My shocking memories, and their impact

The Kelsey Effect also works in reverse, it seems. I had tickets for West Ham Vs Manchester United on Tuesday. Yet it was snowing and I assumed we’d (i.e. West Ham) would lose to the mighty reds (unbeaten since April). So I didn’t go. West Ham won 4-0, although it goes without saying that, had I been at the match, we’d have lost 0-4.

There was a more serious reason for my absence, however. Snowy midweek football matches trigger memories of one of the worst incidents of my life. As a 13-year old on my way home from a very snowy football match our train pulled into a station with policemen, expecting trouble, lining the platform. As we waited, the snow blew into our carriage. I got up to shut the window, only to find a policeman pointing at me from the platform. Before I knew what was happening I’d been hauled from the train and beaten in the face by leather-gloved fists.

Bloodied and confused, and in utter terror, I was dragged to a corner of the station and interrogated. Perhaps at that point – through my tears and blood and my obvious shock and urine soaked trousers – it began to dawn on these burly cops that they’d pulled an innocent child from a train and beaten him up for no good reason. I could hear them discussing the train, now leaving the station, and the fact it was the last one of the night, which led to a bizarre sirens-wailing police-van chase down a snowy motorway to beat the same train to the next station.

As they put me back on the train one of the officers – pointing to my bloodied face – said: “If anyone asks, you did that falling down the stairs, OK.”

Only when I rejoined my friends – who were themselves still shocked from the incident – was I told that one of the officers had shouted “spit at a policeman would you,” as the first leathered-fist hit my face. I guess the snow, the boredom and the shutting window had confused him (although nothing excuses the violence).

Days went by with the only external evidence of the trauma being my fat lip – which I explained to my parents as the result of a crowd crush at the match (this was a decade before the Hillsborough disaster). Yet by the weekend the shock of the incident came flooding out – with me eventually breaking down in tears over Sunday lunch as I confessed the event to my parents.

And the incident has left permanent mental scars – something I have only realised since researching my book What’s Stopping You? It had a profound impact on my view of the world – ending my innocence and shocking my belief system. It shaped – and distorted – my perceptions for many years to come. My attitude towards authority changed. Even with teachers and my parents, I felt more marginalised and became less trusting, less interested in their view. I became more rebellious. More angry, even.

Sure this may have happened to me anyway – a lower middle-class teenager from the English exurbs in the rebellious late-70s could hardly escape the pervasive air of moral and economic decay. And, of course, I do not blame this event for the fear of failure I have experienced all my life (the tackling of which, forms the basis for What’s Stopping You?). Yet even here, unconscious feelings of victimisation – the “why me” aspect of my insecurities (even the half-joke Kelsey Effect with respect to luck) – can all come into play now I think of it.

But I write about the event, not to offer an excuse or seek sympathy, but as an example of memory triggering, and its consequences. The incident illustrates something important: the role of traumatic events in shaping our self beliefs.

In short, the event caused me to experience something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is not as exaggerated as it sounds, and I mean no disrespect to ex-servicemen that have had their lives turned upside down by PTSD. As Yale University’s Dennis Charney – one of the most respected authorities on PTSD – states, even minor incidents, perhaps of public humiliation, can have a major impact on our beliefs because the incident has made a far greater imprint on the brain.

In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman – citing Charney and others – describes the impact of such traumatic events on the brain. The amygdale – which Goleman describes as a key cluster of components in the limbic system dealing with emotions such as anxiety, distress and fear – signals other brain areas to strengthen their impression of the incident, creating a bigger imprint on the memory. For instance, despite a gap of over 30 years, I can still clearly remember the leading policeman’s face, including his moustache, as well as the smell and feel of his leathered glove.

This strengthening generates what Goleman describes as a new neural “setpoint” in the brain that can cause a lifelong resetting of the brain’s default (i.e. instant) responses to even tangentially-similar situations. In other words our inner beliefs regarding our expected outcomes from particular circumstances have been fundamentally altered.

Importantly, according to studies into PTSD, even brief or mild exposure to traumatic stress – especially when young – can permanently damage the hippocampus (a key part of the brain for the formation of memories) stopping normal new cell growth. And this can prevent us from ever evaluating information other than via this traumatised default setting. Goleman uses the example of a child once frightened by a dog developing a fear of that breed of dog and never naturally developing a calmer response (and potentially the opposite – with each fear incident adding to the fearful “setpoint”). Indeed, it can go further than this – with the child perhaps unknowingly developing a fear of particular footpaths where an encounter with a similar dog is no more than possible.

From such incidents, large and small, our belief system springs – a system that can be all but impossible to shift. Sure, we can work on our responses, once aware that our initial evaluations may be faulty (I spend some time on this in What’s Stopping You?). But a total rewiring is unlikely to ever happen – even through hypnosis of other techniques that, in reality, produce only a deeply-embedded and dangerously unworked form of denial.

So is it any wonder that, once the sky turned snowy, my enthusiasm for the match disappeared? Of course there’s also the fact that, now in my 40s, I’ve done my time freezing my nuts off at a football match, whatever the potential for a historic win! Yet the memory was, indeed, triggered – hence me writing about it now.

Do they really “f*** you up”?

The nature versus nurture debate was one that I faced when writing What’s Stopping You? Do our genes dictate our personality traits, or is it conditioning? Having said this I was a reluctant participant, at first adopting the classic fence-sitting position of stating that it is usually a bit of both. Such reluctance is understandable. I learnt from my first book that book publishing is more about winning friends than creating enemies, especially as this debate gets political – for instance the existence of a gay gene, or otherwise, can cause some pretty heated exchanges.

Yet one book forced me off the fence – not on the existence or otherwise of a gay gene I hasten to add but on the fact it is early life experiences that shape our personality and, importantly for the subject of the book, our fears and phobias. And that includes fear of failure, the core concern in What’s Stopping You?

That book was They F*** You Up (2002) by Oliver James, subtitled: how to survive family life. It is James’s contention that our early-life interactions with parents and siblings that has the overwhelming say when it comes to deciding who we are and how we evaluate and respond to the external influences that come our way.

“Yes genes do establish a basic repertoire of traits in nearly all humans,” says James, “but the subtle differences between us in their expression are largely determined by our upbringing.”

One piece of evidence he sets out for this is the Human Genome Project, which aimed at mapping our genes in the expectation humans would have at least 100,000 different genes. Instead they found just 30-40,000 – only twice the number of the common fruit fly. This led a leader of the project, Craig Venter to conclude that genes cannot play more than a minor role in determining the differences between us.

Indeed, James is quite emphatic about this, stating that studies have shown that hardly any psychological differences are predetermined. In his book James focuses on identical twins – pairings that have exactly the same genes so any psychological differences between them must have environmental origins.

James interviews two identical twins from popular culture – Gayle and Gillian Blakeney, stars of the day-time soap Neighbours. To underline their physical similarities, James relays that the two had just been to the opticians to discover that their eye-sight had deteriorated by the same degree over the same period and, he stated, that during the interview he continually mixed them up despite the fact they were dressed very differently.

Psychologically, however, James claims they were chalk and cheese. Gillian was assertive and aggressive – Tomboyish as a child with a shorter fuse and the occasional petulant outburst. She was treated as the baby of the family (in fact was nine minutes the younger), and described herself as a “daddy’s girl” although borrowed many mannerisms from her mother. Yet she was the mentally stronger of the two – confident and manipulative – describing her sibling relationship as a “marriage” in which she played the masculine role.

Meanwhile, Gayle was the opposite. She was less assertive and more helpful as a child – keen to win her parent’s approval. She was the older sister and acted as such: listening, trusting, giving, more reflective. She was shy with men and preferred “brainy types” while her sister plumped for more stereo-typical masculinity.

James cites that a key aspect in their differences was the way in which both were treated by their parents. The mother “was always on Gillian’s side”, excusing her bad behaviour while Gayle struggled to win parental approval. Of course, as James states, this could still be genetic. If we are lovable, we attract more love, although if we are born with the same genes as our twin, surely we would be equally lovable – or not?

Yet shared genes do not mean we are born the same person. For instance, twins may have very different experiences in the womb, winning or losing the struggle for nutrients, space and comfort or perhaps being inadvertently kicked by the other one. Certainly, traumas can begin in the womb – even generating feelings of post-traumatic stress disorder. For instance, Yale University’s Dennis Charney states that significant traumas can occur in the womb (perhaps passed through the mother) – making us unaware of the events that could shape our personalities and fears.

My own anecdotes support this (although I’m aware that it’s always possible to find anecdotal evidence to support a prejudice). I remember spending a lovely summer holiday in the home of an artist who had deep and sometimes disturbing melancholic tendencies that his sister attributed, at least in part, to the death of a sibling while their mother was pregnant with her brother. The mother’s sense of loss and sadness was transferred to the foetus – at least that was his sister’s conclusion.

And even in my own family I can see a psychological difference between my two boys that I sometimes wonder about. The eldest was over two weeks late and was an incredibly relaxed baby – rarely crying, even when receiving injections. Due to obstetric cholestasis my youngest was born nearly a month before term by emergency Caesarean – a process he certainly didn’t enjoy. He remains more anxious and sensitive than his brother and less able to take the world as it comes.

Of course, my sample size is insignificant, but it is interesting nonetheless. And it does bring us to one significant conclusion. That despite the title of his book, nor the content of mine, neither Oliver James or What’s Stopping You? are pointing fingers for mental conditions such as fear of failure. While convinced that environmental factors played by far the most significant part, the environment starts in the womb and could have any number of factors. It is a major stretch from here to an “I blame the parents” position.

And genes are clearly apparent in some conditions. Autism, dyslexia, depression are most certainly genes-related, although may perhaps be exacerbated by self-perpetuating environments that roll down the generations. Having said this, James claims that “science now accepts” that, in most psychological fashioning, genes play only a minor role – a conclusion I’m also prepared to (mostly) accept as the basis for analysis within What’s Stopping You? - although the qualification in parenthesis suggests that I’m still more comfortable with at least one hand on the fence.