to, in some way or another, make sense of our childhood, process it, and those transitions which were less happy—how important is it, the sense we make of those things?
Dorothy Rowe: Well, we've got a choice over how we interpret everything. And of course as children we don't realise that. And we see things in sort of absolutes. It takes us, for instance, quite a while to realise that not all parents are like the parents that we've got. But as we get older, if we're wise, we come to understand that while you have very little control over what happens to you, you've always got a choice of how you interpret what happens to you. So you can spend the rest of your life being bitter and angry and resentful, or you can choose to say, oh well, I was unlucky but a lot of children do a great deal worse. It's not difficult to think of children in this world who do worse than most Australian children.
( ........ )
Dorothy Rowe: In psychosis you lose the ability to be sure about what's going on around you. Now some people listening to this would say, 'How on earth could that happen?' But other people listening to this will know exactly what I mean: that when you're under a great deal of stress, and you're losing confidence in yourself, your external surroundings become increasingly unreal and you're constantly doubting what's happening. In the families of the young people who I got to know when they were psychotic, they'd had experiences worse than mine where the parents in the family were constantly undermining their perception of the world around them. My mother and my sister would always say to me, if I said anything that they didn't want to hear, they would just tell me I was lying. And that was—I'd think, no, I'm not lying. No, that really happened. Then I'd think, well did it happen?
Now with—I was just thinking of one young man I knew; his father was a serial philanderer, but his mother would tell him that everything in the family was wonderful; no, she wasn't upset—even though she was mopping up her tears—and his father was a wonderful man. So this lad, right through his childhood, would know that his mother was telling him lies. But then he would start to doubt—well perhaps, you know, she is my mother, she must be right. And that was how his confidence in his ability to interpret what was around him was totally undermined.
Peter Thompson: Those varnished stories are inherent in family life, but also in organisations. We're told things; we're told we're sacked or we're told —some decision's been made for reasons which aren't the real reasons.
Dorothy Rowe: That's right. People lie to us all the time. That's one of the things that makes life such a misery. And we have to develop really good skills at being able to identify when we're being lied to and to work out the reason why, even though the reason why may not make us feel any more secure. It's better to know the truth than to live within a world of lies—not just the lies that other people tell you, but the lies you tell yourself. You know, you can lie to other people and get away with it if you've got a good memory, but if you lie to yourself, you'll suffer. that's an absolute.
( ....... )
Peter Thompson: This was circa 1950. Are the sorts of problems kids were encountering those days different from what they are today?
Dorothy Rowe: No, they're the same. It's just nowadays every poor child who's distressed and frightened gets a horrible label stuck on them, like ADHD or something like that. It's disgraceful. No longer are children talked about as people. The same thing applies to adults. Every adult's got a personality disorder of some sort. Nobody's normal. This is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Revision 4, which is put together by the American Psychiatric Association, and it's just labelling people. It's quite extraordinary. People who would drop dead before they called anybody a nigger or a queer, will quite cheerfully say to me, 'I've a client, she's a BPD—borderline personality disorder.' Doesn't say, 'I've got a client who's led a very unhappy life and she's extremely distressed and has trouble making and keeping relationships.' No, you don't get that. You just get these initials that sum up another human being.
( ....... )
Peter Thompson: These days you're very sceptical about the use of drugs in treating depression. Is part of your current-day scepticism relating to what you saw happening to Ted?
Dorothy Rowe: Well, what I've seen—that was my first introduction to the dangers of these drugs—but then, when I got more and more involved in working with psychiatrists, as I did once I went to England, I saw the way in which the psychiatrists relied on the drugs—to the extent that they wouldn't admit that these drugs weren't helpful. They called all the bad effects of the drugs 'side-effects', as if that doesn't really matter. And I've seen it in recent years, in the late 1970s it was pretty obvious that the benzodiazepans, like Valium, were addictive. Lots of people could say that, because they couldn't get off them. But the psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry completely denied it, until too many law suits against them and they had to change their minds.
Then there were the antidepressants, the monoamine oxidase inhibitors, MAOIs, the drugs that you mustn't have cheese [with] when you're taking. They proved to be addictive but again, the pharmaceutical societies and the psychiatrists said, no, that's not the case. They still won't admit it, but they very quietly stopped prescribing them. Now the SSRI drugs like Prozac and Seroxat, Zoloft—people are finding really bad 'side' effects from them. Not with everybody. Some people find them quite helpful. But a psychiatrist in England, David Healy, who is a very truthful man, who didn't want to find this—but he's found that these drugs have some pretty nasty effects on your balance and the way you experience your body. And in a small but significant group of people they seem to remove the inhibitions that we all have against killing ourselves and committing murder. You know, everybody at one time in their life has thought, you know, I'll kill myself to get out of this, or, I'll kill that person—and really feel that rage. And with some people these SSRI drugs remove those inhibitions and there's been some terrible things happen. And again, a lot of the psychiatrists, and of course the pharmaceutical industry, won't accept this.
( ....... )
Peter Thompson: You quote, for instance, from the Talmud along the lines of, we see things not as they are, but as we are.
Dorothy Rowe: Yes. Yes, that's the way we're constructed physiologically. The ancient Greek philosopher Epictatus said it's not things in themselves that trouble us, but our opinions of things. And now the neuroscientists who study the brain have shown us that Epictatus and whoever wrote the Talmud were right. We each of us construct the picture that we have of ourselves and the world and our past and our future. And we're free to change that, or we can see it as an absolute and get very upset when the world doesn't fit the pattern that we think is real.
( ....... )
Peter Thompson: Dorothy, when you did go to England you pursued a PhD. What was it that kept interesting you about psychology, and if you like—you're not an academic psychologist, are you? You've got a strange, eclectic mixture of ideas.
Dorothy Rowe: Well I did my stint as an academic psychologist in getting my PhD, so I've got papers published in the British Journal of Psychiatry—so they don't come better than that, I think. But I was working in the psychiatric system and I could see how people, who were already suffering, suffered even more when they became patients in that system. And I could see that they were being told lies about what was wrong with them, what their future would be. And so first of all I wanted to understand what people were actually describing when they talked about being depressed. And what they all talk about is of themselves being alone in a prison. Now you won't find that in any psychiatric textbook. You look in any psychiatric textbook, look at the lists of symptoms—that experience isn't mentioned. They talk about 'lowered mood' and 'sleeps too much' (or not enough); and so on. But not the essential experience of being depressed. So that was the first thing I wanted to write about. Then I wanted to work out in more detail how that experience came about, and it didn't come out of our genes or chemical imbalance in the brain, as we're so constantly being told. But it comes out of the way we see ourselves and our world. How much we value ourselves, how much we're afraid of other people. And so that was what I was writing about, and since then…
Peter Thompson: But to paraphrase, you say about depression that it is the realisation that the way we think about the world no longer fits the reality.
Dorothy Rowe: Yes. Because what always happens with someone who becomes depressed is that immediately before they find themselves in that prison, they realise that they've suffered a terrible loss. And this loss might be something that everybody would agree was a loss; or it might be something that's very private, that only they know about. But when they realise this, they see a serious discrepancy between what they thought their life was and what it actually is. And whenever that happens to any of us, we feel ourselves falling apart. Actually, what's falling apart are our ideas, but it feels like yourself falling apart. And that's utterly, utterly terrifying. And so you cast around for an explanation and the explanation 'good' people come up with—and only good people get depressed—is that the person says to himself, 'It's my fault this disaster happened.'
So when we suffer a loss, the natural response is to feel sad. But if you blame yourself for that loss, then you turn natural sadness into depression.
Peter Thompson: You see depression, really, as a place where we retreat—or need to retreat.
Dorothy Rowe: Yes. It is a place of retreat. It's a defensive position that we can adopt while we sort something out, because everything's become chaotic. Our self has become chaotic, the world around us has become chaotic. And so inside that prison, even though it's a horrible place to be, you've got a space where you can think about your life and what life means. Depressed people are always hard at work on the big problems of philosophy—with 'What does life mean? What does death mean?' But of course they're thinking about them in their own personal terms. And then you can come through it and leave the prison. I've heard lots and lots of people say, 'Being depressed was the worst experience in my life. But I wouldn't have missed it for anything. I'm a much wiser person now.'
Peter Thompson: That is, they yield the positives that come from the experience of self-examination.
Dorothy Rowe: They discover that they're not that essentially wicked, unacceptable person they'd grown up believing that they were. And they also discover that the world goes on, just in its own way. And things happen by chance. It's not because you—this is your punishment for being a wicked person—or there's some grand design where good will always triumph. They realise the world goes its own way and we can control a tiny bit of it and that it's best to accept that life is made up of constant changes and to see that uncertainty, not as something terrifying, but as something that gives us hope and freedom.
Peter Thompson: You say that we choose the meaning we put on events and the things that happen in our life. Do we also choose to be depressed?
Dorothy Rowe: We don't consciously choose. Nobody would choose consciously. But we all have habits, ways of thinking, that are so ingrained—we've been thinking like that since we were small children—that we can just run those pathways in a split second without ever making it conscious. Good people, walking along a busy pavement, they're bumped into by somebody, and good people say 'sorry.' If you're a good person, you walk away thinking, 'Why did I say sorry?' But you've done it unconsciously because you were brought up always to blame yourself when something went wrong. that's the kind of thinking.
Peter Thompson: Help me understand the notion of the unconscious.
Dorothy Rowe: I don't use the term 'unconscious'...because it's got so many meanings. But obviously we can't keep everything we know in our consciousness. It would be utterly impossible. Most of what we know is outside of consciousness, and we have a huge body of knowledge, which psychologists nowadays call 'implicit knowledge.' When you were a tiny boy, you learned to walk. And you know when you've watch, say, an eighteen-month-old child, a two-year-old, trying to put one foot in front of the other—you can see the little mind hard at work. But when you get out of a chair and walk away, you don't think, oh well I have to push the chair back, then I have to stand…you're just operating on implicit knowledge. And most of what we know, most of the ideas we've created, lie within this vast body of implicit knowledge. And we can draw on it at any time.
Peter Thompson: When I review what you've written and what you've spoken of over decades, you've been grappling with this question of wisdom for a long time. Do you feel any closer to it?
Dorothy Rowe: I think wisdom has always been around.
Peter Thompson: Gosh, you've been called one of the wisest people in Britain. That's a ball and chain, isn't it?
Dorothy Rowe: Well, it can have its advantages. I insist that my friends now address me as 'Oh wise one.' I wish they wouldn't smile when they said it. But years ago Aldous Huxley put together a book called The Perennial Philosophy, where he looked at all the different philosophies that had been developed—read all these books—and whether eastern or western philosophies, all of these people came up with the same idea—that wisdom is learning to accept yourself; be at home with yourself. And accept that you're part of everything that exists. And everything that exists is in constant change.
Peter Thompson: I can understand the constant change. Why does it take a lifetime to accept ourselves, often?
Dorothy Rowe: Because in our first years of life our parents—and teachers—impress on us that as we are, we're not acceptable, and we have to work hard to be good. That's part of teaching us how to be members of society. But for many of us, we learn it so well that we don't realise you only have to be 'good enough' to be a member of society. You don't have to be perfect. And your 'good enough' includes being good when it suits you to be good, and other times just pleasing yourself. Or doing good because it makes you happy, not because you're going to get some reward in heaven.
Peter Thompson: You've spent a lifetime observing people: do you love people?
Dorothy Rowe: Yes. I feel sorry for us, because life's difficult, and you know nobody escapes difficulties. Money won't protect you from it. And even if you just lead an ordinary life, if you have loving relationships with other people, with your friends and family and children—if you love, you stand in danger of losing that person you love. But if you don't love, then you're intolerably lonely. You can't escape from that dilemma. So…
Peter Thompson: What you're saying is expressing a compassion and a pity.
Dorothy Rowe: Yes. And I find people interesting. I love people's stories. Anyone can tell me the story of their life and I'll be fascinated. Provided I can ask them questions. And it's entertaining; I like to know how stories turn out. When I'm following up stories, say about the climate change or water shortages and such, and the journalist has written: 'well, by the year 2050…' and I get very angry, because I'm not going to be here to find out.
( ....... )
Dorothy Rowe
Iz liked this so much that she has copied and pasted the entire interview
( Wisdom Interviews: Dorothy Rowe )
Dorothy Rowe: Well...my grandmother had had a very difficult life and my mother was the fourth of her children, and she was—I don't know what she was like as a child, but as an adult, she wanted the world to be exactly what she wanted it to be. And when it wasn't, she got very angry.
Peter Thompson: Why was that?
Dorothy Rowe: I thought this was peculiar to my mother, but when I went to England and started —just had the opportunity to talk with people who were depressed; just listen to them tell their story or talk to me about anything—I found I kept meeting my mother. And I came to realise that the less you value and accept yourself; the more uncertain you feel about yourself, then the less you can handle uncertainty. And so you want everything to be the way that will suit you. And you try to force the world to be what you want it to be. And of course the world will never be what any of us want it to be; it goes its own way. And so if you're trying to force the world into what you want, then you're going to suffer and other people will suffer. It's not just the people who get depressed who want that, but this is what we see in Israel and Palestine. There's Ariel Sharon trying to force the world to be what he wants it to be. You see it in the Muslim fundamentalists, who are acting in acts of terror, trying to force the world to be what they want it to be. And of course that won't happen.
Peter Thompson: It's an exercise of power.
Dorothy Rowe: It's an exercise of attempted power. Because in essence, power is getting other people to accept your interpretation of things. And this is what politicians, leaders, are trying to do all the time. And they're telling us that their way of seeing things is right. In a democracy we take various points of view about that, but under a dictatorship people have to, at least pretend to, accept the dictator's point of view.
( ....... )
Dorothy Rowe: One of the great difficulties a lot of people have is actually then growing up and taking responsibility for themselves. They continue to think of themselves in relationship to their parents. They always think that, if I please my parent, then I'll be looked after and I'll be safe. And they might extend that to a religious belief; if I'm good and please God, then God will keep me safe.
Peter Thompson: Or if I please a marriage partner.
Dorothy Rowe: Or if I please a marriage partner. It's this constant notion that you can't look after yourself; you've got to please this more powerful person in order to survive. And we don't really grow up until we realise that that doesn't work. You have to take responsibility for yourself. And until you do that, you're still in a childish relationship.
Peter Thompson: It's very interesting to hear you talk about this now, because you're doing so with quite a bit of objectivity and dispassion, and seemingly no residual bitterness about it.
Dorothy Rowe: That's somewhere where we all need to get in our lives. Nobody has a happy childhood.
Peter Thompson: Really?
Dorothy Rowe: Yes
Peter Thompson: I've had many people tell me that they have had happy childhoods, and that they realised in their adult lives how precious that was.
Dorothy Rowe: Some people have happier childhoods than others. but even if your parents are kind and loving and extremely skilled at meeting your needs and wishes—parents can be kind and loving and absolutely hopeless at understanding your point of view—that even if you've got all that, you then have to go to school. And so…
Peter Thompson: Oh yes, I forgot about that.
Dorothy Rowe: Yes, don't forget about school. And then there are just the other adults that you meet. Adults can be very unkind to children.
Peter Thompson: We all have to, in some way or another, make sense of our childhood, process it, and those transitions which were less happy—how important is it, the sense we make of those things?
Dorothy Rowe: Well, we've got a choice over how we interpret everything. And of course as children we don't realise that. And we see things in sort of absolutes. It takes us, for instance, quite a while to realise that not all parents are like the parents that we've got. But as we get older, if we're wise, we come to understand that while you have very little control over what happens to you, you've always got a choice of how you interpret what happens to you. So you can spend the rest of your life being bitter and angry and resentful, or you can choose to say, oh well, I was unlucky but a lot of children do a great deal worse. It's not difficult to think of children in this world who do worse than most Australian children.
( ........ )
Dorothy Rowe: In psychosis you lose the ability to be sure about what's going on around you. Now some people listening to this would say, 'How on earth could that happen?' But other people listening to this will know exactly what I mean: that when you're under a great deal of stress, and you're losing confidence in yourself, your external surroundings become increasingly unreal and you're constantly doubting what's happening. In the families of the young people who I got to know when they were psychotic, they'd had experiences worse than mine where the parents in the family were constantly undermining their perception of the world around them. My mother and my sister would always say to me, if I said anything that they didn't want to hear, they would just tell me I was lying. And that was—I'd think, no, I'm not lying. No, that really happened. Then I'd think, well did it happen?
Now with—I was just thinking of one young man I knew; his father was a serial philanderer, but his mother would tell him that everything in the family was wonderful; no, she wasn't upset—even though she was mopping up her tears—and his father was a wonderful man. So this lad, right through his childhood, would know that his mother was telling him lies. But then he would start to doubt—well perhaps, you know, she is my mother, she must be right. And that was how his confidence in his ability to interpret what was around him was totally undermined.
Peter Thompson: Those varnished stories are inherent in family life, but also in organisations. We're told things; we're told we're sacked or we're told —some decision's been made for reasons which aren't the real reasons.
Dorothy Rowe: That's right. People lie to us all the time. That's one of the things that makes life such a misery. And we have to develop really good skills at being able to identify when we're being lied to and to work out the reason why, even though the reason why may not make us feel any more secure. It's better to know the truth than to live within a world of lies—not just the lies that other people tell you, but the lies you tell yourself. You know, you can lie to other people and get away with it if you've got a good memory, but if you lie to yourself, you'll suffer. that's an absolute.
( ....... )
Peter Thompson: This was circa 1950. Are the sorts of problems kids were encountering those days different from what they are today?
Dorothy Rowe: No, they're the same. It's just nowadays every poor child who's distressed and frightened gets a horrible label stuck on them, like ADHD or something like that. It's disgraceful. No longer are children talked about as people. The same thing applies to adults. Every adult's got a personality disorder of some sort. Nobody's normal. This is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Revision 4, which is put together by the American Psychiatric Association, and it's just labelling people. It's quite extraordinary. People who would drop dead before they called anybody a nigger or a queer, will quite cheerfully say to me, 'I've a client, she's a BPD—borderline personality disorder.' Doesn't say, 'I've got a client who's led a very unhappy life and she's extremely distressed and has trouble making and keeping relationships.' No, you don't get that. You just get these initials that sum up another human being.
( ....... )
Peter Thompson: These days you're very sceptical about the use of drugs in treating depression. Is part of your current-day scepticism relating to what you saw happening to Ted?
Dorothy Rowe: Well, what I've seen—that was my first introduction to the dangers of these drugs—but then, when I got more and more involved in working with psychiatrists, as I did once I went to England, I saw the way in which the psychiatrists relied on the drugs—to the extent that they wouldn't admit that these drugs weren't helpful. They called all the bad effects of the drugs 'side-effects', as if that doesn't really matter. And I've seen it in recent years, in the late 1970s it was pretty obvious that the benzodiazepans, like Valium, were addictive. Lots of people could say that, because they couldn't get off them. But the psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry completely denied it, until too many law suits against them and they had to change their minds.
Then there were the antidepressants, the monoamine oxidase inhibitors, MAOIs, the drugs that you mustn't have cheese [with] when you're taking. They proved to be addictive but again, the pharmaceutical societies and the psychiatrists said, no, that's not the case. They still won't admit it, but they very quietly stopped prescribing them. Now the SSRI drugs like Prozac and Seroxat, Zoloft—people are finding really bad 'side' effects from them. Not with everybody. Some people find them quite helpful. But a psychiatrist in England, David Healy, who is a very truthful man, who didn't want to find this—but he's found that these drugs have some pretty nasty effects on your balance and the way you experience your body. And in a small but significant group of people they seem to remove the inhibitions that we all have against killing ourselves and committing murder. You know, everybody at one time in their life has thought, you know, I'll kill myself to get out of this, or, I'll kill that person—and really feel that rage. And with some people these SSRI drugs remove those inhibitions and there's been some terrible things happen. And again, a lot of the psychiatrists, and of course the pharmaceutical industry, won't accept this.
( ....... )
Peter Thompson: You quote, for instance, from the Talmud along the lines of, we see things not as they are, but as we are.
Dorothy Rowe: Yes. Yes, that's the way we're constructed physiologically. The ancient Greek philosopher Epictatus said it's not things in themselves that trouble us, but our opinions of things. And now the neuroscientists who study the brain have shown us that Epictatus and whoever wrote the Talmud were right. We each of us construct the picture that we have of ourselves and the world and our past and our future. And we're free to change that, or we can see it as an absolute and get very upset when the world doesn't fit the pattern that we think is real.
( ....... )
Peter Thompson: Dorothy, when you did go to England you pursued a PhD. What was it that kept interesting you about psychology, and if you like—you're not an academic psychologist, are you? You've got a strange, eclectic mixture of ideas.
Dorothy Rowe: Well I did my stint as an academic psychologist in getting my PhD, so I've got papers published in the British Journal of Psychiatry—so they don't come better than that, I think. But I was working in the psychiatric system and I could see how people, who were already suffering, suffered even more when they became patients in that system. And I could see that they were being told lies about what was wrong with them, what their future would be. And so first of all I wanted to understand what people were actually describing when they talked about being depressed. And what they all talk about is of themselves being alone in a prison. Now you won't find that in any psychiatric textbook. You look in any psychiatric textbook, look at the lists of symptoms—that experience isn't mentioned. They talk about 'lowered mood' and 'sleeps too much' (or not enough); and so on. But not the essential experience of being depressed. So that was the first thing I wanted to write about. Then I wanted to work out in more detail how that experience came about, and it didn't come out of our genes or chemical imbalance in the brain, as we're so constantly being told. But it comes out of the way we see ourselves and our world. How much we value ourselves, how much we're afraid of other people. And so that was what I was writing about, and since then…
Peter Thompson: But to paraphrase, you say about depression that it is the realisation that the way we think about the world no longer fits the reality.
Dorothy Rowe: Yes. Because what always happens with someone who becomes depressed is that immediately before they find themselves in that prison, they realise that they've suffered a terrible loss. And this loss might be something that everybody would agree was a loss; or it might be something that's very private, that only they know about. But when they realise this, they see a serious discrepancy between what they thought their life was and what it actually is. And whenever that happens to any of us, we feel ourselves falling apart. Actually, what's falling apart are our ideas, but it feels like yourself falling apart. And that's utterly, utterly terrifying. And so you cast around for an explanation and the explanation 'good' people come up with—and only good people get depressed—is that the person says to himself, 'It's my fault this disaster happened.'
So when we suffer a loss, the natural response is to feel sad. But if you blame yourself for that loss, then you turn natural sadness into depression.
Peter Thompson: You see depression, really, as a place where we retreat—or need to retreat.
Dorothy Rowe: Yes. It is a place of retreat. It's a defensive position that we can adopt while we sort something out, because everything's become chaotic. Our self has become chaotic, the world around us has become chaotic. And so inside that prison, even though it's a horrible place to be, you've got a space where you can think about your life and what life means. Depressed people are always hard at work on the big problems of philosophy—with 'What does life mean? What does death mean?' But of course they're thinking about them in their own personal terms. And then you can come through it and leave the prison. I've heard lots and lots of people say, 'Being depressed was the worst experience in my life. But I wouldn't have missed it for anything. I'm a much wiser person now.'
Peter Thompson: That is, they yield the positives that come from the experience of self-examination.
Dorothy Rowe: They discover that they're not that essentially wicked, unacceptable person they'd grown up believing that they were. And they also discover that the world goes on, just in its own way. And things happen by chance. It's not because you—this is your punishment for being a wicked person—or there's some grand design where good will always triumph. They realise the world goes its own way and we can control a tiny bit of it and that it's best to accept that life is made up of constant changes and to see that uncertainty, not as something terrifying, but as something that gives us hope and freedom.
Peter Thompson: You say that we choose the meaning we put on events and the things that happen in our life. Do we also choose to be depressed?
Dorothy Rowe: We don't consciously choose. Nobody would choose consciously. But we all have habits, ways of thinking, that are so ingrained—we've been thinking like that since we were small children—that we can just run those pathways in a split second without ever making it conscious. Good people, walking along a busy pavement, they're bumped into by somebody, and good people say 'sorry.' If you're a good person, you walk away thinking, 'Why did I say sorry?' But you've done it unconsciously because you were brought up always to blame yourself when something went wrong. that's the kind of thinking.
Peter Thompson: Help me understand the notion of the unconscious.
Dorothy Rowe: I don't use the term 'unconscious'...because it's got so many meanings. But obviously we can't keep everything we know in our consciousness. It would be utterly impossible. Most of what we know is outside of consciousness, and we have a huge body of knowledge, which psychologists nowadays call 'implicit knowledge.' When you were a tiny boy, you learned to walk. And you know when you've watch, say, an eighteen-month-old child, a two-year-old, trying to put one foot in front of the other—you can see the little mind hard at work. But when you get out of a chair and walk away, you don't think, oh well I have to push the chair back, then I have to stand…you're just operating on implicit knowledge. And most of what we know, most of the ideas we've created, lie within this vast body of implicit knowledge. And we can draw on it at any time.
Peter Thompson: When I review what you've written and what you've spoken of over decades, you've been grappling with this question of wisdom for a long time. Do you feel any closer to it?
Dorothy Rowe: I think wisdom has always been around.
Peter Thompson: Gosh, you've been called one of the wisest people in Britain. That's a ball and chain, isn't it?
Dorothy Rowe: Well, it can have its advantages. I insist that my friends now address me as 'Oh wise one.' I wish they wouldn't smile when they said it. But years ago Aldous Huxley put together a book called The Perennial Philosophy, where he looked at all the different philosophies that had been developed—read all these books—and whether eastern or western philosophies, all of these people came up with the same idea—that wisdom is learning to accept yourself; be at home with yourself. And accept that you're part of everything that exists. And everything that exists is in constant change.
Peter Thompson: I can understand the constant change. Why does it take a lifetime to accept ourselves, often?
Dorothy Rowe: Because in our first years of life our parents—and teachers—impress on us that as we are, we're not acceptable, and we have to work hard to be good. That's part of teaching us how to be members of society. But for many of us, we learn it so well that we don't realise you only have to be 'good enough' to be a member of society. You don't have to be perfect. And your 'good enough' includes being good when it suits you to be good, and other times just pleasing yourself. Or doing good because it makes you happy, not because you're going to get some reward in heaven.
Peter Thompson: You've spent a lifetime observing people: do you love people?
Dorothy Rowe: Yes. I feel sorry for us, because life's difficult, and you know nobody escapes difficulties. Money won't protect you from it. And even if you just lead an ordinary life, if you have loving relationships with other people, with your friends and family and children—if you love, you stand in danger of losing that person you love. But if you don't love, then you're intolerably lonely. You can't escape from that dilemma. So…
Peter Thompson: What you're saying is expressing a compassion and a pity.
Dorothy Rowe: Yes. And I find people interesting. I love people's stories. Anyone can tell me the story of their life and I'll be fascinated. Provided I can ask them questions. And it's entertaining; I like to know how stories turn out. When I'm following up stories, say about the climate change or water shortages and such, and the journalist has written: 'well, by the year 2050…' and I get very angry, because I'm not going to be here to find out.
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