The School of Life: An Emotional Education

by The School of Life

We take the first steps toward maturity by determining some of the ways in which our emotional minds deny, lie, evade, forget, and obsess, steering us toward goals that won’t deliver the satisfaction of which we’re initially convinced.

Early over-protectiveness inspired timidity and, around any complex situation, panic. A continually busy, inattentive parent was the catalyst for a personality marked by exhausting attention-seeking behavior. There is always a logic and there is always a history. We can tell that our imbalances date from the past because they reflect the ways of thinking and instincts of the children we once were. Our way of being unbalanced tends toward a fundamental immaturity, bearing the marks of what was once a young person’s attempt to grapple with something utterly beyond their capacities. For example, when they suffer at the hands of an adult, children almost invariably take what happens to them as a reflection of something that must be very wrong with them. If someone humiliates, ignores, or hurts them, it must—so it seems—be because they are, in and of themselves, imbecilic, repugnant, and worth neglecting. It can take many years, and a lot of patient inner exploration, to reach an initially far less plausible conclusion: that the hurt was essentially undeserved and that there were inevitably a lot of other things going on, offstage, in the raging adult’s interior life, for which the child was entirely blameless.

It is a complicating factor that our imbalances don’t cleanly reveal their origins, either to our own minds or, consequently, to the world at large. We aren’t really sure why we run away as we do, or are so often angry, or have a proud, haughty air, or break every deadline, or cling excessively to people we love. And because the sources of our imbalances escape us, we miss out on important sources of possible sympathy. We are judged on the behaviors that our wounds inspire, rather than on the wounds themselves.

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 traveled through: an immensely tricky early history.

Toward the past, we tend to adopt a sentimental attitude that 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, encouraged by all sides.

We lie by pretending that we are simpler than we actually are and that too much psychology might be nonsense. We lean on a version of robust common sense to ward off intimations of our own awkward complexity. We imply that not thinking very much is, at base, evidence of a superior kind of intelligence.

we deploy bluff strategies of ridicule against more complex accounts of human nature. We sideline avenues of personal investigation as unduly fancy or weird, implying that to lift the lid on inner life could never be fruitful or entirely respectable. We use the practical mood of Monday morning 9 a.m. to ward off the complex insights of 3 a.m. the previous night, when the entire fabric of our existence came into question.

We appeal to the understandable longing that our personalities be non-tragic, simple, and easily comprehended, so as to reject the stranger but more useful facts of our real, intricate selves.

We may think of egoists as people who have grown sick from too much love, but in fact the opposite is the case: An egoist is someone who has not yet had their fill. Selfcenteredness has to have a clear run in the early years if it isn’t to haunt and ruin the later ones. The so-called narcissist is simply a benighted soul who has not had a chance to be inordinately and unreasonably admired and cared for at the start.

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. There is no particular script the child has to follow in order to be loved; the child isn’t required to support the carer’s frayed self-belief or burnish their self-image in the eyes of strangers.

Bakhuysen wanted us to feel proud of humanity’s resilience in the face of apparently dreadful challenges. His painting implies that we can all cope far better than we think; that what appears immensely threatening may be highly survivable. All this the caregiver teaches, usually without reference to ships and Dutch art—just by their way of keeping on.

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 off-set by the memory of the steady attention of significant people in the past?

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?

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. Sometimes a voice is positive and benign, encouraging us to run those final few yards. But frequently the inner voice is not very nice at all. It is defeatist and punitive, panic-ridden and humiliating. It doesn’t represent anything like our best insights or most mature capacities.

An inner voice was always an outer voice that we have – imperceptibly – made our own. We’ve absorbed the tone of a kind and gentle caregiver who liked to laugh indulgently at our foibles and had endearing names for us. Or else we have taken in the voice of a harassed or angry parent, never satisfied with anything we achieved and full of rage and contempt.

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.

When things don’t go as we want, we can ask ourselves what a benevolent fair judge would say, and then actively rehearse to ourselves the words of consolation they would most likely have offered (we’ll tend to know immediately). 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.

The people who caused our primal wounds almost invariably didn’t mean to do so; they were themselves hurt and struggling to endure. We can develop a sad but realistic picture of a world in which sorrows and anxieties are blindly passed down the generations. The insight isn’t only true with regard to experience; holding it in mind will mean there is less to fear. Those who wounded us were not superior, impressive beings who knew our special weaknesses and justly targeted them. They were themselves highly frantic, damaged creatures trying their best to cope with the litany of private sorrows to which every life condemns us.

In meditation, we strive to empty consciousness of its normal medley of anxieties, hurts, and excitements, and concentrate on the sensations of the immediate moment, allowing even events as apparently minor but as fundamental as the act of breathing to be noticed. In a bid for serenity and liberation, we still the agitations of what the Buddhists evocatively term our “monkey minds.”

It is a basic, distinctive quirk of our minds that few of the emotions we carry in them are properly acknowledged, understood, or truly felt; that most of our affective content exists in an “unprocessed” form within us. Philosophical meditation seeks to lend us a structure within which to sieve the confused content that muddies our stream of consciousness. 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. Only by being listened to in generous, almost pedantic detail will anxieties lose their hold on us.

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 toward 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 dutifully taken heed, along the course of our development, to recommendations that we toughen up a little.

There may not be an immediate solution to many of our sorrows, but it helps immeasurably to know their contours. We might, as we turn over our griefs, large and small, imagine that we are sharing them with an extremely kind, patient figure who gives us the chance to evoke hurt in detail, someone with whom there is no pressure to rush, be grown up or impressive, and who allows us to admit without fear to the many curious things that have pained and diminished us in the previous hours.

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 of ourselves. We should allow our minds to wonder at greater length than usual about what the excitement (it could be a view, a book, a place, an insight) might want to tell us about ourselves.

A daily period of philosophical meditation does not so much dissolve problems as create an occasion during which the mind can order and understand itself. Fears, resentments, and hopes become easier to name; we grow less scared of the contents of our own minds—and less resentful, calmer, and clearer about our direction. We start, in faltering steps, to know ourselves slightly better.

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 rarely spoken of in the reserved and cautious public sphere. Any idea of the normal currently in circulation is not an accurate map of what is customary for a human to be. We are, each one of us, far more compulsive, anxious, sexual, tender, mean, generous, playful, thoughtful, dazed, and at sea than we are encouraged to accept. 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.

We need culture to take on the task because we cannot do it all by ourselves. In order to know ourselves well, we rely on the level of self-awareness, courage, and honesty circulating in society as a whole. We will be as hypocritical as the most representative voices around us and we will, conversely, be freed by what society is prepared to countenance as acceptable.

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 into silence. We develop all-consuming social anxiety. We refuse to eat. We babble incoherently. We lose command over part of our body. We are compelled to do something extremely scandalous and entirely contrary to our normal behavior. We become wholly paranoid in a given area. We refuse to play by the usual rules in our relationship: We have an affair, ramp up the fighting, or otherwise poke a very large stick in the wheels of daily life.

Breakdowns are hugely inconvenient for everyone and so, unsurprisingly, there is an immediate rush to medicalize them and attempt to excise them from the scene, so that business as usual can resume. But this is to misunderstand what is going on when we break down. A 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.

Tragedy is the sympathetic, morally complex account of how good people can end up in disaster. It attempts to teach us that goodness is seldom fairly rewarded or error paid for in commensurate ways. The most shocking events can befall the more or less innocent or the only averagely muddled and weak. We do not inhabit a properly moral universe: Disaster at points befalls those who could not have expected it to be a fair outcome, given what they did.

The real purpose of tragedy is not to teach us to be kind to fictional creations; it is to encourage us to apply a complex lens to the travails of all those around us and, crucially at points, to ourselves.

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. The theory urges us to search a little more assiduously than is normal for the strength to which a maddening characteristic must be twinned. We can see easily enough that someone is pedantic and uncompromising; we tend to forget, at moments of crisis, their thoroughness and honesty. We know so much about a person’s messiness, we have forgotten their uncommon degree of creative enthusiasm.

The diplomat succeeds by being a realist. They know we are inherently flawed, unreasonable, anxious, laughably absurd creatures who scatter blame unfairly, misdiagnose pains, and react appallingly to criticism—especially when it is accurate—and yet they are hopeful too of the possibilities of progress when our disturbances have been properly factored in and cushioned with adequate reassurance, accurate interpretation, and respect.

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.

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.

There is a particular way of discussing oneself that, however long it goes on for, never fails to win friends, reassure audiences, comfort couples, bring solace to the single, and buy the goodwill of enemies: the confession of vulnerability.

We are not so much crowing when we hear of failure as deeply reassured to know that we aren’t humiliatingly alone with the appalling difficulties of being alive. It is all too easy to suspect that we have been uniquely cursed in the extent of our troubles, of which we seldom find evidence in the lives around us.

what usually helps us to decide what someone means to us is our sense of what we mean to them. The possibility of friendship between people therefore frequently hangs in the balance because both sides are, privately, waiting for a sign from the other as to whether or not they are liked before they dare to show (or even register) any enthusiasm of their own. Both sides proceed under the tacit assumption that there is some a priori verdict about their value that the other person will be developing in their mind that has no connection to how they themselves behave and is impervious to anything they could say or do.

We can dare to persuade them to see us in a positive light, chiefly by showing a great deal of evidence that we see them in a positive light. We can apply the full range of techniques of charm: We can remember small things about them, display an interest in what they have been up to, laugh at their witty moments, and sympathize with them around their sorrows.

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.

The good listener knows that we’d ideally move—via conversation with another person—from a confused, agitated state of mind to one that was more focused and (hopefully) more serene. Together with them, we’d work out what was really at stake. But in reality this tends not to happen, because there isn’t enough of an awareness of the desire and need for clarification within conversation. There aren’t enough good listeners. So people tend to assert rather than analyze. They restate in many different ways the fact that they are worried, excited, sad, or hopeful, and their interlocutor listens but doesn’t assist them to discover more. Good listeners fight against this with a range of conversational gambits. They hover as the other speaks, they offer encouraging little remarks of support, they make gentle positive gestures: a sigh of sympathy, a nod of encouragement, a strategic “hmm” of interest. All the time they are egging the other to go deeper into issues. They love saying, “Tell me more about …”; “I was fascinated when you said …”; “Why did that happen, do you think?” or “How did you feel about that?” The good listener takes it for granted that they will encounter vagueness in the conversation of others. But they don’t condemn, rush, or get impatient, because they see vagueness as a universal and highly significant trouble of the mind that it is the task of a true friend to help with.

A key move of the good listener is not always to follow every byway or subplot introduced by the speaker, for they may be getting lost and further from their own point than they would wish. The good listener is always looking to take the speaker back to their last reasonable idea, saying, “Yes, yes, but you were saying just a moment ago …” or “So, ultimately, what do you think it was about?” The good listener is, paradoxically, a skilled interrupter. But they don’t, as most people do, interrupt to intrude their own ideas; they interrupt to help the other get back to their original, more sincere yet elusive concerns.

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 this person is doing that is so welcome. By paying strategic attention to our feelings of satisfaction, we should learn to magnify these pleasures and offer them to others, who will notice, heal, and then repay the favor in turn.

Our degree of satisfaction is critically dependent on our expectations. The greater our hopes, the greater the risks of rage, bitterness, disappointment, and a sense of persecution. We are not always humiliated by failing at things; we are humiliated only if we first invested our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then did not reach it. Our expectations determine what we will interpret as a triumph and what must count as a failure.

We aren’t overwhelmed by anger whenever we are frustrated; only when we first believed ourselves entitled to a particular satisfaction and then did not receive it. Our furies spring from events that violate a background sense of the rules of existence. And yet we too often have the wrong rules. We shout when we lose the house keys because we somehow believe in a world in which belongings never go astray. We lose our temper at being misunderstood by our partner because something has convinced us that we are not irredeemably alone.

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, the ones who are asphyxiated without periods by ourselves, take other people very seriously—perhaps more seriously than those in the uncomplicated ranks of the endlessly gregarious. We listen closely to stories, we give ourselves to others, we respond with emotion and empathy. But as a result we cannot keep swimming in company indefinitely.

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’ve had time alone, we can’t be who we would like to be around our fellow humans. We won’t have original opinions. We won’t have lively and authentic perspectives. We’ll be—in the wrong way—a bit like everyone else.

There are many things we want desperately to avoid, which we will spend huge parts of our lives worrying about and that we will then bitterly resent when they force themselves upon us nevertheless.

What we most fear can happen irrespective of our desires. But when we see frustration as a law of nature, we drain it of some of its sting and bitterness. We recognize that limitations are not in any way unique to us.