IT HAS taken the Americans to tell us that a stiff upper lip is better than letting your feelings spill out.
Well, they don’t just spill, do they, feelings? When people start to get things off their chest feelings tend to spread over the floor like something the dog’s just done.
They are best stepped carefully around, other people’s feelings.
No, the University of Buffalo is right. Their study says it is often a mistake to believe talking about some distressing incident is somehow therapeutic and helpful.
Well, thank heaven, for that.
We must be into the third generation that has been advised bottling things up is bad – and the damage to the country is now irreparable. I blame the TV soaps myself. Everybody eventually unburden themselves to someone else on the soaps and you know it is going to happen when one EastEnder says to another: “We need to talk.”
I can’t think of anything worse, but real life has started imitating art.
“It’s Sally. We’re trying for a baby and her fallopians are up the Swannee.”
“Well, hang in there Brad. Just be there for her.”
Good advice apparently, hanging in and being there.
But whenever anyone says their head’s messed up and they’ve suffered a trauma, I am inclined to tell them the first thing they should do is shut up about it.
We have page after page in the national papers devoted to some celebrity’s new book in which they reveal their emotionally disturbed childhood. Or how their lover cheated on them.
My initial thought is: “Why are you telling me this?” Quite apart from the money – the best therapy of the lot – why do these confiders want to confide in me, and a few million others. Even if they weren’t getting paid, be sure they’d be boring the pants off someone with it.
I turn the page, embarrassed for them. But there’s no relief in the sports section. There’s John Terry, blubbering, because he has missed a penalty. Ye Gods! It wasn’t as if Princess Diana has just died or anything.
He went for counselling this fine specimen of athletic manhood and leadership, when what he needed to be told don’t be such a big daft softie. A slap wouldn’t have gone amiss, either.
Quivering upper lip? Hardly British, what?
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