They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition

by Oliver James

Having pored through the genes identified by the Human Genome Project they have been forced to admit that it is extremely unlikely that there are any single genes for any mental illnesses. The new position is that it must be a question of clusters of genes.

early nurture sets the thermostat for our levels of cortisol or patterns of brainwaves in the left frontal lobe. It is also becoming clear that subsequent good experiences, like therapy, can reset the levels to healthier ones and that bad ones can do the opposite.

The true title of Ford’s book should be ‘The Contented Parent’ and of Frost’s series, ‘Taming the Beast in the Nursery’. The needs of the parents are everything, the emotional needs of the small child are nowhere.

Hoffman Process highly effective in bringing alive the impact of their childhood and offering very practical ways to move on from blaming parents and repeating the past

My plea is that all of us take a long, hard look at how our histories have affected us because that way we have a better chance of not recreating our own problems in our children.

I only had to ask simple, straightforward questions, such as ‘Which parent were you closest to?’ or ‘How did your parents punish you?’, for obvious connections between past and present to force themself upon the listener.

Laing continued that ‘we are all murderers and prostitutes … we are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another and to the spiritual and material world’.

Finding out how your parents cared for you when small, whether through your own memory or by asking those who witnessed it or by analysing the way you relate to others today, could lead to a more fulfilled life.

‘A child needs more love and affection than you can get in a large family.’

‘Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.’

is not only the likes of Mia Farrow who find themselves reliving the past – all of us do. In fact, the extent to which we repeat our childhood experiences is quite extraordinary. How we react to our friends as well as who we pick as a lover, our abilities and interests at work, in fact almost everything about our psychology as an adult is continually reflecting our childhood in our day-to-day, moment-by-moment experience.

Woody Allen ended his film Annie Hall. A man visits a psychiatrist and tells him that his wife thinks she is a chicken. The psychiatrist asks why the man does not leave her, to which the man replies, ‘I need the eggs.’ That pretty much sums up all the marriages that I have ever known: each person needs the other’s madness.

if we were living in a highly stressful family in our first six or so years of life this acts like a thermostat, setting our cortisol levels too high or too low in adulthood.

the earlier and more severe the maltreatment suffered in childhood, the more profound its effect. For instance, in a study of 800 children aged nine years, the ones who had suffered severe maltreatment before the age of three were more disturbed than the ones who had suffered it aged three to five (but not aged nought to three).

our first six years significantly explain what sort of adult we are.

siblings don’t have the same parents. Each parent treats each child so differently that they might as well have been raised in completely different families.

genes don’t do much to explain our individuality, nor are they the reason why siblings are different from each other.

Insight is not the same as self-pity.

is up to us to take what they did to us and fashion it to suit our own purpose, to rewrite the script of our lives.

T.S. Eliot was spot on when he wrote that ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality’.

As Sigmund Freud put it, ‘Neurosis is the rule, not the exception’, and grasping this can help us to see that we are not alone. It is also the starting point for understanding what went wrong and learning that we have a choice: we can simply re-enact the past, or we can rewrite the script.

You can continue to be like an actor, endlessly repeating the same role in a family drama whose script was written long ago by others. Or you can become your own scriptwriter.

By contrast, when full-time mothers who have stayed at home are asked this question they tend to express the opposite view. Their infants need constant one-to-one care from their biological mother, and without it they will be damaged. These mothers are much more anxious about leaving their children with someone else, regarding them as fragile and in need of high-quality nurture.

the right wants to uphold the status quo, so genetic theories keep their bubble of illusions intact.

It was expected that humans would have at least one hundred thousand different genes but it turns out that we have only thirty to forty thousand at most, just twice the number found in the common fruit fly.

‘the wonderful diversity of the human species is not hard-wired in our genetic code. Our environments are critical.’

some personality traits are quite heritable, for instance extroversion and emotionality (both 40 per cent), many others, such as sociability (25 per cent), are not.

Memory is 32 per cent heritable, creativity is 25 per cent and exceptional high achievement, up to and including genius, is largely if not totally environmental in origin.

mother supported Gillian’s aggression and suppressed Gayle’s, day in, day out, were bound to have an effect. They may have something to do with Gayle’s tendency as an adult to dam up aggression and with why she occasionally felt so disempowered that she became violent. Perhaps, when words did not work, only physical force could make her point.

the way we are cared for in childhood and afterwards significantly affects how ill we become.

differences between individuals in their proneness to smoking addiction are half caused by genes, but that these differences can only be fulfilled under certain environmental conditions.