Back when I was finishing secondary school, word reached my father’s family that I wanted to be a journalist. My mother told me they had remarked that “you need a very hard neck for that job”.
Here I am today, after a full-time career in journalism and, oddly enough, the remark still circulates in my mind every now and then.
My father grew up in a decaying mansion in Co Kildare. I have this mental image of everybody sitting around in a vast, shadowy kitchen considering my choice of career and whether or not I had a hard enough neck for it. I didn’t, but I managed to bluff my way through anyway.
What I’m interested in, though, is how invisible audiences made up of people who are longer around continue to matter to us as though they were actually there sitting in front of us.
According to the theory of the “generalised other”, you build a society in your head that is made up of parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, grandparents, teachers, and all of those people who constitute the world that you’re trying to fit into.
And because they are inside your head, watching, you can actually feel guilty about doing something none of them is ever going to know about because they are dead or otherwise off the stage.
You can feel good when you do something they would approve of even though they are not there to do any approving any more.
Absent fathers
Not that people have to be dead for this to work. I wrote here some years ago about a piece of research in the UK which suggested boys whose fathers were not living in the home, but who were in touch with them, were less likely to get into trouble than boys whose fathers were not in touch with them.
The researchers believed that when the absent father was a part of the boy’s life, the boy did not want to let him down, even though the father was not physically present most of the time.
In another field, I can think of one or two industrialists who have gone out of their way to honour the memory of their fathers as though they still wanted to impress fathers who were no longer alive.
Sometimes it’s interesting to consider who, among the absent, is influencing your behaviour and feelings and thinking right now. If it isn’t a benign influence, you can throw it off because they’re not here anymore. They sneak back in, though, so you have to kick them out again.
That’s the way it is with the absent and the dead: put them out the door and they climb back through the window. Hard necks, the lot of them.
Still on the dry
Back to the topic of being “on the dry” for January. If you’ve made it this far, congratulations: you’re almost there. At this point it is often easy to forget the positives and magnify the negatives in the experience. But it would be a pity to fall at the last, so to speak.
It’s worth remembering we seem to be constructed to pay more attention to negative experiences than to positive. It may be part of our survival mechanism but it doesn’t always serve us well. So as you get through the last week or the last days, depending on when you’re reading this, take the time to look at the positive sides of the experience.
For me the positives include: I can drive whenever I like; I haven’t had a hangover for ages; not drinking has helped me to lose weight without any extra pain whatsoever; I’ve saved money; I’m fitter.
If you didn’t make it through, there’s always next year. I have a feeling that the Dry January thing will grow, so you can give it another go.
If you want to try before then, remember that February has one big advantage if you want to give things up for a while: it’s the shortest month of the year!
pomorain@yahoo.com @PadraigOMorain
Padraig O'Morain is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness reminder is free by email.