Why We Choose Unhealthy Partners | ALAIN DE BOTTON THROWBACK

0:01Hello everyone, my name is Jamie Lang, and this is Great Company.

0:09Well, hello there, guys. How are you doing? I hope you're having a lovely Christmas and Twixmas. It's sort of that lovely bit between Christmas and New Year. Anyway, look, today we've got something really special for you because we've had some incredible guests from great company. And I want to revisit one of my favorite episodes with the extraordinary Alan de Botton. Now, Alan has one of the greatest minds of anyone I've ever met. He's a philosopher. He's an author and the founder of School of Life. And in this conversation, Alan taught me so much about relationships, about how our childhood shapes us, and how we can work towards becoming the best version of ourselves, something I really want to do in 2026.

0:42So if you're listening for the first time, or you're coming back for another listen, sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode of Great Company with Alain de Botton.

0:54Hi, I'm Alain de Botton, and I'm Great Company. What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of life? Look, I think it's always going to be your meaning. And I think that's the paradox in that phrase, that we think of the meaning of life as something that's out there rather than primarily in here, and that we need to discover our own meanings of life. And really what we mean is, what are my deepest sources of satisfaction? Some of the most pleasant people to be around are those who, perhaps through lots of trials, have understood what is meaningful for them. We recognize them often have a little twinkle in their eye.

1:28They're kind of, you think this person is free. they're inwardly free because they know roughly what they're up to

1:39it's funny i'm i'm in a real process with myself and i'm going to use this as more of a therapy session towards myself if that's all right um i find it let's be honest okay i'm going to be honest um i think a lot of us and maybe lots of people listening we find it very hard to sit with ourselves we separate ourselves all the time and i'm in a real position now of trying to lean into what I would describe as ordinary. I spoke to someone once who I said, I just constantly am looking for exciting things. And they said, that's not a good thing. Life is boring. And it's important to sit with that and sit in that silence.

2:18And I still find that very difficult. I think it's getting worse and worse as we get older because of social media and everything. Yeah. I mean, I'm a big fan of the concept of the ordinary, only because it's actually extraordinary. And most of the time, if we think an ordinary life, an ordinary job, people recoil from that word. We have a very hierarchical system of values, really, which is that the extraordinary is good and the ordinary is boring and awful. um you know i think that some of the most beautiful moments are those when people can accept the ordinary if you think of some of your happiest moments maybe in childhood maybe you know in a relationship or with a friend they often are things that are very ordinary you know we we sat down at the kitchen table and we drew some sunflowers and it was nice you know as a child maybe even as an adult um that can be a beautiful uh moment some of the greatest works of art actually depicting very ordinary moments.

3:12We're on a hunt for things that are ecstatic. And though they have their place, we can't live on the summit. We belong in the lowlands. And making ourselves at home there is one of the challenges. It's interesting you say about sitting with yourself. I mean, look, I think we all, all listeners probably will have this issue as well. Sometimes we're sitting on a train and we think, I can't bear to be here. Get me a distraction. We want to put headphones on. We want to read something, et cetera. A thought is chasing us. And the difficult thing is that when we say we're suffering from anxiety, what is anxiety?

3:55Anxiety is often a worry that doesn't know itself, that we're fleeing. And it gets worse and worse because we're running away so much. And the difficult but really important thing to do is to turn around and go, okay, I'm going to be brave. I'm just going to think about what I'm actually worried about. So a pen and paper can come in handy and just a quiet room. And another very useful exercise, which a therapist taught me is automatic writing. You set yourself the challenge of, what does it say, downloading your brain, just writing whatever is in your mind for two minutes. So you set yourself the task.

4:33Just get a pen and paper. Anything. Write anything. Just where you are now. What is your mood now? And you just write. And what tends to happen is that you find out things about yourself. If you told me to go do automatic writing and just write down my thoughts and just do it, whatever came into my mind, I would almost lean into like, oh, I've got to think about something. So therefore, I'm going to write. How do you sort of separate yourself from not think? Because what you're saying is don't think, but think. So how do you do that? Well, most of the time, we become enemies to ourselves because we're so concerned with seeming normal to ourselves.

5:05So, you know, we're sitting there with our own mind and we think, well, I should be having this sort of thought because after all, I'm a sort of normal person. But the truth is we're all far weirder than we can acknowledge. And in that weirdness are some very important realizations. So take love and hate. We don't love and hate as it's entirely, inverted commas, normal to do so. So take our feelings towards our parents, for example. Many people feel an incredible desire to be very loyal to their parents. It's a very natural impulse. But actually, people's true feelings towards their parents tend to be colored by a far wider range of emotions.

5:44And we could say, that's a bad thing. We shouldn't allow that into consciousness. But if we don't allow it into consciousness. Sometimes there can be buildup of anxiety. You know the old thing that sometimes you catch yourself in a rage with a household object. The drawer doesn't open and you think, damn it, why doesn't it open? And you pull it with violence, etc. And you think, what am I angry about? Now, it's unlikely to be the drawer. It's probably not the drawer. Or the milk bottle that doesn't open. You get in a rage with it. And what tends to happen there is that somewhere along the way, the source of your true anger has become foreign to you.

6:20You've lost touch with the anger that you actually feel. Why? Normally because you feel you don't have the right to that emotion. Now, I'm not advocating for sort of random fury with everyone. And obviously, anger does need to be contained. But the acknowledgement of anger is a different thing. And that is important. You might find that someone at work really angered you by something that they said. Now, again, I'm not saying you necessarily always have to tell them, But for you to tell yourself is really important. Similarly with sadness, something sadden us and we don't know that they've saddened us.

6:53And the thing that we know is depression. If you look at it clinically, what depression tends to be is a sadness or a trauma that has forgotten itself. And so people are, you know, the opposite of a kind of, not the opposite, but the twin of depression is what they call mourning. So in mourning, something or someone has been lost and you go into a period of sadness that has a beginning, middle and an end. You know, it's over. In depression, you're also sad about something, but you don't know what it is. You've literally lost touch with it. And therefore it can be endless because it hasn't been found by your own mind.

7:28And this is the mind blowing thing. Our minds don't understand themselves. I mean, this is such a strange thing. Our minds and our bodies don't understand themselves. and it's so odd because we have a name and we have an identity, and I might say to you, you know, what do you think about the world? And most of the time, you'd be able to tell me. But in many areas, especially as the questions get deeper and deeper, you won't actually know. You'll think, I don't know quite why I'm doing what I'm doing. I don't know why I respond. I don't know why I hate here and love here or desire here. These things are actually quite foreign, And the answers take months, years, decades to bubble up to the surface.

8:08So self-awareness is one of the greatest challenges. Little children don't know themselves at all. That's what's funny about age. But by the time you grow older, you think you should be beginning. There's often insights that come very slowly, but the journey is never finished, that journey of self-awareness. and much of our mental troubles comes down ultimately to failures of self-awareness. What are we really anxious about? What are we really sad about? Et cetera. Wow. Firstly, that was, I'm so glad I recorded that because I can play it on a loop in my mind so I can hear. There are so many things I want to break down here because what's so interesting is I was talking about this repressed feelings that we have.

8:54If you were sitting here and you were to tell a story about how you made your parents proud or you did something with your friend or your family members, that would make me very emotional because I have an excuse to get emotional because you're allowing me to have that place. I don't allow myself to be emotional about things or anger, for example. I find it very easy to have road rage because I don't get angry in my everyday life because I don't allow it to be a place. I can't get angry at a friend, a loved one, a parent, whoever, because I don't feel like I'm allowed to. But I can get angry at someone I'm never going to see again on the road.

9:30So I can swear back at them. So let's try a little bit of light psychotherapy. In your past, you know, say in your childhood, what was anger like? Were you allowed to be angry? Were people around you allowed to? Where was anger allowed to be? Well, I think that I was one of these children who, I was like a bouncy ball you threw me into a room and I'd bounce all over the place so I think I was dubbed a naughty child and I was so frustrated I think that I couldn't communicate in the right way and I think my brain was always all over the place so I think that I was always being told off so my anger came out in tantrums but then when I threw a tantrum I was put into another room so therefore I then couldn't make a tantrum or scream or shout or express emotion as much because I was a nuisance, annoying.

10:24I remember I screamed so much once my brother threw up in the car because I was screaming. But nowadays you would see, maybe there's something frustrated with that child. Maybe something's going on there with the child. Maybe they are ADHD or maybe they are anxious or maybe they are something, right? Or one might say, what was it about the caregivers, the adults around that made your difficult emotions, your tantrums difficult for them you know why did they need you to be a certain way perhaps with quite a lot of force maybe your brother too you know that that who you were or needed to be was not quite allowed i mean you know a classic thing i'm not sure this is you but no no but you can be as by the way and i said you'd be as open as you want i mean i mean genuine i don't know but many entertainers um entertainment was not a choice it was a necessity They needed to entertain because someone around them, maybe many people around them, couldn't quite bear certain things.

11:26So I've noticed just sort of empirically that people who are very funny often grew up in circumstances that were not funny at all. And where the humor that they're excellent at deploying is essentially a way of diffusing the rage and the difficult moods of people around. so it's not so much a you know just a skill like any other it's a survival skill um that people have honed in order to manage the very difficult people around them so you know i mean that we kind of know that in popular way the melancholy clown etc but but it really does tend to have origins in humor being something that you learn um because because otherwise people are are a little too serious and often too angry.

12:16That's interesting you say that because I remember Jimmy Carr saying, um, it's saying people always ask me if I'm depressed. That's why I'm a comedian, but actually you should ask if my parents were depressed. Perfect. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, very often the wit of the child is there to ward off the parents' depression. Really? Listen, people come into the, children come into the world and all of us are honed by nature to figure out what do I need to do here to survive? I mean, literally, that's how one should imagine every child. What do I need to do here to survive? Not necessarily survive physically, though, of course, yes, physically as well, but psychologically, mentally.

12:54What do I need to do? In some families, you need to excel academically. In some families, you need to fail academically. In some families, you need to be very witty. In some families, you need to be invisible. Why would you need to fail in some families? Oh, well, the classic one is parental envy. I mean, it's an awkward fact, but some parents are hugely envious of their own children, and they cannot bear that their child, who they've put on the earth, should be happier than they've managed to be. And so, therefore, the child has to take early retirement from various things. And the child ends up thinking, oh, I'm bad at maths or whatever.

13:27Maybe. Or is there someone who would be rather frightened if you were better at maths? So, families are difficult places, and dynamics occur that really go way beyond what we're ordinarily prepared to tolerate. What does love mean? If I mean kind of adult romantic relationships, adult romantic relationships are a kind of litmus test of our emotional development. And that's why very many of us find them very, very hard. They're also a moment where your past catches up with your present because the way in which we love as adults owes a huge amount to the way in which we experience love as children.

14:14You could say that what we're looking for in adult romantic relationships is often a sense of familiarity, not so much happiness. People go, oh, I'm looking to be happy. Steady. Maybe not. Maybe what you're really looking for is a sense of familiarity, which might be, it might be that what you're really looking for is suffering, neglect, feeling that you're not that important to somebody. Really? Feeling that somebody's got something more important to do other than be with you. I mean, this is why people make such, as it were, strange choices in relationships. I mean, I'm sure we've all had situations where you recommend that a good friend of yours goes out with another good friend of yours to go on a date.

14:52And you think these people really should match. And, you know, both got so much to offer the world. And you call up your friend afterwards. And you go, how did it go? And they go, really nice. Really nice person. And you go, is that a problem? And they go, maybe you didn't have that much to say to one another, et cetera. Now, maybe what they're perhaps struggling to say is, this person I encountered is too nice to give me the feeling of suffering that I need in order to feel I'm in love. Because that's slightly the way in which I may have developed. That being loved and giving love is not an uncomplicated process.

15:33As I say, in many families, for example, you're only loved if you do something. if you achieve something, if you prove yourself in a certain way, it means that in adult relationships, we're often looking to recreate that conditionality. And therefore, well, you know, the ick, why does the ick sometimes descend? It's very Gen Z of you. I know. I've been taught by younger folk. The ick can descend in contact with a level of kindness and sympathy, which doesn't feel warranted and earned. It's simply unfamiliar. And so this is why relationships are often so complicated, because we're on a track to recreate patterns of suffering that we don't understand we're interested in recreating, and which we're unconsciously repeating.

16:25So this is why relationships are so strange. You know, we used to get into relationships because our parents would fit them in, or society would arrange marriage. Now we have marriages and relationships by instinct. We get drawn to people. But those instincts are so much more complicated than we like to think because we're not merely pulled by a desire to be happy. We're pulled by a desire to rework many of the challenges of our past. I mean, Freud put it at its best. His view was that we're looking to recreate painful situations that we experienced at the hands of our parents, but give them a better ending.

17:09So, for example, someone might be, let's imagine a woman who finds herself very often getting together with angry, intemperate, slightly out of control men. You say, okay, why is this happening? We might discover that the past of this person includes a father who was very much like this. And we might say, goodness, this sounds awful. This is ever going no end. The hopeful psychotherapeutic answer is yes, because what the person's doing is not looking to suffer forever. What they're looking is to understand the pattern and solve it, ideally with somebody that they can go on a journey with, which is why, you know, if you had an angry father and you come across a completely calm person, that might not be that interesting.

17:52If you come across somebody who feels the temptation of anger, but wants to work it through with you in your company and that together you might heal from this problem, that can be deeply satisfying for people. So, you know, if we want to be optimistic about the patterns people are involved with, I don't think people are invested in suffering forever. They're interested in finding a way out of the pattern, but they need to be close to that pattern in order to feel that thing we call desire. That desire is often ignited by proximity to a pattern of pain that was experienced in the past. I love that idea.

18:27I don't love that idea, but we actually, we're not trying to be happy, we're looking for familiarity, which is wild, because... Well, it's so paradoxical, right? Well, no, it is paradoxical, because... I look at my wife, for example. So she, her parents loved her. her daddy used to come home and she would get onto his feet and dance on his shoes and she had all this and so she has this immense inner confidence I ever asked her if she'd ever been heartbroken I've never been heartbroken ever and I was like really? you've never been heartbroken? no I've never experienced that me on the other hand I quite like I think I'm drawn to that rejection because I went to boarding school eight years old, divorced parents, that classic abandonment probably.

19:27So I understand from my side why, and Sophie, who is just the greatest thing to me, I think she's the greatest thing that walks on this earth. She's quite, you know, if I could try and kiss her and hug her, get off, you know, she doesn't need it. Well, I want it all the time. And so that's kind of why we work, I would say, and I feel very happy. but from her side if she's experienced love then what is she looking for what do i offer her really if she's have i just made this about myself do i do well look i'm interested in what you're saying it's interesting you say she received warm love from her dad and dance on his shoes etc but when you come close to her she goes no because she's too slightly away so that suggests a pattern of avoidance on her part.

20:14And even though she may have at some points had love, maybe there are complexities there and maybe you picked her. You said you were quite interested in rejection and whatever. And maybe she rejects you just as much as you need to be rejected in order to feel you're in love. If she rejected you too much, you might flee. If she didn't reject you at all, you might think, oh, I'm not sure I can get that feeling. Yes, exactly. So it's possible that you've worked out Between you, a happy medium where, you know, in the classic attachment theory, you are just anxious enough for her love. And she is just avoidant enough that it works.

20:51And that it's, you know, the great trick in love is where are people standing? Too close or not close enough? If people can find the right distance from one another, it can work. But I would be interested to, you know, if she were here, to ask, you know, what was it about her relationship with her parents and her early experience of love that means that when you hunger for her love, it's a bit much. And she feels the need to go away and keep you at bay. Well, she said that her dad used to smother her with kisses and that used to annoy her and I do the same. Okay. So maybe there was a way in which she experienced love as a little bit invasive.

21:27Yes. Because we think of love as, you know, true love is correct attunement to somebody. If somebody wants to be alone, you let them be alone. If somebody's a bit sad, you allow them to be sad. There's a more cartoonish vision of love where it's just hugs and kisses and joy. That's, you know, it's, you know, the sort of parents who goes up to a child and goes, who's a pretty boy now, you know, and always trying to make fun when actually the child might be in a melancholy mood. Let that child have that sad mood. Let the child have their distance. It's possible. Who knows that your wife experienced her father as forcing her, out of affection, nevertheless forcing her to inhabit a certain emotional band, which didn't necessarily always respect what she was actually feeling.

22:09And therefore, she maybe has grown up with a sense of needing to push away at moments when she might not be on the same page. And that's okay. So she means, you know. I'm honestly never been more fascinated in all my life. my brain is going wild with the questions. How do we make sure we're picking the right partner? And is life about finding a partner or isn't it? Extreme modesty is probably a good starting point. In other words, we probably have to acknowledge that we'll almost certainly make some mistakes and we need to go steady. And therefore, when we get married, celebrate if you like, but also cry a little bit preemptively because you're going to be in for some pain because few of us are without error in our love choices.

23:01This is a very imperfect and very demanding business. And it's good just to lower the temperature. The perfect relationship does not exist. The more you insist that it does, the more you're going to have an imperfect one. So to go easy on one another, a relationship is always an encounter between two very broken people who are just trying to get by. And the other person's not trying to do you down. The other person is just struggling with their own issues, et cetera. So if that's the starting point of a relationship, it's much more helpful than, you know, we are two paragons of, you know, beauty and perfection and we're all, you know, whatever.

23:36I mean, at the School of Life, we always recommend that when people go on a date, one of the first questions they should ask is a relatively early question is, how are you mad to the partner, to the prospective partner? In other words, the utility of that question is, we're all mad. The question is just, do you have any insight into what your madness is? And it's fine to be mad. I'll tell you how I'm mad. You'll tell me how you're mad. And we won't make such a taboo of it. So that helps, I think, when embarking on a relationship. Also, you know, it does help to go and have some therapy. Go and look into yourself.

24:09Have a basic grasp of attachment theory. You know, attachment theory worked out 40 years ago now. Very useful. Who's avoidant? Who's anxious? Who's secure? What makes you avoidant? What are your triggers? We don't need people to be perfect in relationships. But if they have some grasp of the areas in which they go a bit mad, that's tremendously helpful. To be able to give your partner a rudimentary, but nevertheless, fairly accurate map of the bits of you that are a little wonky. This is very generous. This is a hugely generous act to say, you know, in this area, I'm, you know, I'm fragile. when it comes to how I might behave about the fact that you have lots of friends, or that you're often down about something, or that you're not punctual or whatever.

24:55These things are difficult. And the reason why relationships get so bitter is that people fail to remember the complicated, in a way, very understandable reasons for why their partner is as difficult as they are. If you can remember, okay, what I'm dealing with is not an enemy who's trying to ruin my life, but someone who really struggled with their father when they were five. That's why it's so hard for them to do that thing in the kitchen that I'd like them to do. They're not trying to ruin my life. They're just trying to cope in their own way. And we forget this. It's so hard. But there should be a patron saint of this.

25:32And there should be reminders before and after the news that this is what we all need to do. I love that, that you should look at relationships as we're both broken individuals and we're just trying to figure this out together. So if you are in an argument with your partner or your loved one or whoever it is, then how is the best way to communicate with each other?

25:51The number one way to unwind a particularly tense standoff is always to give your partner or friend, colleague, whatever, a sense that you are listening to what it is that they're saying. You don't have to agree, but you have to listen. and a very simple way is to go, I hear you. But an even better way, this is what they teach you in class 101 when you could try and train in psychotherapy, is you reflect back to them what they're saying. So they're saying, you know, it's all terrible because of this, that, and the other. And rather than going, okay, yes, I hear you, you say, okay, so I'm hearing that when you went to work, your boss did this and then they did that and you felt this and that way it's left you feeling, And they go, yes, yes, you understand me because you've paraphrased their feeling.

26:37And I can't tell you how satisfying that is. So paraphrasing what someone has just said to you, asking them what it is, and then massively lowers the temperature because immediately someone feels heard. And the moment they feel heard, they're then ready to hear you. So if you do this for somebody, they will then do it back to you. And then you're in a virtuous circle and off you go. Fighting fire is the worst idea, isn't it? Love can be really painful though. And I think a lot of people listening or in this room or maybe yourself, I know I have, we've experienced heartbreak and it's an awful pain.

27:15I remember when I was 16 years old experiencing heartbreak, I honestly didn't know what shoe to put on. It was the worst thing in the world. How do you navigate your way through heartbreak? First of all, to acknowledge that it is one of the worst things that can befall you, proper heartbreak. And of course, the people who break our hearts really badly are not horrible people. I mean, if they were just the horrible people, we'd be fine. The thing you really have to worry about is heartbreak by nice people. The people who are really kind to us for a long time, they get under our skin, they understand our pains, they're truly sweet.

27:50They sit with us through our crises, they are our best friend. And then one day, for whatever reason, they go elsewhere. This is the devastating thing. The ones who come and go and blow hot and cold for a few minutes, we'll get over them. It's the nice ones. That old expression, grief is the price we pay for love. Well, there'll be a lot of grief if there was a lot of love. So it's kindness that undoes us. It's really kindness. And ultimately what happens, I think, in heartbreak is that we lay ourselves bare to somebody. We give ourselves to someone. And then when they go, we are no one anymore because, as it were, the we who lived with them and was with them is no longer viable.

28:38And we have to, as it were, recreate ourselves. We have to go back through every experience and unpick it and create new and parallel memories and unwind all the things that we shared. It is a sort of rebirth. And it is one of the most devastating things. And most of us will probably experience heartbreak, proper heartbreak, only a few times in our lives. But when we do, we need to pull up the white flag and go, I'm not going to be well here for a while, and give ourselves time. I mean, the great thing in the Jewish tradition, when somebody dies, you're allowed to mourn for a year. Official mourning period is a year.

29:18And during that year, it's acknowledged that you will not be entirely yourself. You might be wailing. You might be wanting company all the time. You might be wanting company another time. You might be eating too much, too little, whatever it is. You're going to be heavily unbalanced. And the key thing is everybody knows it. And we need a sort of similar version of this because it is also a death when we lose someone who really matters to us, that we're not going to be ourselves. And it could be six months, three months. It could be a year. It could be more. It could be more depending on what the relationship meant to us.

29:48Have you ever experienced heartbreak? I have. I have. And as I say, one wouldn't wish it upon one's worst enemy. It is. It's horrendous. It is horrendous. Because it is a destruction of oneself.

30:03There are two questions I really want to ask. But the first one, I want to give you a quote, which I think is about self-awareness. The quote is, everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themselves. We go through life wanting to change, create suites, create a podcast, create a business, be the most popular, whatever it is. We never think about, oh, what can we do to ourselves? Because actually, what we should be doing throughout our lives is becoming the best version of ourselves. That's actually what life really is about. Firstly, do you agree with that? Yes, partly.

30:34I mean, yes, yes. And I think, in a weird way, what comes to mind is the word love. Because what makes this possible, you know, how do you become the best version of yourself? you have to you probably need the help of other people you know it can't just be done alone that's the you know working on yourself actually requires other people i agree um and and it requires an attitude of love i don't mean romantic love i mean care um attention uh sympathy compassion all of these things that can get wrapped under the word love um and a lot of the time we know we don't have it and we don't have enough of it we're we're raw um from you know The word trauma is much overused, but it's a useful word for describing what many of us go through and have been through, which is experiences that have not been properly digested, pains that have not been overcome and that impede our development.

31:26So, look, I do agree with you. If we were able to radiate to those immediately around us the care, the love, the sympathy that they are owed, and if we were able to do that reliably, of course, the world would hugely improve. Big question then, if you suggest that lots of who we are is because of what happened to us as kids and childhood, is it then nature or nurture? I think to a huge extent it is nurture. And if you look at people and the strange or difficult things they're doing as adults, a really useful question is to ask oneself, perhaps them, subtly, in what way was this at some point useful for you to behave like this?

32:19Because most of the logic of people's odd or difficult behavior is rooted in childhood, where it once made sense. So, for example, take somebody who, in relationships, finds it incredibly hard to connect with anyone. And, you know, we call this person closed or avoidant or whatever. And for people who are trying to get involved in relationships with this person, this could seem like a real bore, why they like this, why they always elsewhere in their minds, etc. etc. A law of psychological nature would say, look for a moment when in their life that pattern of behavior made sense. And it might be that they lost a parent really early on.

33:01And it's really helpful if you lost a parent early on not to feel anything. It's really, really helpful. It's really clever of their younger self to have worked out that not feeling is a wonderful survival strategy. The problem is that our survival strategies tend to outlive the original situation for which they were devised. They go on to have an afterlife, which is hugely destructive. So someone can't stop not feeling, even though the original circumstances where that not feeling was necessary have gone. Or, you know, we're talking about funny people. Imagine somebody who grows up in an environment where humor is really important for survival.

33:35You know, they've got a depressed parent, they need to cheer them up, et cetera. So they crack jokes. But then in adulthood, you meet them and you think this person can't be serious. They are constantly cracking jokes, but they can't access anything more sincere or authentic. And this book, a person becomes maddening and really frustrating to be around. But again, if one asks, when did this make sense? And the goal of psychotherapy is, can we help a person to go back to when that pattern made sense? And if a person realizes it, they can be free, first of all, to realize why they're doing what they're doing.

34:09Most importantly, they can start to look at their pattern with compassion, because often what happens is, and what prevents people from changing is, people are made to feel guilty or ashamed for doing what they do. Oh, you're an avoidant person. What a bad person you are. Or you can't be serious. What an awful person. No one ever changes, talking about change. No one ever changes when they're hectored and bullied and feel under pressure. We tend to change when we feel in the presence of a loving audience. That's when we feel ready to change because Because change requires an incredible acknowledgement of mistakes and wrong byways, etc.

34:47We don't tend to do, we get defensive. If somebody is attacking us, we're defensive. If somebody's loving towards us and says, you deserve compassion for that thing that you do. Even frankly, why did you start drinking? Why are you addicted to alcohol? If somebody's hectoring us, it's going to be very hard. If someone says, you know, you learned to numb yourself because at a cruelly early age, you encountered things that were unbearable, you know, that can provide a backdrop against which someone can go, okay, maybe, maybe, maybe that's how it started. And then, you know, that can be the beginning of something.

35:24You know, we were talking about the difficulties of acknowledging feelings. You know, there is a moment when people take to drink, right? They just, by the way, this is water to the audience. there is a moment, there is a moment where people, you know, if this was alcohol, where you think, I need that drink. If, if you said to the person, what would you do if you couldn't drink? What might you need to think about? What might you need to feel if, you know, instead of that thing that you're trying to run away from? And often the answer is waiting for us. It's actually waiting. And we might surprise ourselves by how directly that answer is, is there.

36:01You know, in, in, There's these wonderful psychotherapeutic exercises where we're invited to complete sentences. I don't know if you've ever done those. Why don't we try it? Can we try it? Yeah, sure. Well, it's hard to try, but let me give you some examples. Men are dot, dot, dot. Women are dot, dot, dot. Life is dot, dot, dot. I dot, dot, dot. If only dot, dot, dot. If you're asked to complete these sentences without thinking too much, in other words, without letting your conscious brain impede your unconscious, difficult, trickier, more complicated truths, weird and wonderful stuff comes out.

36:34If only my father could still be alive. Men are untrustworthy. Women are good. Whatever it is, we might find answers waiting for us. And then if you pause and go, why did you say that? Are you aware of still thinking about your dad? He died a long time ago. And then that can be the beginning of a fascinating conversation. So these are all ways of getting our minds to unclench in order to release their more sincere, but often more complicated and awkward sides. And can I ask you a personal question? Yeah. We talk about nature and nurture and how our sort of early experiences lead us to where we are today.

37:15You have written more books than I've read. You are fascinated by people in the world and questions and lots of different things. What has led you in your life to, be doing what you do now? Okay. So let's take the principle, it's not just me, but everybody tends to do stuff, not because they totally have choice in the matter, but because there's something driving them to do it. And very often people are either compensating or reacting to certain things. So you can just see, like someone who's spending all their time trying to work out what on earth's going on emotionally, et cetera, it's probably a reaction to the opposite, which is a sense of you know, chaos, et cetera.

37:57Just like the person who makes a huge amount of money is probably at some level escaping a feeling of poverty. You know, it's always tends to be, you know, someone who's cracking jokes all the time is trying to escape. So it tends to be some kind of compensation. So I think I experienced a world which didn't seem to make much sense to me. And therefore, I've been trying desperately to find the sense ever since and to, you know, calm myself down through untying knots, really. We're all going to die having only scratched the surface of who we are. Let's be realistic here. Totally. We will go to, you know, on most gravestones, rather than going, you know, this here lies, whatever.

38:35You know, like, here lies a person who barely knew who they were. At points, they sometimes had a flickering awareness that they might be their own name. But most of the time, they didn't know what the hell's going on. You know, they were just like steering blind. I mean, that is, you know, most of the time. There's this old medieval idea that life is like a bird that comes in from the cold, flies through a great hall with an illuminated fire in the middle, and then flies out the other end of this great hall. And it's an instant of illumination and warmth, but it's blackness on both sides. And it is that.

39:06We have a flash of illumination, but most of the time we're really in darkness about what's going on. Whenever I think about life, there was this amazing person who, I don't know where I've seen this clip, and I've mentioned it before, where she's terminally ill and she's young. And she's asked the question, are you not annoyed at life? Are you not angry? And she said, well, the way that I look at it is this, is that if someone told me that I could go to a place called Earth and I could experience love and happiness and hate and cuddles and getting drunk and going to the park and I could experience all these different things, but only for a short while, would you want to do it?

39:43Of course I would want to do it. 100%. So even if though my time on this place is short, at least I've experienced those things. And I thought that's an amazing way to look at life. Absolutely. And, you know, we are obsessed with longevity, which we associate, you know, with more and more years. But what we also know, we know that paradox about experience, which is that it's really the intensity of an experience that marks it out. And this is where, you know, we have this odd view of time that not all time is of the same length. There's an hour and an hour. It does depend. That blows my mind. Sure.

40:19It blows my mind. And it tends to be, of course, you know, we know that there's people called artists and they seem to make more of time than other people. So they'll, you know, they'll look at a flower and then they'll paint a picture of it. And you think, wow, that picture, that flower was really significant to them. They saw a lot in that. Children are also great at deepening time. You know, they go on holiday and there's a bucket and a spade and they will make something special of that moment. And that moment stays throughout life. So, you know, one of the tricks is not so much to lengthen your life as to deepen your life.

40:56I've had bouts of really bad anxiety, right, in my life, like many people have. And the really scary thing about that is you think it's never going to end. And so when you first have it, which I did when I was 22 years old, and I had it from a panic attack, I thought I'm like this forever. and that is a dare I say it it's sort of a so it's a very scary place to be because you don't want to live like that forever why would you? so how do you then cling on and keep going and you have to because you have to have that belief so what do you say to people who are potentially feeling a certain way or they don't want to go down the route because maybe they sit in that uncomfortable space but it might be a year, two years three years, four years Is it, you know what I mean?

41:40Look, I think what can be tremendously helpful is to broaden the sense of what is normal. Yeah, because what is normal? Well, exactly. It's far broader than what we think. And what tends to happen is that people get a double layer of sort of punishment or self-punishment. They think, you know, not only am I anxious, but I'm anxious that I'm anxious. You know, not only am I angry, I'm angry that I'm angry. You add punishment upon punishment. If you broaden the picture of what's normal and you say, you know, a lot of us, even though it's not, you know, it's not generally spoken about, many of us are a lot more anxious than we discuss.

42:14Many of us are a lot sadder than we discuss. And I think that's why good friendships, deep friendships are often forums, arenas in which people are able to broaden the sense of what is normal to be and do. So good friends will go, anyone else been weeping on the floor, thinking it's all over? Anyone else been raging at the bathroom mirror, whatever it is, that suddenly there's a sense of, we know life's more complicated than the adverts say. We know we're all madder, stranger, but also more beautiful, more ecstatic, more interesting. But the picture is broader. And that's what a good friend should be.

42:57That's what a good friendship should be. It's not, how's everything? Oh, great. No, things are wilder and weirder, but here's someone that I can share that with. And that's an enormous relief. And you mentioned about anxiety. One of the most relaxing things I find in a moment of anxiety is to find somebody else who is similarly anxious in order to share the basic normality and the fundamental legitimacy of the anxiety that one is going through. Because the most frightening thing, and that's why anxiety often happens in situations, if you observe it, where other people are not anxious or don't seem to be anxious.

43:32So in other words, I'm going to the party. Everyone else is normal at the party. I'm the anxious one. So you pit yourself against a presumed opponent or companion who does not have the vulnerability you have. The way to unwind it is to go, imagine if seven other people at that party were also extremely anxious. It starts to lower the temperature. It's like, ah, okay. Imagine if we thought, I mean, the conversation has really broadened. 10 years ago, no one talked about mental health. 20 years ago, they didn't. Nowadays, there's more of a sense that we have something called physical health and we have something called mental health.

44:06Now, what is mental ill health? We used to picture it as craziness, something abstract, something strange. We can't even talk about it. It's for lunatics. It's going on somewhere else and it can't be put into words. Now what we're realizing is that mental ill health has a lot in common with what everybody knows about. Mental ill health is just states that we all know about without the breaks being applied. In other words, it's runaway. It's runaway anxiety. It's runaway sadness. It's runaway self-hatred. So, you know, an ordinary person will go, I don't much like myself today. A mentally unwell person will go, I can't stand myself today, not only today, but also yesterday and tomorrow and the next day.

44:49And frankly, I want to do away with myself. In other words, it's ordinary self-hatred without the breaks on. So that's something that we should all get to grips with. You know, when you think, oh, so-and-so has got mental health problems. What we really mean is they're probably a bit like you when you had that wobble about whatever. They just can't stop it. There's no pause, but it's something we all know. It's just without a pause. So that kind of humanizes it and helps to correct the otherwise mysterious mystique that surrounds mental illness. That is a beautiful way of putting it. It's amazing.

45:25It's a runaway feeling. It's not being able to put pauses between thoughts. So do you think you can then teach yourself to put a break on, to put a pause on, whether it's depression, anxiety, OCD, insomnia? There are ways to tackle that because there's this argument that always comes up where people say, well, they're clinically depressed or you're clinically anxious. What's the difference then? Look, this sounds, you know, boring, and I wish there were a simpler answer. But look, think about ill physical health. Yeah. You have a bad back, et cetera. Let's say you went to a back expert. You've got a bad back, or you've got, you know, flabby muscles.

46:05Your muscles are not in order. You've not done any training, et cetera. You went to a personal trainer. They would say it's going to take a long time. You know, it might take six months. It might take three years. You might need to do this four times a week. You might need to do certain exercises four times a week. It's very boring. You know, we'd love a quick answer. But it took a long time for us to get unwell. it's going to take a long time for us to get well. So we have to start putting in place certain practices. Now, what are those practices for the mind? Anyone who's been through this will end up with a relatively personal list of things that work, but there are obviously themes.

46:38One of the themes is finding yourself in the presence of a helpful other person who can listen, who can contextualize, who can help you. One of the things that happens when we get out of order is that our brains, we stop being able to think properly, but we don't know we're not thinking properly. So we'll get completely wound up and we'll forget that we have lost the thread. And it's tremendously important to have another person whose brain still works, if I can put it bluntly, and who can say, hang on a minute, no, you didn't do that thing that you become obsessed by. You actually did something slightly different.

47:13So it's going to be okay. Or even if that thing does happen, there is still X, Y, and Z that you can try, etc. And that's why the middle of the night tends to be a very bad time. We're alone. Our neocortex switches off. What is the neocortex? The part of the brain that is more sophisticated, required for planning, for reason, for what we would loosely call our kind of rational faculties. When we wake up at 3am, those things are knocked out. And so that's why people feel a purity of panic and fear and regret that doesn't exist in the day. Because in the day, there's always a, but remember the other thing.

47:51Now, that's gone in the middle of the night. So all you're up against is raw fear, regret, whatever it is, anger. And that's why emotions tend to be so hard. Now, if we know that, if we know that we're not likely to be thinking straight, we'll put a bit less pressure on our own thoughts. We'll think, okay, I'm probably a bit mad because it's 3am. And I'm just going to bracket my thoughts. I'm not going to take it as seriously as I might do. And I may need to wait for dawn to return. So yes, we need sympathetic others to help us keep steady. We need time. I mean, the other thing is time for ourselves, time to catch up with the thoughts that we've been running away from is tremendously important.

48:38And the less time you make for yourself, the more the backlog of unthought thoughts presses against the door of consciousness and gives you more anxiety, which makes you run faster, which gives you more of these unthought thoughts, and on and on it goes, until often there is a breakdown. And a breakdown is really the mind saying to you, enough, there is too much that has not been thought about, and I can't take it anymore. So that's why breakdowns can be breakthroughs if they're handled properly, because they're moments when an important piece of knowledge has a chance to articulate itself that you've been keeping at bay.

49:09And it could be something like, I'm intolerably sad that my mother died 15 years ago. That's an odd thought. You never even knew you had that thought, but it's there. Well, that can happen during a sort of breakdown period where... Totally, totally. Or I'm sick and tired of this aspect of my life. I'm sick and tired of this happening, but you didn't allow yourself to know that. Or, you know, this relationship is not working. Or I want to try yet again with somebody else, a relationship that I gave up. I want to try and have another go or whatever it is. These are very difficult thoughts. And often we will think of anything else, the news, the weather, alcohol, whatever it is, in order to avoid that thought.

49:47And then boom, it breaks through at a moment of acute crisis. And it can be a beautiful thing. And we suddenly think, oh, okay, it's awkward, but whatever it is, my sexuality is not what I thought. My romantic life is not what I thought. My professional life is not what I thought. Whatever it is, that can be the beginning of something it's so true about at nighttime as well i always remember my dad giving me um a bit of advice he said he always said never ask anyone to marry you at nighttime very good very good and indeed can i add something to your dad's advice yeah never ask anyone to divorce you at night at nighttime either because because both become very tempting after 9 p.m no no significant decisions no significant decisions of this sort should be taken after you know after daylight.

50:34We should be extremely careful. Can we talk about your new book just for one second? So when you do start to write a new book, what is the starting point? Well, let me tell you. Basically, this book is about everything we've been talking about. It's about mental health. It's about happiness. It's about the meaning of life. It's about all these things. And it's a selection of essays originally written for the School of Life, put together into it's sort of the greatest hits. And anyone who's enjoyed this should enjoy that. Anyone who absolutely hated this probably won't like that. So make your own mind up.

51:06But it's, yeah, it's a meander through all sorts of things about the mind and psychology, really. And it's called a therapeutic journey. And if someone is thinking about going on holiday, or perhaps they want some reading for the tube or whatever it is, why would, should they pick up your book? I'll tell you why not, so that has nothing to do with the content. It just has to do with the style. It's quite, everything's quite short. It gets to the point quite fast. And it's quite fun to read, which I know that sounds kind of weird but we do live in a very distracted age and when I write I spend an awfully long time thinking I'm writing for a very very busy doctor who doesn't have that much time because they're saving lives and doing urgent things get to the point and try and get to it directly without making it too painful so that's what I spend a lot of time doing everyone's nodding their heads that is the best way to sell a book that is amazing it doesn't matter what it's about Hopefully it's not too boring.

52:01It's short. It gets to the point. That's important in this. And I honestly, I know how busy you are. And truly to sit down with you and to steal your mind for an hour, an hour and a half has been pretty special. So I thank you for that. We'd like to end the podcast with eight questions. Okay. What's a saying or phrase that always makes you smile or cheers you up? So I love a very dark phrase. Pessimism, as we know, always cheers us up. No one wants something optimistic. There's a lovely quote from the Roman philosopher, Stoic philosopher Seneca, who says, what need is there to weep over parts of life?

52:38He says, the whole of it calls for tears. So, in other words, the whole thing's a bit of a mess. And, you know, isn't there a quicker way, there isn't a quicker way to a kind of feeling of lightness than to think, you know, it's not the exception. The whole thing's a veil of tears. Anyway, so that's my favorite quote. I really like that. what's the best compliment anyone's ever given you? The best compliment? Why do I want to say, I don't mind that you've got no hair.

53:10That isn't the worst thing. Yeah. It's really, for all bald people out there, it's not an, you know, it's a difficult condition. People, everyone... I'm heading that way. I am. I really am. I really am. Yes. You've got many years left. No one laughs about people who've eaten a lot. And, you know, that's a very serious thing. But, you know, somehow the bald is still a fair target. Everyone loves to mock at the bald. But anyway, it doesn't matter. And as we've evolved and we've grown to survive, surely having hair on our head is the best form of survival. I can't understand. Because, you know, if you've got no hair, you're spending all your time with hats.

53:45There's almost no day of the year when you've not even got the sun hat or a woolly hat. So it's ridiculous. But anyway, there we are. What scares you most about yourself? My capacity to get things wrong, to fall into, you know, to get it wrong, get it wrong in big ways. So error, error. But isn't that a good thing? No, error is error. And if we're talking about errors, they're real big errors. Yeah. So, yeah, it's probably what frightens everyone about everyone. You know, that's what we do. Do you live with the regrets or have any regrets? Sure. I mean, I think it's important to live with the regrets.

54:18Hugely. Someone who doesn't have regrets is dangerous. I mean, of course, of course, one has to regret and mourn and think, God, I did that stupid thing or that cruel thing or that mean thing or that short-sighted thing. If we're ever to have a chance to grow, if you're not embarrassed by at least 15 things that you did last year, you're not learning enough. You're stuck. You should be thinking, oh, my goodness, I'm so sorry about that thing because you're thinking, right, I'm trying to get a bit better. And that's why I think we should allow people to get better. And that's what the word forgiveness is all about, trying to allow people to have their mistakes.

54:54but move on from them. I love that because I think we're conditioned to say we don't have any regrets, but I always go, well, maybe kind of do in some ways think I should have done something differently there or changed it or not said that. Of course. When was the last time you cried and why? Well, I think very beautiful things make me cry more and more as I get older, you know, sweet things. Children's books where, you know, Bunny Rabbit gets reunited with Mummy and Daddy Rabbit. It's just, you know, makes you floods of tears Because as you get older in life, you're inducted into more and more awful things and cruel things.

55:29The contrast with what's beautiful and what's kind and lovely still becomes really acute. And that's, I think, what brings on the tears. You're finding in that lovely children's book or whatever, that's where your true home is. That's where paradise is. But you're so far away from it. You've drifted so far from innocence and joy and all those things. and then you see an image of it and you think, oh, what you're really crying is for your own lost paradise. And that's why often you'll get little children and adults reading to them at bedtime. And the adult is in floods of tears and the child doesn't know what's going on.

56:03They've fallen asleep or whatever. And the adults are like, why? Because the adult's recognizing the cruelty of life. If you wanted to design a robot that would cry when reading children's stories, give it some painful experiences. That's what will make it cry when they encounter something beautiful. What's something you can't let go of? can't let go of like a good thing or a bad thing anything you want whatever way you interpret it albums from the 90s that I keep listening to that I should have moved on from but they just have a a savor mentioning no names Spice Girls mentioning no names I'm going to change this question because I'm this next one because I want to ask you something I think everyone has a superpower I really think they do what would you say your superpower is?

56:49superpower power. Look, I think I like to chomp through a problem and try and think my way out of it. People exercise their way out of things. They act their way out of things. I'm not pretty good at exercise, not pretty good at acting, et cetera. But if I've got any power, it's to try and take things apart. So take a thought apart. So give me a thought and try and unpack it. And that's probably where I come to life. What turns you off? People who are too certain about things. I like a touch of hesitation. I like people who add a maybe into things, a perhaps, at least that's what I'm thinking at the moment kind of thing.

57:25I like a touch of hesitancy. To me, that's not weakness. That's being properly open to the complexity of things. And I think that's often a lovely thing. What turns you on? Other than that thing. I think people who are willing to be introspective. And part of that means thinking I may not already know. So someone who says, let me take that away. That's been rather thought-proud. Let me take that away and give that some thought. That's a lovely thing to say. It's a very generous thing to say. And last one, but I sort of ask this, what do you like most about yourself? What do I like most about myself?

58:02That sometimes I can be very silly and just have some fun. And I think fun is quite underrated. Very difficult to do. But again, coming back to why things make you cry. Fun becomes more important the more serious life gets. You know what I mean? So a lighthearted afternoon has a value at 54 that it doesn't have when you're five. Because when you're five, so much is lighthearted. If you manage to pull off a lighthearted moment when you're older, then it has a depth to it. Well, it's quite fitting because our bonus question is your favorite swear word. Obviously, I can't say it on air. I grew up speaking French and oddly, a lot of them are in French.

58:42They come back in French, which is quite good because then some people go, I didn't know what you said. And you think, good, good, that's fine. It's in French. Alan, thank you so much for coming on Great Company. That has been amazing. Thank you so much.

59:08Thank you.