There is one thing that my husband does that bugs me. Imagine, we are sitting on a beach at sunset, feeling the heat of the dying sun and spending a quiet moment together. I am absorbing it all, the smells, the sounds, the feeling of my breath in the silence and my husband pipes up ‘Isn’t this beautiful? Look at the colours of the rays as they hit the sea? Can you imagine anything more glorious? We’ll have to come back here some day, what do you think? Isn’t this the most perfect place on earth?’ Then he’ll do it with the kids too, ‘aren’t they fabulous’; ‘don’t you think H has great vocabulary’; ‘it’s so sweet the way G says slugs’…..
Sometimes I murmur in response and sometimes, if pushed, I’ll shrug and say ‘I don’t know’ or ‘perhaps’ or ‘maybe’. And it bugs me, I’m happy in my own little quiet world soaking it all in and I don’t want to talk about it; words aren’t good enough, expressive enough, important enough. Occasionally this ends in one of those typical junctures of marital disharmony and we conclude fractiously that we are just two individuals expressing ourselves in different ways.
That is, until just now. I have started reading ‘The Uses of Enchantment’ by Bruno Bettelheim. I thought it was going to be some dry tome on the importance of fairytales and retaining them in our children’s lives and I judged that I’d better read it as I’m never quite sure where my editing of fairytales should begin or end or not at all. So past the first few pages, which are quite parched, and I’ve been thrown into the rich depths of my children’s unconscious and how little I have understood it thus far. It is absolutely fascinating and shows just how much we, as a society, over expose our child’s consciousness to anxious-making adult reality. And I totally get it, because it’s exactly like how I feel when my husband wants me to verbalise my thoughts. I feel put out, I feel pushed into a mental direction that feels uncomfortable and unclear and I do not want to ‘talk about it’, I just want to be in the feelings of my world rather than the thoughts of them.
Yet, this is what I have done to my children so far, I have talked a lot. I have verbalised feelings and tried to draw empathetic comparisons when I now see that instead they need subtle redirection and stories full of their complex, deep, confusing emotions revealed in a tale that is far from the reality of their everyday home life, which speak to their subconscious and gives their feelings permission.
I wrote just a few weeks ago about my daughter’s burgeoning anger (Curiouser & Curiouser) and with this new understanding, I am clear now how she had no outlet for those confusing feelings that arose in her. Those moments when she really hated a playmate, her brother or me, was it ok to hold these strong feelings? Already, in a short space of time, having quit all editing, all nice-making in our stories, I can hear her imaginative play is full of the outlet from these prose. She can now talk about killing in the context of removing the evil fairy in Sleeping Beauty or the big bad wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, rather than a girl she met camping. She can express her violence in a safe context of reliving and replaying the tales rather than test the frightening feelings in our safe home environment. Her preconscious can be displayed without the need for it to become truly conscious and she learns and begins, through her subconscious, to explore the gamut of her emotions.
Bruno Bettelheim explains so poetically how these ancient and pertinent tales are a crucial part of our personal development and how we can use these messages to move through the stages of our emotional growth without the need for excessive discussion or conscious process. The conscious can rest, can sleep and our subconscious can do the work as it absorbs the understandings. Raising our consciousness too early can lead to anxiety and displacement, feelings I know all too well and what I hope to ease for my children. So with thanks to Mr Bettelheim, and a swift addition to the Christmas List of the Grimm Brother’s Fairy Tales, I aim to learn to let sleeping consciousness lie…