Metaphors for suffering come and go, but the idea of being “broken” is currently having its moment. When giving an account of an adversity they have faced, people increasing say it broke them, an expression whose popularity has risen tenfold in the past two decades, according to Google Books.
Perhaps we shouldn’t interrogate our idioms too harshly, but people bend much more often than they break. Even those who experience the worst traumas tend to recover and even grow. The language of brokenness can seem over-dramatic, as if it is common for people to be permanently shattered by what befalls them. For all its hyperbole, though, the metaphor captures the basic truth that experiences can have lasting ill effects.
In his new book How We Break Vincent Deary embraces the idea of brokenness. “We’re all broken” was its intended opening line, he writes, replaced in the end with the more ambiguously bleak “We all live in worlds of our own.” As this line suggests, Deary’s focus is on human individuality and how it is shaped by past and current adversity.
Deary is a professor and practitioner in the field of health psychology who works primarily on conditions involving fatigue, such as autoimmune disorders, depression and the ravages of cancer treatment. His expertise is ideally suited to explaining how mind and body respond to challenges, and how psychological interventions have a role to play in bodily ailments.
Deary’s clinical work within a multidisciplinary setting also renders him familiar with diverse approaches to health and illness, from the physiological to the humanistic. The result is a compelling and layered exploration that doesn’t reduce suffering to psychiatric categories.
How We Break begins with an extended analysis of how personality is formed as our unique temperaments are exposed to our sometimes-toxic environments. Deary argues that we are composed of embodied systems devoted to maintaining vitality, detecting threats and thinking, which he identifies with will, heart and mind. When our vulnerabilities are overwhelmed by acute traumas and the enduring pressures of life, we wear down and out.
People who suffer try to tell stories to make sense of it all, Deary suggests, but these stories can hold us back or make matters worse. In the case of chronic fatigue, finding a credible narrative can be difficult. The solution may be not to weave a new story but to become less attached to the old one, as new, acceptance-based forms of cognitive behaviour therapy recommend. Engaging in more active problem-solving is not always the answer: depressive rumination — a form of over-thinking — can be the result of a failed attempt at self-regulation.
Detachment only goes so far, however. Although people in emotional pain or exhaustion may be tempted to separate themselves from unpleasant people, places and feelings, avoidance tends to backfire: “the problem is that safe zones tend to shrink.” Our aim should not be to feel safe but to be open to new experiences and kind to ourselves. In contrast, “the broken live in small worlds” and have “become hard work for themselves.”
The clearest message of How We Break is that pushing through the stresses of life is often not the best approach. Countless popular psychology books exhort readers to become more resilient, to take charge and to be relentlessly optimistic. Instead, Deary argues that it is often better to rest and withdraw. “Our best defence against the turbulence of life is not self-transformation but self-knowledge and self-acceptance.”
Coping with life’s challenges inevitably drains our batteries and fighting it is not merely futile but counterproductive. Our society has “lost the knack of convalescence,” Deary suggests, and we would do well to slow down, develop the skill of rest and let the body’s processes of restoration do their quiet work.
How We Break eludes the usual genres of psychology writing. It’s not touting a new concept and it makes no revolutionary claim about the human stress response. The argumentative flow of the book is unclear in a way that would doom a work that was attempting to push a new theoretical barrow. Its division into sections on Trembling and Breaking, the one supposedly about the precursors of illness and the other about its expression, doesn’t quite come off: the former is riddled with discussions of ill health and the latter with examinations of will, shyness, pleasure, enjoyment of food and other topics with no intrinsic tie to illness.
Nor is the book a typical work of self-help. Like self-help books it contains a great deal of self-disclosure and a range of case studies, including poignant reflections on the author’s anguished mother, but unlike them the stories rarely end happily. Although Deary directly addresses the reader at the end of many chapters with questions about their own experience, these read as suggestions for personal contemplation rather than focused exercises in self-improvement. An incongruous chapter near the end offers a sort of self-audit, complete with some improvised rating scales, but doesn’t give clear guidance for what the results might mean or what to do with them.
How We Break also differs from standard psychology writing in its sensibility. Psychological concepts are introduced but embedded in a matrix of literary, philosophical and sociological musing. The book is peppered with quotes from Proust, Henry James, Wallace Stevens, Keats and Kierkegaard (whence “trembling,” presumably), and Deary’s writing is self-consciously poetic, veering towards the spiritual.
These features make for an exploration of “the wear and tear of living” that leavens the science of behavioural genetics, allostatic load, the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis and the like with humanistic reflection. This combination may be jarring to some readers, but it is refreshing to have psychological insight presented by such an erudite and emotionally honest guide.
Tubby Passmore, the hero of David Lodge’s novel Therapy, encounters Kierkegaard as he works his way through midlife neurosis. Reading him, he says, “is like flying through heavy cloud. Every now and again there’s a break and you get a brief, brilliantly lit view of the ground, and then you’re back in the swirling grey mist again.”
The experience of reading How We Break is a little similar. There are moments of profound insight and quotes you want to write in a crisp new notebook, but these are surrounded by swirls of allusion and abstraction. Readers looking for a practical guide to dealing with problems in living or for a conceptual formulation of the process of illness will be disappointed. Those with a literary or philosophical frame of mind who are looking for a compassionate exploration of human suffering will be more than satisfied. •
How We Break: Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living
By Vincent Deary | Allen Lane | $55.00 | 304 pages
