Walking to get coffee this morning it’s as cold as I can remember. As I move past people with scarves wrapped tightly around their faces and others scraping ice from windscreens I eventually reach the yellow glow of the cafe and feel the rush of warm air as I heave open the door. Waiting at the counter while the milk is frothed the barista is telling her colleague about her mother having given birth to her at eighteen, followed soon after by three more siblings, before moving swiftly onto divorce in her early twenties. “That’s why I didn’t want to be anything like my mum. That’s why I haven’t got married and I don’t have kids. I don’t like kids, I’m too selfish”. As I disappear up the stairs I wonder about all of this and of the generalisations we cast around with abandon and, most of all, the damage they might do.
I can’t imagine there are too many jobs like mine when it comes to dealing with generalisation. “Relationships suck”, “I’m no good”, “I always mess up”, “Nobody wants to hear about my problems”. It really is an endless stream. Apart form the pain we inflict upon ourselves with such wide reaching assumption we trample many a beautiful flower when we believe that under every step is nothing but the same old grass.
We’re fooling ourselves too when we indulge in generalisation. “Men always let me down” means one particular man in that particular moment. “Nobody cares anyway” means that someone specific is in mind when the words tumble from your mouth. The avoidance of confronting the specific complaint we have renders us completely incapable of doing anything about it. We allow a number of random, possibly unrelated instances to mould themselves into an immovable truth. Psychologist Dr Michael Yapko once wrote “Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up”.
We are excellent at living up to our own self inflicted persona, and generalisation helps enormously. If we can point to being generally bad, overlooked, helpless and hopeless we can remain in the misery of that opinion, saved from making the effort to move out. A client will say to me “That’s just me isn’t it?” and I want to scream “No! It’s the picture you’ve created” but I know it isn’t for me to contradict, because those particular walls only crumble when we carefully pick away at the mortar ourselves.
Generalisation made about other people serves only to compound the problem. “Nobody ever cares about what I want”. Really? Nobody? Had you thought that in order for others to make you such a low priority you have to make yourself one too? Is it possible that people treat you the way that you are willing to treat yourself? Could it be that your generalisation about how people treat you is only made real because that is precisely the way you expect to be treated despite the fact that it causes you pain and distress?
Generalisation seeps where it isn’t wanted and isn’t useful. In anxiety it is common for the sufferer to be unaware of a specific cause or trigger, but instead familiar with a general sense of dread. When one fear is calmed there is always another one waiting in the wings. We become not so much fearful of something specific but fearful of any uncertainty, and there is plenty of that.
Last week on the radio there was a programme called “Abandon Hope” written and presented by the excellent Oliver Burkeman. In it Burkeman examines the power of negative thinking, the art of anticipating trouble so that something can be done about it. This last part is important. Generalisation tends to lead us to one of two dark places. First, when we make negative generalisations about ourselves, everything is unchangeable and hopeless. Second, when we make negative generalisations about other people, the best we can do is hope that they one day change. Neither is helpful but fortunately there is a third place we can go, the place where we acknowledge how we truly feel, nail it to some specific evidence, and then set about taking action to make it different and sticking with the plan until it bears fruit. We can’t do that armed with generalisations, only with indisputable truth.
The barista may never marry and may never have children, but I hope it isn’t because she thinks that everyone who struggles at some point in their life is doomed to do so for eternity, or that all parents who have children when they are young break up. Life is so much more complex than that, and it is this which is both our greatest challenge and most wonderful salvation.
Leave a Reply