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October 24, 2020 - March 22, 2021
Once we’re past eighteen or so, our progress is still monitored but it is envisaged in different terms: it is cast in the language of material and professional advancement. The focus is on what grades have been achieved, what career has been chosen and what progress has been made in the corporate hierarchy. Development becomes largely synonymous with promotion. But emotional growth still continues. There won’t be a simple outward measure: we’re no taller, we’ve not boosted our seniority at work and we’ve received no new title to confirm our matriculation to the world. Yet there have been
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Understanding does not magically remove the pain but it has the power to reduce a range of secondary aggravations and fears. At least we know what is racking us and why. Our worst fears are held in check, and tears may be turned into bitter knowledge.
The melancholy know that many of the things we most want are in tragic conflict: to feel secure and yet to be free; to have money and yet not to have to be beholden to others; to be in close-knit communities and yet not to be stifled by the expectations and demands of society; to explore the world and yet to put down deep roots; to fulfil the demands of our appetites for food, sex and sloth and yet stay thin, sober, faithful and fit.
Symptoms of our self-ignorance abound. We are irritable or sad, guilty or furious, without any reliable sense of the origins of our discord. We destroy a relationship that might have been workable under a compulsion we cannot account for. We fail to know our professional talents in time. We pass too many of our days under mysterious clouds of despair or beset by waves of persecution.
Towards the past, we tend to adopt a sentimental attitude which is far more attentive to the occasional endearing exception than the more challenging norm. Family photos, almost always snapped at the happier junctures, guide the process. There is much more likely to be an image of one’s mother by the pool, smiling with the expression of a giddy young girl, than of her slamming the veranda door in a rage at the misery of conjugal life; there will be a shot of one’s father genially performing a card trick, but no visual record of his long, brutal mealtime silences. A lot of editing goes on,
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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’. The adults know their own flaws and do not expect a child to be fundamentally better than they are. We do not have to comply at every turn to be tolerated. We can let others in on our shadow sides. 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
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Candour determines the extent to which difficult ideas and troubling facts can be consciously admitted into the mind, soberly explored and accepted without denial. How much can we admit to ourselves about who we are even if, or especially when, the matter is not especially pleasant? How much do we need to insist on our own normality and wholehearted sanity? Can we explore our own minds, and look into their darker and more troubled corners, without flinching overly? Can we admit to folly, envy, sadness and confusion? Around others, how ready are we to learn? Do we always need to take a
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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 time, to catastrophe? Of what material do we feel we are made? Will new acquaintances like or wound us? If we are a touch assertive, will they take it or collapse? Will unfamiliar situations end in a debacle? Around love, how tightly do we need to cling? If they are distant for a while, will they return? How controlling do we need to be? Can we approach an
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It’s one of the structural flaws of these minds that it is immensely hard for us to think deeply and coherently for any length of time. We keep losing the thread. Competing, irrelevant ideas have a habit of flitting across the mental horizon and scrambling our tentative insights. Every now and then, consciousness goes entirely blank. Left to our own devices, we quickly start to doubt the value of what we are trying to make sense of and can experience overpowering urges to check the news or eat a biscuit. And as a result, some of the topics we most need to examine – where our relationship is
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What helps enormously in our attempts to know our own minds is, surprisingly, the presence of another mind. For all the glamour of the solitary seer, thinking usually happens best in tandem. It is the curiosity of someone else that gives us the confidence to remain curious about ourselves. It is the application of a light pressure from outside us that firms up the jumbled impressions within. The requirement to verbalize our intimations mobilizes our flabby reserves of concentration.
We arrive in therapy with questions. We have a presenting problem which hints at, but does not fully capture, the origins of our suffering. Why, for instance, do we appear so repeatedly to fall for people who control and humiliate us? How can we be so convinced we need to leave a job and yet have remained unable to locate a more satisfying replacement for so long? Why are we paralysed by anxiety in every public context? Why do we sabotage sexual possibilities?
The relationship with the therapist becomes a litmus test of our behaviour with people in general and thereby allows us, on the basis of greater self-awareness, to modify and improve, in the direction of greater kindness, trust, authenticity and joy, the way we typically relate to others.
A good internal voice is rather like (and just as important as) a genuinely decent judge: someone who can separate good from bad but who will always be merciful, fair, accurate in understanding what’s going on and interested in helping us deal with our problems. It’s not that we should stop judging ourselves, rather that we should learn to be better judges of ourselves.
We need to become better friends to ourselves. The idea sounds odd, initially, because we naturally imagine a friend as someone else, not as a part of our own mind. But there is value in the concept because of the extent to which we know how to treat our own friends with a sympathy and imagination that we don’t apply to ourselves. If a friend is in trouble our first instinct is rarely to tell them that they are fundamentally a failure. If a friend complains that their partner isn’t very warm to them, we don’t tell them that they are getting what they deserve. In friendship, we know
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Key to the practice is regularly to turn over three large questions. The first asks what we might be anxious about right now. We are rarely without a sizeable backlog of worries, far greater than we tend consciously to recognize. Life, properly felt, is an infinitely alarming process even in its apparently calmer stretches. We face a medley of ongoing uncertainties and threats. Even ordinary days contain concealed charges of fear and challenge: navigating through a train station, attending a meeting, being introduced to a new colleague, being handed responsibility for a task or a person,
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A philosophical meditation moves on to a second enquiry: what am I upset about right now? This may sound oddly presumptuous, because we frequently have no particular sense of having been upset by anything. Our self-image leans towards the well defended. But almost certainly we are somewhere being too brave for our own good. We are almost invariably carrying around with us pulses of regret, loss, envy, vulnerability and sorrow. These may not register in immediate consciousness, not because they don’t exist, but because we have grown overly used to no one around us giving a damn and have
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The third question to consider within a philosophical meditation is: what am I ambitious and excited about right now? A part of our mind is forever forward-thinking and hopeful, seeking to maximize opportunities and develop potential. Much of this energy registers as vague tension about new directions we might take. We could experience this inchoate restlessness when we read an article, hear of a colleague’s plans or glimpse an idea about next year flit across our mental landscape as we lie in the bath or walk around a park. The excitement points indistinctly to better, more fulfilled versions
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The misunderstanding begins with a basic fact about our minds: that we know through immediate experience what is going on inside us, but can only know about others from what they choose to tell us – which will almost always be a very edited version of the truth. We know our somewhat shocking reality from close up; we are left to guess about other people’s from what their faces tell us, which is not very much.
THE IMPORTANCE OF A BREAKDOWN One of the great problems of human beings is that we’re far too good at keeping going. We’re experts at surrendering to the demands of the external world, living up to what is expected of us and getting on with the priorities defined by others around us. We keep showing up and doing our tasks – and we can pull off this magical feat for up to decades at a time without so much as an outward twitch or crack. Until suddenly, one day, much to everyone’s surprise (including our own), we break. The rupture can take many forms. We can no longer get out of bed. We fall
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Kindness is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free people do not exist.
Contented people have no need to hurt others.
At the heart of the shy person’s self-doubt is a certainty that they must be boring. But, in reality, no one is ever truly boring. We are only in danger of coming across as such when we don’t dare (or know how) to communicate our deeper selves to others. The human animal witnessed in its essence, with honesty and without artifice, with all its longings, crazed desires and despair, is always gripping. When we dismiss a person as boring, we are merely pointing to someone who has not had the courage or concentration to tell us what it is like to be them. But we invariably prove compelling when we
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Friendships cannot develop until one side takes a risk and shows they are ready to like even when there’s as yet no evidence that they are liked back.
is sad enough when two people dislike each other. It is even sadder when two people fail to connect because both parties defensively but falsely guess that the other doesn’t like them – and yet, out of low self-worth, takes no risk whatever to alter the situation. We should stop worrying quite so much whether or not people like us, and make that far more interesting and socially useful move: concentrate on showing that we like them.
The warm, on the other hand, make a well-founded guess that those they encounter, despite the observable initial evidence, are not what they seem. They may look adult and composed, but the truth will be reassuringly more complicated. They will, beneath the surface, be intensely confused about many things, in great need of comforting and play, filled with regrets, embarrassed about their bodies, troubled by peculiar urges and beset by a sense of failure. The warm know themselves well enough to walk past the surface presentation and assume that their own stranger selves will have echoes in the
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True adulthood begins with a firmer hold on the notion that the solid and dignified person will, behind the scenes, almost certainly be craving something quite ordinary – something as unelevated and as human as a hug, a cry or a glass of milk.
The good listener doesn’t moralize. They know their own minds well enough not to be surprised or frightened by strangeness.