Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury

by The School of Life

The relationship should be a place where each person is conscious of how fragile their partner inevitably is on certain matters – and takes deliberate care to treat them delicately. This is an admired accomplishment and a real expression of love.

The road to calmer relationships therefore isn’t necessarily about removing points of contention. It’s rather about assuming that they are going to happen and that they will inevitably require quite a lot of time and thought to address.

We’ll have the courage of our dissatisfaction – and patiently sit with a partner for a two-hour discussion (perhaps with PowerPoint) about the sink and the crumbs – and thereby save our love.

We haven’t found a stigma-free, winning way to keep admitting just how much reassurance we need.

Within our psyches, acceptance is never a given, reciprocity is never assured; there can always be new threats, real or perceived, to love’s integrity.

Rather than asking for reassurance endearingly and laying out our longing with charm, we might instead mask our needs beneath some brusque and plainly hurtful behaviour guaranteed to frustrate our aims.

This way of seeing a partner’s failings makes us painfully agitated. The Weakness of Strength theory reminds us that many of our partner’s irritating and disappointing characteristics are actually the shadow sides of things we really like about them.

Our panic has a fatal way of undermining our capacity to deal with the underlying, real problems. Being calmer doesn’t at all mean that we think everything can be fine; it just means we are in a better state of mind to cope with the genuine challenges of our lives.

result, we now travel through society assuming the worst, not because it is necessarily true (or pleasant) to do so, but because it feels familiar; and because we are the prisoners of past patterns we haven’t yet understood.

Ideally we would be able to give other people early warning of our areas of fragility, so that they could take this into account when dealing with us. We’re pretty ready to do this around physical bruises and injuries. If you have a bandaged hand, people know not to grab it. And in theory the same could happen with tender psychological areas.

if we employed the infant model of interpretation, our first assumption would be quite different:

More particularly, and paradoxically, we are often furious at them for not knowing something that we assume they should know – without ever having been taught it.

because we don’t respect teaching very much.

the most central, unavoidable and, in many ways, noble aspects of life.

we are called upon to ‘teach’ almost every hour of every day: teach others how we’re feeling, what we want, what is paining us, the way we think things should be.

We’ve fatally misconstrued teaching as a specific professional job, when in actuality it’s a basic psychological manoeuvre upon which the health of every community, relationship and office depends.

We rarely learn very well when we have been humiliated or belittled, are insulted and threatened. Few of us can take ideas properly on board when we have been called fools and shits. Our minds are simply not at their most receptive until we have been patiently comforted, reassured of our value and given licence to fail.

A hysterical teacher has a priori lost the capacity to accomplish their goals.

It’s a paradox of the field that our teaching efforts tend to succeed the less manically we care that they will come off.

We carry a heavy background grudge that someone doesn’t yet know something they have never been given a chance to learn.

So great is the intensity of disappointment, it cuts us off from the poise necessary to educate them into respecting (and then perhaps living up to) one’s vision.

It sounds Machiavellian – but it’s merely the outcome of a very nervous personality with low faith in others and in the chances of working through problems.

Part of becoming a good teacher means altering how we speak to ourselves – and then, in turn, others.

To do this we need to encounter equally convincing and confident, but also helpful and constructive, varieties of voices over long periods – and take care to internalise them: the voices of a friend, a therapist, an author or a kindly teacher. We need to hear the voices often enough and around tricky enough issues that they come to feel like natural responses; they become our own thoughts that we can then speak to others about.

Our heads are large, cavernous spaces; they contain the voices of all the people we have ever known. We should learn to mute the unhelpful ones and focus on the voices we really need to guide us through the thickets.

if we grasped a little more the tangled background of misunderstandings, then we wouldn’t feel quite so angry and desperate. It might be that if you could take time to work out what’s actually going on in your mind, you’d discover that behind the anger is a feeling of shame at your own vulnerability; or that behind the impatience is a fear of failure. So politeness doesn’t so much deny what one is genuinely feeling as provide a greater opportunity to discover one’s emotions more accurately.

We may be quite inclined by nature to damage or destroy our rivals; to take advantage of those who are weaker than us; to grab more than our fair share of anything good if we can; to humiliate those who we feel are in some way alien; to revenge ourselves on anyone we feel has upset or disappointed us and to enforce our opinions and beliefs on others if we can. These are natural inclinations, Hobbes argues; therefore, we positively require a set of constraining conventions that artificially induce better ways of dealing with other people. Politeness is not mere decoration. It is directed at dealing with a major human problem: we need manners to restrain the beast inside.

It should be normal to lavish intellectual attention on just this issue. It should be expected that we will, at points, require to seek a great deal of external help. At other points we might need to take a week away from everything and everyone and give ourselves over to solitary thinking, free from the pressures of pleasing (or deliberately confounding) anyone else.

There are going to be long, tricky processes involving a lot of crossings out, a lot of changes and repositioning of material as we try to understand ourselves.

It ought to be one of the most basic things we recognise about each other: a common fate we face. It’s very sad. But it is not sad uniquely to any one person. It’s a strangely consoling tragic idea that imagination always, inevitably, outstrips the potential. Everyone is unfulfilled, and that’s just a consequence of the odd way our minds have evolved.

patience is grounded in; namely, an understanding of how certain processes really work. The phrase is pointing to a major cause of agitation: that we don’t have a proper understanding of how long certain things are likely to take, and therefore we expect them to be accomplished more quickly and simply than is in fact reasonable.