Over the last few weeks and months I have noticed how much material is in the media about how human beings struggle with others being different from themselves. When I turn on the TV I see this in documentaries about the holocaust, in reality television shows, and all the time within the news. It is these differences that are used to justify some of the most horrendous acts that humans are capable of, such as mass exterminations of groups in the world population, acts of terrorism and torture.
In this article I want to explore the whole question of differences between people, how they develop and are maintained and consider some ideas about what we can do to help ourselves manage our struggles with difference.
Difference and similarity is an mportant factor in helping form our sense of who we are in the world and where we belong. If I can say I am like these people and different from those people, that can provide me with a sense of my own identity, as well as a sense of the people I am safe with and those with whom I feel less safe. At some level we can think of this as being an evolutionary process that has helped us survive as mammals over many millennia.
Within Transactional Analysis we would think of this process of forming our identity as part of what we would call script. Script in this context is a set of conclusions that people draw in response to perceived (and received) messages from their early environment. Script then goes to form a significant part of our frame of reference, which is about the way in which we understand ourselves and others in the world and live out our lives.
We can have many influences on our Script development. It can useful to think of ever expanding circles of influence. The first of these would be our family of origin. This would be formed from our parents (or primary caregivers), siblings, and possibly other adults living in our house. We can then think about the wider family. Then various groups we may belong to, such as school groups, religious groups, ethnic groups, friendship groups, gender groups, class groups, work groups – some of these may be small or large groups; groups where we have regular contact or groups where contact is infrequent. We can then think about our wider culture, which may operate within the region of a country, a country itself, a continent or even across continents (e.g. western culture) which influences the messages we are bombarded by via the media and interactions we have with others on a day to day basis. From this we can see that we develop an increasingly complex set of influences on our identity and belief systems. It is from these that we develop our sense of what is right and wrong and how we, others and the world should operate. The process of developing a Script is inevitable – we cannot get away from this. It is the way we learn to manage this multitude of influences and get on with our lives. Our problem comes when we start thinking of these ways of managing our influences as hard and fast realities. It is this that leads to prejudice – as sense of us as fundamentally right and ‘those others’ as fundamentally wrong. When this happens we can find it very difficult to get back to seeing the other as another human being trying to find a way of managing the influences upon them.
As a psychotherapist and trainer of counsellors and psychotherapists I believe that it is important for us to seek to understand what it is like for the other person to view the world from their frame of reference. This doesn’t mean we have to give up our perspective, though rather suspend our prejudices to fully understand what life is like for them, to have compassion for others as fellow human beings in the world and attempt to understand others behaviours from their frame of reference.
I was struck recently by a talk I attended where the speaker was talking about some of the atrocities going on in the world. She said ‘we do not understand why we are hated so much’. This statement has really stayed with me and made me think about how much I sometimes struggle to understand someone else’s Frame of Reference and to recognise that this can be about my resistance to wanting to know. However, maintaining the ‘us and them’, whilst feeling like it might protect us, does not lead to peace.
Mark Head BSc (Hons), MSC TA Psych, CTA(P), UKCP Reg. Psychotherapist, TSTA(P)
Mark is an experienced and qualified UKCP registered psychotherapist and has a private practice based in Sussex. An accomplished teacher, he has taught in a variety of settings including Counselling Skills and Diploma courses. He brings
his business background and experience to his work in organisational development. An endorsed TA supervisor, he runs a supervision practice for other counsellors and therapists.
thelinkcentre.co.uk
