Mind Your Head

What if your grown up kids won’t talk to you? Imagine putting in all that effort over the years tending to their every need, trying your best only for them to ultimately reject you. For them to develop the idea that there was something in your approach, some element of the way you tried to rear them that they found irrevocably offensive. You tread a very fine line and it’s an easy thing to err slightly on one side or the other, too draconian or too liberal. In most cases once children reach a certain age they automatically forgive parents of everything heretofore by putting it down to a clash of youthful angst and mature conservatism. What, typically, is the reason for the animosity to be carried over into adulthood?

An obviously tyrannical approach on the part of the parent is one obvious answer. To enforce such a level of strictness as to stymie a child’s social development or inhibit his or her ability to relate in a normal healthy way to peers can quite justifiably be the source of considerable resentment later in life. Any level of emotional or physical abuse will obviously also lead to resentment. But what of the situation where a parent is adopting reasonable methodology, avoiding either extreme? We have all seen even these situations spill over into open hostility later in life.

The simple explanation could be all about the age in which we live. Nowadays we are subjected to an ever expanding tornado of media. The sources are many and varied. We have a 24/7 news cycle with a choice of several all day TV news channels, the internet, not to mention the plethora of traditional print media, newspapers and magazines. The field is crowded and the amount and variety of content seems to be on the increase all the time. One daily paper will introduce a healthy living supplement on Wednesday and before long they all have one. The ante is constantly on the up and in an effort to stay ahead of the competition you will get newspapers unveiling features week by week on all manner of topics. Travel specials, spring garden planting specials, personal finance, health and more appropriately for the subject at hand, mental health.

Discussion of mental health and related issues have quite rightly assumed a much more prominent position in Ireland in recent years. We now feel more inclined to talk openly about things that we would not have up to even as recently as a decade ago. We are a more affluent people, travel more and are generally more inclined to take notice of how things are done elsewhere. There are aspects of American culture in particular that we have as a nation become enamoured with and consequently sought to assimilate into our own lives. It is seen as a mark of our new found sophistication to adopt elements of the lifestyle that we perceive as being progressive and urbane and is thus in keeping with our own self image in this regard. A couple of the characters in Sex and the City for example provide a model for many women on how it’s possible to take control of your professional and personal life and in the process subvert what would be considered by many to be traditional values here in Ireland.

We look to the United States as the origin of practically all social phenomena which eventually work their way into the fabric over here. We look at their literature, cinema and TV drama to which we are all exposed and we see characters openly discussing relationships, feelings, emotions. Such characters are usually placed in affluent settings - they are professional, educated people. We aspire to such openness, we see it as being progressive, mature, sophisticated. We want to be seen as complex individuals with the depth to tackle such issues candidly and without self consciousness. We are affluent, cultured people why shouldn’t we also be complex?

And so over time the landscape changes, each successive generation being that little bit more inclined to broach subjects that were heretofore off limits. Familiarity with psychological and psychoanalytical terminology becomes more widespread, strands of the language start to change. We talk about things such as abandonment issues and separation anxiety. We begin to look at elements of our past: our childhood, our relationships with siblings, with parents. We might resurrect a memory that bears analysis in a new light, in the framework of seeking to understand why it is that we are who we are. And it’s here that something long forgotten may get flagged under the new microscope of introspection, an incident or a comment becomes a slight or an injustice, a reason to change the dynamic of a relationship.

Discussions of this nature become synonymous with people like the characters represented in the show “Brothers and Sisters”: slightly dysfunctional absolutely but also educated, intelligent and complex and therefore very attractive in our eyes. It follows that if the characters are alluring then the subject matter and it’s discussion inevitably is also. Pop culture has such a power to destigmatise things for us. To endorse a certain type of behaviour, to validate a certain type of discussion.

Is it possible that left unchecked such pervasive cultural influences will eventually erode our national identity - that we will cease to be Irish people with all the associated quirks and foibles and become a nation of people with “issues”? We have shown ourselves to be more than willing to absorb everything that America throws at us, have we passed the tipping point, are we capable of screening out what is pulp and just accepting what is worth while? The United States is the template for how so much of our lives unfold despite our protestations to the contrary. You cannot on the one hand bad mouth imperialist America while simultaneously accepting without question every one of it’s cultural exports.

There was a recent Ray D’Arcy radio show which involved a discussion about childhood bedrooms being redeployed as something else by the parents once the children in question had grown up and moved out. Listeners were invited to text and e mail their comments and feelings on the topic. Such a show would have been inconceivable even ten years ago. Back then people in this country would not have received encouragement from any quarter to “feel” anything about such a frivolous thing, but now there are prods from all directions. Nothing is too trivial to have feelings about. This is the message we are getting. From the supplement with your newspaper to women’s fashion magazines to every second drama on television. It’s OK to feel. The logical conclusion of such interminable analysis of life’s minutiae could easily be the reinterpretation of some parental guideline from the dim and distant past as an attempt to crush your dreams or decimate your childhood.

In the realm of emotional health the media and ultimately ourselves have allowed life to imitate art. The discussion may have been opened on our behalf but we can still decide when we want to change the subject.

Care to share? Because you’re worth it.