The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

by Stephen Grosz

We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses. ANDRE DUBUS II, Broken Vessels

– it took me time – to realise just how very different people are from each other.

how attached Peter was to violently upsetting others. But why?

For a small child, violence is an overwhelming, uncontrollable and terrifying experience – and its emotional effects can endure for a lifetime. The trauma becomes internalised, it’s what takes hold of us in the absence of another’s empathy.

couldn’t allow himself to feel weak. Dependence for him was dangerous.

I believe that all of us try to make sense of our lives by telling our stories, but Peter was possessed by a story that he couldn’t tell. Not having the words, he expressed himself by other means.

When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us – we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.

‘One of the problems with your joking is that we can feel as if we’ve talked about something that troubles you

and we have talked about it, but it hasn’t really been dealt with,

‘Your jokes are aggressive, you get your revenge, and you feel a bit better. Your humour seems to work: you don’t hurt so much afterwards. But you also seem to lose the drive to better understand the situation.

over the past decade, a number of studies on self-esteem have come to the conclusion that praising a child as ‘clever’ may not help her at school. In fact, it might cause her to under-perform. Often a child will react to praise by quitting – why make a new drawing if you have already made ‘the best’? Or a child may simply repeat the same work –

The students who were praised for their effort showed a greater willingness to work out new approaches. They also showed more resilience and tended to attribute their failures to insufficient effort, not to a lack of intelligence. The children who had been praised for their cleverness worried more about failure, tended to choose tasks that confirmed what they already knew, and displayed less tenacity when the problems got harder.

‘You’re so clever’ gave way to an increase in anxiety and a drop in self-esteem, motivation and performance.

In trying so hard to be different from our parents, we’re actually doing much the same thing – doling out empty praise the way an earlier generation doled out thoughtless criticism. If we do it to avoid thinking about our child and her world, and about what our child feels, then praise, just like criticism, is ultimately expressing our indifference.

focus was on what a child did and how that child did it.

Unhurried, she talked to the child, but more importantly she observed, she listened. She was present.

Being present, whether with children, with friends, or even with oneself, is always hard work. But isn’t this attentiveness – the feeling that someone is trying to think about us – something we want more than praise?

gap between what a person says and what he makes you feel

He seemed never to have acquired a skill that we

all need: the ability to make another person worry about us. And

Matt did not register his own emotions.

Typically, what brings a potential patient to a consultation is the pressure of his immediate suffering.

Matt had learned at an early age to deaden his feelings and to distrust those who offered him help. Our encounter was no different. Matt did not feel enough emotional pain to overcome his suspicions and accept my offer to meet again.

Matt suffered from a kind of psychological leprosy; unable to feel his emotional pain, he was forever in danger of permanently, maybe fatally, damaging himself.

At one time or another, we all try to silence painful emotions. But when we succeed in feeling nothing we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us, and why.