BITESIZE | The Childhood Patterns That Secretly Shape Your Adult Life | Alain de Botton #636

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Welcome to feel better, live more by its size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism

to get you ready for the weekend.

Today's clip is from episode 495 of the podcast with author, internationally renowned philosopher

and founder of the School of Life, The Wonderful Aller de Botton.

Aller is known for his unique ability to apply philosophical concepts to everyday life,

and in this clip, Alan explains how our childhood can impact our adult relationships

and behaviors and share some practical tools that can help us better understand ourselves

and each other.

Most things that adults are doing that is counterproductive, that is not in their interests and the

interests of those around them.

Most of those things have a logic, a certain logic, a twisted logic, you might say, that

dates back to their early childhood where that behavior made a certain sort of sense and

they keep doing it because they're unaware that it once made sense and they're also unaware

that it now absolutely doesn't make sense.

Let me give you an example.

Let's imagine that you're a child growing up in a familial war zone, mum and dad don't

get on, they're throwing things at each other, there's violence, etc.

One of the things that you might do as a child is disassociate, you cut yourself off

from your emotions.

So you're in a high-intensity emotional arena and you just cut yourself off, you just go

often, you fantasize, you disappear.

This is brilliant.

If you are 5 years old, you can't disappear, you can't get rid of your parents, you will,

you come up with this fantastic way of dealing with it, you disassociate, fantastic.

Scroll forward 20 years and that person's in a relationship and suddenly things are quite

intense.

And what's that person doing, disassociating, this is maddening for everyone around.

They don't know they're doing it, their partner might not be able to explain it to them,

they quite, they feel it, but they're with words of vocabulary, etc.

And you know, you can go through four divorces before you work out, I'm doing this thing

that made sense.

And so, lesson of psychotherapy is to say, thank you very much to that very clever 5-year-old

that worked out that in order to survive there to dissociate, thank you for this, but

now it's enough.

Now we're going to move on because this is no longer helpful.

And you know, there are many versions of this, take the person who can't stop making jokes.

You know, we all know people who are a bit too lighthearted for their own good, it seems

like they can't approach pain, they're all time cracking jokes and there's a life of

the party, but there's something plastic about their mood, we feel.

If you scroll back, they're often people who've had to deal with depressed parents, where

there couldn't, there couldn't be an acknowledgement of pain because the parent was sinking.

So the child had to cheer up their parents, no child should have to cheer up their parents,

but it happens a lot.

And that person then ends up being manicly cheerful, quite contrary to their own interest,

they can't touch their own pain because that would have been too hard when they were

6, 7 and 8, but they may now be 42, so super important to understand the pattern and correct

it.

That's what we mean by psychotherapy.

Psychotherapy is a chance to observe your patterns.

You know, people go through life projecting, you know, that word projecting.

In other words, they take an emotional response that's based on a situation that they knew

in their past and they layer it on to a situation in the present, which might not be warranted.

So someone might think, all men get very angry with me.

And when I make a mistake, they can't forgive me, which is why I will try not to do anything

in case I get it wrong.

Now that might be an implicit projection that you're layering on to your boss, to your

friends, to your child, to your spouse, et cetera, terribly unhelpful.

It probably has its origins in your relationship with your dad, let's imagine.

But that was you and your dad, but you're carrying that story into an arena where it really

doesn't belong anymore.

So a lot of what psychotherapy is is repatriating stories and making sure that we're not operating

with patterns that don't belong in the situation where we're putting them into action.

Yeah.

I mean, you talk a lot about how our childhoods influence our adult lives, how we show

up in relationships, how we feel about ourselves.

And I think, by the way, since it's one mental wellbeing or our physical health, it's

indeniable that childhoods are crucially important and nutrition.

We give at that age.

All these things, you know, what happens in those early years are so influential.

I mean, it's deeply insulting.

I don't want to believe this.

We all have heavy incentives not to believe this story because who wants to show up age

30, 40, 50, 60 and be told that their first 10 years are determining their life?

I mean, this is one of those awful stories that we've discovered.

Doesn't mean to say it's not true, yeah, unfortunately.

And, you know, look, if you look at anybody, if you look at any adult who is doing strange

stuff, by some way, let's imagine someone who's sabotaging their life every time that

they get near to success, oddly, they blow themselves up or every time a relationship

is working well, they sabotage it in some way, you know, and they go relationship, relationship

after relationship.

What's going on?

Why are we doing this?

Almost certainly you've got to look backwards, you have to look backwards.

And this is what psychotherapy teaches us.

Yeah, I mean, your book is called Atherapucic Journey.

Right?

By going on that journey, us as individuals can empower ourselves to change hugely.

I mean, look, I think one of the great adventures that we can be on individually and collectively

is self-knowledge.

Again, come back to the ancient Greeks.

They thought that knowing yourself was the imperative of every human.

And, you know, therapy, self-expiration, reading, friendship, et cetera.

You know, one of the things that we're always should always be looking for is to understand

ourselves better, because being ignorant of ourselves is behind so many of our problems.

It's because we don't know who we are that we marry the wrong people, go to the wrong

jobs, respond in inadequate ways to situations, et cetera.

We're not in command of our own minds.

And one of the great insights of psychoanalysis of Freud originally is that the conscious mind

is a tiny part of the mind as a whole.

And we know that our minds are planning how to walk and digest food and run various physiological

processes without any conscious inquiry or knowledge.

But that holds true also for our emotional lives, that most of our emotional life is unconscious.

And, you know, I sometimes imagine it's like we're like sort of a person with a tiny

flashlight in a vast, shaped, dark chamber, and we can illuminate just a tiny portion

of our lives.

And most of us will all die, strangers to ourselves.

We will all die with much of who we are, still mind and darkness.

We won't know who we have been.

I mean, this is going to get sort of tragedies of existence.

We inhabit a self which we only partially understand.

But I think one of the greatest and most fun things to do is to expound the boundaries

of knowledge.

Now, it's got a weird ambition.

I mean, if you said to somebody, you know, if somebody said, you know, what are you doing

for your holidays?

And you go, well, I'm just furthering self-knowledge because that's my great adventure.

Look, it was a highly strange, you know, the moment when you understand a little bit better,

who you are, why you do the things you do, why you respond, this is always a joyful day.

And it makes you so much more of a safe person to be around because people who are able

to flag up their behavior to others are a blessing.

Yeah.

When I think about what I said before to you about helping patients change their behaviors,

that I did that knowledge is not enough.

It's the self-knowledge that we need, that the deeper awareness, this is where I really

feel we go wrong with our public health advice, or it doesn't work as well as it could

work.

And the psychoanalyst looking at it would go, you guys have forgotten there's an unconscious,

an unconscious mind.

Exactly.

And the unconscious mind does weird stuff.

I mean, you know, we were talking about self-sabotage, right?

Many of the things that go wrong in people's lives are not external.

They are people behaving in ways that are contrary to their own interests for reasons

that they don't really understand, but that often have something to do with their past.

I mean, so imagine somebody who every time they get close to success blows it up.

Imagine that this person had an envious parent.

It's Cassandra really weird.

Who's got an envious parent?

Well, many of us do.

Parents, sad truth, can be envious of their own children.

In other words, they can be threatened that by a child's talent, beauty, etc.

And though on the one hand they want their child to be happy, on the other hand, not

any happier than they've been, this is, you know, and children pick up on this.

And so they can be a guilt sometimes to be able to bear, to have a better life than

your parents.

It's a real psychological achievement.

It's not, it's not natural.

I mean, it's not, it's not a given.

It may be something that you need to work at.

So it's just a small example of, you know, somebody may feel that in order to feel balanced,

they have to feel guilty, that guilt is an important part of their sort of mental economy.

And again, this may come back to a feeling from childhood that they were only safe if

they felt that they'd done something wrong.

And if they knew, if they'd been made to feel bad, so then the feeling of being bad accompanies

them through life as a protective mechanism.

Very unnecessary, huge cost to themselves, but it can happen.

If there's someone who's listening to that, someone, someone who just heard that and has

just had the self-awareness that they may be an envious parent, okay?

Because no one wants to be that envious parent.

The person who just had that insight doesn't want to be that person, but is again, acting

on their own childhood and their own experiences, right?

What advice would you give to that person?

So look, in the early days of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, the feeling was, if somebody

knows this, they'll stop immediately, oh, I mean, if he's parent, great, I'll stop tonight.

Similarly, you know, let's say in a relationship, somebody becomes aware that every time someone's

nice to them, they hold it against them.

They can only tolerate people who are nasty to them.

And you point, they say, oh, my God, that's me.

And then it will stop.

The truth is trickier.

So what psychotherapy is realized is that insight is part of the solution, but you also need

to have a corrective experience.

And this is what therapists spend time doing, that when therapists in a room with a client,

they know that the client will probably play out with them patterns that they will also

be playing out somewhere else.

So the envious parent might start to say to the therapist, do those curtains cost a lot?

Or is that your car outside?

They'll probably be bringing their envy to the therapist.

And that the best way to solve this is in that room with the therapists that you can

explore that issue live in a relationship, in a relationship that's unfolding in the

here and now, rather than simply bringing it in from the outside.

And that if you correct it there, you'll have a good chance of correcting it in life

more broadly.

So the classic one in therapy is that the person, let's say, who's always worried about

other people at the expense of their own well-being, there's something that happens

because to, you know, if you've had a sort of childhood and you haven't been able to

worry about yourself, but other people have been going off the rails.

You'll want tendencies that you'll grow up into somebody who's always worrying about

other people, always putting other people first, et cetera, at your own detriment.

And this might play out with the therapist.

You might say to the therapist, something like, are you tired, or I'm so sorry for bothering

you.

And you might have had this as a doctor, some people who were sort of worried that they're

bothering you if I'm coming to see you.

And you want to go, and you know, the solution will be to say, why are you so worried about

how much sleep I've had?

Is this right?

Is that, you know, I noticed that every time you come and visit me, you're worried that

I might be inconvenienced by your presence.

I'm not.

Why do you think that is?

And so by holding a mirror up to somebody and tracking their behavior, not just once,

but over time.

Remember what we're saying about sort of the analogy with physical exercise?

It's not going to be just once.

We're lifting up one weight, one time isn't going to solve your muscle problem.

Similarly, emotionally, you might need to, you know, work at a dynamic within a relationship

over time.

And we tend to think in quite conventional ways.

The task of the therapeutic often is to give ourselves a context in which our true complexity

can emerge.

Sure.

Sure.

There are exercises like journaling, you know, if you journal and you allow yourself

to write, whatever comes into your mind, just, you know, there's a technique of automatic

writing where you just say, for two minutes, I'm just going to write, I'm going to keep

writing.

I'm not going to stop and I'm going to take my pen off the paper, but I'm going to keep

writing.

It doesn't matter if it's complete gibberish, but I'm just going to see what is in my

mind.

I challenge your listeners.

I mean, literally do, you know, do it.

If you're listening to this and you're tempted by it, take two minutes, get a piece of

paper and a pen and write and just force yourself to write for two minutes about whatever's

on your mind.

Anything.

And I would hazard, I would bet that probably at the end, you will have learned something

about yourself that there will be something about what you've written that you weren't

in conscious command of.

It might be that you're much angrier about something that you've allowed for or you're

much more loving, you're much more tender or you're more full of regret or whatever it

is, but something to the left or to the right of your standard vision of yourself.

And, you know, welcome to the unconscious working to the mind.

I mean, this is what we're talking about.

The mind, we have a hard time understanding ourselves as we don't allow, we don't create

mechanisms where we can unspool the tightly bound truths about who we are.

This idea that we need time to allow the inner workings of our mind to emerge, I think

is fascinating.

I'm immediately drawn to something that I say quite a lot, which is I believe the most

important practice for our health and happiness is solitude.

Like, I really, really believe it's very hard to live that contented, fulfilled, even

healthy life without solitude.

And one of the things I believe that solitude gives us, whether it be journaling or meditation

or yoga, whatever it might be or a walk, is time for things to emerge.

To be in a meditative frame of mind, I think is enormously valuable.

To allow moments when you don't know what you might want to say to yourself, to yourself,

but you're allowing for a range of opportunities.

And there's an odd way, as I just observed, in which some places are more conducive to

this than others, a train carriage that's fairly empty and a long train journey is tremendously

conducive, I think, to a conversation with yourself.

Why is that?

I think it combines just the right level of distraction and the right level of motion to

keep your mind as it were from getting stuck and frightened of itself, because the mind

does get frightened of itself.

Oh my God, if I open that door, I'm going to get stuck in a cul-de-sac, where I realized

that, you know, I mean, the wrong relationship, my job's awful, you know, it's helpful to

have movement.

So the passing of those pylons outside and the quiet in the carriage are assisting

your mind to lose fright of itself.

And you might find that, you know, at the end of two and a half hours, you haven't just

gone to Manchester, you've gone into parts of yourself that you hadn't explored.

Yeah.

For someone who has heard our conversation and they feel like they're struggling in

their life, they're lost, they feel unhappy, they don't have fulfilment, what would

your final words are them be?

You know, welcome to the suffering spirit in which, you know, we all share that we are

all far more lonely than we need to be because we buy into the self-presentation of others.

No one wants to present themselves in the way they do, we're just forced, we've collectively

keep lying to each other about what it means to be human.

And I think what we've been discussing is what it actually like to be human.

And the reality is that we are far more silly, far more hopeful, far more desperate, far

more sad, far more beautiful than we admit to ourselves and to others.

And if we just allow ourselves a broader sense of what it means to be human, our spirits

will lift.

Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip, do spread the love by sharing this episode with

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