Alain de Botton | A Therapeutic Journey - Lessons from the School of Life

foreign welcome to this event from how to Academy tonight we are joined by founder of the school of life and best-selling author whose Works including the School of Life how proofs can change your life and the consolations of philosophy have indeed transformed the lives of readers all over the world tonight this will be a talk about getting unwell this will also be a talk about finding meaning again you'll also have a chance to ask him your questions after his presentation so without further Ado please welcome to the stage [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hello what a what a pleasure to be here to present my new book and as you just heard it is called a therapeutic Journey it's out actually a couple of days and it's a follow-on to a book that some of you might know which I brought out a few years ago and that was called a school of Life an emotional education and this is called a therapeutic Journey and it's really following on from this exploration that I've been on my colleagues have been on at the school of life for a number of years into this very broad area which we might call mental well-being um and it's obviously a a vast topic um I should say that I certainly don't believe that it's possible for anyone to be sane is any is anyone in the room think that they are sane just just let's just have a show of hand anyone who that goes I'm very glad you're obviously a very very sane audience because in a paradoxical way in which these things work the best marker of having at least a measure of Sanity is a friendship with once more insane sides and um the ability to recognize the extent to which one isn't entirely well and cannot be by the simple nature of facts of human nature this is about as good as we can ever get if any of you dating very useful way to sift out those who you should continue a meal with or not is simply to turn to your companion at some point normally after the starter at least and say so in what ways are you mad and if the person looks kind of puzzled and angry and defensive and says how do you mean mad just leave I mean put a little bit of money down but quit the restaurant but it's not going to work it's not going to work but if they're able to take the first steps into outlining some of the ways in which they may you know be tricky at points another key question is to ask somebody if they're difficult to live with if somebody thinks that they're easy to live with again run run it's just this is a very very bad sign so at the school life we very much believe everybody's hard to live with and everybody's insane very good starting point Journey what we're looking at in particular is the darker side of mental experience um and that is the process of getting mentally unwell it's taken us about you know 2000 years or so to even be able to mention what should have always have been an extremely almost Common Sense point of view which is that just as we get ill in our bodies we of course get ill in our minds there is no such thing as a life that can be spent uh in a mind that is entirely well we tend to like because it's so frightening we tend to try and create a war a hard separation between the crazy and the same well as you've been as you'll pick up from what I've been saying um I certainly don't believe that that's the case that the border is Shifting The Border is permeable and um any good insane life will include many moments of what one might as well call insanity this is not a one-way Street it's a constant passage between um states of of distress of acute distress and states of Greater wellness it's worth maybe just summarizing or just just trying to look at some of the ways in which a healthy mind operates because all of us have moments when we are able um to think in healthy ways and it's you know especially when you lose that ability to think to reflect on what healthy thinking is it's really a miraculous thing you know first and foremost what a healthy mind is is an editing machine what it is able to do is to rank thoughts in order of importance and not present Consciousness with the full uh unalloid uncategorized um panoply of emotions that it could feel at any time things are ranked and things are sometimes compartmentalized and put far away I'm going to talk about defense mechanisms in their more pejorative sense in a minute but it's important to know that the ability not to think of certain things at certain points belongs to health for example if there were thoughts that I was having right now about being here on stage I wouldn't be able to continue my I may not be able to continue much longer but I'm going all right for a few minutes but um if I were to have certain thoughts like what on Earth am I doing here what what about if people weren't nice to me what about if if I didn't know what I was talking about you know all these things would quite quickly trip me out and bring me into a state where I couldn't do what I could do what I could do so in other words in order to function in the world you need to prioritize categorize keep certain thoughts uh at Bay particularly punitive thoughts you know we are all in order to keep going immense optimists we need a boost of optimism all the time to Bear ourselves I mean all of us you know when we are so-called down we tend to have those realistic depressive thoughts goodness I'm rather ugly goodness I'm rather strange goodness I'm so stupid Etc now if those thoughts were allowed to submerge us we couldn't get out of bed there is but at the core of Health there lies a certain necessary dose of optimism and it's only when we lose that that we start to realize absolutely how key it is not least we have to forget on a daily basis that we're going to die um philosophers love to remind us of death and there are you know real advantages sometimes that are focusing way to remembering death but if we really had to keep that thought of death in mind as perhaps we should we couldn't keep going so there's a lot of thought a lot of thinking that we need not to do in order to function as we do but sometimes these very healthy mechanisms of thought and processing start to erode and for a period or perhaps a longer Period start to break down and we enter a state of mental unwellness we're no longer able to categorize our thoughts we're no longer able to prioritize we're no longer able to sleep we're no longer able to therefore benefit from that risk start that a fresh morning endows us with when we're able to look again at a topic in a certain way we become hyper realists and that hyper realism becomes unlivable and at its worst life itself starts to seem unendurable um I think that you know many of us have at least tasted a share of what this might mean hopefully it was only a little moment in life sometimes it can be longer I would say that very few people get through an entire life without at certain moments slipping into these kinds of territories and this is really what the book is about those moments when we lose our grip on all those processes that the mind has in order to be able to get us through the day now why on Earth does it happen um there are stresses undoubtedly in daily life um there are things that aggravate a fragile mind but at the school of life and this will annoy everybody so I'm really sorry um we are very focused unfortunately on childhood um sometimes we leave we have we run a YouTube channel and um almost every film we make seems to mention childhood and there's a few people in particular who every time we book a film go oh look at them they're going on about childhood again and I feel real sympathy oh my goodness I mean we do seem to go on a lot about childhood um it's really boring to have to think about your childhood many of us are 30 40 50 years decades um out of childhood and still here I am telling you that it's all about your childhood well that's extremely annoying and I really sincerely apologize but the only way to forget about your childhood is to go and explore it we're not exploring childhood for the sake of nostalgia or because we love mommy and daddy or because it was such fun but in order to get rid of the thing once and for all you know these ghosts of the Mind tend to be ghosts that sprung on us in childhood and without um the courage to go back and look at them um we are unable unlikely to find the free Freedom the calm the creativity that we all seek you know childhood is it took Humanity an unbelievable length of time to recognize the role of childhood in adult development I mean you don't find any medieval person going you know the reason I lack confidence is my parents you know there's no ancient Greek who's on record explaining their behavior because of a parental shortfall of affection it just doesn't exist there is no record you know we have to wait until the 20th century before people speak in this way which can of course lead us to a kind of Suspicion you know are we somehow are we modern somehow uniquely pampered obsessive in this area I don't really think so I mean compare it to our discovery of certain kinds of bacteria you know it took until the late 19th century until the age of Freud to realize that at a bacterial level there are things that inhabit jugs of water that on a bad day could kill the population of an entire city that they're a macro biotic biological macrobiological organisms that you can't see with the naked eye that have the capable capacity to kill millions of people and it's so implausible and something akin to this goes on in relation to our own childhoods where again slightly invisible processes are at play that have the capacity to fail adult lives in ways that are as destructive as a certain kind of poisoning part of the problem of human beings is they have such an inordinately long maturational process a horse a foal is up and running in an afternoon so if baby horses mum and dad are slightly strange or they are suffering from all sorts of things doesn't really matter because they're often often about within the afternoon but we humans you know we're at least 18 19 20 25 until we can get away from these people and these people are likely to be carrying all sorts of distorted patterns which we learn with some of the same natural inevitability as we learn language you know none of us learn our native language right sitting in a classroom and slowly taking it in we simply imbibe it passively from the surrounding environment while we're doing handstands in the garden drawing buttercups at the kitchen table we are learning languages that people are speaking around us and it's not just languages in the grammatical sense we are also learning at all times emotional languages who can we trust what is a man what is a woman what is what am I what is my worth um how what will happen if I reach out and try and communicate with another person all of these things all of these conclusions the language that we learn um is being taken in all the time and it becomes a very dense native language now of course we know how hard it is in adulthood to start learning Finnish if we grew up speaking a Korean and how hard it is when you're a native English speaker to pick up Spanish you know we'll know that we've probably got to go to language school three four times a week we might need to do it for years Etc people get very impatient when you start telling them you have learned certain a certain emotional language and if you want to try and correct it it's going to be a huge labor you know you might need say to go to therapy once a week even twice a week and three times a week and they go what are you kidding you think I've got time to do that um surely you can just you know read a book just this book we'll give it now this book is a fantastic start but the bad news the bad news is not enough it's not enough even though it runs to 400 pages and has you know a wealth of insights not enough it's just the beginning of the journey you're gonna have to go under but be patient with yourself as I say think of how long it took you to learn English or whatever language is your native language think how complicated it would be to change that language it's no easier to start learn a new language of men and women and relationships and self-esteem and confidence all of these things are just as knotted and just as firmly embedded uh in US um many many of us almost say all of us suffer from what nowadays is a little bit of a fashionable word but like many fashionable words it has its use traumatized we have all suffered trauma in childhood now what is trauma trauma is essentially The Experience an experience that is both painful and at the age and at the stage where where it is experience It is incomprehensible we simply cannot frame it process it digest it or make sense of it so it is swallowed in an undigested form that is what it is to be traumatized and as we know and this is one of the great discoveries of 20th century Psychotherapy the only I think the only way in which trauma can be handled is if we go back and unpick it and understand it and thereby process it and let it um liberal and work a Liberation from its effect which we have not understood you know most mental troubles come from things that have not been properly looked at anxiety for example is worry that doesn't understand itself depression is sadness that has become unknown to us and therefore is bled across the whole of Our Lives irritability is Rage that doesn't know its true Target you know why when you open the drawer and you can't open it and you get an absolute feeling you start hitting the draw and you're wearing is a damn key it's not just me you do this too we all do this too right um and then you think hang on a minute it's not the drawer is it yeah it's something else why why am I in such a range and that terrible thing that we have to start to think I'm not understanding myself I'm I'm diverting Rage which belongs in one place and I'm kicking the dog I'm kicking the draw I'm kicking the driver whatever it is um many of our emotions do not find their correct targets and the reason is that their correct targets are extremely awkward to come to understand for example it's really nice to think that your parents are lovely and you love them of course you know that's the way it should be so to imagine that you're in a real Rage with them that's that's kind of awkward or maybe you're in a rage with your partner well that's a bit awkward you're supposed to love them a brief diversion into sex why do people stop having sex some people stopped having sex well um the standard Common Sense view is this is just a sign of time passing we go off people no no no no we don't it's a sign of Frozen rage um all of us upset our partners all the time in quite small ways your partner comes home and goes interesting story to tell you oh just I just gotta make a phone call you pick up your phone and start looking at something now your partner's not going to you know scream at you probably they'll just take it on the chin because they've learned they're a good boy or girl they've learned to be brave and to be an adult but none of us are adults in relationships all of us come to relationships as essentially adults shall three or four or five year old inner being and so when Partners say to each other grow up you want to go this is not the game where you grow up you know growing ups for the office the domestic sphere the domestic sphere is one where we can't help but bring a very small toddler with us and that toddler is extremely vulnerable and it gets hurt all the time you know that slightly cutting remark that you made about your partner at a party quite funny everybody laughed or they didn't laugh and now it's three weeks later and they're still pretty upset the problem is they don't know they're upset why don't they know they're upset because anger does not communicate itself cleanly to us they are out of touch with their emotions all of us are constantly getting out of touch with our emotions and a lot of our so-called illnesses are the result of Legions of emotions that have lost sight of their true aim because we are not very well equipped to repatriate our emotions and find out who was that anger really meant for and as I say some of the reason for that is that the anger that is due to certain people we think I'm supposed to be nice so how could I be in a rage with my mother she's really nice she's very lovely she's giving me Christmas present Etc um how could I be angry with my partner they seem to you know I'm married to them etc etc all these things that stop us from understanding the complexities of our own lives and therefore end us up in these kind of knots come back to sex and one of the things that happens then is um when a lot of accumulated anger that doesn't know itself has come to Lodge in our minds the last thing we want it to be touched why would we be touched by someone we're in a rage with I don't want to be touched by someone I'm in a rage with but thing is we don't know we're in a rage the partner definitely doesn't know we're in a rage no one knows what's going on everyone's reading a lot of books good for penguin but other than that not such a great time in bed you know quite quite boring because no one knows what on Earth's going on until maybe slowly you find your way to something that says might I be in some ways in a rage School of Life we make these cards these dating cards we're supposed to take them with on a date and ask your your partner uh all kinds of questions and one of the questions which is phenomenally useful such a simple question you go on a date night with your partner and you say to them something that I might have annoyed you recently and how how have I annoyed you recently and the thing is everyone annoys everyone recent it's a fantastic question you can ask and if you're able to you know get it out over dinner without hitting each other joke Joe we're not condoning um all sorts of um bad behavior but if you can do it politely with Grace with humor with kindness you know none of us need perfect Partners we need Partners who are able to have an insight into their imperfections and to communicate these imperfections before they've done us too much damage in a way that we can absorb and vice versa that is a good a good relationship so anyway um I'm trying to evoke the idea of a landscape in which so much of what we feel is outside of our conscious command very useful exercise to do to try and win back more of the emotional territory in the name of processing is to at night last thing at night to just make a little bit of time to go back through the day and just go what's coming up for me here what am I feeling here what are the emotions that I haven't sufficiently felt and it could be rather surprising thing it doesn't always have to be bad things you could say you know I was totally moved by the sight of a tree at midday and I just want to think a little bit more deeply about this so or maybe there is a kind of regret that I felt and I've not been able to process it all day so being able not just to live but to make time to process the act of living seems at the heart of trying to do that process of mental hygiene that seems so so important um I was going to tell you about difficult childhoods and sometimes people say we don't know what a good childhood is who knows what a good childhood is um it's so subjective no one knows what a good parent is we can't tell well I think there are a lot of generalizations loose it's not a scientific study but there are things we can broadly say will be going on in a good childhood a childhood that sets us up well for mental well-being and later life and conversely things that might be missing from a childhood which will at least aggravate the possibility of reaching adult life in a more fragile state um number one and most uh simply to feel that you are at the center of the parental world for a time for a time is absolutely essential to a feeling of well-being there's a terrific anxiety in some parents you know you can spoil a child well look you can't really spoil a child when a child is six months or a year or two years you know that later on yes you know there are moments when of course you can start to put boundaries on the child's if you like egomania but the egoists the so-called narcissist the proverbial narcissists of adult life the people who are grandiose these are not the people who were made to feel like a little emperor when they were one the people who were made to feel like little Emperors when they were one are very happy in adult life to take their place among everybody else and not stand out the Disturbed people need to build careers where they come on stage and they speak to lots of people always you know a sign if you're if you're a good parent a sign that you're doing a good job is that your child has no desire to be famous if your child has a desire to be known by anyone other than three or four people something's going wrong pay them more attention they're lacking right they're compensating so um in a way that that whole that whole narrative that to give a child too much attention creates an egoist I don't believe is true in the early years what children need to feel is that you know the universe has opened up to produce them and they are at the center they are the sun and the moon and the stars and every time they walk into the kitchen everybody's delighted and every time they utter something it's fantastic and every time they do a drawing it's great now this doesn't go on forever but in the very early days this belongs to solidity that is how you I believe how you solidify a personality um and part of what that means is that a parent has to attune themselves to the needs of a small person now that's really weird and difficult because small children are really quite bizarre creatures the things they care about the things they're invested in are really surprising to an adult mind but a good enough parent gets down on the level of a child and tries to see the world through their eyes a world in which you know if nunu's eye has fallen off you know Nunu the pet rabbit if his eye has fallen off it's a tragedy it is actually a tragedy now if you stand back as an hour and go that's not a tragedy son it's gonna be you know there's going to be a lot more tough stuff coming your way it's true but it's not helpful all right stoicism is a fantastic philosophy not for the under ones okay it's just not it's not brilliant this is what went wrong with Great Britain this is the history of Great Britain writ large you know boarding school fantastic when you're 40. it's called the army before that no spare is that um so Attunement to the needs of a of a small child you know parents have a very bad habit of not quite listening to their children and the reason if you have a child that's very very noisy it's often a sign that you think you're listening to but you're not quite I was um I was at a Holiday Resort a few months ago and there was apparents objectively very nice and there was a child having a little bit of a difficult time on holiday quite a sort of nice resort by the beach all very nice buffet breakfast buffet and the child at breakfast was saying John Mr Beam I don't know three and it was saying I hate it here I want to go home this place is poo quite loudly everybody was hearing this nice dining room was poo we all looked at our plates a little bit worried right and the mother uh was saying obviously she went well you know we all we all mess up as parents but my mother was saying don't be silly you're having a lovely time it's the holidays and this hotel is very expensive all right I mean kind of sensible but it's not really listening and similarly you know a child returns home from school going mummy Daddy I want to kill the Headmaster I want to blow up the school and the parent will go the parents will go don't be so silly that's ridiculous uh you know the police would get you if you did that sort of thing okay that's not really what the kid is saying really what the kid's saying is um I'm really unhappy uh I want to let off steam I'll be okay tomorrow but you know I want to be in a rage for for a minute and then I'll get better and you know the ability to gift the child that kind of air time is that is love that is the work of love and we can't do it all the time anyone who's been a parent I've been a parent you cannot do it all the time but if you can do it sometimes that is a wonderful uh gift incidentally wonderful gift for adults too you know we live in a culture where people are always going you know everyone's speaking no one's listening what on Earth is listening well listening is the great thing by the way is coming up in a few months and many people thinking what do I get my partner Etc good news is here's a gift you can give them simply write them in IOU saying I will listen to you for half an hour every day for a month and you could say half an hour a day a month that's not very good but this is real this is the luxury of luxuries but you've got to do it properly now what is it to listen properly so when the partner comes home and says God I really hate my boss they're so annoying and they're so you know and and the other things that buzzing in marketing is an idiot and then the sales people are all full and blah blah blah and I hate everybody and I feel terrible about myself Etc and not listening is to say look you know it happened to me a few a few years ago I was in sort of the same position as as you let me tell you a few things first thing you need to do and get out of pad first thing you need to do is just like write down who the people are that you're not getting on with and then and then get a chart what you need to do is do a very simple thing but very hard thing which is to reflect back what they're saying you simply need to find other words to capture what they've just told you so you need to go I'm hearing that works a nightmare for you at the moment I'm hearing that a lot of people that you're working with are sort of driving you to distraction and that you're feeling that it's not very good for you and that you're feeling kind of low about that and I I hear that and you'll be having sex tonight if you do that um definitely definitely and it's going to really you know boy things up right and it's so simple but we go to the ends of the Earth we do almost anything other than do that so try that um what are the other things that uh that parents uh uh parents do um stand that childhood is full of odd phases that children want all sorts of things that but they're not threatened by the childishness of the child it takes immense inner maturity to be able to tolerate the immaturity of of a child also you know it's a painful thing to to acknowledge but many parents do fall um for envying their own children it's very taboo what's that mean envy your own children you're going to envy your child you know yes yes it happens a lot in small ways and large um and it's just you know probably all of us who are parents who've been parents have had moment so we thought hang on a minute this kid is having a better life than I am I'm not sure I'm entirely happy and we may small ways just want to make sure that we're not too left behind and you know it's a dark truth but the ability to gift a child a better life than the one you've had it's it requires a lot of maturity and a lot of Courage it doesn't come easily um the other thing that a good parent is able to do is to be a little bit boring um no one wants an exciting parent the role of mother or father you want to be seen by your children as predictable as having no particularly you're having a very simple sort of life that you know all your complexities that you wake up at three in the morning your kids don't want to know you know you are a complicated human being to be a parent at some level to be a skillful actor or an edited down human because we simply in order for a child to to come into its own full complexity it doesn't need to have the parents complexity always in front of it and this is as it were a gift not to have to reveal too much of the agony of Being Human too early to uh to a child um if a childhood goes well the number one outcome of a childhood going well is how the child feels about itself not about the parents I mean parents is that's the other thing all sorts of factors come in but all you need to do to work wonder it's very simple exercise right how do you feel about yourself whether you're a decent person a good person an okay person deserve to be on the earth or not right out of ten who basically feels that they're in the kind of eight to ten group like more or less they feel good about being them who feels that they're more or less in that category little show of hands of those people okay good good and who's maybe in the zero to three you know their life may be going well just like themselves just like the whole thing it's rather who's who's in that group with me okay okay so this gives you a flavor all of us about different childhoods the story of childhood is refracted in one's own estimation of oneself that's where you pick up as it were how we feel about ourselves and you know broadly speaking a lack of love has made us ill and it's only really the presence of love that can heal us and by love I don't just mean um romantic love the romantic love could be part of it it could also be friendship and it can also be Psychotherapy um and um let me talk a little bit about Psychotherapy um at the school of life with great very keen on Psychotherapy uh this book is called a therapeutic Journey but let me start by saying they're probably one or two psychotherapists in the room so with apologies to them many many psychotherapists are not quite how do I put it suitable for you uh they might not be right for you um and so I know many people who've said well I tried that and the guy was so weird or you know the whole thing was so odd I'm never going back there again and I understand that I think we have to look at therapy a little bit like we might look at dating in other words you don't go off the whole subject of a relationship because you've been on one date one bad date or two bad days you have to keep searching but many therapists don't suit many clients so you have to kind of look around and forget a good fit but if there is something that's really good about Psychotherapy it's this so because of childhood because of the language that we learned in childhood all of us have acquired expectations of how the world is and how the world will respond to US based on um certain things that happened in the microcosmic world of the family so we we extrapolate from what happened in the family and generalize outwards to the whole world it's a natural thing that we do but it means that because our families of origin are generally carrying a lot of warps and a lot of distortions we're likely to approach um adult life full of expectations that are not necessarily very fair either on ourselves or other people so for example we may think that everybody thinks we're boring or everyone's out to get us or anyone that we try to love is going to humiliate us or that in order to win anyone's favor will always have to agree with them or whatever it is we carry stories of what we need to do to get loved and also what the what we can expect from the world and these stories carry distortions and normally we play out these distortions in The Busy World of relationships and the office and our friendships and no one quite notices so you know and also they're doing their stuff back to us so everyone's kind of projecting wildly into one another you know someone's going everyone hates me and the other one's going I want to aggress everyone and you know it's just a mess of of projections and counter projections and no one sees what's going on and there's no um a reason or or ultimately forgiveness or reconciliation but what can happen in therapy is you take your issues and when it's going well you play them out with the therapist so you become really convinced that the therapist hates you because you're so boring and because therapy is just a room with a therapist the therapist can actually observe that and go no I don't think that's necessarily right but I think I'm finding you quite interesting the therapist can see in a kind of petri dish things that are normally just lost in the complexity of the of the day-to-day world and therefore there's a chance to correct what's going on so that all those slightly strange ideas like you know that um in order to get anyone's love we have to entertain them all the time or or whatever that these things are not necessarily correct so we have a chance in the the the sort of clinical and clean confines of a therapy room to see what we're doing and get a chance to question whether it still makes sense it has an origin but that origin May no longer be fair to reality as we as we have to live it um and one of the key things to to reflect on is that you know we often see people who do things that look a bit crazy right like we see somebody and they're all the time I don't know um not succeeding at things they could succeed at or they are you know pulling out of relationships that looked promising or they are putting up a wall when anyone tries to love them or they're sabotaging their chances or you know whatever and we think what either why does that person do it it's completely crazy there's no logic to it here's a very important point there is always a logic those behaviors which look in inverted commas crazy Once Upon a Time made great sense I want to go further not only did they make great sense they were very often the difference between life and death between managing to continue with life and giving up on life we needed those patterns imagine imagine the following scenario right imagine somebody who grows up with a parent who is suicidal right they are threatening suicide they're suicide medicine commit suicide right how on Earth does a child survive that experience right well one of the ways that they might learn to survive that experience is to shut down completely right they will never ever let anyone in because to let someone in is to risk their own Annihilation right and that when you're five years old to work that out that is near on genius to work account that in order to survive you need to shut the drawbridge very tight fast forward to 25 35 45 family situations resolved itself in whatever way and you've moved on and you're trying to have relationships or whatever but in a horrible way that defense mechanism is still active and now it's trouble right because now it means that when somebody comes along and says oh we could have a relationship no not possible because the drawbridge is still shut so a lot of the behavior that is sub-optimal in adult life once had a logic which we don't understand and we're not sympathetic to we don't even see it but if we can learn to see that logic we can largely then come to unpick it or imagine somebody who let's say we all know these people who can't stop joking around somebody who let's say is completely optimistic and sunny and even when something's sad they were at a funeral they're like oh you be and they're making a joke about the casket and whatever and you want to go where's yourself sadness what why are you not able to get in touch with your sadness that's what one feels right there's a sort of unreal relationship to the world again imagine that that former child has come through a journey where once upon a time it was absolutely essential that that person be the clown and cheer up maybe a depressive mother or a father who was you know very angry and um couldn't couldn't find anything optimistic that child needed to become a clown to get to the next stage of life but now that precise Behavior starts to be extremely negative in another another thing that children constantly do when children are brought up in sub-optimal surroundings right with parents who may be not that nice to them um it would be devastating to the child to have to see that the fault lies with their parent right to to imagine when you're a four-year-old that your father or mother is really not a very nice person and maybe really quite Disturbed and kind of awful right this is an unbearable thought and this was the work of a pioneering Scottish psychoanalyst called Ronald fairbairn wonderful psychoanalyst who discovered he was working with very deprived people in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the 1930s and he arrived at a fascinating conclusion he talked to children from the most deprived most violent most abusive families and he discovered that those children spoke very highly of their parents they would say by father he's a great man you know this is the guy who was hitting the child my mother she's amazing mother you know left the kid unclean unfed for days what was going on well in fairburn's view it's better to think that you are the problem than that you've been born into a problematic situation so what happens when you're in a sub-optimal parental situation is you start to hate yourself and blame yourself and feel bad about yourself because it is preferable to the other bit of really bad news which is to think that you've been born into such an inadequate family that you may not survive it so this is the way in which the Mind twists itself buys itself peace but you know with with at Great cost for for the long term many of our symptoms it should say end up in our bodies you know our minds our minds are very frightened of insight and most of the time they will try and ward off Insight but there's also another part of our mind that wants to know the truth about our childhoods about our parents about our caregivers about who we are right and there's a constant push and pull between the forces of repression and the forces of honesty right and it constantly is a kind of tussle and you know you can imagine it as a knock on the door please please think a little bit more give me some time to process and if we're constantly busy um well most obvious uh symptom is insomnia what is insomnia other than the mind's Revenge if you like for all those thoughts that you tried so hard not to have in the day that have come back at 3am because they need to be heard what are certain kinds of bodily symptoms other than messages from the mind that haven't found a verbal conscious mechanism of expression you know when you're double doubled up with back pain with lower back pain right what's your back trying to tell you um what are your shoulders trying to tell you what's your stomach trying to tell you our organs are very often the emissaries of messages that we haven't found a conscious way of addressing so the body starts to be an organ through which we are having to speak to ourselves in a kind of code it's very painful doctors can't work it out because for a doctor what is lower back pain other than a physiological uh event when of course it is a psychological event or sometimes of course not not always but sometimes it's a psychological event that hasn't had a chance to to understand itself um I think we can have some time quite a lot of time for questions and answers and um and a chance to have a a a discussion um but really ultimately just to kind of sum up the sort of drift of where I've been taking you think of Socrates who at the dawn of Western Civilization he's asked what is the goal of Life what is the highest purpose of human beings answers rather paradoxically very beautifully know yourself right and follows it up with the thought the unexamined life is not worth living why is it not worth living because the unexamined life is that bit more painful it's that bit less creative it's that bit less stuck in patterns that we didn't ask for and that are limiting who we can be so Liberation awaits us when we can have the courage to see that most of us are in some ways bent crouching um hedged in by aspects of the past that we haven't yet had the opportunity to know and that the prize of self-knowledge the real prize of self-knowledge is to be a little bit less afraid a little bit kinder to oneself and a little bit more connected to other people at an authentic and sincere level thank you so much soon thank you so much Ella we're gonna take questions in groups of three so um Shall We Begin on that side great so um I can't quite see you but I'll hear you um so whenever uh whenever you're ready um first of all thank you very much um for being a person bringing an inspiration and perspective um in my life personally and and relationship too my question is related to your initial Mark around anger and rage in particular in regards to fear of and abandonment so I wonder um if you have any thoughts or perspectives you concerned that regard how to to nurture um sort of embracing that aspect of emotions yes look it's such an interesting question you know we hear nowadays a lot about people Pleasers right I sometimes think you know that issue of anger is quite connected to the issue of the people please what is a people pleaser it's really somebody who hasn't been gifted the opportunity to see that their own reality could be acceptable to many many people at many many junctures of course not always at all times but that they've got such a low threshold for accepting their own ideas perspectives on things that the only way in which they feel they can be loved is to submit to whatever authorities are around to agree and you know I think you'll be picking up from just what I've been saying you know what's what's going to be the history of people pleasing and trying to educate you in the role of looking backwards always what's we don't know exactly but the history of the people please generally has a situation where the truth of the growing child was not acceptable to an adult and therefore the child imbibed a view that the only way in which to prove acceptable was to shut up and accept whatever happened to be around the Nazis are good people oh yes yes very nice thank you very much uh you know it's a great idea to murder children in their but oh yes thank you yes because you don't have any courage to stand up for your own truth and you know that lack of confidence which many of us know I mean you know it's it's it's tragic comic um is is really the legacy of not feeling that we could be ourselves and accept it you know the wonderful psychoanalyst Donald winicot says it makes this great distinction between the true self and a full self and he says that a a functioning adult life has those true selves and false cells in a good balance the true self is what you really think what you really believe what you really want some of it is quite difficult and small children especially if they're a loved environment will let you know their true self quite sort of you know vociferously from from a young age they'll they'll scream they'll want more more video they they want the TV they they want to eat something they want to stay up all night play have a pillow fight Etc but they're letting you know what they really want of course adults can then have to accommodate that in different ways but the the the the the way in which winter cut interpreted it is that a full self should then grow up on top of the true self right the full self does is designed to mediate between the true self and the outside world so when your boss comes along yeah you might not want to tell them the whole truth when you know someone you know when an important guest comes to your house you may want to slightly fake certain things etc etc right we need a full self to function in the world but in order to be able to tolerate the demands of the full self the true self has to have been allowed a little bit of a run around and a compromised life is when that balance is sort of out of sync so Health means getting that true self full self-balance uh uh in order so to answer your question um what you know what do we need to do in order to have a a better relationship to our anger first of all understand how is it that anger came to be so frightening to us right how did our own anger I'm not talking here about violent Expressions sometimes we we shoot so far to the other end we're not talking about doing any one harm we're talking about registering a deep unhappiness with the situation right there's the act of anger and there's the feeling of anger and the more we disallow ourselves from the feeling of anger the more that that feeling then has to emerge as symptoms a symptomatic anger and that is irritability uh that is insomnia as bowel troubles etc etc so make friends with your own shadow side think of that very useful jungian idea of the Shadow side that there are many bits of us that is currently in Shadow the side of us that has slightly strange sexual thoughts that is sometimes angry that wants to give it all in and move to another country that that has odd thoughts about their friends Etc sure these things are in Shadow in most of us and the goal of life is to try and move as much of what is currently in Shadow into the light not in order to act on it right because some of the reason why we we we don't want to bring things out of the Shadow is that we think that if we do we'll have to act on it no no there's an enormous difference between tolerating a thought and acting on a thought and come back to anger the ability to tolerate the thought of one's anger is the beginning of an easier relationship to one's very legitimate sense of frustration with the world I've heard it said that um the end of suffering is the beginning of wisdom and um I'm wondering what you would Advocate to get us there does everybody need to be on psychotherapy um uh does everybody need to be in Psychotherapy um yes and no um I mean no in the sense not everybody needs to go to an actual therapist you know 50 minutes a week or more um not necessarily but I think everybody has to be involved with a word which is the title of the book what you might call the therapeutic which is in other words an aliveness to um well number one you know what's the Bedrock of psychotherapy the unconscious right that very you know sometimes it's so it's so ubiquitous we forget what an extraordinary idea Freud bequeathed the world at the beginning of the 20th century when he posited and and it sort of sounds odd surely humans had realized this before and they sort of ish had but not really that most of mental functioning is unconscious in other words there's an enormous amount of who we are what we want what we feel that we don't know about um and Freud's you know again the Bedrock of the site therapeutic is a lot of the material that is unconscious causes us trouble it has been driven into the unconscious in order to spare his pain but long term we buy that avoidance of pain at a very high price and that a good life is one we are able to stomach as much of our own truth as possible and the only way in which we'll be able to do that is about another word that's key love love for ourselves love that we've been shown by others kindness that is the tool that's going to allow us to tolerate ourselves rather than tear ourselves apart or build walls in our mind between what we can see and accept and what is simply too appalling given how we feel about ourselves go for it so we just have a question in the back there yep hi sorry yeah here um hi thanks Alan that was really brilliant talk uh I just wanted to know to what extent do you think people can wake up and just have a bad day and the reason I asked that is because there are some days where I wake up and feel that my neurochemical was off balance and I seem to just hate the world so yeah I just wanted to know what are your thoughts about that yes I mean absolutely and you know you you talk about an imbalance at a sort of chemical level you know I think one of the things one of the many things that we have to kind of accept is that we are these strange creatures where our big brains cohabit with a body which has certain needs and demands and you know sometimes this particular era of sort of people who spend a bit too long in their own brains that you know Suddenly at certain point they'll go there is no meaning to life all humans are cruel there is nothing worth living for all of my careful reasoning leads me to suppose that existence has no purpose or meaning and thinking why is this person reasoning in these sort of thoughtful ways towards such negativity and the reason could be that they're really taking a survey of reality and that's their conclusion or they're missing three hours sleep they're three hours Short of sleep and that's why they're coming up with all these theories that the relationship's broken they hate their children the nation's going to pot Etc it could be that they need an orange juice quite fast right and and sometimes especially as you know thoughtful people we underestimate the claims on the body so we should never get so clever that we deny the possibility that our clever clever thoughts are really just an outcome the outcome of as I say a shortage of glucose or or something like this I mean parents of small children children know this you know when a formerly Sunny child like you know dancing around and doing wonderful things suddenly he goes hey hey Mommy I hate daddy I'm going to kill myself I don't quite say that do they but um that sort of thing it gets very tragic um a a a sort of novice parent I panic oh my goodness I've gotta I've got to try and help the child to make the world and a more experienced parent goes right nap time straight to bed half an hour nap it'll all be better in a half now so we remain you know key Point Key point you know keep you know we're rushing dolls right and there is there remains an infant within us and that infant unfortunately gets tired and when it gets tired it gets very tragic and the best thing that the parental side of us can do is go right we're going to go to bed we're not thinking any more of this I'll address this in the morning if it's still so pressing okay we'll call schopenhauer Nietzsche we'll read Descartes Etc but probably it would have blown over and we can we can move on I think that was since I told this photo as always but um I wondered what do you think are the drawbacks of psychotherapy because as a society we're constantly sort of incentivized to look inwards oh if you're feeling bad do some mindfulness do some yoga have a gratitude journal and so on so these are the kinds of solutions that were given to us to things like the pandemic and I wonder it kind of promotes this belly button view of the world we're constantly looking at ourselves in the mirror in the mirror in the mirror and there's some step where you have to look outwards and act in the world and actually help your neighbor and and do some volunteering and do things that don't necessarily uh focus on you and what you are but how you can change the world and things out there so where does the boundary lie between introspection and action yes looks such a good question and you know I I couldn't really give it justice but but look I'd say that um the goal ultimate of psychotherapy is not more Psychotherapy it's to be done with the whole thing precisely so that one can then look outwards um the thing is that there's no point saying to somebody who's mentally unwell pull yourself together stop thinking about yourself so much it's like you know the last thing the person wants to do is in a wretched State of Mind is think about themselves the reason they're thinking so much about themselves is because they're desperate that you know they would love to forget all about themselves and to go off and be an active member of society so we have to be a little bit careful in saying you know because anyone gets to boarding school stoicism of like you know what happens to just pull their socks up and get on with life and you know they would love a mentally unwell person would love to get on with life more than anything they just can't and then the question is what do we do with that person and yes sometimes an orientation towards outside can jog the Mind towards you know A New Perspective absolutely but if a problem is rooted somewhere in the psyche and somewhere in a in a story of trauma and difficulty um you know I'm revealing my my prejudices I I think that the only game in town probably is gonna be to take that on board you know because I come back to the language acquisition Theory we have acquired a language and we're gonna have to try and correct that language and the only way to do that is to notice we're speaking it um and simply as it were changing the subject while sometimes helpful um I think you know is is um you know could be tricky but look I'm aware this is a very difficult subject and you know I am I'm generalizing and you know if if some of you think yeah on a minute that didn't work for my friend or you know I get it I get it this is this is me generalizing and it's you know it's the it's it's the The Perils of standing up on a stage and and coming up with um with clever sounding sentences it it's very nuanced and and I think you know it's important to say the field of mental unwellness is incredible incredibly complicated and requires huge sort of care as we move across it and um and and it's something that you know um I try never to forget that there are so many angles so many so many different cases etc etc and so part of it is just um having as much experience trying out as many things as as a right for you because they're really it is hard at some point for an outsider to say that's going to make you better that and only that very very hard very hard yeah hello hi hello and thank you for the wisdom thank you for the questions I have a practical one now that I have your book I'm wondering who did you write it for did you write it for the parents to make sure that we're not traumatizing our kids or did you write it for the kids to try to deal and rewrite the story and the patterns um well you know it's going to be a sort of silly sounding answer but both both because you know what is apparent other than a former child and what is a child other than a future maybe parent or at least caregiver or person you know who will one day have authority over somebody and a capacity either to harm or or to help and you know one of the painful things about about life is that of course there's intergenerational transmission of problems and many of us are really dealing in our adult life with the problems with which our parents were grappling I mean an interesting thought exercise think about you know you won't have a scientific answer to this but if you just sort of is it worth try and imagine maybe tonight lying in bed shut your eyes and think what will my parents grappling with what you know if I had to try and sum up what were the main challenges of my parents life maybe you know they had to I don't achieve a certain kind of status or free themselves from their parents or assert their Identity or create a Rel you know whatever it may be and then think well what's my relationship to the parental struggle and you know there's a there's a sort of eerie frightening poignant way in which very often you know the kids are trying to help their parents in in some way or the problem that is was in the parent has found a form within the child and the child is trying to deal with it and trying to heal the power the parent may be long dead but still the child is trying to think about what might have helped the parent so I wrote this book for my parents hello yeah hi Ellen thank you for your talk um I found your Insight on being therapeutic in examining the unconscious very very insightful um my question is the wavy frame mental health compared to physical health today and tell me if that comparison is wrong um when we talk about physical health we talk about physical health but when you talk about mental health we are talking about mental illness uh we don't talk about physical health just about diabetes or heart diseases or knee problem we talk about endurance flexibility strengthens all sorts of that but when it comes to mental health we're just talking about problems no good markers to know our we are progressing with other equivalence to strength endurance so would you share some thoughts on what do you think is a good mental health not talking about traumas and other things yes I mean such a good question and it sounds ridiculous but I know we do have a list in this book on what mental health is because I I couldn't agree with you more absolutely 100 um you know it's such things it's such Maneuvers as for example um the capacity to forgive oneself and this could sound odd what does that mean forgive ones well but literally to to not um relate relentlessly return the mind to its worst moments this belongs to health the capacity to achieve perspective on things in other words to to grade issues and to assign you know a one to one a three to another a ten to another but not to have everything as a 10 the ability to grade problems um the ability to sequence thoughts so that not everything um is coming at you uh at once that you're able to to create as it were an orderly line for your thoughts um and that you're able to devote sustained energy to unpicking certain things without being overwhelmed by the whole lot I mean they sound rather banal and you know they are quite they are quite banal but they're the bedrocks of mental well-being and it's only when mental health goes we think oh my goodness I cannot stop thinking as if it were today about an incident 12 years ago I'm I'm now and 12 years ago have have stopped um you know or that you're unable to stop having an argument with someone who died 30 years ago you are still having the argument in your head you might be waking up in the middle of the night saying that's unfair and you're speaking to a dead person right this is what happens to people whose Minds have slipped out of their normal control that that time and the ability of time to sequence emotional events has has disappeared um so anyway there's a whole long list of factors but you're absolutely right to draw our attention to it you know can we as it will go to the gym and do exercises in this area as we can yes and the book has some um but also it's it's also about gratitude to just work you know when you are feeling okay notice what you're doing notice what you're doing that you're able to say ah I'm going to get onto that tomorrow morning I don't need to do that now or ah I don't need to give myself such a hard time this is mental health in action um and you know sometimes we think of mental health in such weird terms such diverse terms you know whether it's going to a clinic or an everyday form of mental ill health some of the same factors are at play and it is about essentially destroying oneself and there are many many ways of destroying oneself yeah I think just a couple of couple more questions hi yeah I was wondering how much you think these ideas can be taken to a societal level you started your talk by saying how fundamental optimism is to mental health and it feels like part of what's so broken in society at the moment is that we have fundamentally lost the faith we've lost the ability to collectively imagine a better future and indeed that it feels like a deliberate political tactic to Prey Upon that malaise and their overwhelm to produce the worst forms of paralysis or nativist politics or a kind of defensive and cruel politics even in the worst cases and I'm wondering how you think a society can examine its shadow self what that looks like in practice and how you come out of the other side um look I I feel your passion and unfortunately I share it you know unfortunately I mean I wish I didn't but I I I fear you're absolutely right um uh the causes are many but um you know we know that bad news sells we know that alarm um uh gets eyeballs etc etc so the forces of kindness the forces of calm the forces of perspective are now more endangered than ever the forces of optimism the forces of utopianism the forces of imagining a better world all of these things are in in Retreat um look I would say it's individual by individual if you're a parent every child that you manage to raise in the world who has who is self-possessed who is calm who has a measure of optimism who has not been so badly treated that they need to treat others badly is a win you know let's let's really try and understand this we live in a society of widespread sadism sadism is a defense mechanism what is sadism Satanism something happened bad happened to me it's intolerable that it happened to me what's the way that I'm going to deal with it I'm gonna make life hell for somebody else right I will take my injury and I will put it on somebody else um masochism is also difficult but there's less masochism around we're much more a sadistic Society where we're constantly doing past the parcel with our wounds um and I think you know at a psychological level I mean you I I noticed that your question is political and I could answer it politically I I'm gonna because of where we are today I'm going to answer it psychologically and as if you're a psychoanalytically every time that a human being enters adulthood having felt a reserve of Love they don't need to be sadistic towards somebody else they don't need to get their kicks from from passing on cruelty and and that's the beginning of societal change and a good Society is one ultimately where the balance between those who need to make others suffer and those who are feel good enough about themselves that they will be enriched through kindness when that balance is is entrained so I've answered it psychoanalytically as I say I know there's a political angle as well foreign hello so I hope I can articulate my question well but please correct me if I don't my question is about uh trauma and childhood and I was just wondering if our bodies sort of pick and choose the traumas they want to basically keep the score of and remind us of 30 40 years later and the reason I ask is because I would be talking to someone and I'd mention what I think is a normal and just general thing that happened in my life and they'd be appalled but then I would be really hung up on things that other people would find with the kids that makes sense I I didn't fully understand so you think that people people's assessment of what is a traumatic incident feels quite subjective I think you're saying right there is no there's no sort of um rule book about what is considered a trauma and I think I think that's correct that um you know it it it it is um you know what matters is how an incident was interpreted and felt by an individual um and and different things will affect different people because you know the context is very uh different for some people you know a parent will leave and that's okay because the surrounding environment was such that you know that could be born that absence could be born for others it may be you know a a tear through their life which they'll be wrestling with until the day they die um it a lot does depend on the susceptibility of the individual and and what else is is going on which is why you know I think the um I think we should be very careful to grade other people's traumas for them to say that's not serious you know and again parents do that you know parents will say um you know uh you know baby tiger toys lost its tail and the parent will say to the child don't make such a fuss it's only the tale if you know it doesn't matter it's only a tale of a toy for the child when you're two maybe that tail is everything right so careful because we just don't know how others are kind of taking things particularly very small people um and um and and it's very very subjective um on that note time is ticking by um so what I really want to say is an enormous thank you to all of you for coming by I want to thank my editor uh a man called Simon Prosser who works at Penguin Books he is genius among Publishers I'll tell you why he publishes more people who for a long time no one's ever heard of until they become Superstars for years Simon Prosser published a writer called Bernadine evaristo who's one of the most famous writers in Britain now when prizes etc for years Simon published Bernadine and no one noticed and Simon said this person is worthwhile for years he published a writer called Ali Smith one of the most distinguished amazing writers in Modern English literature no one read her for years and Simon said this author matters why am I mentioning Simon Simon is an example of a man with a true self right he has to work within a publishing conglomerate he's got bosses Etc but basically he gets a hunch and he sticks with it because somewhere in Simon's past sorry Simon to think about your childhood someone probably said yeah your intuition is right he was able to hang on to his true self and that's how he he publishes and I'm immensely grateful my whole career is really owed to a few others too but it was really owed as to Simon and it was he who said you could take some of these um uh uh ideas from the school of life you could put them in a book so thank you Simon for um for making a therapeutic Journey possible and um thank you to all my colleagues at the school of life for doing what they do it's an institution that day in day out helps people in therapeutic ways come and visit us you see us find Us online schooloflife.com and if you get this book hope you enjoy it and I hope in some way it jogs your mind on a therapeutic Journey thank you also to everybody at the how to Academy for making um tonight possible most of all thank you to you thanks foreign

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Length: 70min 50sec (4250 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 03 2023