it from being intruded into or sabotaged by any remaining “issues” from your Personal History, Memory Store or Upbringing layers. The insulation and preservation job of this layer – what in the diagram is labelled “Present Life” – is therefore represented in the diagram by a thick dividing line. This layer covers over and separates itself off from old scars or unhealed wounds, just as the real onion generates a thicker layer to protect itself from interior infection or damage. In an emergency, should the outer skin be ruptured, this layer has also to take over its vital protective operations in safely holding in the entire organism, so it has to be tough. The more turbulent your personal history the tougher this protective layer will need to be, for fear of further internal events spoiling your hard won stability – say marriage, children and job satisfaction.
The space between inner and outer skin
On the other hand, someone with a relatively untroubled background may seek something more exciting, risky even, in adult domestic life. They are more open to and interested in their past life, may even wish to continue with it. They may also long for life right outside their “onion”, seeing all the chances and choices afforded by the external environment. They have little need of rigid boundaries, feel them as prison walls. Their partner sees in all this nothing but threats to hard won happiness. Much difficulty and even episodes of Depression can arise in the home when two contrasting Personal History layers have wrought very different attitudes and expectations about coupledom, children, money and the rest. Despite long association, the pair may have been unable to come to a compromise about the thickness of that Present Life boundary. Instead of blaming one another for their differences, it might help if both parties inspected one another’s personal chronicle to enable them to understand why their partner is so recalcitrant, why one doggedly pursues a sense of security while the other hankers after more adventure, looking fearfully outward toward the barrier posed by the thickest layer of all, the outer onion skin.
The Outer Onion Skin
The outer skin of a real onion is the tough boundary between the onion’s entire interior and the outside, dangerous as well as nurturing, world. In human terms the outer skin represents the individual’s public “face”, the big chunk of them that other people first meet, oblivious to the deeper not so “tidied up” chunks inside. In both cases the “face”/skin has the responsibility for stopping any “untidy” material that will make them “look bad” from seeping out, and to prevent any external assault from the environment from breaking in and damaging vulnerable internal structures.
Let’s take an example. An otherwise contented adult is destabilised by a brother’s death. The brother had been someone with whom our subject had been in rivalry for years and whom they hated and loved in equal measure. The impact of this event from the outer world threatens to break through the outer skin of the onion, cross the Present Life and Personal History area and break into the memory store, reviving all the dormant conflicts safely locked there till now. Should the subject’s tough outside skin and the next “Present Life” layer beneath it not be robust enough to act as a buffer between the outside world and the deeper inner layers, our subject’s sense of a coherent Self is compromised and the chances of an episode of Depression or other mental health problem is increased.
Outside the onion
Our daily lives are full of pressures from every quarter. We have money worries, career demands, tricky relationships to negotiate, exams to pass, illnesses to battle with, elderly parents to care for, the question of what to get for dinner tonight, finding time to exercise. The list is endless. The pressures of themselves don’t cause the Depressions but they can weaken our resistance to it. It’s noticeable that some people appear to withstand enormous pressure and others can bear very little. Why?
You need to imagine the usual tumult going on inside the onion (fragile relations with the Self, memories threatening their return, problematic residues of childhood, unstable personal history, unhelpful genes) pushing outward, demanding expression and resolution in the external world. Simultaneous real life issues are hammering at that onion from the outside causing reactions from within. No wonder we sometimes need to grow a thicker skin!
More external pressure can be borne by the individual with strong onion layers – good current emotional attachments, a reasonably happy childhood, a relatively peaceful and secure memory store and lucky genes. Less fortunate folk appear more vulnerable to an outside observer because they’re necessarily working so hard at their inner, unresolved agendas most of the time that there’s little energy left over for handling external crises or day to day domestic ones. These remain low on their psychological “to do” list. Yet other people ignore a rumbling inner world (its origins too frightening to contemplate) so long as their present day relationships and social lives compensate for earlier deficits, deprivations and conflicts. Thus their energies are invested outside their onion or in the area between the two thick layers (The Present Life layer and the Outer Skin), in order to keep this state of affairs going. They appear more adept at dealing with the outside world, but who knows what’s going on inside that’s being so efficiently defended?
The Outer Skin and the second Present Life layer regulate the exchange of all these forces across their boundaries, in whichever direction they flow, trying to maintain sufficient equilibrium to keep the whole human onion intact, in other words mentally healthy. In a real onion the outer skin protects the inner layers from getting bruised and possibly dying, while stopping delicate internal structures that are trying to grow or heal, or infections wanting to spread, from spilling out. All living things and systems share this structure in varying degrees of complexity and we humans are no different.
It’s important not to see the concentric circles of the diagram as rigid impermeable walls. They are drawn this way solely for clarity and convenience. The contents of the spaces between the circles (see labels) flow into one another, competing or combining with each other, boosting or diminishing the effect of one another upon the “onion” as a whole. Even if you have a fairly contented life now and it seems unremarkable to you, a closer inspection of your “onion” is almost certain to reveal earlier tensions between the various forces crossing and re-crossing its layers, before that way of life got bedded in. Mira just could not see that all this onion stuff had any relevance for her.
Mira’s “boring” story
Some years ago I had a therapist friend who was rather rich and enjoyed the benefit of a live-in nanny whose multi-talented husband was the gardener and odd jobs man. The three of us women often met for coffee at my friend’s home. Mira liked to tease us, rolling her eyes and yawning ostentatiously whenever we talked about psychology and therapy. One day she challenged us. “Look here, I’m perfectly ordinary, happily married, got a nice job and lovely flat, no hang ups. All that stuff about childhood things forming you, it’s rubbish. Life is just luck, accident. I tell you what, ask me anything, go on, anything. You won’t find a single thing that influenced my journey through life. I’m psychologically the most boring but happy person you’ve ever met. My background is irrelevant to how I turned out.”
My friend, her employer and pal, picked up the gauntlet and this is what materialised.
Mira came from a big family, which she chuckled about. They were a superstitious lot, going back at least three generations. To my friend and I these family tales amounted to accounts of obsessive compulsive behaviours and they seemed rife. Aunts, uncles, cousins, all seemed affected though only one ever had a diagnosis and treatment. Learned responses or genes? These behaviours were regarded as dotty and tolerated by all, frequently joked about. Mira too found them amusing, not at all worrying. A typical story was the one about Auntie Iris who was summoned for jury duty and refused to enter the courtroom before she’d polished all the brass door knobs. As he left the court the judge was alleged to have commented approvingly on their shine!
Mira grew up with several brothers and sisters in a warm household, her parents happy together though Dad was
