(Saturday sport in the rain, like a normal parent. So of course I recorded some poetry and wrote a blog about it.)

This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin has to be the Blur Song 2 of poetry, a short concussive blast that’s over before it began but has lingered in public imagination like none of the worthy remainder of the artist’s repertoire has.

It’s probably also the poem most discussed in psychotherapy throughout the anglosphere:

The thing is, I disagree with the poet on his contention in the third and final stanza.

Yes, intergenerational trauma is a thing. Yes, the parents who made a mess of you were made messes of themselves by the messes you called grandparents.

But ‘man’ doesn’t have to hand on misery to ‘man’.

I know in this video I’m sitting in a parked car in some soggy foreign suburb looking and sounding like the poem looks and sounds to me (if I’ve pulled that much off).

But I hold this poem in my heart, in my work, in my home life with…bruised hope.

Misery doesn’t have to deepen like a coastal shelf, if we deepen. Larkin wrote this after the war, in the country of my birth, among generations of expert non-deepeners.

We worked, we drank, we slept, we worshipped (or slept in church), drank, slept and worked some more.

Deepening into our losses, our sadness, anger, fear – this was not the done thing. Therapy, paid help to deepen into your life, was for the urban educated who could afford such intergenerational reflection and healing.

To afford therapy of course, you need more than the money. You need the cultural permission. Larkin wrote in a setting where there was no question about the deepening of intergenerational misery.

What deepening could feel safe enough for ordinary people in English suburbs, towns and villages?

Here in 2024, though, we know more than ever about the body-brain that gives life to our minds, our experiences of self and of each other as social animals.

We know intergenerational trauma underpins more medical ill health than previously suspected, and we expect to unearth more links between genes, epigenetics, the systems of the individual body and the systems of human society.

We also know more than ever about deepening, its many kinds, its many applications, so that we can tailor therapy to individuals and family groups that can…unf*ck you up.

Healing is possible. Hope is real.

I don’t think Larkin’s advice not to have kids is wrong necessarily. I think the world gets better one longed-for, welcomed pregnancy, one well-resourced love-lit childhood at a time, and by helping as best we can those for whom that is not the case.

Culture wars that pit parents against non-parents chew up column inches and server space, but I want us to move beyond them. The world needs us to.

Because for generations the world has been f*cked up by its mums and dads, the humans who were supposed to look after it. It desperately needs good-enough parenting by adults ready to deepen into its miseries. It promises deepening joy and meaning in return.

You don’t have to have kids to help parent the world. You can nurture people around you, especially those younger, less experienced or less well-resourced in some way. You can nurture gardens, buildings, animals, organisations. You can nurture a workplace.

Whether you do this as a parent with kids of your own, or not, doesn’t matter. As an adult, you can help unf*ck up the world.

So don’t disengage. Don’t get out as early as you can.

Connect. Stay late.
Deepen.

#psychiatrying #psychoetry