The School of Life: An Emotional Education

by The School of Life

A casual acquaintance may, in a few minutes of conversation, deduce more about our psyches than we have been able to determine across many decades. We are frequently the very last people to know what is at work within ‘us’.

each of us is the recipient of a large and complex emotional inheritance that is decisive in determining who we are and how we will behave. Furthermore, and at huge cost, we mostly lack any real sense of what this powerful inheritance might be doing to our judgement.

Children can’t go elsewhere. They have no extended social network. Even when things are going right, childhood is a gentle open prison.

Everyone around us may have been trying to do their best and yet we end up now, as adults, nursing certain major hurts which ensure that we are so much less than we might be.

Having lived around a parent disgusted by the body, sex became frightening. Surrounded by material unreliability, we had to overachieve in relation to money and social prestige. Hurt by a dismissive parent, we fell into patterns of emotional avoidance. A volatile parent pushed us towards our present meekness. Early overprotectiveness inspired timidity and, around any complex situation, panic. A continually busy,

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. We aren’t mesmerized by people who are offhand and frustrating; we don’t relish being punished. We can locate candidates who are kind and nurturing – and don’t judge them as weak or deficient for being so.

When another person frustrates or humiliates us, can we let the insult go, able to perceive the senseless malice beneath the attack, or are we left brooding and devastated, implicitly identifying with the verdict of our enemies? How much can the disapproval or neglect of public opinion be offset by the memory of the steady attention of significant people in the past?

An intellectual understanding of the past, though not wrong, won’t by itself be effective in the sense of being able to release us from our symptoms. For this, we have to edge our way towards a far more close-up, detailed, visceral appreciation of where we have come from and what we have suffered. We need to strive for what we can call an emotional understanding of the past, as opposed to a top-down, abbreviated, intellectual one.

Oddly (and interestingly) this means intellectual people can have a particularly tricky time in therapy. They get interested in the ideas. But they don’t so easily recreate and exhibit the pains and distresses of their earlier, less sophisticated selves, though it’s actually these parts of who we all are that need to be encountered, listened to and – perhaps for the first time – comforted and reassured.

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. We absorb the tones of contempt and indifference or charity and warmth that we will have heard across our formative years.

We can be more compassionate. We will inevitably, in the course of therapy, realize how much we were let down by certain people in the past.

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

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

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

breakdown is not merely a random piece of madness or malfunction, it is a very real – albeit very inarticulate – bid for health and self-knowledge. It is an attempt by one part of our mind to force the other into a process of growth, self-understanding and self-development which it has hitherto refused to undertake. If we can put it paradoxically, it is an attempt to jump-start a process of getting well, properly well, through a stage of falling very ill.

What the breakdown is telling us above anything else is that it must no longer be business as usual; that things have to change or (and this can be properly frightening to witness) that death might be preferable.

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

The story is a reminder of what kindness demands. We resent others with unhelpful speed when we lack the will to consider the origins of their behaviour. The

It is only too easy to imagine that those who have hurt us are somehow invulnerable and noble; we readily remember reasons to be ashamed of ourselves. However, to hold on to the idea that hurt generates meanness casts our opponent in the subservient role.

One has to feel very small in order to belittle.

their punishment lies in the pain they must be enduring in order to have such an urgent need to lash out. We, who have no wish to hurt, are in fact the stronger party; we, who have no wish to diminish others, are truly powerful. We can move from helpless victims to imaginative witnesses of justice.

Kind people seem destined to end up either broke or overlooked.

We can be kind and successful, kind and interesting, kind and sexual.

Kindness is a cardinal virtue awaiting our renewed, unconflicted appreciation.

we all have problematic families, have all been disappointed, have all been idiotic, have all loved, have all had problems around money, all have anxieties – and will all, when we are pricked, start to bleed.

Shyness is the most modest, kind and unfortunate way of insisting on the specialness of one’s particular province.

The interesting person isn’t someone to whom obviously and outwardly interesting things have happened, someone who has travelled the world, met

The gift of being interesting is neither exclusive nor reliant on exceptional talent; it requires only honesty and focus. The person we call interesting is in essence someone alive to what we all deeply want from social intercourse: an uncensored glimpse of what life looks like through the eyes of another person and reassurance that we are not entirely alone with all that feels most bewildering, peculiar and frightening in us.

that we should expend so much effort on trying to look strong before

But, and this is the key point, what usually helps us to decide what someone means to us is our sense of what we mean to them.

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. We have to realize that whether or not the other person likes us is going to depend on what we do, not – mystically – what we by nature ‘are’, and that we have the agency to do rather a lot of things. Even though we may initially get very few signs of their interest (they might be looking a little distracted and behaving in an offhand way), we should assume that this is only a legacy of a restraint that springs from fear that they are not able to please – and that so long as we keep showing them warmth and encouragement to appease their self-suspicion, the barriers will eventually come down.

make that far more interesting and socially useful move: concentrate on showing that we like them.

We are so used to thinking of teasing in its cruel, mocking forms and hating it as such that it can sound initially implausible to think that there could be such a thing as good, affectionate teasing, a kind that we might long for and feel honoured to receive.

The good teaser aims to reform us, not through lectures, but by encouraging finely administered tart jokes at our surface selves. They consider our ponderousness and nickname us ‘Hamlet’, they note our commitment to the dark side of existence and ask us if there are any rules against Weltschmerz smiling, they hand us the dishcloth and wonder if Sir or Madam might like to scrub the lasagne dish.

Our smile isn’t just a sign that we have found something funny, but an admission of how much we ourselves would like to change – and how much we are relying on our friends to help us do so.

Yet few of us know how to do it, not because we are evil but because no one has taught us how and – a related point – few have listened sufficiently well to us. So we come to social life greedy to speak rather than listen, hungry to meet others but reluctant to hear them. Friendship degenerates into a socialized egoism.

Good listeners fight against this with a range of conversational gambits.

cursed and exceptionally deviant or uniquely incapable. But the good listener makes their own strategic confessions, so as to set the record straight about the meaning of being a normal (that is, very muddled and radically imperfect) human being.

They confess not so much to unburden themselves as to help others accept their own nature and see that being a bad parent, a poor lover or a confused worker is not a malignant act of wickedness but an ordinary feature of being alive that others have unfairly edited out of their public profiles.

When we’re in the company of people who listen well, we experience a very powerful pleasure, but too often we don’t really realize what it is about what ...

The reasons are legion. Relationships are rarely if ever the blissful marriage of two minds and hearts that Romanticism teaches us to expect; sex is invariably an area of tension and longing; creative endeavour is pretty much always painful, compromised and slow; any job – however appealing on paper – will be irksome in many of its details; children will always resent their parents, however well intentioned and kindly the adults may try to be. Politics is evidently a process of muddle and dispiriting compromise.

The problem with our world is that it does not stop emphasizing that success, calm, happiness and fulfilment could, somehow, one day be ours. And in this way it never ceases to torture us.

There is no need – on top of everything else – to be anxious that we are anxious. The mood is no sign that our lives have gone wrong, merely that we are alive. We should also be more careful when pursuing things we imagine will spare us anxiety. We can head for them by all means, but for other reasons than fantasies of calm, and with a little less vigour and a little more scepticism. We will still be anxious when we finally have the house, the relationship and the right income.

Even the tycoon and the couple in love are in pain. We have collectively failed to admit to ourselves how much anxiety is our default state.

We must, when possible, learn to laugh about our anxieties, laughter being the exuberant expression of relief when a hitherto private agony is given a well-crafted social formulation in a joke. We may have to suffer alone, but we can at least hold out our arms to our similarly tortured, fractured and, above all else, anxious neighbours, as if to say, in the kindest way possible, ‘I know …’

Because our culture places such a high value on sociability, it can be deeply awkward to have to explain how much, at certain points, we need to be alone.

We need to be alone because life among other people unfolds too quickly. The

By retreating into ourselves, it looks as if we are the enemies of others, but our solitary moments are in reality a homage to the richness of social existence. Unless

We don’t go around saying, ‘I had a great day today. The high point was staring out of the window.’ But maybe, in a better society, this is exactly what people would quietly say to one another.