The School of Life: An Emotional Education

by The School of Life

humanity was intrinsically, rather than accidentally, flawed. That we suffer, feel lost and isolated, are racked with worry, miss our own talents, refuse love, lack empathy, sulk, obsess and hate: these are not merely personal flaws, but constitute the essence of the human animal.

We have complex histories, we are heading towards the ultimate catastrophe, we are vulnerable to devastating losses, love will always leave us wanting, the gap between our hopes and our realities is always going to be unbridgeable. In the circumstances, it makes no sense to aim for sanity; we should fix instead on the goal of achieving a wise, knowledgeable and self-possessed relationship with our manifold insanities, or what can be termed ‘sane insanity’. What separates the sane insane from the simply insane is the honest, personable and accurate grasp they have on what is not entirely right with them. They may not be wholly balanced, but they don’t have the additional folly of insisting on their normalcy. They can admit with good grace – and no particular loss of dignity – that they are naturally deeply peculiar at myriad points.

It is logical that Socrates should have boiled down the entire wisdom of philosophy to one simple command: ‘Know yourself.’

We make our lives tougher than they should be because we insist on thinking of people, ourselves and others, as inept and mean rather than, as is almost invariably the case, primarily the victims of what we have all in some ways travelled through: an immensely tricky early history.

It becomes difficult for us to keep in mind how much in all our characters was marked by what are (from a grown-up perspective) almost laughably minor yet hugely potent emotions.

We keep away from ourselves because so much of what we could discover threatens to be agony. We might discover that we were, in the background, deeply furious with, and resentful about, certain people we were meant only to love. We might discover how much ground there was to feel inadequate and guilty on account of the many errors and misjudgements we have made. We might recognize how much was compromised and needed to be changed about our relationships and careers.

We don’t only have a lot to hide, we are liars of genius. It is part of the human tragedy that we are natural self-deceivers. Our techniques are multiple and close to invisible:

What properly indicates addiction is not what someone is doing, but their way of doing it, and in particular their desire to avoid any encounter with certain sides of themselves. We are addicts whenever we develop a manic reliance on something, anything, to keep our darker and more unsettling feelings at bay.

We lie by being very cheerful.

We lie by attacking and denigrating what we love but haven’t managed to get.

We lie through a generalized cynicism, which we direct at everything and everyone so as to ward off misery about one or two things in particular.

We lie by filling our minds with impressive ideas which blatantly announce our intelligence to the world but subtly ensure that we won’t have much room left to rediscover long-distant feelings of ignorance or confusion upon which the development of our personalities may nevertheless rest.

In an emotionally healthy childhood, someone will put themselves profoundly at our service.

They did not, all the while, ask that we thank them, understand them or show them sympathy.

In an emotionally healthy childhood, we’re given the benefit of the doubt. We are assessed by what we might one day be, not by exactly what we are right now.

Our carer constantly searches beneath the surface for a more sympathetic set of reasons. They help us to be on our own side, to like ourselves and therefore, eventually, not to be too defensive about our own flaws, the existence of which we grow strong enough to accept.

In an emotionally healthy childhood, the relationship with our caregiver is steady, consistent and long-term. We trust that they will be there tomorrow and the day after. They are boringly predictable. As a result, we are able to believe that what has gone well once can go well again and to let such an expectation govern our pick of available adult partners.

In an emotionally healthy childhood, we aren’t always required to be wholly good boys or girls. We are allowed to get furious and sometimes a bit revolting – at certain points to say ‘absolutely not’ and ‘because I feel like it’.

This period of freedom prepares us to submit one day to the demands of society without having to rebel in self-defeating ways (rebels being, at heart, people who have had to obey too much too early).

In an emotionally healthy childhood, our carer isn’t jealous of or competitive with us. They can allow themselves to be overtaken and superseded.

Equally, the good carer isn’t overly ambitious on the child’s behalf. They want them to do well, but for their own sake and in their own way.

In an emotionally healthy childhood, the child learns that things which break can be fixed. Plans can go awry, but new ones can be made. You can fall over and start anew. The carer models how to plough on and remain hopeful. A voice of resilience, originally external, becomes the way the child learns to speak to themselves.

Importantly, in an emotionally healthy childhood plenty goes wrong.

a lot of good comes from having the right, manageable kind of friction, through which the child develops their own resources and individuality.

In an emotionally healthy childhood, the child can see that the good carer isn’t either entirely good or wholly bad and so isn’t worthy of either idealization or denigration. The child accepts the faults and virtues of the carer with melancholy maturity and gratitude – and in doing so, by extension, becomes ready to accept that everyone they like will be a mixture of the positive and the negative. They won’t as adults fall deeply in love and then grow furious at the first moment of let-down. They will have a realistic sense of what can be expected of life alongside another flawed, good enough human.

Self-Love

Candour determines the extent to which difficult ideas and troubling facts can be consciously admitted into the mind, soberly explored and accepted without denial.

Communication Can we patiently and reasonably put our disappointments into words that, more or less, enable others to see our point? Or do we internalize pain, act it out symbolically or discharge it with counterproductive rage?

When other people upset us, do we feel we have the right to communicate or must we slam doors and fall silent? When the desired response isn’t forthcoming, do we ask others to guess what we have been too angrily panicked to spell out? Or can we have a plausible second go and take seriously the thought that others are not merely wilfully misunderstanding us? Do we have the inner resources to teach rather than insist?

Trust How risky is the world? How readily might we survive a challenge in the form of a speech we must give, a romantic rejection, a bout of financial trouble, a journey to another country or a common cold? How close are we, at any ...

Inner Voices Somewhere in our minds, removed from the day to day, there sit judges. They watch what we do, study how we perform, examine the effect we have on others, track our successes and failures – and then, eventually, they pass verdicts. These determine our levels of confidence and self-compassion, they lend us a sense of whether we are worthwhile beings or, conversely, should not really exist. The judges are in charge of our self-esteem. The verdict of an inner judge doesn’t follow an objective rule book or statute.

The origin of the voice of the inner judge is simple to trace: it is an internalization of the voices of people who were once outside us.

Part of improving how we judge our lives involves learning – in a conscious, deliberate way – to speak to ourselves in a new and different tone, which means exposing ourselves to better voices. We need to hear constructive, kindly voices often enough and around tricky enough issues that they come to feel like normal and natural responses – so that, eventually, they become our own thoughts.

In ‘philosophical meditation’, instead of being prompted to sidestep our worries and ambitions, we are directed to set aside time to untangle, examine and confront them.

Key to the practice is regularly to turn over three large questions. The first asks what we might be anxious about right now.

We need, during our meditative sessions, to give every so-called small anxiety a chance to be heard, for what lends our worries their force is not so much that we have them but that we don’t allow ourselves the time to know, interpret and contextualize them adequately.

A philosophical meditation moves on to a second enquiry: what am I upset about right now?

The third question to consider within a philosophical meditation is: what am I ambitious and excited about right now?

Our picture of acceptability is – very often – way out of line with what is actually true and widespread. Many things that we might assume to be uniquely odd or disconcertingly strange about us are in reality wholly ubiquitous, though simply rarely spoken of in the reserved and cautious public sphere.

We need charity, but not of the usual kind; we need what we might term a ‘charity of interpretation’: that is, we require an uncommonly generous assessment of our idiocy, weakness, eccentricity or deceit.

Even when they do not know any of the details, generous onlookers must make a stab at picturing the overall structure of what might have happened to the wretched being before them. They must guess that there will be sorrow and regret beneath the furious rantings, or a sense of intolerable vulnerability behind the pomposity and snobbishness. They must intimate that early trauma and let-down must have formed the backdrop to later transgressions. They will remember that the person before them was once a baby too.

Our societies are very interested in winners but don’t really know what to do about losers – of which there are always, by definition, a far greater number.

We trust that the world is more or less just – and that, the odd exception aside, people will secure roughly what they deserve. Those who are condemned and broken did something wrong; those who succeeded worked hard and were good.

We may sometimes wonder how certain irritating people have come into our lives. After spending time around them, what dominates our awareness of them is their flaws: how rigid they can be, how muddled, self-righteous, vague or proud. We grow into experts in their deficiencies of character. We should in our most impatient and intemperate moments strive to hold on to the concept of the weakness of strength. This dictates that we should interpret people’s weaknesses as the inevitable downside of certain merits that drew us to them, and from which we will benefit at other points (even if none of these benefits are apparent right now). What we’re seeing are not their faults, pure and simple, but rather the shadow side of things that are genuinely good about them. If we were to write down a list of strengths and then of weaknesses, we’d find that almost everything on the positive side of the ledger could be connected up with something on the negative.

Kindness is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free people do not exist.

The polite person, by contrast, proceeds under a grave suspicion of themselves and their impulses. They sense that a great deal of what they feel and want really isn’t very nice. They are indelibly in touch with their darker desires and can sense their fleeting wishes to hurt or humiliate certain people. They know they are sometimes a bit revolting and cannot forget the extent to which they may come across as offensive and frightening to others. They therefore set out on a deliberate strategy to protect others from what they know is within them. It isn’t lying as such; they merely understand that being ‘themselves’ is a treat that they must take enormous pains to spare everyone else from experiencing – especially anyone they claim to care about.

It is their extraordinary suspicion of themselves that helps them to be – in everyday life – uncommonly friendly, trustworthy and kind.

the polite person starts from the assumption that others are highly likely to be in quite different places internally, whatever the outward signs. Their behaviour is therefore tentative, wary and filled with enquiries. They will explicitly check with others to take a measure of their experiences and outlook:

The polite person starts from a contrary assumption that all of us are permanently only millimetres away from inner despair and self-hatred. However confident we may look, we are very vulnerable – despite even great outward plaudits and recognition – to a sense of being disliked and taken for granted. Every piece of neglect, every silence or slightly harsh or off-the-cuff word has a profound capacity to hurt.

the polite person will be drawn to spending a lot of time noticing and commenting positively on the most apparently minor facets of others’ achievements: they will say that the watercress soup was the best they’ve had for years (and that they’d forgotten how much they liked it); they’ll mention that the ending of the writer’s new novel made them cry and that work on the Mexico deal was particularly helpful to, and noticed by, the whole company. They will know that everyone we come across has a huge capacity to be hurt by what we sometimes refer to as ‘small things’.