THAT'S MEN:Our inner protesters are an irrational and pointless way of expressing men's need for power writes PADRAIG O'MORÁIN
AM told that when I was a baby and learning to be spoonfed, my mother had to follow a particular procedure to get me to eat.
She would put the food on the spoon, stand behind me and then manoeuvre it around to my mouth. Only if she was out of sight would I consent to eat.
This, so far as I know, was my first experience of protest.
As we are in an age of protest I thought it would be interesting to look, not so much at protest on the street, but at our “inner protester” so to speak.
The inner protester doesn’t usually show up outside Leinster House, though it happens from time to time, but usually kicks up in a smaller arena.
The whole business of refusing to do what is good for our health provides an example of protest in that smaller, personal arena.
I remember being in a state of protest at one time at the notion of giving up smoking. I quit successfully more than 20 years ago but, thanks to my inner protester, it took me a great many efforts to get to that point.
I distinctly remember a feeling of protest at the warnings by the royal colleges of this and that about the links between smoking and lung cancer. These warnings, my inner protester claimed, were thought up by killjoys who could not bear to see people enjoying themselves.
I wasn’t the only one to take an attitude of protest to the notion of giving up the smokes. In one of my workplaces, before the government smoking ban came in, we had a ballot on smoking on the premises. The proposal to ban smoking outside designated smoking rooms won a hefty majority.
But, one smoker protested, we had only counted the votes of those who had actually voted. Had we counted those who had not voted, adding them to the “no” side – the only logical thing to do, she insisted – then the outcome might have been the opposite. That’s a perfect example of the inner protester at work.
My own inner protester, I reckon, successfully sabotaged many of my attempts to give up smoking and only left the stage when I got to the point of really, really wanting to stop.
A classic example of the inner protester at work in relation to health can be seen in the refusal to co-operate with a treatment regime prescribed by a doctor. I have written before about the stress felt by the wives of men who have cancer – a greater stress, sometimes, than that of the men themselves.
I suspect that this is due to the men’s contrariness when it comes to taking medication as and when they are supposed to and to following doctors’ orders.
The wife is fussing around and trying to manage the situation while the man’s inner protester frustrates her again and again. Sometimes this costs him his life.
Why would we carry on in this way? William Glasser, who developed Reality Therapy, suggested that we have four basic psychological needs which we are always seeking to meet. These are power, belonging, freedom and fun. The inner protester, I believe, is about power.
What this means in turn is that sort of protest I’m talking about isn’t caused by the doctors, the wives or the royal college of this and that. It comes from inside ourselves as an irrational and pointless way of expressing our need for power.
The inner protester can rear up very quickly. I recall a man turning on his heel and walking out of a Chinese restaurant because a waitress had asked him, for reasons that remain inscrutable, to sit at a table beside the one he had been heading for. The table she wanted him to take was identical to the other one and was in the same area, but the inner protester sprang into action and the man went off without his dinner.
In the era of discontent we now find ourselves in, some protests will be organised because they have a fighting chance of making something happen, or preventing something from happening. But others will be organised, all unknown to us, by our inner protesters and will actually be a complete waste of time.
The trick will be to tell one from the other.
Padraig O’Morain is a counsellor