How to Feel More Understood, Valued and Secure in Your Relationships with Alain de Botton #574

26:30Alain de Botton:He loved going sailing. And he said to her something like, you know, my last relationship, my partner didn't like sailing and that really cost us, you know, that was damaging. So we met automatically a sort an atmosphere started taking hold like if this is going to work you have to like this so she dutifully went out and tried to show what a good sailor she was and you know even though the boat was actually quite tiny and it was leaking and all the rest of it very uncomfortable so i've got to keep going and so she started to suppress her needs and after three days of this uh sailing trip um she broke down and she said i can't take this anymore you know and of course then things got repeated and you know there was an argument etc they get back on track but what it shows is in order to be a good lover you have to be able to say this is what i can tolerate this is what makes me happy um this is what i like this is what i don't like and to be able to say it gently compassionately calmly but but also quite firmly quite firmly this is me this is me i don't like going for long country walks.

27:35Alain de Botton:I'm not into cold water swimming. I don't like the poetry of T.S. Eliot. I like to be in bed quite early. You know, these are things, and of course, all these things have an antecedent. You know, if we've had a childhood where it's always somebody else's needs that came first, if we never be able to express who we really are, we don't have a training in this. A good parent will be able to say to their child, if you need to go to the bathroom during class, put up your hand, just ask the teacher, explain what's going on. And, you know, they should be able to understand. Or when you go to your friend Sophie's house for her birthday party, if you don't like the cake, ask her mum for a slice of bread.

28:13Alain de Botton:That'll be fine. In other words, it's okay to be who you are. If you can explain it politely, that's fine. And another person should understand. And as importantly, if they don't understand, you've got every right to politely, gently say, I'm not sure I'm happy here. I might need to walk away here. and these are skills that again i mean they should be teaching us this alongside you know geography and physics from a young age yeah this idea of being a teacher it's quite an interesting one i know in some of your previous work you've written about the ancient greeks and their sort of belief system about relationships this idea that actually each of you is teaching the other person to become their best selves which i thought was a really aspirational notion of what a relationship could be.

29:01And in some ways, then I thought, it sounds like your partner is almost your coach in some ways.

29:10Alain de Botton:And your partner should have a really keen eye for your faults. Now, this is something we find really hard to say. You'll get a lot of sympathy from your friends normally if you say, well, I broke up with someone because they didn't really love me for who I am. They didn't really love me just as I am. People go, oh, that's terrible. But looked at more generously in a more complex light, you might think, hang on a minute. Do any of us really deserve to be loved exactly as we are in all our flaws and all our compromises right now? Isn't it actually more generous towards someone to love them not for who they actually are, but for who they themselves are trying to become, for who they themselves would like to be, but need a lot of support in order to try and become.

29:57Alain de Botton:That might be true love rather than the more static acceptance of everything that you happen to be today. So is it us teaching our partners how to be the best version of themselves? Because the way I think about it and if I think about my own marriage, I would say that what I've learnt over the years is that it's not necessarily about me teaching Vid or her teaching me. I feel if I use her as a mirror to find out where I can improve, then I can become a better version of myself. Not because she's teaching me, but instead that she's actually reflecting back to me where I can improve. It's a solid difference, isn't it?

30:51I don't think I'm... And then, I think then she might change, not because I'm trying to change her, but because I've changed. And therefore, we, you know, in relationships, you know, none of us exist in isolation. We're constantly being influenced by the other person. It sounds like you guys are very evolved.

31:11Alain de Botton:And I think you, I think I'd like to hold on to the idea that you are actually teaching and learning, but you're doing it in a very gentle, almost invisible way. But I think it's going on. You know, when you talk about mirroring, that, you know, she might mirror a behavior. I'm imagining, let's say, you know, you speak in a certain way and it upsets her. She doesn't need to say, you know, let me give you a lesson in how you've overstepped a boundary. You just notice that she's upset and that helps you to think about it and you take that away and you reflect on it. So there is a lesson going on, but it's a very silent and a very generous, you know, it sounds like you're both learning, but without, you know, delicately, delicately.

31:52Alain de Botton:But I'd still, look, I think our partners have a ringside seat on our flawed sides and all of us are flawed. Obviously we are. We come into a relationship having not learned all sorts of things we might've learned as we developed, you know, through life. All of us have a lot to learn. By the way, that's a very good starting point. I mean, if two people on an early dinner date can accept that each of them is a work in progress and each of them has a lot to learn, that's a fantastic starting point. There's nothing less romantic than two people who think that they are totally accomplished as they are.

32:30Well, that's the problem, isn't it? That's the cultural norm. And you've written before about how we are obsessed with the run up to relationships or to marriage. You know, the kind of early days and the, you know, even the term falling in love. I was reflecting on it this morning, but that's what we say routinely. We don't think about it. We fall in love. What does that mean? Well, to fall, to tumble, to be out of control, you know, gravity's taking us and we're powerless to do anything about it. Well, yeah, actually that was what the first few months of my relationship were like, but they're not anymore.

33:07So even within our language is an incorrect idea of relationships or a potentially misleading idea about what relationships

33:20Alain de Botton:are. Absolutely. And also an inability to admit the terrors of love. You know, this is a big theme. I think that we always say everybody wants to fall in love. Everybody wants love. Let's accept that for a large section of the population, love is as frightening as it is exciting. Love is something that we want to run towards but also run away from. We can't explain behavior in couples without acknowledging that there is a huge desire for closeness but also a complicated desire for distance. and every relationship has, you might call, a sort of element of distance management where people are trying to find the level of distance which makes them feel comfortable.

34:04Alain de Botton:A psychologist once wrote that there are two fears in love, that all love stories can be read through polarity of, on the one hand, a terror of being engulfed, being swallowed by another person, and on the other hand, a terror of being abandoned and of being totally solitary. So love happens somewhere between the space of terror of engulfment and terror of solitude, terror of loneliness. And we each of us have to navigate and within a couple have to navigate how much we can hold these two elements in check. And many relationships collapse because one person is in danger of trying to swallow the other person or make the other person feel swallowed.

34:46Alain de Botton:And the other one is in danger of making the other one feel totally abandoned. and then you get terrible tensions. Yeah, and we see that certain dynamics build up in relationships over time that help them to work. And I remember in the COVID era where many relationships suddenly were put under new strain because there was a dynamic, I guess this is almost the cliche, but the guy in retirement who plays golf three times a week, who is out of the house for six hours, three times a week, and then going for a drink with his golf buddies afterwards, which we didn't think about. But then suddenly when that's not on the table and that husband is constantly there, there was real issues in relationships because they'd built up a dynamic that allowed them to have the closeness and the distance.

35:41Alain de Botton:And there are many things like that that seem to be obstacles to love but a quietly supporting love. So you get situations, let's say, with long distance relationships where people go, oh, it's such a pity that you live in New York and I live in London. What a pity. If only we could live together. And they yearn and this goes on for years and years. And then finally, they find themselves able to live in the same city and boom, it breaks up. Or you get this with affairs. Two people might be, one person might be married and they're longing for the person to get a divorce so that it can be together.

36:09Alain de Botton:And this goes on for years. And finally, the divorce comes through and it looks like they can live together and announce their love in front of the world. And boom, the one person leaves and can't take it because their love was actually being held together by distance, by an element of distance. And this speaks of the complexity of our attachment patterns, that we need a certain amount of distance, in many cases, as much as we need closeness. Yeah. in terms of these cultural expectations, these artists we grow up with, which then causes us problems, perhaps, when we actually do get in a long-term relationship, if we choose to, which of course not everyone chooses to.

36:54I think about, do we need to do we need to have a better idea of the stages in a long-term relationship? And I'll tell you for me, one thing that really helped me when my mother was seriously unwell a few years ago, when I actually thought she might die, was the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. And it really helped me at that time because there was brutal honesty within it that all living creatures undergo this cycle. You know, creation, birth, growth, decay, and death. And the brutality of that really helped me. I thought, oh, this is the natural cycle of all living beings. This is what we go through.

37:44And maybe mom at this moment in time is in the penultimate stage and decay before death. Okay. And although that's not something we like to talk about because we don't like to talk about death much in this society, it really helped me. I thought the brutal honesty of this is actually helping me deal with the situation. I think a similar concept could potentially apply to relationships where if I think about my own relationship with my wife, I feel we're probably on our third or fourth relationship now, you know, 18 years in, there's different stages. And although we don't have the, you know, the kind of intensity of the first few months where, you know, basically screw everything else.

38:29All that matters is when am I going to see her next? What are we going to do? Like an amazing few months, which led to me proposing after three months. It was just total wild, you know, romantic, lost in the bliss of early romance. Obviously, our relationship is better than ever before now, but it's much more grounded and calm and it's different. So I guess, what do you think, Alan? Do you think we need to also do a better job at actually defining the various stages that one goes through in a long-term relationship? Might that be helpful for people instead of expecting it all to be that kind of intensity forever, which it's never going to be.

39:11Alain de Botton:I think, you know, if a relationship survives, it's going to be calling upon a different set of resources at different stages. And I think the reason why relationships collapse at certain junctures is because one or other or both parties are lacking some of the skills that would be required to keep things going. Skills. Again, that word comes up, right? So, for example, you know, in the very early days of love, communication is not that necessary because you're finding intuitive agreement, you know, romantic, intuitive agreement. But then comes the era where you're going to need to start to speak up and use language.

39:48Alain de Botton:And you're going to be called upon to negotiate with your partner about certain things. So negotiation skills, communication skills, also forbearance, an ability to understand yourself, your own gremlins, your own dynamics, etc. You know, you could make a long list of the skills that are required and they'll tend to be, And you could almost put a timeline to it. You could say, you know, on the whole, after two months, you're going to start to need this skill. After four months, this skill. After three years, this skill. And then you can start to see where do people's relationships tend to collapse.

40:19Alain de Botton:Ah, they tend to collapse at the six-month juncture. Or this is somebody who, you know, by two or three years, they're always, you know, the thing breaks up. And, you know, more tragically, you get relationships that manage to survive 10, 20 years. But they don't last 30 years. They don't last 40 years. There's still something that one or other is not able to learn in time and to have resources for in time inside themselves. Yeah. It's interesting that in this idea that in the early days, intuition might be enough. OK, but over time, those other skills that you were never even being called on to use initially suddenly starts to become more and more important.

40:58And I think in many ways that speaks to the ideas in your latest book, From Trauma to Healing. Because trauma and our own traumas clearly play a role in our relationships. You talk about this idea that unprocessed trauma gets projected onto our partners. But then there's also this idea that actually a lot of those skills that we need to speak up for ourselves to say what our needs are, are often skills that we've never ever developed. maybe because of our childhoods and you i know you probably been asked this several times before but you've written again a quite provocative but i think a very accurate statement about marriage in your previous work marriage ends up as a hopeful generous infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't yet know who they are or who the other might be binding themselves to a failure they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.

42:01That is so profound, so true, and kind of speaks to this idea of unprocessed trauma is something we will end up projecting onto our partners unless we do something about it.

42:15Alain de Botton:I mean, it's worth just going, what is trauma? Because it's obviously a word that people are using more and more. It used really just among psychologists and psychotherapists. And now it's entered general circulation. People will speak about their trauma. And, you know, sometimes critics will go, you know, everything's a trauma nowadays, etc. What is a trauma? Trauma is really a pain that has left a legacy that's been unexplored and that's having a consequence in present behaviour. So trauma can be large or small. It can be as small as, you know, you fell off a chair in childhood and you were not comforted in time or as large as you witnessed abuse or severe neglect, etc.

42:52Alain de Botton:So it ranges right across the board. But one thing that all traumas have in common is that there is a lack of understanding of what the traumatic dynamic was. And then off the back of that mystery comes an inability to explain either to oneself or to other people what the difficulty is. So people who are so-called traumatized go through the world unable to account for some of the things that they do either to themselves or to others and so they'll be for example always failing at challenges you know whenever an opportunity comes around a big opportunity they'll find that somehow they manage to miss that opportunity spoil that opportunity they won't know why they'll blow up a relationship blow up a job prospect something and they don't know no one else knows and it seems quite strange.

43:39Alain de Botton:Now, that can be traced back to, let's say, a trauma around the consequences of succeeding in an environment, an early childhood environment, where that would bring about the rage or jealousy or competitiveness of a parent, which can happen, you know, quite often. So that then failing becomes a way of surviving. I've got to fail in order to hold on to the love of someone I care about. Sounds like a perverse dynamic, but it happens. And I think that, you know, that qualifies as a trauma in the sense that it's a dynamic that's painful, it's difficult, it's not understood, and it's going on to have a legacy in adult life.

44:16Alain de Botton:And, you know, one feels immensely for people with something like this. Yeah. There's, in chapter two of this new book, the chapter two is symptoms of trauma. You write, the central paradox and particular difficulty of trauma is that we tend to have no active awareness that we have experienced it. And I guess what you just said there is quite interesting to me in the sense that jealousy of children, right? So how do we start to identify, you know, what are the symptoms we can look out for in our life that might signal to us, oh man, I've got some unprocessed trauma that I could do with looking at.

44:59I mean, a really key question is, how do you feel after something's gone right for you?

45:05Alain de Botton:Right? After you've succeeded, after you've heard some good news, etc. Some of us, great, we celebrate, absolutely no problem. Some of us, we think, hang on a minute, something feels a bit eerie, something feels a bit worrying, that there is something about a beautiful situation. Let's say we started a new relationship, things are going well, or we're promoted at work, or, you know, we get some good news from a friend. And rather than thinking, oh, great, we get a bit worried. And that's often a sign that we've been, there's an association somewhere in our minds between powering forward, winning and upsetting somebody.

45:38Alain de Botton:And it is one of the great secrets, one of the great taboos of parent-child relations that, you know, in a way as a parent, you want the best for your child. But there are many things that children do that will discomfort a parent unless they are very honest and quite self-aware. Let's imagine that you as a parent have grown up in quite a deprived setting and you want to give your child everything. You want them to have what you didn't have. And so you manage to give that to them. And then lo and behold, you suddenly think, you see your child and they're really smiley and happy and content. And you think it's great, but at the same time, something might be niggling at you and you think my child's maybe a bit entitled or they don't really understand someone like me or they've never bothered to see how painful life is in my childhood, etc.

46:32Alain de Botton:And you might get resentful, resentful of your own child for whom you would lay down your own life. Very peculiar. But psychological life is full of these peculiarities and we have to be ready to catch them and we have to be imaginative enough to allow them space. space. There are very unfamiliar and quite alarming sounding dynamics between parents and children. That's fine. The thing that's not fine is to brush them all under the carpet. Yeah, that's the key thing, isn't it? If you just heard that and it resonated with you, don't push it away. Don't then distract yourself. Don't go and start scrolling something else or pouring yourself a glass of wine.

47:07There's the opportunity. There's the opportunity to learn something about yourself, right? Do you want to go somewhere really dark and complicated?

47:14Alain de Botton:I would love to. Let's talk about Freud and sexuality in families. Okay, it's a really delicate topic. Freud's enormous insight. I mean, the cliched version of Freud is Freud said, little boys fall in love with their mothers, little girls fall in love with their fathers. You know, and that sounds quite patterned, just quite strange. Looked at more imaginatively, what Freud is telling us is a story about healthy human development. He proposes that in order to develop well, a little boy or girl has to feel from its opposite sex parent that it has a capacity to charm and delight. I'm using those words carefully, charm and delight, not seduce, charm and delight.

47:56Alain de Botton:In other words, there will be a moment in an ordinary development where a child will get a terrific sense of validation that their mum thinks that they're really, you know, really a charming and lovely little person and ditto with the daughter. Now, there are two dangers in this. The parent is not able to give validation to their child. They're unable to recognise the child's strengths and charms. They just hold them at bay and they have to be very cold. This robs a child of confidence and makes the child feel that they don't have legitimate powers in the world. But there's another extreme, which is that the parent, God forbid physically, but much more commonly emotionally, slightly seduces the child, slightly says, oh, you know, let's not tell mum about this.

48:46Alain de Botton:We're just having a special moment. Or your dad doesn't like us chatting like this, but well, you know, maybe the marriage is not going well. And the child is invited to compensate the parent for some of its missing emotional nourishment. Very dangerous territory. The child then grows up with the feeling of, I've got too much power here. That's not comfortable. The child will then have to rein in that power and will feel that there's a boundary that's in danger of being crossed. And that child then won't be able to grow into someone who feels expansive and powerful. So these are just some of the delicate things that are going on in so-called ordinary families.

49:26Alain de Botton:And they're reliant on a lot of maturity and a lot of health, which is not always present. Yeah. Have you read the book Silently Seduced? No. No, it's a pretty provocative book, but it's, I can't remember the author now, it's absolutely fantastic. It really sort of showcases, in a very blunt way, some of these dynamics that can exist. And again, there's no blame about this stuff. I mean, even when this stuff happens, it's often driven by unconscious needs and sort of parents' own traumas from their young age. Once you get into trauma, you're like, your parents are playing out their trauma. You're playing out your parents.

50:09You know, it all sort of gets passed on. But these things I think are really, really important to talk about. flipping it then onto parents, because if we're saying that a lot of the reason that relationships or long-term relationships in the 21st century are fraught with problems is because we project unprocessed trauma onto our partners, then following on from that, it's important to think about, well, what can I as a parent do to prevent traumatizing my own children?

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52:33Alain de Botton:First of all, if you're even asking that question, that's a fantastic starting point. You know, there's an idea which is very dangerous that the only thing you need to do to be a good parent is to provide materially and show up every now and then. Of course, these things are extremely important and, you know, great accomplishment and many people haven't had even that. But that's only the beginning of the story, not the end. An awareness that you might be passing things onto your children, that there are unresolved things in you, which will transmit to the next generation. Let's just look at some of the things that parents can be doing without knowing they're doing.

53:08Alain de Botton:Let's imagine a parent who at a young age had to shut down their vulnerable sides, and they had to be very brave, very stoic and powerful through life. We can be sympathetic to that. But let's imagine they are then in charge of a very tiny, very vulnerable person. A great temptation of that parent can be to bully their own vulnerable child for their fragility and to start to say essentially, don't cry. You're a little boy. You're a little girl. This is not allowed. It's not right. Let's go and do athletics together. Let's go and be strong together. In a way, they're so worried about their own weakness that when they see weakness in a child, they turn against it.

53:52Alain de Botton:Children are a kind of mirror to us. Everything that we're afraid of, all of our shadow sides show up in a child. So if you're worried about being weak or not intelligent or not popular or not sporty enough or not intellectual enough or whatever, it's all going to appear in your relationship to your child. It's just going to appear. So you will be threatened by certain things in your child? A good exercise might be to say, just imagine if you hadn't had children, you stop and say to yourself, what might I be threatened by in my own child? Just in the abstract, ask yourself that question, see what comes up for you.

54:30Alain de Botton:And those are things almost inevitably that you've not dealt with in yourself or that you've had to, you know, shut down because your own development was challenging. Yeah. So Tristan, before we're talking about long-term partners potentially being teachers to each other, but I would argue that you could even go one step beyond that and say that your children can be the very greatest teachers you will ever come across if you allow them to be. And certainly in my own life, I would say from a young age, as a father, a real drive for me to sort out my inner world and my unprocessed traumas was, oh, wow, I don't want to pass this on to the kids.

55:20Sometimes children showcase a behavior that you don't like, but you're like, well, I've sort of got that behavior myself. right so I can either tell them not to do it or I can work on myself so I no longer display it and I think yeah children can be the best teacher can't they absolutely you know we have to notice

55:39Alain de Botton:what what's triggering us in their behavior in other words what's provoking an outsized level of emotion and it might be you know my child is sobbing is they're crying why are they doing that I'm getting annoyed with them or my child is a bit slow in some area or they're a bit precocious in an area. And that seems to be provoking us. So there'll be all sorts of things, different things, but almost always they relate to something in you. And there is, you know, let's talk about the psychology of bullying. Parents bully their children, not necessarily overtly, but covertly. And what do we mean by bullying?

56:12Alain de Botton:We mean, you know, we know bullying from the playground. What happens in bullying is something intolerable is occurring inside you. And you can't bear to see an echo of it in somebody else and you just evacuate it and you say that person's got the problem rather than I've got the problem you make a scapegoat and this this happens in in relation to to people's own own children and it can be very subtle but nevertheless a kind of of bullying a lot of children's sports coaches will End of Festival. And, you know, talk about parents often putting their unrealized dreams onto their children, which is really interesting, isn't it?

57:00That, you know, people didn't achieve what they wanted to and somehow they're trying to make up for that by overly pushing their children. And you can see this quite a lot, you know, when you go to children's sporting events. And I think there's a real toxic side to this. One thing I've realized, I've shared this on the podcast before, due to certain things in my childhood, I was very much driven to succeed. I very much needed, past tense, external validation to feel good about myself. I thought that's what I need to do in order to get love. and I would only play sports growing up where I could be the best.

57:42I wouldn't play anything where I couldn't do that, where I couldn't dominate and win because I realised actually over the last years that it's not that I actually enjoyed winning, it's the pain of losing was too much. I didn't enjoy winning, I just couldn't stand to lose, which is a very toxic way of living. And what I've noticed, because I would like to think my wife and I, I think we do a good job with our children. Certainly, I would say one of the things that is most important to us is how we bring our children up. I've noticed when I go running with my son or do park run with him, I just love this, the fact that actually, some nights he'll just go and chill.

58:25He'll go, yeah, I'm just having an easy run today. And sometimes he'll push himself and sometimes he'll just, you know, he'll be like, yeah, I could have sprints at the end. I didn't feel like it.

58:34Alain de Botton:Like, oh, that's interesting. That's great. Because I never would have done that as a kid. I would have always pushed myself because it said something about who I was as an individual. And I've had to restrain myself from putting that onto my son. And I love it. I just go, wow, maybe actually you love yourself enough that your time doesn't reflect who you are as a human being. I didn't have that as a kid, but I'm really glad that you do. But then again, I think, you know, there's always a pendulum in this. And you can be traumatized by a parent who can only give affection in relation to achievement, that they've got something in their system, which means that, you know, I will only love you in relation to how you perform.

59:15Alain de Botton:But those people can then produce in the next generation someone who will then have children who will be denied a legitimate engagement with competitiveness. So there's a certain kind of modern parent now who's the fruit of very competitive parenting who now says to their child, I'll love you whatever you do. It doesn't really matter where you perform in the exam. It doesn't matter where you are in the race. that can also deny a child something. So we have to be so careful. And this is where, you know, you laugh, but... No, no, I laugh because I think there's a truth to it. And there's almost an inevitability that humans sort of react to what has gone before them.

59:58And we go to the other extreme.

1:00:00Alain de Botton:Again, a very useful thing for any prospective parent to ask themselves is, what am I trying to correct from my childhood? And where might I overcorrect? If what I'm trying to do is to create a virtue, Where might this virtue slip over into a problem of its own? So I'm trying to escape competitiveness. Okay, fine. What might happen if there's too much of an escape from competitiveness? Or I'm trying to give a child lots of choice. Okay, what might happen if there's too much choice? Or I'm trying to give my child a very ordered life. Okay, what happens if there's too much order, etc.? So we humans tend to either undercook or overcook ingredients.

1:00:42Yeah, it's interesting when you observe a lot of these so-called heroes and idols in society, like your Tiger Woods or your Michael Phelps, who by one metric have achieved greatness. Okay, the greatest ever, for example. Those things came at a huge cost, a huge cost. with Tiger, for example. If I ever have the opportunity to talk to Tiger on this show, one of the questions I would love to ask him is, was it worth it? Was the cost that you had to pay, the price you had to pay for those 15 majors and the title of greatest of all time worth the marital strife, the painkiller addiction, the inner torment?

1:01:28Michael Phelps, 26 or something, gold medals at the Olympics. your greatest of all time, and multiple mental health struggles. And I think that's also an uncomfortable truth that many of us don't like to look at in society, that actually some of the people, whether it's sporting success, business success, political success, a lot of those things came at a huge cost, didn't they?

1:01:56Alain de Botton:I think, you know, we get into trouble because we have this one word called success. And it tends to cover, you know, we say, is so and so a success? And we tend to mean in our culture, financial success, fame success, sporting success, etc. What we tend not to mean, the metric we're not applying, is a broader human-based idea of success at the, really the most important game in town, which is satisfaction. Satisfaction with oneself and with the life that one's creating. And this has got to be the true prize. And I think that, you know, we get any amount of legendary athletes, politicians, artists that are in the room, and you say, you know, has it been worth it?

1:02:35Alain de Botton:And I think the honest answer is generally no. Would you swap all of this for a bit of ordinary happiness? The poignant answer is God, yes. God, yes, I would. That, you know, I wasn't enjoying this level of self-sacrifice. I wasn't enjoying this. I felt an inner compulsion normally because these people would have grown up in extremely conditional, love-conditional environments where there was no way of surviving emotionally without reaching a level of perfection. And I think, you know, the universe perhaps won't really mind so much if there are fewer amazing golf performers or if our, you know, swimming teams don't, you know, hit exactly the right second.

1:03:19Alain de Botton:You know, maybe the universe doesn't really care about that. Maybe the thing that does really matter is, could you sleep at night? You know, were you able to be tender with those who loved you? Are you able to live comfortably with yourself? These are the true prizes. This is the true wealth of life. It really upsets our notion of wealth. You know, if we were to reassign that word wealth to encompass happiness, contentment, generosity, not of a financial sort, if that could be wealth, then how many of us would be poor without knowing that we were poor and how some of us might be quite rich without ever having been given permission to think of ourselves as rich.

1:04:01Alain de Botton:There's a major realignment that's on the offing. One of my favourite phrases or quotes is from the Tao Te Ching, true wealth is knowing what is enough. I love it. And it certainly resonates with me on a deep level. Parenting. In your experience, both your professional experience and your personal experience as a parent, what do you consider the most important things we can do for our children? Look, at some level, we are hosts to them. We invite them into the world. And I think to give them a sense that they are welcome, that they were wanted, that they didn't happen, as it were, by accident or when they arrived, they had a place in our hearts.

1:04:49Alain de Botton:This gives a basic sense of validation is absolutely important. I think another really important thing is to give the child a sense that though we know many things, though we're accomplished in some ways, we don't even begin to know it all or even a fraction of all. We are stumbling around. We're good parents, but we're not perfect parents. You know, no one needs a so-called perfect parent. And I think there's a terrific drive in the modern world for parents to think that they are serving their children by trying to be the perfect parent. If you aim for perfection, what you're really doing is humiliating your child because no child is perfect.

1:05:30Alain de Botton:They're flawed. And then they look at the person they love and admire and think, goodness, I've got to be perfect in order to match up. No one wants that. we need you know not gods and goddesses we need ordinary flawed humans to be looking after us in order that we can then accept our own humanity and that of others yeah you've spoken before about the cost of good parenting in the context of this idea that in front of our children we will often edit ourselves we won't say certain things or if we have conflicts with our partner we may not engage in that conflict in front of our children, which is admirable, which has many upsides.

1:06:15But one of the potential consequences is that they then get an unrealistic idea of what an adult relationship really looks like. That's right.

1:06:25Alain de Botton:I mean, you can get poignant scenarios where someone will be together in adulthood with a partner and they'll be thinking at the back of their minds, it's funny my partners often cross not like my dad my dad was always calm or um my my partner's not like my mum not always um you know so helpful and so generous with their time and affection and they'll think something's gone wrong here i think this is this is not the way that i was brought up these are not the sort of people that i that i'm expecting and of course these are precisely the people that their parents were their parents just took enormous pains inordinate perhaps not very wise pains, to hide everything from them about their reality.

1:07:07Alain de Botton:They weren't always calm. They weren't always generous. They weren't always sympathetic. They were striving very hard at limited periods to do this. And for a parent to be able to signal to a child, maybe, you know, when they're reaching adulthood, late adolescence, to say, you know, I tried very hard bringing you up. I'm a complicated person. You don't need to say it. You can teach it without, you know, So you can just, in a calculated way, lose your temper, be a bit grumpy, etc. Show that you are both lovable and sometimes a bit of a pain. And that's such a generous thing for someone. I know people who are unable in adulthood to form relationships because they have an idea of who their parents were and what their parents' marriage was like, which is not true.

1:07:51Alain de Botton:So they are sacrificing themselves on the basis of an illusion. Going back to this idea of expectations in relationships potentially causing problems, especially if those expectations are unrealistic based on Hollywood and romance and poetry. I think one thing we don't often talk about enough in public is the role of sex in relationships. and it's interesting as a parent now of children who are 15 and 12 it very much seems to me that society even at that young age like it's become quite a sexualized society I think that the media people are consuming even what is shown on so-called family shows on television I think there is a certainly to me an over-sexualization going on that kids are being exposed to at younger and younger ages.

1:08:56I'd love to get your perspective on that, but also, you know, more broadly, what do you think the role of sex is in a long-term relationship?

1:09:09Alain de Botton:Look, sex is an incredibly serious topic that we don't yet fully know how to talk about as a society. There's incredible shame around it. There's a sense. Also, the topic is either obvious or silly or not worthy. So we hit this topic from many different angles, but the sum total is that we often don't discuss it properly. It is a conduit to intimacy, true intimacy. And it's also one of the strangest things that people do. If you think about what kissing is. I mean, the very act of a kiss is hugely bizarre. A mouth that's normally used to either, you know, chew mashed potato or utter words is for a moment open to another person, that they can enter your mouth and you theirs.

1:09:59Alain de Botton:I mean, you laugh, but it's, I mean, if you were showing a visiting alien from, you know, planet Kepler 32b, and you said, you know, this is what we do here on this planet, they would think this is highly alarming. But also, why is this being fetishized? Why is this more interesting than eating an oyster or playing tennis? What's going on here? And we'd need to explain, there is always serious, there are always very important and serious things going on in all sexual activity. I think that, you know, intimacy is based on the idea of doing something with someone in a very privileged way that could be shocking, disgusting, and repulsive with anyone else.

1:10:34Alain de Botton:It's a way of marking out someone as unique to you, that you're able to do something that you wouldn't think of doing with anyone else. So many things are very cathartic that go on in the sexual realm. If you think of the whole area of kinks, why does somebody have a kink? People will tend to discover that there are certain things that turn them on more than others. And it's a great mystery. And we know some of the sort of classic ones, oh, so-and-so likes to dress up in this kind of uniform or likes to have this sort of practice. And, you know, we've got sort of a map of what that might look like.

1:11:11Alain de Botton:But in fact, if you boil it down, people tend to have really particular areas of excitement, etc. Let me give you my theory of where these zones of excitement come from. I think that excitement is almost always sitting on an area of life that was once quite painful and is an area of tension. And what sex allows two people to do, or more, but let's imagine a couple, two people to do, is to revisit an area of difficulty without some of the limitations of ordinary life in order to have a little cathartic, joyful moment. Let's imagine somebody who has to assert authority all day, every day in their day-to-day life.

1:11:53Alain de Botton:It's exhausting, it's tiring, it's kind of difficult, kind of traumatic. They might enjoy, in sex, letting go of all their authority and of surrendering to somebody else in order to re-find a kind of balance that's been lost in ordinary life. Let's imagine somebody who has a really hard time with some of the gender roles that's been assigned. Maybe they feel that they're being asked to play the role of a man or a woman in a way that's ended up feeling quite uncomfortable for them. It's excessive. But again, in their sexuality, they're able to find a better balance where they can visit a less gendered, a less stereotypical role and rediscover a kind of balance.

1:12:32Alain de Botton:So you're saying that could be a good thing? I think at its best, sex allows people to rebalance themselves and to re-find qualities that are absent from day-to-day life. And so one of the things to always observe is, in people, what is it that's turning them on particularly? And how does that relate to areas of deprivation or struggle or difficulty in their day-to-day life? Because you can draw very interesting lines of connection. And as I say, behind every so-called turn-on tends to be something that was unusually difficult for that person. my wife and I were discussing this week kissing. And the idea that it really speaks to what you just said, actually, about the actual act of kissing.

1:13:15And what we were discussing is, is kissing there in all cultures? Or do we kiss because we've seen it in films, right? So I don't know if you've done any research on this, but do all cultures around the world kiss? or is it unique to certain cultures? Because you're right, on the face, it's quite a bizarre thing.

1:13:39Alain de Botton:Yeah. There's a lovely quote from the French 17th century philosopher La Rochefoucauld who said, there are some people who would never have fallen in love if they hadn't heard there was such a thing. So that speaks of the socialised nature of love, that love, of course, sets parameters. It says, you know, when you're in love, you will feel this. And then you think, oh, do I feel this? And sometimes you might feel it but not have a word for it and your culture provides that word. And sometimes you may not feel it at all, but pretend you're feeling it because you think, oh, that's what I'm supposed to feel.

1:14:09Alain de Botton:And is there some of this in relation to something like kissing? Sure, there probably are some people who don't like kissing at all. And they end up doing it because that's what you're told that you like to do. And one of the great struggles in life is to try and find a way of loving that is true to us. And even if you don't like kissing, you'll probably like something that's a bit intimate and cosy and private. And it might be enlacing your toes, whatever it is, or holding hands or something like this. But it is important to be able to think, am I enjoying this or am I not? Many couples I've spoken to recently have had this issue around sleeping together.

1:14:48Alain de Botton:It's seen as an absolute proof of love that you're able to share a bed with someone. But many people privately think this is really difficult, really annoying. I like to, you know, wake up in the early morning, do some reading, just whatever it is. And they can't tell their partner because they're under an ideological sort of stricture that says, if you love, you must share a bed with someone, even if they snore, even if it's uncomfortable. And I think one of the freedoms of true adulthood should be able, that you're able to articulate how, what love is for you. And it might include separate bedrooms?

1:15:24It's, you know, it's something that's prevalent in, I would say, certainly British culture and maybe Western culture is this idea of independence. Okay. And I think it speaks to what you just said about sleeping. So there is something I would say in this culture that is very much prioritizing, let's get those kids independent early. I've got friends who actually, who literally the first day their child came back from the hospital after being born was, we're not bringing them into our bedroom because we need to make sure that there's a boundary right from the start. Okay, so the child must know that that's their bedroom and this bedroom is for mommy and daddy.

1:16:08Okay.

1:16:11And the more you sort of learn about the world, and this is one of the best things about travel, is you realize that actually there's many different ways of living in this world. The Japanese, you know, the mums, to my understanding, they sleep with the kids. The dad does sleep somewhere else. And I think it's very freeing to know that there is no one way. Every method has a consequence. What method do you want? What consequence do you want? And I think that's a really awesome one to think about is, you know, So not sleeping in the same bed doesn't necessarily say something about the state of your relationship.

1:16:48It might do, but it doesn't necessarily need to. But then it circles back to what we were saying about sex, I think, in some ways. Some people would say that sex is an essential need. It's an essential component of a long-term relationship. But I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that. I've been thinking that an essential ingredient for a long-term relationship is intimacy. There are many ways to experience intimacy. One way might be through sex, but there are many couples that I've come across in clinical practice over the years who no longer have sex, but seem to have a great relationship.

1:17:31So I kind of feel there's something in the air in society today about, oh, you know, everything's hyper-sexualised. You know, the reels and the social media videos about sex tend to go viral. Everyone wants to know about it. But I think there's a real complexity to sex. I don't think every couple needs to have sex in order to be happy. But at the same time, a lack of sex could pose a problem in certain relationships.

1:18:00Alain de Botton:I mean, just to step back to what we were saying about children being very close to their parents and all of that. I think in our culture, there's this idea that a good childhood, that you'll know that your child is having a good childhood if they grow up fast. That people will say, oh, my child's doing really well. They're really old for their years. A little alarm bell always rings for me. I think we need to allow children to grow up at their own pace, which might be quite slow. Everyone's going to get there in the end. Generally, children who grow up fast are compensating for parents who are still children inside.

1:18:39Alain de Botton:A child needs to step forward and become as adult as a parent is immature. The more immature a parent is, the more mature a child has to be. so bless the children that have got the luxury to be as immature as they want to be for as long as they need to be and they can then grow up at their own pace that's a luxury come back to the idea of um sex and intimacy um let's talk about sexual perversion so you might know this from your your work um there's something called sexual perversion sexual perversion let's take something like flashing all right somebody a flasher what are they doing they're opening their raincoat and they're showing themselves naked to a stranger.

1:19:22Alain de Botton:What on earth's that about? Why are they doing that? Right? It's always very good to look at the extremes and then think backwards of what's going on. The reason they're doing that is, I mean, if you went up to that person and went, oh, good for you. Can we go head off to a hotel? They would run for the hills. They would be terrified. What are they terrified of? Why are they doing this? They're terrified of intimacy. They're terrified of the intimacy that accompanies, that can accompany the sexual act. and therefore they're trying to do this thing which is flashing which will prevent by its very structure any intimacy being possible think of the voyeur who's got a telescope and they're getting off on looking at people in their apartment across the road again if you knocked at their door and said don't look at you know throw away your telescope let's have a tumble in bed again they would be terrified they need that element of distance and that's telling us something really important about sex in general which is sex is a very intimate act.

1:20:18Alain de Botton:And it can be, if your experience of intimacy is fraught with danger, which it can be, come back to trauma, then sex can also be rather threatening, which is why you get the phenomenon of people who have sex and then need to end a relationship immediately, you know, run away. They have sex and then they go away. Not because they're necessarily playboys or girls, they may be that too, but really what it is is they've taken somebody into a very close relationship to them and then they need to get away really fast because it's too close. And a lot of what we call sexual perversion is essentially a fear of the closeness that sex asks for.

1:20:57Alain de Botton:At its most tragic, not to frighten the listeners, but why do people murder people? Why is this thing called sex murder? What is that? What's going on there? If you talk to clinicians about this, this is, again, about a fear of intimacy, that somebody has sex with someone and then feels a compulsion to murder them right after the sexual act. And the reason is that they've been witnessed. They've been seen. There is a danger of a relational bond. And that is intolerable to somebody who is disturbed, traumatized enough in their mind not to be able to tolerate. Why do people have sex with animals?

1:21:33Alain de Botton:Again, it's one of the great mysteries. What on earth's going on? The thing about an animal that is sought for by people who do this is the animal is a non-reciprocal being. It can't understand you. There is no danger of a reciprocal bond. And that's why people seek that kind of release, because intimacy and mutuality is impossible for them. It's really interesting, Alan, you've gone into some areas which a lot of people would regard as taboo or very dark. But actually what I'm hearing is you talk about them as a real compassion, as a real understanding, as a real sense that actually all behaviors serve a role.

1:22:16Too often we try and judge the behavior without really understanding the role that that behavior is playing in that person's life. And although these things may be uncomfortable to talk about or to discuss, it's really important, isn't it? It's really important that we try and have that more compassionate sort of approach to the world and go, look, people are playing out their trauma. People are playing out their complex internal world. And maybe we should be a little bit less judgmental and a little bit more understanding.

1:22:48Alain de Botton:Also, you know, it's provocative, which is why people don't want to think about it, because we are all on a continuum. Yeah. And, you know, even though we may never have flashed at someone, we will have known probably the fear of intimacy around sexuality. It may have been a brief moment, a brief moment after we'd kissed somebody. We thought, oh, I need to go and read a book and be on my own. We might have felt that. And if we felt that, that's on a continuum with a much more extreme version. So the world becomes more interesting the more that we can see the link between who we are and the link between behavior which we might describe as abhorrent or beyond the pale.

1:23:26Alain de Botton:This is why people tend to box their opponents off into a zone called, you know, the monster. and they don't see that there's always a connection between who they are. Let's imagine somebody who's got a political opponent and they think, I would never do that. That person is just a mad person. Steady on. Try to ask yourself a more challenging question. What bit of you is present in the person that you think is beyond the pale? That's a provocative question. That's a question that will help your own growth. Don't simply go, that person, I've got nothing to do with them. Go, right, we're all human beings here.

1:24:01Alain de Botton:What bit of you is in there? Yeah. I remember speaking to a well-known actor on this podcast many years ago, and one of the things he said to me really caused me to reflect for quite a few weeks afterwards. And it was this idea that when he's playing a role, I thought he's trying to get into character. He's trying to think, what would someone who is this person that I'm playing in the film, how would they think? How would they walk? What would they say? He said, no, no, no, no. When I'm playing a character, I'm trying to find where does that character exist within me? so it's really fascinating that we all have um love and hate light and dark within us if we can acknowledge that to ourselves and of course it makes us if if we can travel in these zones it makes us much more interesting people to be around and i think one of the great mysteries of social life is why do some people feel interesting to us even though they're not saying anything particularly interesting but they make us feel interesting in their presence we feel able to share all sorts of things.

1:25:14Alain de Botton:We feel interesting with them. And then other people, we think, I have nothing to say to them or around them. We feel a bit dull. And often that's because we're registering unconsciously how much room they've got in themselves, how much they've explored themselves, and therefore how much of us has room to land in them. And I think, you know, the more you've gone into, the more doors you've opened in yourself, the more other people will feel, oh, okay, in their presence, I'll open some doors. Do you think a good quality long-term relationship can help us heal our trauma? It's essential. I mean, really what we're saying is that the cure for trauma is love.

1:25:58Alain de Botton:And what does that mean, love? Love means somebody who's in tune with us, somebody who follows us. What's the most romantic thing you can say to somebody is, listen, I hear you, to say I hear you, I'm listening to you, I hear you, to feel heard and to feel that all the difficulties, all the shameful bits of us are meeting with an audience. This is emotional nectar. This is what we all need. This is what we go crazy without. Why is solitude difficult? Because there's no one mirroring you. There's no one hearing you. There's no one confirming that what you're feeling is okay. When you say solitude, can I just clarify what you mean?

1:26:40To me, there's a difference between solitude and loneliness. When you say solitude, what exactly do you mean by that? That's a good distinction.

1:26:47Alain de Botton:I mean loneliness. I mean loneliness, because you're right, of course, there is the good sort of solitude. But loneliness is an enormous problem, both in relationships and outside of relationships. And it's important to stress, it exists in relationships as well. You are lonely whenever you're sitting with someone and they say, I don't understand, or that's wrong, or you're illegitimate for feeling that, etc. And you're also lonely when you have no one at all. But it's both those things. There are as many lonely people in relationships as there are outside of relationships. if love can heal trauma or if love is really the only thing that truly heals trauma i guess we need to specify what kind of love we're talking about if indeed there are different types so yeah the love we would ideally have for our children is unconditional love i love you without any conditions and the more you sort of sit with that statement the more you realize that many people did not actually feel unconditional love growing up.

1:27:53But I guess I'm really fascinated by the difference between, you know, there's some obvious differences between the love we have for our children and romantic love, okay? You know, obviously in terms of intimacy, for example, or what that intimacy may look like, right? But is it possible, do you think, to unconditionally love your romantic partner?

1:28:24Alain de Botton:I think that conditions don't always have to be the bogeymen in this. I think it's possible that a condition is a loving thing to lay down. To be able to say to someone, there are things that you could do that would break my trust. that's actually a way of respecting the other person's intelligence possibilities for maturity and so on i think to to say anything is possible as an action is a difficult and slippery slope i think that can you do that with your children well see i think the children are not made happy by boundaryless childhood if you say to a child i love you so much you go to bed at any time you can eat anything you like you can do anything you like they will panic it's it's an act of love to say bedtimes at seven and no later.

1:29:11Alain de Botton:Children will panic if they feel they have got so much power over their parents that they could allow anything to happen. It's hugely containing to know that the other person will at some point say stop. And a little bit of that happens in an adult relationship as well. A lot of the way in which people treat us is to do with the signals that we've unconsciously sent to them about the kind of behavior that we will tolerate. And if we send out a signal that will tolerate anything, the other person is almost frightened by our level of license. You know, it's scary to be with someone who has no boundaries.

1:29:51Alain de Botton:It's a relief to know that they have boundaries because that helps us to discover our boundaries. And a boundary is a very important part of psychological health. Is there a risk that in talking about love and trauma and relationships using words that we over-intellectualize things? Look, I would love that we could get there by intuition alone. I would love that we could just ditch words and all this chat, etc. and just do it by instinct. But I don't think, you know, I think, you know, we've left the Garden of Eden where things just happen spontaneously. We've got to till the soil. And part of that is tilling the soil of language and making that effort to say, I'm going to put a word to a feeling and I'm going to try and convey that feeling to you.

1:30:41Alain de Botton:It's very hard. And on a bad day, it's very boring, but we've got no other option. We are, you know, we have mouths for a reason and they're there in order that we be able to share who we are so the other can understand us. And can I provide perhaps not an alternist perspective, but a perspective that continues on from what you're saying? I think a lot about these ideas that certain things apply at certain times in our life or certain times in our relationships. So in the first few months, as you've already said, intuition seems to be enough. We're falling in love. Everything's amazing, wonderful, and blissful.

1:31:20Then, after a period of time, you realize, oh, I need some new skills here. I now need to find words. I mustn't try and expect my partner to mind read me. Perhaps I should actually be able to express my needs in a non-confrontational way. So you have to develop the new skill of communicating better. I'm wondering whether there's a further stage than that. And again, we're all biased because we look at our own relationships to sort of quantify these things and think about them. And I think I'm at the stage with Vid, my wife, whereby we've really improved the way that we communicate.

1:32:06and I think there is a deep knowing within us that we're going to be together for life. I can't prove that to you with words, okay? I can't predict the future that something won't happen whereby that may change things, right? Because of course, when everyone's getting married, they're believing it's going to be for life as well. But I no longer think it's a belief. I think it's an inner knowing that we're committed to each other for our life. What's your perspective on that?

1:32:47Alain de Botton:First of all, you're a very, very lucky man. You know, and I think don't underestimate how fortunate you are. This is one of the major blessings. You know, there will be people who are richer than you. There are people who are more famous than you. There are people who are cleverer than you. But I don't think there are many people who are as blessed as you in having that relationship. And I think that people who've got that sort of love sometimes can forget that it's truly something that is monumental and that will be giving them a confidence, a security, an anchor every day of their life. You know, if, God forbid, your partner were to die or to meet somebody else and leave you, etc., your life would be in bits, possibly for a very long time.

1:33:37Alain de Botton:you would be unanchored, unable to cope with things, doubting yourself, etc. And, you know, it's a horrific situation. So, you know, like many kinds of privilege, we're apt to forget it. And I think there is no greater privilege than emotional privilege. And I'd simply want to say to you, count your blessings. It's an amazing thing. And I think it puts you in a true elite. I think the only elite that anyone should ever aspire to, which is the emotional elite. I truly appreciate what you just said there, because it is quite easy to take things for granted. And I guess just hearing you say that gave me a newly felt gratitude for my relationship with her.

1:34:26Alain de Botton:You know, we're used to dividing society by classes, aren't we? Yeah. Lower class, middle class, upper class. And we tend to have a financial metric. And then we tend to think those at the top are fortunate and those at the bottom are unfortunate. That's one metric. You know, let's try and imagine society in terms of an emotional class, where they're at the very top are those in the sort of loving relationship that you've described for yourself. That is an elite. And it cuts right across socioeconomic categories and age categories and health categories. It's something that cuts right across. And, you know, we need to celebrate that, acknowledge it.

1:35:05Alain de Botton:You can have somebody who's at the pinnacle of one metric and at the bottom of another metric. Yeah, it's interesting what you say there because I wouldn't want to give anyone the impression that it's been easy to get there. It certainly hasn't. And I've said before on this show that the first year of my marriage was probably the toughest year. We had a whirlwind romance. I proposed after three months. We got married after eight months. The world's amazing. Everything's great. First year of marriage. Wow. We're like, oh, I didn't know this. You didn't know this. You're learning about each other.

1:35:38But I also think we had very good modeling in different ways from our parents. We grew up with the idea that marriage is for life. So both of us, my wife's parents are still both alive. They're deeply in love and have been married for many, many decades. Until my dad died in 2013, I think my parents had a very different relationship from my in-laws in terms of how they express their love. But that's been our modelling, which I think we're very fortunate to have. If you regard long-term relationships as normal or even optimal, at the same time, we've gone through these various stages. And I would say one of the most profound realisations for me is something I shared in my last book.

1:36:27So I won't go into all of it. But in essence, a few years ago, my wife was about to go on a course, a seven day course to process some of the traumas she experienced as a young girl when she grew up in Kenya. And I think it was the day before she left. And I think this is the most mature thing I've ever done in my relationship. I said to her, if at the end of these seven days, you change so much that we can no longer be together, I'm okay with that. This is something you have to do for you. And I don't think before that I'd had the maturity to look at our marriage like that. But I feel that a lot of things you talk about in your latest book from Trauma to Healing, Me and Ved have gone through that stuff on our own, on our own journeys.

1:37:20We've gone through a lot of our pre-existing traumas. And one thing I've learned is that the less needy I can be in this marriage, the better it will be. The more I can take care of myself, then I can come together with her without a need, without this pull, without this unhealthy reliance. Now, I appreciate this may not be the norm, right? Or it may be. It's very hard to know what is going on in other people's relationships. And clearly what you just said is that I seem to be in a very fortunate place. But I would also argue that me and Vid have put our relationship first and foremost. I will, although people would regard me as very so-called successful, I would say I turned down lots of opportunities for more societal success because I realized it would be worthless without my relationship with my wife.

1:38:22so I've got very good over the years at saying no to something I know you know yeah I told you before we started recording I still live five minutes from where I grew up okay I still live five minutes away from my mum 30 seconds away from my brother I have a very grounded important family life and so when I get invited to come down to this or that in London half the time I'm like you know what I'd rather sit on the sofa and have a cup of tea with my wife yeah yeah and a couple

1:38:49Alain de Botton:of things from what you were saying. I mean, we've got this idea that if love is true, it's got to last forever, that you have to hold on to someone forever. I think sometimes one of the most generous things that we can do, if we're with somebody who needs to grow or develop in a way that might not encompass us, and sometimes it doesn't, to be able to let them go with grace, to be able to say, I know what you need and I can't provide it for you. You know, we often look at breakups always is as a tragedy rather than sometimes at least as two people realizing they can't give each other what they need to grow.

1:39:27Alain de Botton:What makes breakup so difficult is that very often people can't explain this to one another. They haven't got the words to say. But if you are more emotionally mature and evolved to be able to say, you know, go off into the world, leave me, don't feel guilty about that, but grow. What a gift that is to be able to give that to someone and also to receive that kind of message. There's something else I want to talk about that just came to mind about love and trauma. You know, I was saying earlier, we've got this idea that love can heal trauma, that if you've had a traumatic past, to be the recipient of love is a beautiful and lovely and healing thing.

1:40:13Alain de Botton:I agree. But let's not forget that when that tends to happen, what can occur is that the first and instinctive response of the traumatised person in the face of love is to reject love, to eject love, because they can't metabolise the goodness that's in love. It's like people who've been kept prisoners in a camp. The doors are open. They've been leading a life with a very deprived diet. suddenly they're given a banquet and they rush towards the food that food can make them ill and even kill them because they can't their stomach has had to shrink so much it can't deal with the richness on offer and what can fatefully happen is if you try to love someone who's come from a place of trauma what you can find is that even though they want to love you they want to be with you.

1:41:04Alain de Botton:What they end up doing is ejecting you from their life. And they don't even know why. It just feels too much. It feels uncomfortable. It feels stifling. They can't even quite put words on it. But if they were able to phrase it, what they'd really say is, please don't love me so intensely because I've had to survive. But in order to survive, I've had to reduce my need for love so much that I'm being asphyxiated by something that's so beautiful and so necessary. Alain, may I read you something from your latest book? Yeah. Chapter one, the very start, causes of trauma. Few of us can hope to get through love unscathed.

1:41:50The threats to us are so numerous and so stubborn that we are rarely far from opportunities for suffering, terror, agony, and despair. Arrayed against us are awkward parents, treacherous friends, chaotic societies, disturbed exes, sterile workplaces, errant lovers, unreliable bodies and ungrateful children. The odds of making it through the obstacle course, substantially unharmed, are negligible. Are you a pessimist?

1:42:26Alain de Botton:I sometimes think I might even say it somewhere in the book you know there's a cup of human sorrow imagine there's a cup holding tears or a poison I think that all of us probably have to drink from that cup of human sorrow at some point in life we probably have to take a big gulp of human sorrow and it tends to happen at different moments over different things for different people the chances of getting through this life substantially unscathed are minimal. Remember the famous last line of Oedipus Rex, call no man happy till he dies. Great wisdom of the tragic Greeks. In other words, think of the Greek worldview.

1:43:07Alain de Botton:The gods are watching all of us and they don't think that anyone is a god. Any human is a god. And the lot of human beings is to suffer and to be open to suffering. And the Greeks were very alive to the concept of hubris. Hubris is, you know, getting too big for your boots, thinking you've cracked it, thinking you know what's going on. And, you know, all the Greek, you know, the story of Daedalus and Icarus, etc. All the Greek stories are about people who forget that they're human beings, they're not gods, and they are vulnerable. We are all so vulnerable to disaster, which is why we need to be so grateful every single day that we don't have a catastrophe on our plates.

1:43:47Alain de Botton:We need to be grateful. And we need to be so kind, so kind to others who do not have the fortune that currently we might enjoy, because it's all temporary. And life really has a habit of turning things over. How old are you? 47. Okay, you're 47. And your life's been charmed in many ways. You've worked extremely hard. You've got to, you know, an amazing place. But you're still young. And goodness knows what the gods have got in store. Now we're going to touch some wood here and say, you know, we hope it all goes well. But your level of exposure to accident is enormous because you're a human being.

1:44:26Alain de Botton:And all of us are in that position. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm 47, right? And obviously, I've shared a couple of things with you which are a reflection of my life today. There's been many struggles along the way. I've had sick parents for much of my adult life. I've had huge amounts of adult caring responsibilities for much of my life for a variety of different people. My dad died in 2013, which I really, really struggle with for a long, long time. But I would argue that it's all those experiences, that suffering, if you will, which has led me to the place that I am today. You often reference the tenet of Buddhism, life is suffering.

1:45:18And I'm certainly not here to say that Buddhism got it wrong, right? Definitely not as arrogant to think that. Having said that, I believe that, well, that's one way of looking at the world. I actually feel very content a lot of the time, Am I? So I would say I'm an optimist. So it's not that I disagree with those words. I think they're beautiful words. At the same time, I think I I wonder, maybe it goes back to what you said about my relationship with it. Maybe I don't realize how lucky I am. Maybe that foundation that I've got, that I feel I have, allows me to go, yeah, life is great.

1:46:02Alain de Botton:Don't get me wrong. To believe that life is suffering, that life is dark, that there's a lot of pain coming our way, etc. This is not a one-way ticket to grief, sorrow, and despair. It's actually a ticket to lovely things. appreciation, joy, giggling, dancing in the kitchen late at night, hugging those who are close to you, taking pleasure in small things, cinnamon buns, hot baths, the first day of spring. We will love these with all our heart, not because our life is without suffering, but because we know suffering. It's when we know that there's darkness, that the light stands out. And so therefore, there's nothing incompatible between feeling intensely that life is full of suffering and also experiencing every joy that it can provide us yeah it's interesting one of my best mates a few years ago found out that his son had a non-malignant brain tumor and one of the things he's done since then is he always says yes so whenever his child says oh hey daddy can we do this or can we do that?

1:47:11He says, yes. And I remember hearing that going, wow, that's lovely. I very much tried to then apply that with my own children, you know, take the suffering and turn it into appreciation and go, well, what would life look like if every time my daughter said, hey, daddy, can we throw the netball in the garden? Even if I've got 20 emails to write and get back to and people are respecting them from me, what if I just thought, yeah, actually, you know what, let's go play an apple. But of course you can go to another extreme, can't you? Like you were saying before, you can go pendulum the other way.

1:47:46But I definitely want to just highlight the point that I think my dad dying, seeing my mum nearly die three years ago. And with my mum now, mum is still alive. And every time I go around and see mum, which is most days, because I live five minutes away, I have an appreciation now that I didn't have four years ago. because I'm like, oh my God, I never thought I'd have these moments again. So every time now I was special, but it needed the suffering in order to give me the appreciation.

1:48:20Alain de Botton:Which is why, you know, there's that annoying thought experiment that people will constantly throw at us, philosophy constantly throws at us, which is measured against the possibility that you will be dead tonight. How does your life look now? You know, how are all the decisions that you're making day to day, how do they stack up against the perspective of death? and most of us when we hear that always have to recalibrate we think oh i'm probably not doing enough of that i'm probably doing too much of this and that's showing us that that our inner compass is is always you know losing sight of true north and so using that graveyard as you know this is why for centuries a skull was seen as a great thing to put on your table because every now and then you just look at the skull and you think right i'm heading towards that so how much does it matter that i should you know this person irritated me or this person said this etc to measure everything we're doing every day against the bellwether of death is a wonderful way to give your life meaning.

1:49:12Yeah. At the end of this book, you talk about healing trauma and you split it up into things to avoid and things to aim for. Things to avoid were things like too many commitments, the wrong people, status, news and phones. Can you elaborate on any of those and why it's important when healing trauma that we think about not only what we can do, but what we can avoid? Sure.

1:49:40Alain de Botton:I mean, the environment is huge, has a huge influence on our state of mind. And very often people will say, you know, I'm not in a good frame of mind. And you say, oh, just tell me what you've been up to, you know, for the last week or so. And they'll go, all right, okay, well, I flew to Berlin, and then I flew to New York, and then I'm just back from a conference. And then I've got written three papers and then my children, one of my children needed to be driven halfway across the country, etc. And they're still only at Wednesday. And you think, hang on a minute. And you're worrying about why your mind is not as steady as it should be.

1:50:11Alain de Botton:We take extraordinary risks with our mental sense of balance by stuffing our calendars full of events and not noticing when we're slipping out of our minds. I mean, we are sensitive, very sensitive instruments, You know, all of us sharing a brain with the person who, you know, Mozart wrote his symphonies, Van Gogh made his paintings, etc. We all have those sort of brains, brains of infinite sensitivity. And so even if we're not great musicians or great artists, we share in their, you know, receptivity to the ups and downs of life and to the color and the beauty and the horror and the pain. And we tend not to give our lives the time that they deserve to be properly felt.

1:50:54Alain de Botton:And I think, you know, one of the ways of defining mental well-being is a life where you are able to let events resonate as they need to. If something's happened, they always carry a resonance. Five minutes of living might require 10 minutes or 20 minutes of processing. Something might have happened in five minutes that needs to reverberate properly through our system. If we're constantly on to the next thing, then we're accumulating these stifled resonances. And in the end, what you get is mental illness. Yeah. Too many commitments, you know, things to avoid. That was the first thing you raised about, too many commitments.

1:51:30And I think it very much piggybacks on what we were saying before about success and what does the modern world tend to value? What does a capitalist society tend to value? and the amount of us who are overcommitted. And I guess that's one thing I've become acutely aware of and I'm being pretty ruthless with trying to address. I'd love nothing more than an empty day on the calendar, which, yes, can be a privilege as well. Not everyone has the agency in their job to be able to do that. I understand that. But everything's got a cost, hasn't it?

1:52:08Alain de Botton:Everything has a cost. And the whole idea of doing nothing, when we haven't got any external commitment, we're not doing nothing. We've got an opportunity to go inside ourselves, to explore ourselves, and do that hugely important work of processing things that have happened normally when we've been in the company of others. So solitude is a necessary state in relation to a busy life with others. People have an enormous impact on us. They upset us. They enliven us. They trouble us. They cause us anxiety. And we need time with ourselves to discuss. All of us have got a five-year-old child inside of us, and that's us.

1:52:50Alain de Botton:And if you had a five-year-old child, you would know that that child needs a nap, that that child shouldn't do too much, that shouldn't stay up too late. It might get quite tearful if it's got to do something quite complicated. It might be quite shy in front of strangers. Our problem is that we're more robust for a while at least than we should be. And so we forget that we're carrying this vulnerable five-year-old child and we jostle this five-year-old child until eventually it can't take it anymore. So think of yourself always as you steer through life as being responsible for a much more vulnerable version of you that you need to make sure gets to bed relatively early.

1:53:25Yeah, you put down news as something to avoid. When was the last time you watched the six o 'clock news?

1:53:32Alain de Botton:I mean well the thing is that we're still one of the early generations to be able to feel that in order to be a well-informed person we should be in touch with all the tragedies and disasters that have happened to anyone in our species over the last 12 hours that's both a privilege and an enormous burden I mean no one previously in history had to deal with so many catastrophes had to fill their minds with so many examples of human failure on a regular basis and to feel that they were not properly informed and they didn't properly belong to humankind unless they had that capacity to take on the disasters of others.

1:54:10Alain de Botton:And I think that sometimes we can't really serve people well who are close to us and depend on us if our minds are so filled with tragedies and disasters that we can't actually help with that are happening somewhere else around the world. So it's not about shutting your eyes to human need. It's about being selective about the sort of needs that you can take care of and attending really to those who are close to you where the difference can be made. Yeah, because often when we expose ourselves to all these negative news stories, they make us feel powerless. There's an inertia within us, a sadness within us that then permeates around everyone, you know, in our lives, in our actual immediate environment.

1:54:53So we're actually powerless to even change those people or influence those people. And, you know, I very much try and live by, you know, I think the quote that I think has been attributed to Gandhi, although I believe there's controversy over who said this first, you know, be the change that you want to see in the world. So we've got this idea that it's always

1:55:12Alain de Botton:better to acquire more knowledge, more knowledge, you know, if it's always better to know more. But I think at a certain stage we think, might it be important sometimes in some areas to know a bit less? Might a certain kind of awareness get in the way of serving those who depend on you? And when it comes to things like modern media, yes, there are certain things which it doesn't help you to function to know this. It's not personally affecting you and it will in fact sap your spirit and energy to be a good citizen. Take that to the lens of health and sort of, let's say, physical health. Not that I think really you can separate physical health and mental health and emotional health in the way that we try to do it.

1:55:55But I would argue that most people, when it comes to improving their health, they don't actually need more knowledge. They've already got enough knowledge. They're not actually applying the knowledge that they've got. so they're under the mistake and believe that a newer book, another podcast telling me about this, is somehow going to give me new insights or new information that I can apply. And actually the truth is, you know, you probably already know enough. You've got to uncover the reasons why you're not actually doing it.

1:56:28Alain de Botton:I mean, people will say things like, I've not read enough. That's why I'm not, you know, creative enough. Or that's why I'm not, you know, getting on it. And I always want to say, look, you've read more than Plato. You've read about five times as much as Shakespeare. You're not using the stuff you've already got. Your problem is not that you don't know enough. It's that you're not making use of the stuff that you already know. And adding more isn't going to help. It's absorption that's the trick, not ingestion. Recover Things to Avoid. At the end of the book, you talk about things to aim for. And you write about things like nature, therapy, retreats, modesty.

1:57:03Are there any that you want to just elaborate on a little bit?

1:57:07Alain de Botton:Look, nature is a classic one. The great thing about nature, the reason why nature brings us so much is that it doesn't care about us. It provides us with a stunning, normally visually sublime lesson in the indifference of the universe and eternity in what we're up to. And so often the reason why we get unwell is that we get burdened by a sense of the unbelievable importance of everything that we're doing, thinking, feeling and going through. And it's hugely salutary. It's a real relief to be told, you don't matter. You are a speck in the vast universe, in the cosmos. And far from this humiliating us, it can actually lighten our spirits because we think, thank goodness, you know, a lot of what I'm going through, it doesn't matter.

1:57:48Alain de Botton:So, again, really important perspective in a walk in a forest or a look at the night sky. These are delivering philosophy lessons about the way that we don't really matter. we don't really matter ain't that the truth ain't that the truth Alain I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation as I did our first conversation I think the new book from Trauma to Healing is stunning as are all of your books it's beautiful succinct you know thought provoking writing at the end of this conversation for someone who's stumbled across it today and has had some insights about their own life. They've had some realizations that perhaps they're in a relationship that is not going the way that they want it to.

1:58:43And they're wanting to change things. How would you advise them to start?

1:58:49Alain de Botton:Can I blow my own trumpet? I wrote a book called The Course of Love. And that book is a study of a relationship. And it's both a novel, but also an essay. and I think it's a book that many readers have been comforted by and learned from etc I poured I poured a lot of love into that book I run this thing called the school of life which exists online and in the real world and a lot of help and assistance is given there about relationships I'll tend to write something for the school of life every day and post it on on our channel and on our blog, etc. So, you know, that's an area where you can keep up with us.

1:59:28Alain de Botton:I'm constantly encountering new problems. And the way that I help myself is to turn difficulties into ideas. That's what I've been doing ever since, you know, as a young man. And that's what I most love. And if it helps and resonates with others, what I've tended to find is, if I'm doing the work on myself, if I've gone somewhere honest in myself, it should ring a bell in the other person. Not always true, but that's, you know, sometimes people go, ooh, you know, how did you know that about me? I go, I've got no idea about you. I'm just trying to find out about myself. And if I'm an accurate scribe of what's going on in me, might ring a bell in you.

2:00:04Alain de Botton:The most personal is the most universal. Lovely. Love that. Alan de Botton, it's an absolute pleasure. I love what you do. I love your writings. Thank you so much for coming back on the show. Thank you. What a pleasure. Thank you.

2:00:21Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect.

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2:01:44So please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks, and as audiobooks, which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week, And please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health.

2:02:27Making lifestyle change is always worth it. Because when you feel better, you live more.

2:02:42Thank you.