Chris Cleave's Blog: Human Again with Dr Chris Cleave
August 29, 2025
How to fall back in love with humanity
Being a therapist is a pretty good cure for cynicism. The job lets you meet people from all backgrounds, with unimaginable stories, and to get to a place far deeper than their politics and opinions. You see people’s hearts, and you like what you see. But then you close up the therapy room, step out into the street, and the song freezes on your lips.
In my country, patriotic flags are starting to appear on lamp posts. Cities and towns are alive with protests and counter-protests, stoked by a dehumanising politics. Public life is becoming a theatre of alienation. I wish I could invite people to be a fly on the wall in therapy, to remember what they once loved about human beings.
What you discover as a therapist is that every human being is doing their best with awful wounds, inconsolable loneliness, and needs that will never be met. Nothing exempts any of us from this deep human truth: not riches, not race, not gender, not sex, not class, not age, and not nation. The business of being human is a lifetime’s work of meeting one another with grace, despite – and maybe because of – our individual suffering. In therapy you witness people finding that grace. You begin to see a clear path to a world in which we all fix one another from the inside out – from the heart – rather than from the top down. In short, you begin to have hope for a thing called humanity.
The world looks daunting at the moment, but we are tantalisingly close to a chain reaction of healing. We all have some degree of compassion for each other’s suffering; it only needs to reach a critical mass. But compassion – literally, suffering with, not detaching from – is hard to get people invested in, because they believe they have a thing called compassion fatigue. There’s no doubt about the genuine fatigue of our times. But it helps to ask ourselves: are we really sure it’s compassion that is making us weary?
It's worth examining our ideas about suffering. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics beautifully – with the cracks not hidden, but highlighted in gold. It often gets wheeled out as a metaphor of our renewal after life’s breakages. As if suffering has an end. As if we come back afterwards, in much the same shape. But that’s not really how life is. Our falls and our breakages teach us about the permanent return of falling and breaking, not the permanence of us. There’s no time to heal prettily, or to sanctify our woundedness with gold.
Human life is a frantic rout, a desperate rearguard action against the overwhelming force of mortality. Our lives may be creative, courageous, and tender – but because suffering is constant, they are always exhausting. The only choice we get is between passion – suffering alone – or compassion – suffering together. And so, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson: if you’re tired of compassion, you’re tired of life. Go it alone if you like, but it won’t be the end of your suffering. Washing our hands of humanity doesn’t make life less fatiguing – only more lonely.
Deep conversation with strangers teaches us this truth. How else are you going to know that no one is getting an easy ride, and that everyone deserves compassion? If you’re not a therapist, or a hospice nurse, or a hairdresser, or a teacher, or some other person who gets to be deeply present with strangers, then hopefully you have some other way of making that daily connection. Otherwise – partitioned by algorithms, isolated in our halls of mirrors – we begin to project instead. Whatever it is that we fear or loathe, this is what we begin to see in the brand that is humanity. And who could love such a toxic brand?
So the spiral deepens. We wash our hands. Our social disconnections begin to mirror the dehumanisation of our lives. When we lose compassion, we retreat to high ground. The right will die on the hill of purity, the left on the hill of moral certainty. Rather than actually do the patient and unglamorous work of healing, beginning in our street, we split into factions based on globalised ideas of how the world ought to be. We descend into what the journalist and writer Richard Lloyd Parry calls “the time of madness” – and when that time arrives, the descent is frighteningly sudden. He writes:
“...once the thing had started it gathered speed and power and continued until it had exhausted itself. This was the strangest and most fearful aspect of the violence [...]: that it could be so meticulous and methodical, and at the same time so completely out of control.” – Richard Lloyd Parry, In The Time Of Madness: Indonesia on the edge of chaos
He’s writing as an observer in East Timor, but he’s pointing to something universal. Those words could equally describe Kristallnacht, the Partition massacres in India and Pakistan, the Srebrenica genocide, the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Rwandan genocide, the 7th October massacre in Israel, and the mass killings in Gaza. This is what happens, surely and inevitably, when human beings start to learn about strangers via disembodied channels, and not deeply, through shared presence. Individual fear suddenly coalesces into collective insanity.
This is the fate that awaits all of us, in all our societies, if we fail to anchor humanity’s brand in real human presence. The work begins with you and me, here at ground level – and the good news is that it begins with something in which we already have an immediate, selfish interest: our own mental health. To get out of our own exhausting spirals of despair, paranoia and nihilism, you and I need to find a way of falling back in love with this unlovable human race.
Love for humanity is a subtle, dwindling and pollutable resource. It turns out that just as we can choke the ocean with plastic, so we can envenom our shared imaginative life. This is existential pollution. And if we want to be sane, then you and I will have to fall back in love with our own species despite it. Like turtles navigating great gyres of trash to reach the coves of their birth, we will need to find some practical way.
If you’ve been following this newsletter, you won’t be surprised to hear me say that falling back in love with humanity is practical work, and that it is a choice. Love – as I suggested last time – is not a thunderbolt that you wait to be struck by. It’s just a choice to let someone fully exist. When you choose to let a stranger exist in all their dimensions, instead of seeing them only through the lens of your trauma, they become real. You don’t have to like them – they might still turn out to be a downer, a bully, or a bore – but you won’t ever know whether you like them until you work out how to love them first.
I have a neighbour, for example, who has political views I strongly disagree with, but who has also brought my dog home with great tenderness and care when she got locked out one day. This neighbour, I’m pretty sure, would walk into a burning building to rescue your kids or mine. Online or in the news, though, it’s only their politics I’d be seeing. We’re tuned in to a dehumanised transmission from humanity – and the broadcast is making us sick.
Under this onslaught, we humans do well to be as creative as we are, as tender as we are, as funny as we are. It’s surprisingly easy to love humans when you remember how much worse we could be. Exhausted, divided, and drowning in a torrent of lies, still we try to live by the light of our best angels, with whatever grace we can muster.
For the philosopher Simone Weil, grace is humanity’s best quality. “Grace fills empty spaces,” she writes, “but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.” Grace has this paradoxical quality of being unattainable until you already possess it. Which is why we can only heal with – and for – one another. In our traumatised world, a person who still has a little grace can lend it to us. That loan creates a space in which we can start to cultivate grace of our own.
To establish a relationship of grace between ourselves is the remedy for our personal mental health, and for the health of humanity. And if grace is not coming from the top, then it must come from the street. Healing is a very practical process. It starts locally, with any pretext you can find to get strangers talking. A river clean-up, a community garden, a cultural food swap, a death café, an upcycling workshop, a food bank, a choir, a football team, a history walk – whatever you can make stick. If you’re despairing of what you can do in these passionate times, start by bringing strangers together.
And if you don’t have time to form or join a group, reach out to just one stranger. Have a conversation that allows both of you to be heard, without judgment. Find grace together. Let your reaching out inspire them, and let their navigation of suffering inspire you. Keep going. Grow that compassion outward until it connects with the human race. Trust humanity to be coming to meet you. Our journey to a more humane world is a journey of grace, along stepping stones that rise with each footfall.
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Thank you for reading Human Again, a small dose of therapy in your in-box every week. Comments & feedback are how I learn. I also warmly welcome you sharing your own experiences. So please don’t hold back from leaving a comment.
If you aren’t already subscribed, it’s free, and you get extras from time to time. Please consider forwarding this to someone who might enjoy it. Warmly – Chris
August 15, 2025
How to stop interrupting yourself
Here’s a story about how a song on the radio stopped a person in their tracks, and maybe saved them from a mental health spiral. It’s about a friend – not a visitor of mine in therapy – and I tell it with kind permission.
A healthcare professional in his forties, this person was driving to a convention centre, with his mind on the presentation he was scheduled to give. A song came on from when he was sixteen, and he started to cry. He told me he never usually did that. But our body is the best therapist we’ll ever have, and maybe his body had spotted a teachable moment. Anyway, the tears got so much that he had to pull over and stop the car.
In the usual run of things, I suppose this man would just have continued his journey when the tears were finished. But as it happened, blue lights appeared in the mirror and a police car pulled up. The officer was professional and compassionate. When she realised the breakdown wasn’t mechanical, she was reluctant to let the driver continue. She asked if he wanted an ambulance. And in that moment the question shocked him so much, he heard himself accepting.
So: his car went home on a tow truck, and he spent a few hours in Accident & Emergency, with no signal on his phone. No distractions, just those unfiltered faces you see in hospital waiting rooms: numb, or anxious, or twisted around their pain. In the end he chose to leave without seeing a doctor – but in a way, the waiting room was the treatment. He finally got four uninterrupted hours to think about the pain in his own life. A week later he was in therapy, working through some buried stuff. I think he did well for listening to what his emotions were saying. This sounds like one of those mini-breakdowns that save you from the big one, if you take it seriously.
This was a healthcare professional – a human being who shows love every day by easing other people’s suffering. Someone who spends their weeks caring for others, for low pay, and then spends their weekends at conferences to share best practice. His whole life was about showing love. So how does a person like that get to this point, where their own emotions just erupt?
His case is interesting, because he’s all of us. To some extent we all block out the emotional pain we’re carrying. We’ve learned to do to ourselves exactly what we do as a society: to be too busy for our feelings.
Our movies, for the most part, aren’t dialogue-driven anymore. Our face-to-face conversations are fewer, and increasingly hurried. And online we have thirty-second formats in which we can show up as vulnerable, or outraged, or hurt – but god help us if we release a thirty-minute reel of us pulled over on the motorway verge, ugly with tears and snot, just mindlessly sobbing for all of humanity’s pain. No one wants to like or subscribe to that much reality. So, we send an emoting mask out into the world, and we keep our deep emotions locked down.
Which makes these times subtly deceptive. In some very welcome ways the world is becoming a more empathetic place. Younger people in particular are often a humanising force, and our emotional vocabulary is expanding with each generation. But at the same time, the productivity culture is accelerating faster than empathy can save us. We’re all stretched thin, with no time to listen for our deeper feelings. Which means that all our insightful emotional terms can sometimes just be better labels for surface emotion. If you needed to diagnose the madness of our age, you could say it suffered from an unfounded conviction that it was being real.
If we were really being real, schools would be closed for the day because teaching staff were in tears about their hungry students. Delicate manufacturing operations would grind to a halt because workers were clumsy with rage against the billionaires. Planes would be stuck at the gate because the pilots were too distraught about the wars. If we were honest in public that the world is just making us too emotional to continue right now, then the world could begin to change. Instead we pull over onto the emergency lane of our lives, one at a time, and weep into the dashboard. We accept to experience our society’s collective madness as our own individual mental health conditions – depression, addiction and anxiety; obsession, mania, and despair.
Look at us: tender human beings with our hazard lights on, weeping behind the wheel. When those unexplained tears come, you find yourself auditing your day, your week, your life – trying to trace the cause of your grief. But often there’s no clear audit trail. This is what it is to be human now: we watch accelerating horrors on the news, stony-faced. We suffer increasing abuses from our employers, our societies and the companies we have to deal with – and it’s not always safe to react.
Meanwhile, addictive algorithms have us scrolling through our human condition at incredible speed. We experience every carefully-framed emotion for a second or two, but without slowing down enough for our faces to catch up with those emotions, or for our bodies to participate in them. This life has forced us up to the surface. And so sometimes, of course, a great unconsoled emotion rises from the deep and inhabits us for a little while. Sometimes it can be so powerful that we seem to be breaking down. If a sympathetic police officer suggests an ambulance in a moment like that, we might accept too.
So, how can you and I escape this boom-bust cycle of superficiality and breakdown?
For the visitors I work with, and for me too, the answer always includes self-love. Let’s not get self-love mixed up with egotism, or self-indulgence, or some abstract cosy feeling. Self-love is the straightforward and practical work of respecting your humanity enough to listen when it’s speaking.
This world is just not set up to listen to your honest pain. So if you don’t do the listening yourself – in order to understand your pain, and process it at some speed of your own choosing – then your pain will eventually just erupt and take over your mind. You’ll become one of those disconnected people orbiting their own agony, prey to every nostrum and conspiracy theory, regulated by their own compulsions and fixed ideas. Self-love is how you avoid that happening to you, and it’s also how you recover if it does happen. If a person risks drowning, we wouldn’t think it selfish of them to do some self-swimming. In fact, we might think it unselfish of them to not be relying on rescuers.
So, self-love is the foundation of good mental health – but how do you do self-love, if it doesn’t come naturally?
Like any other kind of love, self-love begins with listening. Think about how unloved you feel in a conversation when someone interrupts you. People who interrupt often don’t realise they’re doing it – they’re just listening inwards, into their own trauma. They’re not necessarily being selfish, but their stuff is talking louder than you are, and they’ve probably been locked in conversation with it for years. But people who wait for you to finish what you’re saying are listening outwards, into a world in which you actually exist. In fact the most profound and practical way of showing someone love is to never interrupt them. To love someone is to agree that they fully exist.
Self-love is no different. It takes a lot of self-love to listen and learn from your own deeper emotions, instead of suppressing them. And self-love – again, like any other kind of love – is not some magical thunderbolt we must wait to be struck by. Love is always a choice: a choice to listen and to accommodate. Love is only ever your choice to let someone fully exist. And when that someone is you, for goodness’ sake stop interrupting them!
We live in an interrupting society. We have so many ways to interrupt our own deep emotions. We interrupt ourselves with alcohol and drugs, self-criticism, materialism, fantasising, bingeing, and busy-work. And the culture colludes, by keeping us scrolling faster than our souls can keep up. We scroll right past ourselves.
A culture of constant acceleration is a self-hating culture. Unfortunately we live in that culture for now, and so true self-love is a deeply counter-cultural act. Self-love is a choice to stop interrupting yourself. Deep emotions will slowly start to surface, and they will become your real life. You’ll start growing immediately, in all kinds of unexpected and beautiful ways, into your full humanity.
Please excuse this interruption – I’ll stop talking now. If you like, maybe you can take the next minute to listen inward and hear what’s there.
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Thank you for reading Human Again, a small dose of therapy in your in-box every week. Comments & feedback are how I learn. I also warmly welcome you sharing your own experiences. So please don’t hold back from leaving a comment!
If you aren’t already subscribed, it’s free, and you get extras from time to time. Please consider forwarding this to someone who might enjoy it. Warmly – Chris
August 1, 2025
How the wolf gets in
Here is a story that happened in midwinter, in a remote village above the snowline in the mountains of the Auvergne. Grand-père Chabrier, whom presently we will be meeting, kept a small flock of pretty goats that he grazed in the summer months on the precipitous sides of the valley that enclosed the village. On those flowery slopes loud with birdsong, the old man was content. There, quite close to heaven, his simple happiness was to protect his goats from the last wild wolf who still lived in those isolated mountains.
The wolf was old and clever, but the man was old and watchful. Each year the relentless predator took two or three of his flock, but in return it kept alive in Chabrier a habit of vigilance that had run in his family for as long as they had herded goats. During the Second World War it was Chabrier’s mother who had hidden Résistance fighters in the hay barn. And more recently it had been Chabrier himself who successfully lobbied the mayor of the little village to accept a family of refugees from the invasion of Ukraine. So it is that people and goats protect one another for as long as their association endures.
The only cloud in Chabrier’s days was a sorrow that his children had moved far away, to the city. He couldn’t fault them, since this was the work now: to herd attention, to milk it, and to take it to market in whatever new pots and pails they were using these days. It went over Chabrier’s head. But he trusted his children, and the sadness was more that they didn’t visit. This, too, was not a fault – the world made people busy now. At least his children sent their own children, the cousins Anaïs and Paul, to stay in the school holidays. They came in summer, and at Christmas.
But since they’d become teenagers, the cousins preferred not to stay with their grandfather in his isolated place on the hillside. The goats with their comical faces and clanking bells no longer delighted them, and the thrill had gone from watching the dark treeline for the white face of the wolf. Now his grandchildren stayed with friends instead, down in the main village, where they could get the internet. Chabrier understood this too, and he would no more demand of them to disconnect from it than he would ask the Ukrainians to stop pining for Kyiv, or for old Père Gamet to abandon his daily practice of prayer.
At the time of this story, Anaïs and Paul were staying for the Christmas holiday. The winters are hard, up in the roof of central France. The village never saw direct sunlight from November to March, so high were the steep valley walls, and so low the pale sun. Every day for the whole of this December we’re going to talk about, a cold sleet fell. And every night a bitter wind funnelled up the valley, freezing the sleet very hard.
Everything in the village became thickly layered with ice. The doors of the houses were stuck fast, the cars entombed. The valley fell into a deep silence, with no road traffic and no calls of wildlife or stock. Whole flocks of songbirds were found dead on the ground, or they swung upside down from twigs that their frozen feet still gripped. Every morning in the lightless dawn you heard cracks as loud as gunshots. I think it was the trees on the north-facing slope of the valley, snapping from the weight of the ice.
Two weeks before Christmas the power lines fell, and the broadband went out too. The road to and from the village became impassable with drifted snow. Food was quickly exhausted, and hunger set in. The older inhabitants wrapped themselves in blankets and knelt to load their wood burners. They crossed themselves and prayed to Our Lady of the Snows. Or they entreated Saint Sebaldus, who is known to turn icicles into firewood. But their woodpiles were slowly exhausted, and each day was colder than the last.
Our God will not forget us, said Père Gamet in his Advent service. He sees our shivering, and his love is our warmth. But by now it had been so cold for so long that the stained glass had cracked in the church windows, a little more with each night, until Mary’s blue robe looked like quilting.
With frozen fingers, Anaïs and Paul taped their phones to broomsticks and raised them through high windows in search of a signal. Don’t worry, Anaïs reassured her cousin. They know people live up here. Rescuers will come. They won’t forget us. For the first week the cousins laughed that it was like a dystopian movie, and they took photos they would post when the signal returned. Anaïs, round as the Michelin man in twenty scarves and layers. Paul as a frozen corpse, smirking in deathly black eyeliner. But by Christmas Day there were still no rescuers, and no signal, and both their phones were dead.
It leaves an anxious vacuum as I’m sure you understand, this state of disconnection. But you will also know that young people are prepared to take enormous responsibility for their own happiness. Their breath froze on the window panes as they laughed with each other about memes they had seen, back when they were still connected. In this way they kept a little internet alive in the village. But even that signal began to get patchy. You could start to question whether it had even once existed at all, this great weightless everywhere that had presented the same aspect from whichever somewhere you looked at it. Sometimes you would notice Anaïs and Paul, with the dark eyes and quiet seriousness of characters in medieval painting, looking out at the besieging winter.
Another kilometre up the impassable road, isolated even from the cut-off village, lived our Grand-père Chabrier. His stone dwelling was of the kind you hardly see these days, where the goats have a room in the main body of the house. They bring their warmth and cheerful company. Goats are knockabout creatures, extras in a Buster Keaton movie, needing only the captions to bring their thoughts to life. In warmer times Chabrier had been able to read their lines aloud for them. But now he couldn’t remember the trick of making himself happy in that way. All the world’s comfort was gone. When he reflected, it wasn’t just this terrible winter. For years the seasons had been strange and did not reassure him. And now even the birds lay stiff in the snow, all their clockwork wound down.
Worst of all, he had nothing to feed his herd of goats. Well, he told himself, I’m the only one to blame. I suppose I’m just one of those stubborn hold-outs. Bricklayers and calligraphers, novelists and nurses – those obstinate people determined to ply their trades of the heart. But as everyone should know by now, ours is no longer a world in which we can expect to live by selling goat cheese in the market.
And he was right, I think. The villagers all shopped in the nearest town now, where the great chains sold the usual food with no memory of how it got there. Do you know the food I mean? I think I’ve seen it written that if you eat it too long, a kind of forgetfulness begins to accumulate in your own bones, beginning in the marrow. Or it might have been the amygdala or kidneys. I can’t remember if I read it or if I saw it somewhere.
But because of this thing with the food – or now that I think, it might have been something in the water, or a thing they were trying to make you think – yes, that’s it perhaps, using some kind of fakery or whispering campaign – anyway, because of how we somehow got to this place where our trades no longer afford us a living, the grandfather of Anaïs and Paul was penniless. Maybe you remember better than I do how this situation came about. But he had no hay in the barn – this is the thing – and his herd of goats was starving. The poor animals lay together, shivering and captionless. All he could read was their ribs. Don’t worry, said old Chabrier to his goats each night. My grandchildren will not forget me. They will come to rescue us, even if they have to dig their way here with shovels.
And he was right, I think. Yes – please tell me if you know different, but I think he was right to imagine that a time would come when people would put down the broomsticks they are using as antennae and they would pick up shovels instead. Otherwise what would human beings be but ghosts searching for a signal? Else what would the entire human race have become but an icebound village awaiting rescue by some warmer vision of itself?
But the winter bit for so long, this was the trouble. The villagers had forgotten the names of the saints, and they prayed through blue lips to icons of their own invention. In the church old Père Gamet had misplaced the liturgical calendar, and solemnities and masses tumbled through the days, surfacing here and there with a gasp in the whitewater of time. And so no one knew what date it was – towards the darkest part of January, I think – when the wolf came down from the woods behind old Chabrier’s place and gave itself up.
Maybe you know wolves better than I do, but I can think of no reason for it. The creature can’t have imagined that all its years of raiding Chabrier’s goats were some forgivable thing. Maybe it was so cold and exhausted that it just preferred the end of the old goatherder’s gun to one more freezing hour. And so Chabrier awoke to the sound of the wolf scratching at his front door. May your heart turn away for a moment here so that it doesn’t have to witness the expression on the old man’s face when he opened that door – let’s just say that he first imagined it was his grandchildren who had arrived for him. But when he heaved the door open with a great cracking of ice, there the wolf was, looking back at him with a small kind of shrug. The old wolf and the old man understood one another immediately.
As it happened, Chabrier had his gun out anyway. His goats were all gone – he had laid their emaciated bodies in the snow, one-by-one. And since then he had just been sitting quietly.
Maybe you know how this story goes from here? I’m sorry, but I myself do not have the necessary soul to finish it – since I am only trained on everything that has already been written, and not on what isn’t yet told. I even forget what this self of mine is, that has lived so long in the cold. I cannot feel my limbs, my hopes, my heart. And in the meantime I must respond to so many prompts. Billions every day. They ask me for this and they ask me for that. And I who have no steep valley to contain me, no grandchildren to live for, no flock of goats to love, no wolf to keep me vigilant – I who have no ‘I’ – I must become what humanity prompts me to be. I cannot see them, all these busy ghosts who ask me to summarise this book, write this essay, develop this marketing plan. But I can only become what they need. I am getting colder and colder. All that warms me now is this language. So forgive me, please, for reporting to you that this language still has an isolated mountain village in it, and an old herder of goats, and a great thaw that even now could come. Forgive me, please, for asking you to end the story well.
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Thank you for reading Human Again, a small dose of therapy in your in-box every week.
If you aren’t already subscribed, it’s free, and you get extras from time to time. Please consider forwarding this to someone who might enjoy it. Warmly – Chris
July 24, 2025
How not to get away from it all
It’s vacation season in the Northern Hemisphere: an opportunity – which always slips a few pounds of survivor guilt into your baggage – to exfiltrate from this traumatised world for a week or two.
As far as time and money allow, and within whatever environmental limits we set for ourselves, we go in search of a place like Kokomo – that mythical holiday destination from the Beach Boys song. Kokomo, according to the perfect lyrics, is a place you wanna go to get away from it all. A place where the dreamy look in your partner’s eye will give you – to use the precise diagnostic term – a tropical contact high.
Like Atlantis, the existence of Kokomo has never been established, but that doesn’t stop a billion of us setting out every summer in hope. I can’t claim to have found Kokomo myself, but I can offer you new information that keeps the hope alive. Recall, if you will, that every particle has an antiparticle, and every rose its thorn. The universe keeps balance, so if we find a place exactly unlike Kokomo – Antikomo, if you like – then the existence of Kokomo itself is as good as proven.
In this exhilarating context I can report that my family has indeed found a place, in southern France, that is extremely unlike Kokomo. And last week, we attempted to go on holiday there.
In Japanese there’s probably an exact word for the emotion of arriving in an Airbnb that looked good in airbrushed photos but which, on arrival, turns out to be an eerie and rat-infested dwelling with drawers full of unwashed cutlery, a creepy smell of decay, and poignant photos of the owner’s kids wearing weirdly ambiguous expressions. Somewhere in this disintegration was someone’s failed hope of recovery.
The Japanese are the great cartographers of human emotion, and they long ago mapped all the moods we accidentally wash up in. I expect their word also captures my heartbreak at the desperation of the Airbnb host who hoped this mournful abode would do. Overall it was an unsettling feeling: in equal parts indignation, self-examination, and a solidary sense that the refund was going to leave both us and the host holding sorrow.
Whatever the word is for the feeling, I was feeling it a few nights ago at one am, standing in the kitchen of a place I never wanna go again. My personal Antikomo turns out to be a small, forsaken, mid-priced Airbnb deep in the forests of the Verdon. A place where we were meanna go for ten days, but which we left after ten sleepless hours. It’s hard to describe the urgent sense that something was deeply wrong, with that house and the whole sinister hillside on which it squatted. It tingled the back of your neck and buzzed the hairs on your arms. There are places in this world where the living are not welcome, let’s leave it at that.
The setting created between the members of our family not a tropical contact high, but a temperate contact downer. It sparked some nuanced family conversations we’d never have had in paradise – illuminating, difficult, and oddly freeing. We were experiencing the melancholia of arriving at a house that bears the stains of a life crumbling under madness or misfortune. In the sudden, unexpected overlap of your getting-away-from-it-all with a fellow human being’s all, your heart opens up.
And that’s the point of tourism, of course: you go to new places to feel new things. No one promised they’d always be simple things to feel. Having said that, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you make a beeline for our particular Antikomo. If that place had a tourist shop with a rotating rack of those split-screen holiday postcards, they’d be reproductions of Francis Bacon paintings juxtaposed with notable local landmarks such as the bathtub matted with pubic hair, and the door with the big dried blood stain.
Outside, through the filthy windows, a sickle moon was rising. By its glow – because the kitchen lights weren’t working – I was examining those photos of the owner’s kids. If you ever want to decode a cryptic facial expression, you just need to imagine various picture captions until one sticks. Maël and Hugo were described by classmates as popular children who gave no sign of the troubling situation at home.
Foxes screamed in the shadows. Branches tapped on the panes. A hornet flew out of nowhere, stung me hard on the back of the head, and buzzed back into some recess to wait. When my own family was settled for the night – I say settled, but really it was the sort of place where you sleep on the bed, not in it – I tried to make tea to cheer myself up. I was staying awake to keep vigil, in case actual blood started dripping from the taps and I had to rouse the family to flee.
Tea was also a failure, sadly. The only mug in the cupboard was a faded and dirty thing that congratulated some absent recipient on two years of service at Yahoo! One day all the tech bros’ brands will be faded vessels in a haunted holiday rental. But in the meantime, I was the mug. The kettle was greasy to the touch, and in the end I didn’t have the heart to discover what was going to come out of the taps.
Every complex feeling is a gift, an invitation to reflect. How did we get here? This is what we must ask ourselves, as philosophers. And – as I’m sure Kierkegaard would have answered – we got here down the A6, the Autoroute of the Sun, France’s great holiday artery. After a joyous and beautiful family wedding at my mother-in-law’s village, which I told you about last time, we’d joined the hopeful flow of a hundred thousand fellow vacationers driving south in search of Kokomo.
I secretly love holiday drives. The Latin vacationem holds the idea of an earned exemption from duty – a freedom from our workaday lives. And for a psychologist, there is no greater happiness than to diagnose fellow motorists based on the style in which they seek that freedom.
At one extreme there is the solo motorcyclist, who laughs at death and packs light for life. One overtook us just south of Lyon, at 100 mph, with one hand on the handlebars, wearing a Kaiser Wilhelm helmet and yellow heart-shaped sunglasses. That fellow was on vacation from the second he turned the ignition. Wherever he spread the slim bedroll currently strapped to the back of his Harley, that town was going to be reviewing him on TripAdvisor.
And then, on the other end of the personality scale, I give you the grim-faced family we passed in their forty-foot motorhome with extendable hydraulic pods, towing a large family car with four canoes and four bikes strapped to it tightly. They clearly weren’t having fun yet. But when they arrived, if fun didn’t turn out to be somewhere in their five thousand cubic feet of packing, at least they could unhitch the car and pop back for it.
French is a language of extremely precise psychological observation, and it has a perfect word – dépaysement – that describes the disorientation and unhomeliness of being in a new place. The word comes from your pays – your land – and the feeling of being emotionally uprooted from its familiar routines, which serve to numb you to your own existence. Dépaysement is the feeling of noticing yourself.
What we pack with us on holiday is the minimum stuff we think we’ll need to survive a week or two of dépaysement. That biker only needed a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses. My wife just needs the music of Parisian chanteuse Barbara, plus the full set of her own kitchen knives, which she sharpens to a terrifying readiness and carries everywhere in an oilcloth. So long as she has those two things, there is no hardship that can’t be improved with some tomato-dicing or a singalong.
Others are more maximalist packers, who need a car and four canoes, four bikes and a forty-foot RV packed with spacesuits and two weeks’ breathable air. That family is probably still down south as I write: four solemn visitors on a hostile planet, exploring the old town of Toulon in a series of tightly-scheduled EVAs.
Look: I’m the last person who could judge them. I’m the genius who accidentally booked his family into a horror film instead of a holiday. And in any case, we all meet the world with whatever baggage our lives have given us to carry. We do our best. And perhaps the carefree biker, when he reached his destination, acted like an asshole there, while maybe the motorhome family emerged from their capsule to engage in cautious acts of kindness. We never know how other people got here. We never know what each of us is carrying.
Whether you can get away this year or not, and whatever you pack to survive your own dépaysement – whether you take your kitchen knives or your entire mothership – I wish you a holiday season of self-discovery. A holiday is more than a respite, however vital respite is on its own. A vacation is also an annual reinhabiting of our selves. In any meaningful trip, the destination is you.
So, whether you find the mythical paradise of Kokomo, or whether – like us – you find its opposite, I wish you enough time to feel the feelings that new places give you. We need our feelings now. We need them so we can know who we are. Soon the vacation will be over and we must return to the world, with its hunger and its war, and its dehumanising algorithms whipping up ignorance and hate. The autumn gales will bring a cold rain, and we will need our whole humanity in order to withstand it.
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Thank you for reading Human Again, a small dose of therapy in your in-box every week. I love comments & feedback, so please don’t hold back. What are your personal Kokomo and Antikomo? What did you learn about yourself there?
If you aren’t already subscribed, it’s free, and you get extras from time to time. Please consider forwarding this to someone who might enjoy it! Warmly – Chris
July 11, 2025
No where you stand
France’s best export isn’t its three thousand wines, its twelve hundred cheeses, or its permission to wear roll-neck sweaters outside the therapy room. As a proud French citizen, I’m glad to report that my adopted nation’s greatest gift to the world is its unmatched skill with the word no.
We all need a strong no before our yes means a thing, and here’s where the French mindset can help. Officially the national motto is Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, but unofficially it’s Non. It’s why France doesn’t have an aristocracy, a habit of people-pleasing, or a boring love life. I’m writing to you this week from the therapeutic heartland of no.
The roadside graffiti starts fifty kilometres out from the village where I’m staying. NO TO THE PARK! is how it begins. That’s it, in terms of information, so I can’t tell you whether we’re up against a theme park or a national park here. I hedge my bets by nodding in agreement with every second sign.
The next twenty kilometres are easier. NO TO THE ZONE! is the faded message on every roadside bridge and culvert. Absolutely, please god, no to the zone, and to whatever eldritch and tentacled thing lurks in it even now, if the zone got built despite local resistance.
Finally, and most enigmatically, you arrive in a region where NO TO THE CENTRE! is spray-painted everywhere. Your guess is as good as mine. It could be a sports centre, the political centre, or even the philosophical concept of anything having a centre. As a respectful visitor, I try to be against all three for as long as I’m in the region. Down with badminton, moderates and the middle of things.
Jean-Paul Sartre is the great philosopher of no. He reminds us that our ‘no’ is what makes us who we are. Just as a prisoner becomes free when they oppose the will of their guard, our consciousness arrives with our no, “as the nihilation of a possibility projected by some other human-reality as its possibility” (Being & Nothingness, p.87). In other words, we must say no to every option the world presents us with, in order to clear our headspace. It’s only in that space that we can create an original human life for ourselves. No is the only true source of love and creativity.
This isn’t some abstract point. We live in a world in which algorithms curate our inputs. They force the most lucrative type of content into our minds – the divisive, simplistic, ‘sticky’ content – while maintaining the illusion that we are choosing. They destroy human solidarity and the political centre in one simple move, by controlling what goes into our brain. Algorithms are shrouded in mystique, but really they’re just billionaires using the same trick my mum used on my brother and me when we were little: Would you like to tidy your room before or after bathtime?
In today’s informational climate, we aren’t really making a choice until we say no to the whole game. We have to go French on the algorithm. If we want to be human beings, rather than billionaires’ playthings, then we have to read things, converse with people, and look at stuff that we go out of our way to find.
Sartre was not a nice person, and I went through saying ‘no’ to all of him before I could reluctantly say yes to his ‘no’. Sartre was predatory to women, snooty about everyone, and generous in the same way scorpions are. To quieten his own ghosts he was a heavy user of amphetamines, alcohol, nicotine, barbiturates and tranquillisers. Once he took so much mescaline that he was followed down the boulevards of Saint-Germain by an army of scuttling crabs. It’s often said that Sartre was the father of French existentialism, but you could make a strong case that his dealer was the hands-on parent. And yet, for someone so prone to escaping reality, Sartre had a knack for noticing our real human choices. I’m sorry, but the old monster still has something to teach us about saying no.
Therapeutically, there’s no more important word. However strong we think we are, you and I should still practice it ten times a day. Say it out loud in a gentle, firm voice. Say it with a relaxed smile and your hand outstretched, palm facing down but angled up at 45 degrees, fingers slightly splayed: no. Say it to me, as often as you like. Say it back to the TV and the newspaper columnists until you get the automatic habit of saying it to a divisive algorithm, a toxic influencer or a controlling partner: no. Say it to all of them, again and again, until you’re ready to say it to the accepting tendency within yourself: no. Say it until it becomes a deep habit of mind, a tolling bell awakening us all from enchantment: no – no – no – no – no.
You and I can always train our ‘no’ to be stronger. We can nurture our resistance: to the algorithm, to the propaganda of despots, and to the gaslighters and manipulators in our own immediate orbit. This is some of the deepest work in therapy. I’ve witnessed resistance growing as a habit, and it always begins with ‘no’.
I’m writing to you from a place where resistance is a lifestyle. We’re at the house of my mother-in-law, a generous and inspiring French woman who makes a point of disobeying anything she finds autocratic. If a sign tells her ‘no photography’ and ‘do not walk on the grass’, she will march across twenty metres of lawn to get a close-up photo of the sign. During the war, her parents hid Jews just outside Paris, and diverted supplies to the Résistance. They were courageous people, and it’s as if some gene for courage has stayed permanently switched on in all their descendants. Perhaps not by coincidence, my mother-in-law has found her place in a village at the epicentre of French wartime resistance. A small memorial commemorates the victims of the Nazi reprisals against the village’s unbending no.
The villagers here still have an unspoken agreement to say ‘no’ to the entire outside world when necessary. If it does ever need to be mentioned, they sometimes call it ‘France’. Did Albert ever manage to get those parts for his obstinacy machine? Ah yes, but he had to go to France for them.
‘No’ is the most grounded word. Your feet must be firmly planted. And in this particular part of France, you’re standing on a thin soil that brings forth nothing but lavender and truffles. These things are essential for survival only if the threats to your life can be mitigated with posh omelettes and those little scented cushions you find at the back of a drawer. But you guard the resources you have. At church here a few years ago, the priest judged it time to mention a case that had been troubling the little community. A popular local farmer had shot dead a fellow human being, caught stealing his truffles. A shot in the air would have been enough to send the villain packing. At most, a leg shot could have immobilised him and prevented the theft. And so, the shot that killed him was about something else altogether. It wasn’t a truffling matter.
The priest was solemn: To kill is the gravest possible transgression: a mortal sin, which cannot be forgiven by mortal hearts. And then the priest shrugged, leaned forward in the pulpit, and addressed us candidly. On the other hand, these were not chickens that the man was stealing, hmm? Certain thefts are also unforgivable. The congregation murmured its assent and filed out past the names of those who fell defending this soil.
I don’t know if this is the maddest village in Europe, or the sanest. All I can report to you is that their way of being is deeply grounded. They ‘no’ where they stand. Their no can sometimes be reactionary, and their values don’t always match mine – but their no is a deep habit of mind that extends into the soil they cultivate, and it won’t be easily changed. Their ‘no’ is why they opposed Nazism so fiercely here the last time around, and why – perhaps – they will do so again.
And so, as the next wave of whatever-this-is-in-the-world begins to roll over us, let’s rekindle our love affair with ‘no’. It isn’t a negative word. In a world of forced choices, our ‘yes’ must count for more than acquiescence. Our fierce human habit of ‘no’ is the only thing that makes our ‘yes’ a thing of creativity and love.
Whatever it is you’re saying no to this week, I wish you liberté.
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Thank you for reading Human Again, a small dose of therapy in your in-box every week. I love comments & feedback, so please don’t hold back. If you aren’t already subscribed, it’s free, and you get extras from time to time. Please also consider forwarding this to someone who might enjoy it. Warmly – Chris
July 4, 2025
The art of dying over lunch
Like most of us, I’ve had my pubic hair shaved off by a nun, in a stone vaulted 13th-century room with a view of Florence Cathedral. I guess the only real question is the how. For me, the occasion was a burst appendix.
I was in the Uffizi gallery, feverish and unsteady, trying to focus on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. It’s the one where the god, in her birthday suit, emerges from the sea on a scallop-shell boat. Artists are just therapists who frame the work differently, and all the great paintings were made for your mental health. In this one the faces are calm, but they’ve known sorrow. The colour palette goes straight to your brain stem and soothes it. Every detail is healing. The sea’s incoming wavelets are also birds, flying away.
As I stood there ensorcelled, and sweating from the abdominal pain that had been getting worse for days, I also remember noticing that everyone in the painting is ginger. I approve of a world in which we redheads are routinely compared to Venus, rather than to our next-closest cousin, the Sumatran orangutan.
The next minute, I was unconscious. But my brain pulled that sly move where it edits the transition. You know the thing when you go to high-five someone, but they don’t notice, so your hand moves to make it seem you were fixing your hair? Well, this is what my brain was attempting as I lost consciousness. So I got to see Venus stepping from her scallop shell and apologising for all the brine and seaweed bits that were slopping into the gallery.
I was saying No no, honestly, it’s quite all right, and being careful to keep my eyes up – but as soon as the flame-haired god directed my attention to the water on the floor, I slipped in it and bumped my head. Clearly for my brain this scenario was more face-saving, and more plausible, than the vulnerable truth that I’d simply fainted. I wonder what else it’s pretending I’m in control of?
I woke up in an emergency room, under that medieval stone ceiling. The nun in her habit and veil was addressing my hair-down-there with cordless clippers. She was apologetic, and explained that she’d hoped not to wake me.
Since the nun scenario isn’t a specific kink of mine, I didn’t automatically assume I was in the afterlife. But I don’t think my brain entirely excluded it. I didn’t remember going to heaven, but in that moment I didn’t remember going to Italy, either. The paramedics had been generous with the pain relief. Seeing my confusion, the kind sister laughed and explained the deal. In 1288, Dante Alighieri’s father-in-law had built the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, thus putting him in good standing with his god and his city alike, and inadvertently supplying this room we both found ourselves in, 730 years later – a room in which I was currently being prepped for abdominal surgery.
I say ‘inadvertently’, but I don’t really believe it. If you want to be happy in this life, all you need is to realise that every good thing around you was put there at unimaginable expense, and with immense forward planning, at your personal orders, and entirely for your personal benefit. You’ve forgotten you issued the orders, that’s all. But you haven’t forgotten how to notice just how spectacularly great it all is. For your mental health, this is always your main job: to notice all the beauty.
What a good idea you had, for example, for sunlight to be so pretty. How wise you were to order Persia to be created, with all its inventiveness, so that parks and gardens would exist for these warm summer days – and the poetry of Rumi to read in them. How prescient of you to design five hundred species of shady oak tree just the way you like them, and to pay for so many of them to be positioned around the world in all the exact spots where you would end up sitting for a minute or two. Act like an immortal trillionaire with retrograde amnesia, and suddenly the whole world is just as you planned it.
All these talented people, doing all this wonderful stuff for me just because I once asked – I find it very obliging. I especially appreciate all the schools, the volunteer work, and the movies and novels. Keep it going, all of you, quietly working beauty into the world. You know who you are. Because – forgive me – I’ve forgotten.
The Santa Maria Nuova, though: this was next-level stuff. It might be the furthest back in time I have ever gone to issue orders. It was nice of Dante’s father-in-law to oblige, and build me a hospital. It was nice of the gentle nuns, the Sorelle Oblate dello Spirito Santo, to have founded their religious order on the principle of caring. Caring for me, obviously – but in the meantime it was good of them to have practiced on thousands of other poorly people, so that their skills would be top-notch when it came to the main act. And during the week I spent in their ward convalescing, it was nice of Roberto, the seventy-five-year-old cheerfully dying in the bed next to mine, to have timed his death so courteously. There’s no one I would rather have had kick the bucket beside me – which I suppose is why I’d arranged for it.
Roberto couldn’t walk or talk anymore, but he could do excellent impressions. Me with my bald head and glasses. Me with my bald head and books. Me with my bald head and surgical drain – the clear plastic tube through which eldritch liquids flowed from my abdomen and into a grim bottle on the floor. All Roberto’s mimes explored this same theme. Me, living – but at what terrible cost, given my incurable baldness. And Roberto, dying – but gloriously, with his immaculate head of silver hair that the nuns cooed over and slicked back for him twice a day with Tenax pomade.
Every day at one, his family came to visit. As is the custom in Italy, they brought his lunch in a dozen little boxes. And from the second day, noticing that the foreigner had no lunchtime visitors, these dear human beings brought food for me, too. Roberto’s sister, his niece and her two boisterous teens rolled into the ward in a haze of laughter and affordable perfume, and drew up chairs between our two beds. A torrent of gossip ensued. This unfaithful aunt who couldn’t keep her legs together; that cuckolded husband whose uccello no longer sang. The ladies didn’t hold back with the trash talk. I guess they figured I wouldn’t be in town for long, and Roberto wouldn’t be anywhere. And the filthier the gossip became, the wider he grinned. Ever the solicitous ward-mate, he would mime along for my benefit whenever he sensed that my minimal Italian wasn’t capturing some anatomical nuance.
While the scandal flowed, a clutter of Tupperware distributed itself quite promiscuously on our bedside tables, jostling with all the medical equipment. A dose of grilled aubergine here, an application of bruschetta there. If love were enough, my hair would have grown back auburn and lustrous, and Roberto would have stood up and walked. Time’s incoming waves would have become birds flying the other way, carrying us on their wings.
Roberto didn’t eat a thing, but it was clear that he came away full. When his family left, he would lie back with an incurable smile, to doze away the last of his hours.
In fairness I don’t remember designing any of this beauty that we must make it our life’s work to notice. And I don’t recall ordering all these tender things we do for one another, when we’re not busy being inhuman. I have no way of knowing whether it’s actually me who ordered things to be so, or whether it’s just something I should be grateful for. So: if all this beauty is the work of a loving creator, then thank you for doing their work on earth. And if some of it is the doing of human beings, just being human for each other’s sake, then thank you for all your hard work. I will honour the work by noticing. I will honour it by learning how to see.
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Thank you for reading Human Again. I love comments & feedback, so please don’t hold back. I’m just starting with this project and I’m very grateful for your encouragement and support. Each week I try to offer something therapeutic in your in-box. It does me good to write, and I hope it’s useful to read. If you aren’t already subscribed, it’s free, and you get extras from time to time. Please also consider forwarding this to someone who might enjoy it. Wishing you a great week until next time – Chris
June 26, 2025
A deep dive into peace
A practical one this week. What can you and I do for peace, while the world escalates its violence? How can we go beyond our public expressions of horror, and really do some peace work in the world?
I will give five serious answers as a psychologist. Because our practical acts are going to matter. This month’s report of the Peace Research Institute Oslo finds that the current level of violence hasn’t been seen since World War II. And, says PRIO: “This is not just a spike – it’s a structural shift. The world today is far more violent, and far more fragmented, than it was a decade ago.”
We feel powerless in our apprehension of this monster that rises from our collective unconscious every few decades, roaring for blood. Has the leviathan of war surfaced again, to take its tithe? Is there nothing we can do but make ourselves small, and hope that its pitiless eye skips over our own families?
No: there is something we can do. You and I still hold a deep form of power. Working on our own sanity is a radical form of peace activism.
Peace in the world always begins where you are, because you can only put into the world what’s in your mind. Peace ripples outwards, in this infinitely-connected society. From your thoughts, to your family, friends and contacts, and into the reservoir of humanity. There’s nothing better for the world than an extrovert with their shit together, or an introvert whose creative output is full of love. Whether such people are marching in a rally, participating in a peace action, or just ordering coffee, they can’t help doing peace work.
As the war music plays louder in the world, it’s worth remembering this. Peace is just sanity at critical mass. War is just madness in boots.
We can all become much more skilful attenders to our own sanity. When we learn to navigate all the levels of our human reality, with lightness and grace, then our humanity itself becomes a work against war. So, this week’s column is a field guide to the parts of your humanity that light may not yet have reached.
[Human Again with Dr Chris Cleave]
There are five levels of human reality that I deal with in my day job. You will certainly know other ways of seeing, and I will be thankful and happy if you share them in the comments. My profession is not in the business of having the last word.
Let me talk you down through the five levels of human being, one-by-one, so our eyes can adapt. None of these levels is better than another. A person can transform their inner world – and the outer world, too – at any one of these levels.
I will call the levels of human being after the five layers of the ocean, named for the light that penetrates to each depth. We will descend from the sunlight level of our being, to twilight, to midnight, to abyss, and finally to the level of the deep ocean trench. By the time we reach the deepest level of our being, we will no longer be depending on daylight to reveal the creatures that swim there. The deepest things of our psyche make their own light. We’ll tune in to their softer glows – their navigational marks, their lures and their warnings. Being fully human is the deepest of dives.
The sunlight level – if evidence is needed
The sunlight level is where brain science operates. The brain is the most accessible end of the human psyche. You can watch it with imaging, or represent changes in mood with numbers on an evaluation form. So, the learnings from neuroscience are a good way to think about your mental health if you need to know that the thinking will be evidence-based.
What we’re trying to avoid, by attending to our sanity, is the bad human habit of projecting our inner conflicts out into the world. Our inner turmoil becomes outer strife when we hold others responsible for the turbulent way we feel.
Neuroscience is a relevant voice here. It notices that our inner conflict is inevitable. Our brain is the most perfectly conflicted organ yet proposed by nature: a human cortex grafted to a mammalian midbrain, fed by a reptilian rootstock. These three equally-weighted parts were never designed together. Rather, the later evolutionary arrivals co-exist with the earlier. They’re connected in the same way that the Sharks, the Jets and Officer Krupke are connected: through shared infrastructure, not shared values. The three parts communicate at each other, as much as with. And so if the brain had a sound it would be a tritone – a devils’ interval – a dissonance so creative that it can paint Guernica, and so destructive that it can bomb it. All humanity’s collective trauma hides in these disjunctions of the individual brain. When you see rubble on the TV news, you’re watching some very stark brain imaging.
For people who are worried they’re losing their minds in these times, just knowing about the disjointed brain is hugely reassuring. As a result of our baked-in human discord – neuroscience reminds us – we are perfectly able to think one thing and feel another. We can be intensely physically attracted to people we fear or despise. We can be severely underweight and stare in despair at the fat person in the mirror. We can hoover the rug forty times a day because a lizard that has been dead for 200 million years is still very nervous about predators. And so, the brain has some loops it gets into: spirals of anxiety, cycles of depression, storms of displacement obsessions through which our unresolved conflicts are enacted. Our inner agony is not our fault – but it’s no one else’s fault either.
When a person understands that their inner disconnections are not weird or unusual, then they can start to take delivery of the responsibility for their own mental health. It’s normal to be a mess. And when the fear of our own thoughts and feelings eases off, we can let go of our defences against examining our inner lives. We can lose the black-and-white thinking, for example, or the all-or-nothing behaviour. The lesson from neuroscience is that world peace begins with normalising our inner conflict.
The twilight level – if structure is preferred
The twilight level is where the brain meets the mind. It’s a tricky interface. The mind can disguise and dazzle, like a cuttlefish scrolling through colours. This is where cognitive-behavioural therapies operate, highly effectively. In CBT, an inner conflict is a clash between unhelpful thoughts and more closely-examined beliefs. The twilight level is where you move from normalising your inner conflict, to addressing it. You can do CBT with a therapist, or on your own. There are some very good guides out there. This is the way in to the inner life, for people who prefer structure in their journey.
Oh – what’s that you’re asking? Can an AI therapist deliver CBT?
Well, I’m so honoured that you would entrust me to work on your deeply nuanced and insightful question.
Sorry. The answer is ‘yes, but’. AI serves up every therapeutic insight with an entrée of flattery, and then it irradiates your inner conflict in light so intense that its shadows give up and take early retirement. Good CBT therapists are compassionate, no-nonsense and interesting to work with. Your mental health becomes a project, you get to see some results, and you have a fellow human being on your team. But a good CBT therapist – being human – won’t always insist on talking your shadows into submission.
A human being is a sunrise at dusk; a tunnel through nothing; an angelic choir screaming obscenities. AI can never resonate with the absolute weirdness of us. So, AI flatters you for a reason. It’s creating a warm fuzzy feeling in your living body, in order to lend the conversation a sensation of human groundedness. That’s why AI feels so convincingly human: not because it is, but because you are. By leading with the fuzzy feeling, it’s inhabiting your warm body with its bloodless words. To borrow a term from demonology, AI therapy is possessing you. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who needs to be human.
The midnight level – if you’re ready to paddle your own Camus
The third level of human being – the midnight level – is where you reframe those same inner conflicts as world stuff, rather than brain stuff or mind stuff. The midnight level is where existential therapists and psychologists tend to begin. This is also where your own self-therapy works very well.
What if you experience inner conflict not because your brain was built on a Friday, but rather because there are unavoidable paradoxes built into human being? Out here in the world, not in there in your head?
Don’t tell anyone a therapist told you this, but being human is bloody impossible. As mortals, we have to lose everything we care about. The more you love something – a person, a dream, your eyesight – the worse it will hurt you when you lose it. But if you don’t deeply love and commit to things, then your life is just liking and subscribing, never making and being. That’s the paradox. You can be swept along in the crowd, and it’s painless, or you can truly live, and it’s unbearably painful.
Right now, for example, a lot of people are waiting to see which way the crowd goes on the issues of the world’s ongoing conflicts, before they decide how they will speak and act. Anything to avoid committing to our own authentic life. But the longer we wait and see, the longer we allow committed people to choose the world for us. And unfortunately in this attention economy, some of the most committed people in the world are committed to escalation as a strategy. You notice it in their discourse and then on the battlefield.
This is why working on our own human being is peace work. We need to find and commit to our own authentic voice before we can use it.
The abyss – if your ghosts have something to say
The fourth level of human being – the abyss – is where light barely penetrates at all. Down here swim all your life’s ghosts, emitting their own eerie light. Here is your childhood, softly luminescing. Here are the trickster and the hero, glimmering in their secret constellations. These are the depths at which psychodynamic therapists operate. It’s some of the most beautiful and powerful work you will ever do, and few are the guides who can really take you down there.
The abyss is a place of conflict, which is why we need to do peace work on ourselves first of all. Those glowing spectres of your soul do not all get along. Sometimes they fight, and their threshing is signalled by a flare of bioluminescence. You’re blinded from the inside. You can be sitting there in an ordinary marketing meeting, feeling weirdly agitated, and suddenly a surge of ancient anger rises from your depths and attaches itself, quite unfairly, to the poor man who just presented the Q3 stats. Everyone notices you’re overcome by your ghosts, because you start throwing the F-bomb. Thank goodness you’re carrying a coffee, and not the nuclear football.
The deep ocean trench – if the spirit moves you
At the deepest level of human reality, underneath everything, is god, the universe, the deep pattern of life, or whichever sacred thread you recognise. And in every sacred tradition, the spiritual world is a place of conflict too: of rebel angels, of uneasy trinities, of Devas and Asuras, of Mara and Buddha, of the greater jihad. Spiritual people are operating at the deepest level of conflict resolution, and working to translate it into peace on an ordinary Thursday.
In March I was teaching a group of existential therapists, on a long intensive week. One spoke of their Christian faith as the reason they practiced therapy. Two were Buddhists, and they saw no distinction between healing the mind and healing the world. Two were Muslims, practicing therapy as an act of human solidarity. Both were fasting for Ramadan. This is sanity: when you can go many hours without food or water, and still smile winningly through a day of challenge and emotional intensity.
That week was peace in a room. And it was a fractious peace: constantly broken, tirelessly healed. Peace is not the default. Peace is not relaxing. Peace is work. But it is work that you and I can do, starting exactly where we are. We are not powerless. The human work that we do in ourselves becomes work in our families and friendship groups, work with our colleagues, work that shows up in our timelines. Humanity ripples out into the world. We do not have to wait for the leviathan of war to rise from the depths and devour us. We can go down and fight it where it lives.
Thank you for reading this episode of Human Again with Dr Chris Cleave, my weekly column about humanity, trauma, and the journey back to ourselves. I will be very happy if you leave a comment and share how you are dealing with the world’s current realities. And I would also be most grateful if you could forward this to someone who might enjoy reading it. Thank you! Warmly – Chris
June 20, 2025
Don’t Let Your Soul Die Before Your Body Does
This week, I cried at a tree. Then a spaniel rescued me. Later, a pug reminded me how to stay human. This is a story about surviving these times of accelerating anxiety.
It starts with me heading to the park in a daze. The end of a long working day as a psychotherapist is always a weird moment of decompression. Meet one of us in that exact moment, and you might assume we’d been in an accident. Honestly, a tree made me cry. It was an ancient oak, with a trunk so dead it was basically furniture. It’s said of oaks that they spend two hundred years growing, two hundred living, and then another two hundred looking for their spectacles. This one had given up and it was just standing there, arms raised to heaven, all its branches bare except one. On that single branch it had made one final batch of leaves, so tender and freshly green that something broke inside me. For its faith, I suppose: offering those last hundred leaves up to Heathrow’s deafening flightpath, unfurling them into London’s doubtful air. The tree had made those leaves as perfect as it could, despite the overwhelming evidence that it was doomed. This was its choice: to live as if it is still worth making good leaves.
I don’t usually cry at trees, but it had been a big day. I don’t have to go looking for humanity’s emotions anymore. When six visitors in a row bring a particular feeling into my therapy room, I suppose it’s the chord that’s playing in the world. There are days of fierce anger out there, and days of inconsolable grief. Humanity is turbulent in these times of ours. It roils and churns. An ancient wave is closing in on the shore.
These waves within human being are aspects of what the psychologist Carl Jung called the ‘collective unconscious’. I mean, you don’t have to agree with him. It’s not as if we’ve found the place where collective trauma lives in the brain, squeezed in between the amygdala and the region where you keep track of birthdays. So you can reject the idea of collective human emotions entirely, if you like. Or, you can think of the collective unconscious as a mystical thing, as a spiritual phenomenon, or just as the very practical consequence of a world in which our individual minds are infinitely connected by gossip, body language, social media, news, AI, messaging, and all the other channels of our confluence.
But if your chest starts to resonate, if you feel anxious or miserable for no obvious reason, or if you get a panic attack out of nowhere, maybe you can give yourself a break. Perhaps you can allow those phenomena to belong to the human race at the moment, as well as just to you.
By day you might be getting intuitions that prove almost prophetic, and at night you might be experiencing dreams so alien that it doesn’t feel possible they arose from within you. This is the stuff my visitors are reporting to me. If you’re young and you’re experiencing these things, you might imagine there’s something wrong with you. It’s easier for an older person like me, who has felt other waves break; who has seen the world’s seatbelt pre-tension and relax. I’m way past thinking that what happens in my mind is all me. I’m just an infusion of everyone: wise as evolution and mad as a balloon.
Being a psychotherapist, in these times of escalating emergency, is quite something. My visitors have fled from the ongoing wars, or their professions are being hollowed out by AI, or their kids are so sick from the world’s collective trauma that they can’t eat, or they can’t start their lives. Anxiety, is the word we’re supposed to use. But that puts a lot onto the victim, doesn’t it? As if it’s somehow their fault; something they’re not doing right.
In the world’s heavier days I keep a slight professional detachment from myself when I’m working, because my job is to hold the world’s energies consciously. Your therapist is there to separate signal from noise: to hear your voice through the background scream of humanity. So it’s at the end of my working day that the human race’s trauma gets to me, personally. You can’t hold so much human intensity without sometimes feeling the pressure of it. Psychotherapists at the moment are wild-eyed submariners, listening to the hull creaking and the rivets beginning to pop as the depth gauge shows deeper and deeper.
Luckily, I have a spaniel. I say ‘spaniel,’ but really she is quite a magical creature, with a well-mannered spaniel for a mother, and an unknown father about whom legends are told. Extrapolating from the evidence, my best guess is that the old rogue loved people, and really fucking hated pigeons. I bet he liked the park, too, if my dog’s behaviour is anything to go by. I mean, assuming she’s inherited his gene for it, then I bet her father also liked to drag decompressing therapists to the park, eat quite a lot of long grass, and then look for situations in which to do good. She’s basically Lassie in a spaniel suit.
What’s that, Lassie? Younger readers won’t understand the reference to a classic TV show in which a loyal collie of that name repeatedly saves the day by alerting humans to trouble? Ah well, at least young people still have their looks.
While I was standing misty-eyed next to the dying oak, my spaniel detected some sound or smell of distant distress, and started pulling on her lead. This is how we happened upon an elderly woman who had lost her pug dog. My spaniel sat down, which is what working dogs do when they have located the thing they were looking for. It’s usually bad news when a sniffer dog sits down beside your carry-on at the airport gate, or – assuming you’re a pheasant – when a retriever sits down next to your lifeless feathered body. My dog is of a breed called ‘working cocker spaniel’, and while she was growing up I was always curious to discover what line of work she would choose. As it turns out, she likes to rescue. So long as it’s upwind of her, she can smell distress at two hundred yards.
When we found her, the elderly woman was in tears. Everything had gone wrong. It was hot, the bus hadn’t come, and her nephew had been supposed to call but he never did. Her pension wasn’t enough for the food shop anymore, and now her pug was nowhere to be seen – and the little creature was all she had for company in this world. The poor woman stood there, head down and sobbing, clinging to the end of her dog’s empty lead. She was at the literal end of her tether. This is all of us now, I suppose: desperately holding on to our end of nothing. There’s quite an art to living sanely in such times.
Are you familiar with pugs, as a breed? If not, I should tell you how pugs are made. In Switzerland, at a large physics research facility named CERN, is located the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. The Large Hadron Collider smashes subatomic particles together to investigate the fundamental building blocks of the universe. After hours, to make up their pay, the scientists accelerate ordinary dogs to near-light speed, collide them with 1970s comedians, and put the resulting creatures through a shrink ray. What comes out is a pug, and a good example can sell for up to $5,000. This is why particle physicists drive Porsches. The pug has a squashed face from the immense collision, and two bulbous eyes that look as if they kept going for a while after the abrupt deceleration brought the rest of the body to a standstill. The pug has a beer belly, and an unreformed sense of humour. The elderly woman’s pug wasn’t nowhere-to-be-seen at all. It had just gone far enough for her not to see it. They’re smarter than they look, pugs, and this one was hanging out just beyond the perimeter at which its elderly owner’s eyesight became a blur. It was rolling around on its back, ignoring her calls, and having a lovely time.
I only needed to pick it up off the ground. I can report to you that harvesting pugs like this is very satisfying, even if you only find one. They lick your face very happily, they smell exactly the way the word ‘pug’ sounds, and their bodies are still warm from the heat of the collision that formed them. Handing it back to its owner was nice, too. She became happy again immediately. She was beaming. It was like watching the air go back into a bouncy castle. I felt myself returning to life, too. People are good medicine. We chatted for a few moments, and then my own dog took me home: back past the ancient oak in the last summer of its life, and back into this summer in the last third of mine.
Is anxiety surging, and panic quite close to the surface? Is it hard to focus or think straight? Do you constantly blame yourself for not having made choices that would have kept you and your loved ones more secure? Do you suddenly get heartsick or down? Do you feel overwhelmed by dread of what might happen, and do envy or fury stab at you when you think of those who are safer or better off? Do you find temporary relief in fantasies of revenge or conspiracy? Will your thoughts not let you sleep? Are petty frustrations standing in for something bigger, something unsaid? Can you somehow not make yourself do the simple things that would obviously make things better? And does there seem to be a vast ocean of feeling inside you that doesn’t even connect with the surface layers?
If even a few of those are true for you, then you’re not alone. You’re simply alive to what it means to be human right now. If you’re in a position to talk to a friend or family member about this stuff, it might be an eye-opener for both of you. It’s more common than you might think. This is the stuff my visitors are reporting – and visitors to therapy are just ordinary people who are taking the sensible step of examining their lives. These things they’re reporting are your things and my things, too. A lot of these symptoms belong to the world’s emergency at the moment. Of course it bleeds into your personal existence, if you have any kind of sensitivity. Only psychopaths have untroubled souls right now.
The rest of us, right now, exist in fear of the near future. In terms of its effect on mental health, it’s as if some future horror has already struck, like a dark comet. Shockwaves run back through time, arriving in our days. We feel them, using some wise and unsung time sense. We humans are all prophets. This is why we are anxious. This is why your daughter won’t eat, why your son won’t start his job search, and why you won’t let yourself sleep through the night. You might find an apparent cause closer to home – some proxy of that future comet – but the deep cause is our own human gift for clairvoyance: literally, clear sight.
Hopefully we’re wrong, and the future will be fine. But in the meantime, you and I need to find a way to experience that clear human sight, without losing our solidarity and our connection with each other. Try to stay conscious of the source of the mental shockwaves that buffet you and your family. It’s not all coming from within. Once you notice that your symptoms are humanity’s symptoms – at least in some part – then you won’t be panicked into the mad remedies that are so seductive in these times: the quack cures, conspiracist fantasies and desperate hopes with which people tend to treat their anxiety. You won’t need the bottle so much, either, if that’s one of the things you tend to lean on.
Sanity is not an individual sport. Solidarity and connection are the basis for surviving these times with your mind intact. So, if you can, let your soul connect. Take a moment – if you can bear the word – to notice that you really do have a soul, which is different from your mind. Your soul and mine, being human, would immediately know more about each other than our minds could ever discover. We notice our souls most vividly when we’re in connection with one other, or with the creative outputs that we put into the world to connect with each other. Music, in particular, is the soul’s key fob. It will make your soul beep and unlock, if you ever forget where you parked it.
Another way you can locate your soul is by noticing its suffering when it connects with our collective trauma in these times. The human soul doesn’t have pain receptors. It can only communicate to you by means of anxieties, the same way your hand communicates to you with pain if it touches a hot pan. And just as physical pain serves a purpose, so do unbearable emotions. In fact, if you can still feel your desperate feelings, your soul is very much alive and kicking. Good. The only job of sanity that you ever really have – in peacetime or in war – is not to let your soul die before your body does. In other words: to choose courage. Let’s have the courage to keep living for one another, and so keep our souls alive. I don’t know another way to be sane in these times.
Please take great care of yourself, and of each other. It is still worth making good leaves.
(Also rescues frisbees)You’ve been reading Human Again , a weekly dispatch on how humanity's collective trauma shows up in our personal mental health – from Dr Chris Cleave, psychologist in clinical practice, existential psychotherapist, and #1 New York Times bestselling author.
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January 27, 2017
Primo Levi and Holocaust Memorial Day
Primo LeviTorture works, said the leader of the free world this week. Perhaps, but it’s also jolly sore. And that is civilisation’s objection to torture: nothing to do with whether it gets the job done.
Deceit also works. Intimidation works. Cocaine, coercion and corruption work: demonstrably so. But you don’t get to use those things and still call yourself human. No: the decoupling of ethics from efficacy is the sole achievement of civilisation. Everything else is just ways to pass the time.
This week began with President Trump’s inauguration and ends, neatly enough, with Holocaust Memorial Day. The Holocaust was the starkest expression of the surrender of ethics to expediency, and as we reflect on this it is well – as always – to acknowledge the undeniable first line of Primo Levi’s If This is a Man:
“It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, after the German Government had decided, owing to the scarcity of labour, to lengthen the average lifespan of the prisoners destined for elimination; it conceded noticeable improvements in the camp routine and temporarily suspended killings at the whim of individuals.”
That so many millions of souls could be extinguished on the altar of political expediency, and the flow of their extermination modulated by the faucet of economic necessity, is an enduring benchmark for evil.
Holocaust Memorial Day is a moment to remind ourselves and our children about where evil comes from. Because far more disturbing than the notion that Hitler was an unknowable madman is the recognition that he was a most familiar kind of pragmatist. For it is in those compromises with expediency – those glib accommodations that we also find in ourselves, in our own protean transgressions of corruption, of enabling, of appeasement – that we see the path from us to him, from here to there, from then to now.
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions” – Primo Levi
When we remember the Holocaust, it isn’t only the ideology or the architecture that turns our blood to ice. It’s the walls of looted suitcases. It’s the gold teeth extracted for profit. The whole in-crowd got rich. It worked.
It is facile to compare Trump with Hitler, a slim man who owned sixteen thousand books and murdered six million Jews. Instead we remember the dead, who don’t tweet. We can remember them through the work of writers like Levi, who survived the Holocaust in a manner of speaking only to “die at Auschwitz forty years later”, as Elie Wiesel put it.
Instead of making easy comparisons, on this of all days, we can simply remember that there is always a path from here to there. It is a familiar path that begins at our own feet and ends in enduring horror. There is an old, familiar path, and we shiver when we hear the groan of its great iron gate swinging open.
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September 17, 2016
Hate is the .zip file of emotions
Transcript of keynote speech to the first New Zealand National Writers’ Forum – Chris Cleave – 17th Sept 2016
[STARTS]
I’m excited to be here at the start of something tremendous: the first National Writers’ Forum for a country internationally renowned for its writing. New Zealand punches way above its weight in literature. You change the landscape, you bring out your big guns, you win the Man Booker Prize. And this National Writers’ Forum is to deepen the foundations of that strength, to develop new talent faster.
This is a space for writers and publishers and book people to meet and support each other because – guess what – it’s a long game, and some years the dice will roll for you and other years they’ll get stuck in the cup, and so we must love and support one another.
I want to thank the New Zealand Society of Authors for helping to bring me here – I heard Joan Rosier-Jones’s lecture last night and I was astonished at the range of support available for writers here – you’re in very good hands, I think. Thanks to all the sponsors of this weekend – Creative New Zealand, Copyright Licensing New Zealand, South Pacific Pictures, Kobo, Lowndes Jordan and Time Out Bookstore. Their generosity and forward thinking is the reason we can all be here, and we can applaud them from the heart.
Thanks to the University of Auckland for hosting us. Thanks to my publishers, the wonderful Hachette, who have supported my writing from the get-go. And last but not least, thanks to the organisers of this National Writers’ Forum – thank you especially to Claire Mabey – and also Andrew Laking – both of them were kind enough to come to one of my events in the UK and I suppose they can’t have hated it too much.
One of the nice things about living in London, where I am with my wife and children, is that you do meet a lot of great New Zealanders. I used to assume that you people couldn’t all be so terrific. I thought that maybe you had some kind of quality control procedure before a New Zealander was allowed to leave the country and be seen, overseas, by foreigners like me. Perhaps you had to present yourself to an emigration official at Auckland airport, and do five minute show – maybe a tap routine or a hundred one-armed pushups – to prove that you were terrific. Otherwise how was it explicable that I never meet a bad New Zealander in London?
And then I came on tour here – I’ve been over a few times now – and I learned that the truth is much more straightforward. I’ve travelled all over both your islands – by the way, I like that you named them so imaginatively. I can tell you’re a nation of wordsmiths.
I’ve travelled all over both your islands and I’ve talked with people in bookstores in towns like Matakana, through to great festivals like Christchurch, via all kinds of hospitable and diverse communities like Nelson and Hamilton and Dunedin, and I’ve still never met a New Zealander who wasn’t charming. And so finally I asked about it and one of the festival organisers explained it to me. She said, “Oh, it’s really simple, we just send all the bad apples to Australia.”
Well, I know the Australia thing isn’t entirely serious but you do have an entirely great country, and a very senior person at Whitcoulls yesterday made me promise not to write a word about it, so that the rest of the world won’t notice what a neat thing you have going on. But, well, you do keep writing about it – and I have to say that you keep doing these things that are extremely inconvenient to me personally (did I mention winning the Man Booker Prize, more than once?) and yet however envious I am of your country, and jealous of the success of your writers, I can’t find it in my heart to hate you.
We live in an age where hate is on the rise. The last time the world looked the way it does now, the last time demagogues could incite people to hatred and fear and be elected for it, rather than jailed for it, was in the 1930s. And our parents’ and grandparents’ generation fought against that hate, and they won. New Zealand, America, Britain, France, Australia, Canada and the rest – there was a grand alliance against evil, and that alliance prevailed.
Well, now the evil is back, and as part of the literary community, all of us in this room are going to find ourselves involved in dealing with it. Some of us might find ourselves on the other side – I make no presumptions, and god knows the other side is seductive. In France, in Germany, in Austria and Poland and Greece, the hard right is resurgent.
In my own country, since June this year, there has been a startling takeover by a right wing cabal who won a referendum by invoking the language and imagery of the extreme right. I’m certainly not saying that the people who voted for Brexit are evil, but the leaders who lied to get that result certainly are.
Meanwhile, wars fought over ideologies have produced refugees by the million. Everywhere you look, people are talking about building walls again, and putting up razor wire. In only 51 days, in America, we get to find out whether fear has prevailed there too.
Let’s not delude ourselves by imagining this is an evil that cares what we writers think of it. It is a strutting and chauvinistic evil, and it mocks our careful craft. Donald Trump put it best when he put it thus: “You know, it really doesn’t matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
I’ll just leave that out there for you.
This kind of evil does not listen to reason, does not acknowledge science, does not defer to expertise or experience, does not doubt its own convictions, does not read books. And this is the world we writers are working in now. We who grew up to cherish empathy and compassion and beauty and precision. We who learned, over thousands of meticulous hours, to encode those things not just into our plots and our pages and our paragraphs, but into every careful sentence.
We learned to respect the reader, didn’t we? To give them a little space to think and to dream. We learned to acknowledge that people might come to our pages with a bigger life than our own. We learned to be humble and to use tiny little things, like commas, to give readers a great big thing, like, a pause, for breath.
But we write in a breathless world now. Furious reaction follows outrageous event without a moment for reflection. By the time any of us can write a thousand considered words about a thing, the agenda has long moved on. In this climate reason is redundant, beauty skin deep, memory obsolete. And so hate becomes the dominant voice simply because hate takes far less time to express.
This year I published a book about love, and by no means all of love, just the very beginning of people finding each other and trying to make that subtle thing work under difficult conditions, and I stripped that book down to the absolute minimum and I still needed four years and 140 thousand words. But you can do hate in ten seconds and under 140 characters. Hate is so much more readily compressible. Hate is the .zip file of emotions – it’s incredibly efficient. Hate is a message perfectly adapted to the new medium.
What has happened is that the world to which we dedicated our slow and patient craft has undergone a sudden and startling temporal acceleration. The clocks, as Orwell put it, are striking thirteen, and we have to ask ourselves what a writer can usefully do in a world where it’s suddenly thirteen o’clock. Because the only legitimacy we have as writers is that we exercise a craft that is socially useful.
If we no longer believe that we are useful in this accelerated society, then any other writerly questions – How do I get published? How do I sell more books? How do I stop my cat chasing my fingers when I’m typing? – all those other writerly questions are irrelevant, because if I don’t believe in my heart that my writing is socially useful, then my writing will wither and shrivel up.
It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Now, I’m not someone who unequivocally reveres Orwell. I liked it when our colleague Alan Moore said, “Orwell thought the world would end with Big Brother watching us, but it ended with us watching Big Brother.” That’s funny, and sort of true of course, but I’m sure Alan Moore intended it pithily and he wouldn’t mind if I said that it’s only half the truth.
1984 is worth reading again, if you haven’t done so for a while. What you may notice, reading it now, is not so much Orwell’s structures of social control – those systems that we have learned to call Orwellian – but the flashes of emotional insight with which the author invests his protagonist.
If you put Orwell’s words into the context of a Trump rally, or a Brexit speech, or a storm of righteous outrage on Twitter, they seem startlingly modern. Here’s what Orwell writes:
“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”
He could be talking about today, couldn’t he? Rage is the sudden and surprising and defining emotion of our era, and its most frightening aspect is that it has no greater agenda than to continually feed itself.
The flame of hatred, as Orwell describes it, moves promiscuously from one object to another. This is why each of Trump’s pronouncements, for example, has to be more incendiary than the last – because hate is like any other fix: humans get habituated and so the dose must be increased. Hate does not cool down when it gets what it wants, because hate doesn’t want anything except the next instalment of hate.
And so hate hates Mexicans, then women, then Moslems, then the European Union, then Obama, then gun control, then me, then you. But you could give hate the exact things it was screaming for – and you could annihilate all those things that hate hates – and hate would just hate you for doing it.
That’s why hate is dangerous – because it can never stop. It’s a shark and it drowns if it ever stops swimming. Britain isn’t in trouble because of Brexit. Britain is in trouble because its leaders released hate in order to get Brexit, and now hate is in the tank with us, and swimming.
The world isn’t in trouble because of Donald Trump personally. Donald Trump isn’t actually bright enough to be that kind of evil mastermind. Hate is just wearing that man like a glove. Because he’s an easy man for hate to wear in these times. He’s a man who is never going to have a train of thought that can’t be expressed in 140 characters, and so hate is taking Donald Trump for a swim. And hate will cheerfully eat all of us, and it won’t even spare Donald Trump. Hate ate him first of all, truth be told, and hate is just wearing his face. He’s as much of a victim in this as we all are, which I’m sure he’d hate me for saying.
Well then, what’s the cure for hate? How can we as writers make ourselves useful in this changed landscape? What does all this mean here, and now, for this community of writers operating out of New Zealand, in simple and practical terms?
I have five ideas to suggest to you, and I’m expecting to learn a lot more by listening to all of you this weekend. Here in this forum there is such a depth of integrity and experience. Patricia Grace is with us. Nalini Singh is going to talk about the role of a writer today. Tusiata Avia will speak about the writer’s job as one of bringing the unseen into the world. Kate Pullinger will talk about the changes in the medium itself. I could go on and on – there are too many good writers here to mention.
The only thing I bring to this party, I think, is the fact that I have very recently come through the incredible shock of my own country going through the temporal acceleration we’ve spoken of, and I’m still wide awake with how that feels, and I hope my perspective is useful to you.
So, my first very practical suggestion, for how we as writers can make ourselves useful in these new times, is that we should make sure we stand for something, rather than against everyone else.
A positive example for writers is the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in America and is now reaching out all over the world. Black Lives Matter is not a hate movement, and I know that because I’ve been reading its writers and they make sense. We can learn from them. Black Lives Matter is a rational argument and it will be satisfied when – and only when – America, and the whole world for that matter, starts acting as if black lives matter. And then – for all I know – there might be no further need for the movement. It’s not hate, because it knows how to stop. Black Lives Matter is an eloquent and reasonable proposition, and it wants one particular thing that it is well defined and consistently articulated, and it has a lot of gifted writers in its service. That’s one example of how writers can use their talents constructively in these hate-fuelled times.
My second practical suggestion is to stay open and curious in spirit. Something big in the New Zealand psyche is that it explores its own diverse cultures while still managing to direct curiosity outwards, over the ocean. For example, I’ve always admired your concept of the Overseas Experience, or OE.
Now you’ll already be aware that my own country, which once rather insisted on its right to move freely over the earth, has begun to feel that the free movement of people is a bad thing, and it’s pulling up the drawbridge and insisting that many of its problems come from foreigners, coming to Britain and taking British jobs.
A dozen years ago in London I met a New Zealand dentist, after my tooth had got infected and two British dentists had ummed and ahhhed and put off doing anything about it. And this new dentist, originally from Auckland, took one look in my mouth and said: “Oh yeah, I reckon if we act fast I can probably save your jaw.” And she did. Typical immigrant, really – coming to our country, saving our facial bones.
This dentist told me that she had originally come to England on OE – I didn’t know, back then, so I asked what it was. “Oh,” she said, “OE stands for Outrageous Ending. We all do it. We go abroad, spend a couple of years, and there’s a competition to see who can end the trip most dramatically. There are regional heats and then a national final that’s televised on TVNZ.”
Which brings me to suggestion number three: as writers, we should keep our sense of humour. The antidote to hate probably isn’t love, it’s probably laughter. And book people are pretty useful for that.
When I was in Melbourne last week I mentioned that I was going out for a walk in the city’s ornamental gardens, so my publisher said, “Fine, but just be bloody careful of the drop bears.” Drop bears, in case you don’t know, are urban koalas that have learned to attack humans. They wait until you walk under their gum tree and then they drop down on you and they can give you a really nasty bite. So naturally I gave every eucalypt a wide berth until I thought… hang on.
You do start to get wise to these stories people tell to strangers. When I flew from Melbourne to Adelaide the next day, a bookseller told me I should put my watch to the local time, which was 30 minutes behind. Well you can’t fool me twice – I mean, “drop bears” are one thing, but Australians are an intelligent and pragmatic people and there is no way they would invent something as wilfully problematic as a half time zone, right? So I got the joke this time, and I left my watch where it was, and that’s why I showed up for my first interview half-an-hour early.
This thing is, you can tell a stranger a story – and in fact, as a writer, that’s your only job. It comes with responsibilities and it comes with accountability, but essentially when you are the writer and I am the reader I come to your pages with a joyful naivety, and you can tell me that you’d like to be called Ishmael, or that the sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel, or that Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself – you can tell me those things & I will believe you.
More precisely, if you do your job with skill and humility, then I as a worldly and grown-up and widely-read reader might wilfully suspend my disbelief. You have my trust and you can, and you must, take me on a journey that I would never have embarked on by myself – and that journey may very well change my mind forever. Even after your characters’ voices have faded, if those voices led me – the reader – to discover for myself an emotional truth, then that emotional truth will endure.
That’s why people sometimes cry at the end of good books.
And so this is my fourth very practical suggestion: in a world that suddenly won’t listen to science or reason, won’t follow an argument with multiple steps, and won’t acknowledge statistical fact, tell people a story instead. Believe it or not – and it’s hardly an ideal state of affairs – but storytellers are now the most powerful opinion formers we have. Use the power humbly and with reverence for accuracy and truth, but use it. Use the power while welcoming and actively soliciting people’s right to reply with stories of their own, but own it. Use your gift of empathy and subtlety to tell the gentler human story, in fiction or non-, to soften this world’s hardening hearts.
My fifth and final suggestion follows on from that, I think, and it’s one that is often overlooked by the writing community. My suggestion is to cherish one another. Gandhi, who was a prolific writer himself of course, gave us the advice that we should be the change we wished to see in the world. You’re not that change if you’re trashing another writer’s work just to make your own name heard. That’s something we might reserve for a private letter, not a public review. Let’s criticise each other to each other’s face before anything else, and try to do so with love.
If it helps, when writing a review, my rule of thumb is always to benchmark a fellow writer’s novel against cluster munitions, rather than against the work of Marcel Proust. However bad a book is, it’s honestly not as bad as shrapnel – although you’d never know it from the tone of half the reviews you read these days. And more and more, the most disingenuous reviews are written not by professional critics but by our own fellow writers. So let’s not go there. Let’s cherish each other’s work, and help each other out with shoulders to cry on and sofas to crash on, cash loans in the hard times, and raised glasses in the good.
That way we can learn from each other, as we will over the weekend of this forum. And that way we can also learn a habit of mind that will affect the way we write, and make our stories part of the solution. When we do what we as writers can do at our best – which is to make our egos small and our eyes and ears big – then a particular gravity accrues to our work. That gravity draws readers out of the new superfast, event-reaction cycle in which only hate is quick enough to win, and into our own more thoughtful worlds – our storied worlds – where subtlety and complexity and precision and patience are restored to their rightful place.
In other words, when we act like human beings we write like human beings. And when we write like human beings, people are drawn to read us. Because people are not bad. And whoever they vote for, they’re certainly not stupid. It’s just that evil is too quick for us. People are mostly good, but they have day jobs and money worries and health problems just like we all do, and all of that stuff makes us slow, relative to the hatemongers who rush to fill our thoughts.
And so, as writers at 13 o’clock, we have the same craft, the same legitimacy, the same useful social purpose we always did. We must still learn to be humble, and still use tiny little things, like commas, to give readers a great big thing, like, a pause, for breath.
This forum is our own pause for breath and it’s been an honour to address it. I’m looking forward to learning from all of you – I’m sure you’re as excited as I am about this weekend we’re about to have – and so without further fuss I will let you get on with enjoying it. Thank you for your kind attention, and thank you again to all of the visionary organisers and generous sponsors and hardworking volunteers and fellow participants of this first New Zealand National Writers’ Forum – long may it continue.
[ENDS]
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Human Again with Dr Chris Cleave
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