Alain de Botton: Introspection, defence mechanisms, and ghosts

0:00Hello and welcome to Happy Place with me Fern Cotton. This is the show that asks how we can be kinder to ourselves and others. Today, I'm chatting to Alain de Botton. When there is a shortfall of love, you've got two options. Number one, the sadistic option, which is to go off and make somebody else unhappy. Someone has evacuated something negative into us, we evacuate it into others in order to alleviate our things. That's the origin of bullying. So it's a sort of transgenerational transfer of hurt. And then the other mechanism, which is slightly better for the world, but not much good for the individual, is the masochistic response, which is someone's hurt me and I'm going to treat myself like that hurtful person treating me.

0:40You will become your inner torturer. If we could get rid of that, we'd have a happy planet. Alan is the bestselling author of 15 books. His writing is basically a philosophy for everyday life. He's also the founder of The School of Life, which is a platform dedicated to bringing about health, growth and self-understanding in various ways through psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy and art and my god it's helped me a lot. His latest book is A Therapeutic Journey and it basically looks at the whole arc of mental health from crisis to recuperation. He's amazing at taking what feels absolutely huge complex subjects and writing about them in a really clear and really kind way.

1:28And that's the way he talks about it in this chat too. And we talked about some big stuff, intergenerational transfer of trauma, the logic behind defense mechanisms, what a healthy mind actually is. That one was huge. But honestly, he just makes it all feel so manageable.

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3:53Okay, here it is. This is the show.

4:18Alain, it's so lovely to meet you. Very nice to meet you. Thank you. We've got a lot to talk about today. First of all, I'd like to say thank you for writing this brilliant book, which I loved reading. We've seen many dog-eared pages throughout. It's a very gentle and beautiful book, A Therapeutic Journey. And there is a real mission in this book because you start at the top by stating that this book insists that we cannot allow terror, self-hatred and sadness to overrule us and to bring us down. And I wonder if you think those particular troubles are more prevalent today, or are we just talking about them more?

4:57I think they're pretty much constant in human nature. And of course, they pass down the generations. So that one of the most awful things that happen is that, you know, terrified people breed terrified children. People who've been terrorised will go on to terrorise, etc. So there's this terrible sort of intergenerational transfer of difficulties. And I think we are, you know, there is hope on the horizon in that we are starting to understand how the psyche works and do things about it. I mean, we're still at the beginning of learning how to parent, for example. And a lot of this is how generations are brought up.

5:33You know, we know so much more than we did 100 years ago. and some of that knowledge at least is filtering down so that in the real world people are taking action that's very different and informed by the best knowledge of how you educate the next generation. I mean, you question this in the book, is it a modern luxury to look into this stuff, to have self-inventory and to have a sort of explorative keenness to find out who we are and why we are like we are? why do you think it's a bad thing to assume that it's self-indulgent to have any form of self-exploration um well i think there's always a guilt about doing some of the most necessary things so i'm always struck by how people will say oh looking at yourself that's self-indulgent but then they'll go and book a skiing holiday and that's somehow not self-indulgent or something you know it's very odd or people will go um therapy that's very expensive and then they'll go out to a very expensive restaurant but somehow they'll think that the therapy bit is you know the self-indulgent bit.

6:32So that feels very British as well. Yes. I mean, I think there's, look, it's very frightening to look inside yourself. So I've got a lot of sympathy for that. All of us are in flight from aspects of ourselves. There's so much, you know, fear, doubt, regret in ourselves. And who wants to spend a lot of time with that? So, you know, we are so well armed with all kinds of distractions that can keep us buoyant and can feed us a sort of impression that things are okay, which is why often people keep going for a long, long, long time until finally they hit a wall because something is bigger than their distractive kind of resources.

7:14But yes, we're odd in assuming that something which is not a luxury is deemed a luxury, in other words, introspection and self-exploration. Yeah. I mean, like you've just suggested there, people go lifetimes without being diagnosed or without taking any time to look at what's going on. And a lot of the time they'll be undiagnosed because whatever's going on for them mentally or otherwise becomes their normal, even if it's really, really negative. And I guess then it becomes extremely difficult to work out if something needs adjusting, if something's wrong. How would you suggest we decipher when our normal is perhaps not quite okay?

7:54I mean, that's such a good question, because what we're really talking about here is defence mechanisms. And, you know, we all have these things called defence mechanisms, which are ways in which we've adapted normally to slightly suboptimal environments that we grew up in. And, you know, it's easy to knock defence mechanisms and go, oh, that's just, you know, that's just nonsense and we need to get rid of them. But usually they have a real logic to them. And at some point in our life, they're really, really important. And take, you know, something that people go on and on about is the fear of intimacy.

8:27Take the fear of intimacy. Now, it's easy to say, and I know in certain circles people go, oh, fear of intimacy is often a male thing. It's seen as a bit of nonsense that we all need to get over. But let's be a bit generous towards this thing we call the fear of intimacy. Let's imagine you've grown up in an abusive household, a household where someone is raging, a household in which someone is alcoholic, a household in which someone is humiliating you, bullying you, et cetera. how wonderful and i mean this genuinely how wonderful to develop a fear of intimacy that gets you through to the next stage that is not just some sort of quirk designed to annoy your partners it's actually a survival strategy yeah so when you're four five six etc to have that in place to have that as something that you can draw on will help you to survive the problem is what happens to that adaptive strategy decades later when you're in your 30s your 40s your 50s and And let's say you're trying to form relationships, maybe with a partner, maybe with your children, maybe with colleagues, whatever it is.

9:25And you find that there is a barrier between you and other people. Then it becomes a problem. What I'm trying to say is I think we need to be generous towards a lot of the stuff that we end up doing. Because when you see people doing crazy stuff, and we all do crazy stuff, sometimes it's our friends, etc. Don't just sort of shrug and say, oh, why are they doing that? It's nonsense. Say, in what circumstances might this rather peculiar behaviour have made a lot of sense? And almost always, you can either know the answer because you know a bit about the history, or you can guess. I mean, let me give you a few other examples.

10:01Let's imagine somebody who can never be sincere. You always feel that they have a jokey, buoyant, something plastic manner. And you think, where's the real them? And you can never feel that you reach it. Again, it's a bit annoying, hard to get to know such a person. keeps them away from deeper connections with people, etc. But if you're five and you're in a difficult environment, maybe you've got a depressed parent who is really looking to a child, as depressed parents sometimes are, to carry the hope for the family, then you get assigned that role. I've got to be the hopeful one. And maybe you're five and you've got to become the joker, you've got to become the up person, etc.

10:40And then you find that in later life you can't shed that. So I guess what I'm saying is don't just describe people's behaviour as crazy. Search for the logic which probably once made that behaviour really sensible. And then gently, gently, and this could be, it's all of us as well, it's not just other people, all of us, you know, it helps to be really compassionate towards why you might have developed that defence strategy, but then learn to let go of it on the basis of having understood why it arose and why it might no longer be necessary. Yeah, I mean, it's a hard thing to do, but it's essential if you want to change for the better and experience deeper relationships and everything that you've just spoken about.

11:21And I've heard you talk on, for the School of Life, doing these talks about how we have to look at childhood and nobody necessarily wants to. It can be quite painful or it can, or some people are bored by the concept of it, but it's essential. We have to go back there to figure out why we are how we are today. Yeah. And, you know, I'm really sympathetic to people who say, oh, no, not childhood again, you know. And I hear that a lot from people, friends, acquaintances, etc. They go, oh, surely not that childhood thing. And I do appreciate, I mean, who wants to be in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 30s on and be returned to a few years when, you know, you didn't have much reason, you perhaps can't even remember those years.

12:00Why do we need to do this? And I think, well, look, several things. Think about learning language, right? None of us really remember what it was like to learn the language that we speak, our first language. We don't really remember because it happened unconsciously while we were doing other stuff like playing in the garden, going swimming, drawing buttercups in the kitchen, whatever it was. we were actually taking in tens of hundreds of words grammatical structures laws of grammar etc we don't remember any of it but we speak that language now we speak english korean finnish etc whatever it may be um something similar i believe goes on in the emotional sphere without us noticing in our home of birth in our environment of birth we are learning an emotional language not of grammatical expression, but a language that teaches us, you know, what men are, what women are, what trust is, what love is, what betrayal is, what hope is, all of these things.

12:56And it goes inside us. And we have absolutely no idea that we're speaking a very, very particular language. And families are always these fascinating units that don't let on how odd they are. They don't even know how odd they are. They kind of, everyone bolsters everybody else in a kind of normalizing effort. Occasionally, you know, you go to university and you think, yeah, mum, dad, a bit odd. But, you know, it doesn't even begin to cover. We all have come from quite strange, quite local places. And then what happens is that we take these strategies that we learned in our families of birth and we play them out with other people.

13:34And this is, you know, our old friend projection, which is one of the most vital words. You know, you talk about this, we all talk about it. It's one of the most vital words in the kind of therapeutic lexicon. The idea that what we're all engaged with is projecting onto often fairly neutral reality scripts and stories and expectations that were created in us in very local scenarios. And sometimes they're very good scripts, like a script that we might trust people or that we might put the best of ourselves forward. That can be a very useful and helpful assumption to go life. But very often, unfortunately, they're more trauma-laden scripts where we imagine that, you know, if we tell someone a secret, they'll immediately betray us or that the only way to win someone over is to seduce them when actually maybe we don't want to seduce them.

14:23You know, all these rather complicated scripts that we might have learned. And to kind of unpick that and look at reality is a life's work. It's a life's work. And also, I guess it's not particularly helpful to just go, well, I blame my parents. You know, I'm a parent, you know, we're all going to project onto our children and that will cause, you know, problems. And hopefully there'll be beneficial moments in our parenting as well. But we can't just sit there and go, well, this is how I am. My parents have ruined everything. That's not helpful. What do we do if there is a certain amount of rage or resentment about childhood?

14:54Do you need to unpick that before you start looking at your own behaviour? I mean, look, I'm really sympathetic. You know, we're recording this a few weeks before Christmas. It's relevant to talk about Christmas. This is when families leave a pitch. Absolutely. And, you know, there is, particularly in grown-up children returning home after having, you know, been living an adult life, there's a sort of thing, feeling of, I want to get things off my chest and confront the people who've moulded me in certain ways that might have be causing trouble. And I'm really sympathetic to that wish. I'm also really cautious about whether it can work.

15:31You know, there are wonderful stories of parents and children who are able to really enter into kind of deep dialogue. It's rather like the reconciliation between countries, countries who acknowledge that they've seen things in a different way. But this is a rare thing, very rare thing. And very often we damage ourselves when we go to parents and say, you know, there's three things you didn't understand, etc. And then we get hurt all over again. And then the parent gets hurt and, you know, everybody's getting hurt. And that's why Christmas is often a sad affair. But it's about acceptance then?

16:04Well, often I think it's about taking those feelings to somebody else. It could be a friend, it could be a therapist, you know, who's probably better equipped to deal with them. It's, you know, it's a real temptation to return the hurt to its sender. But I think it's probably more mature to take the hurt to someone else and to unpack it. And of course, look, if one was the Buddha or Jesus or Freud, one can say, it's very easy to say, they didn't do it on purpose. And in a sense, no one does anything on purpose. Even a mass murderer doesn't do anything on purpose if looked at from a sufficient distance.

16:41But when you're up against someone or something that's hurt you, it's very hard to adopt that thing. But I think the key principle should be, make sure you look after yourself and make sure you ask yourself before confronting someone, is confrontation with them ultimately in my own interest? Or is it simply maybe playing out an appetite for drama and suffering in myself that, you know, actually I should probably let go? Yeah. And I guess one of the other reasons which could motivate us to look at our childhoods if we haven't already is the fact that, you know, you talk about in the book, we have sort of the ghost of our childhood walking around with us quite often and I'll notice that probably more actually it could be in my working life and outside of my working life but if I look at specifically in my working life sometimes sort of 14 year old Fern turns up who's at state school not doing very well and I think everyone else is just so much smarter and they've got it all sorted and I as a 42 year old have to sort of gather her up and go look I know you're there and I'm I hear you but just shush for a bit because 42-year-old Fern needs to do this bit.

17:46We've all got that younger self sort of skimming around the outskirts of our movements through the day. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things, one of the lessons is that 14-year-old Fern, it was really good that she did what she did when she was 14. That was probably really helpful to have a certain kind of attitude, a certain kind of way of manoeuvring through the world that got you through to being the 16-year-old, the 18-year-old, the 19-year-old, etc. So it's not a case of saying, you know, that 14-year-old was a total idiot and completely irrelevant. It's just if she shows up, you know, in the board meeting, it could be troublesome.

18:19And so I think we need to make friends and be quite compassionate towards the different parts of us that coexist. You know, the eight-year-old who's outraged and maybe, you know, sticks up for their interest a bit too loudly. Well, it was probably really good that they knew how to be outraged and knew how to stick up for themselves aged eight. Is it the best strategy when you're or 30 or 40? Maybe not. Maybe that's when it gets difficult. So again, it's not about chiding oneself for not being clever enough. It's about, I think you put it really well, that there are these different parts of us constantly coexisting.

18:53And it's almost like you've got more around the table. Let's learn to be kind and to understand where each one's coming from and herd them towards a coherent direction, which serves the you in the here and now. Yeah, I think it's game changing when you can get your head around that one. It really is. At the start of the book, what I found to be really helpful was how explicit you were in what a healthy mind is. And I don't think I'd ever, you know, I'm deeply interested in this stuff. And I'll read as many books as I can on these subjects, listen to all the TED talks. I don't think I'd ever stop to go, what's a healthy mind?

19:27It's the simplest of questions. Would you mind sort of running through a few of those outlines so that we can all hear what makes a healthy mind? Sure. I mean, yeah, you raise a really good point. We always talk about mental health and mental ill health. What do people mean? Okay, here's a few things in no particular order. I think one of the things that a healthy mind is able to do, and it sounds a little odd, is bracket. What I mean by bracket is the ability to sequence thoughts in order of their validity to you at a particular moment so that you don't get a thought which, while true, while legitimate, has no place at a particular point in time.

20:05So for example, let's say you're trying to get up on stage and make a speech, right? Do you need the voice that says, so-and-so really criticized me when I was at school and said I was an idiot? Do you need that voice right then and there? Or actually, do you need another kind of voice, which is, I'm going to do this and it's fine. Do you know what I mean? And so the ability to sequence thoughts and arrange them more or less in the way that we need them arranged to do what we need to do is a really important part of mental health. And when you speak to people who are unhealthy of mind, and this is everybody at some point, what they're unable to do is kind of simply say, yes, thanks very much.

20:42I don't need to hear that right now. Able to kind of create a hierarchy of what it's important to know. So that's one thing. Related to that is the ability to be kind to oneself. And this could sound odd or sentimental, but there are always many interpretations that we could bring to bear on who we are and what we're doing. And they range from the very indulgent to the very punitive. And there's no one truth about who a human is. There's a range of truths and perspectives. And health depends on interpreting who we are and what we happen to be doing with some of the generosity of a friend. Now, a good friend isn't a liar.

21:25They're not saying you're fantastic. when actually things have messed up, but they're putting the most generous interpretation on whatever it is that you've done. It could be good or it could be bad. So they're not, you know, they're not deceiving you, but they're putting a helpful gloss, a kind gloss, but a helpful gloss. And helpful is the key word here, which is we need to survive and live. So, you know, it's in our interest that we find a way of making life bearable for ourselves at any point. And the mentally unwell mind, you know, we could ask, why does a mind get unwell? It's because the negativity that is in everyone and that derives from negative experiences becomes simply overpowering.

22:05We have no resource left to combat the darkness that's in everyone. It normally does have a developmental origin that we simply haven't been shown enough positivity for long enough to remain on our own side and on the side of hope, which means that our kind of attachment to the light is just that bit more fragile. It doesn't take that much to kind of tip us over. And, you know, that's why people who have had challenging developmental paths do need to pay more attention than others to making sure that they can surround themselves with voices, internal and external arguments, if you like, in favour of keeping going, in favour of, you know, sustaining themselves in life.

22:52Yeah, it's interesting because I really like the bit in the book where you were talking about, you know, we're bombarded with news and media and most of it is negative, quite frankly. And we sort of, I guess, put that under the guise of I'm keeping up with everything, I'm informed. But at the cost of our sanity, and I think like you just said there, if we have a mind that might be slightly on the fragile side and could tip into despair quite easily, watching just incredible amounts of news all day long or catching up on your phone probably isn't the best idea. So you're essentially saying it's okay to not be informed.

23:25Absolutely. I mean, look, it's, you know, that word informed is such a fascinating one because it's informed of what? Yeah. Just the bad stuff. Right. Or even just the external stuff. Yeah. You know, because someone who, this is an old, old debate throughout philosophy, you know, someone who sits on a rock and contemplates is also getting a lot of news. But where are they getting news from? From within, rather than news from without. And in the West today, in modernity, we hugely privilege the acquisition of information from the outside. And we also hugely privilege new information. So that's something that's happened today.

23:58I mean, the clue's in the word. We have this thing called the news. In other words, the new stuff is more important than the old stuff. I mean, if somebody said, what's the headline news? Headline news is something that came up 2 ,000 years ago and was invented. People go, no, that's all. We've heard about that. As though, you know, the important and the novel belong together. But, you know, as we all know... I never thought of that. It's a very interesting... Yeah, because I guess I've concentrated so much on the connotation being negative, news negative, but the new element of it, I hadn't really thought about that.

24:30And it's really a scientific notion. You know, science is an area where, unlike lots of other areas, the new really does tend to be better. In other words, because science is based on a constant evolution towards greater precision and greater understanding of reality, the new paper on penicillin is likely to be better than the 100-year-old paper on penicillin. And that really works for the scientists. But what's happened is that that scientific model has spread across all areas. So we think that the new in all areas is going to be superior. But even in order to understand something that's happening now, the best way to understand it might be to go to a library and pick out a book written 500 years ago, which will give you a clearer insight into the dynamics than watching CNN on and on and on, which won't show you anything.

25:14And psychologically, the same thing is true, that many of the things that we most need to know have not happened today. They might have happened, come back to the childhood thing, they might have happened 30 years ago. They might have happened when we were three. And a culture that keeps on drawing us out of ourselves. I mean, I think we really do live in an addictive culture. And we're very used to that word addiction being used in quite specific things, drugs, alcohol, etc. And I think we need to broaden it. You know, I think we need to redefine addiction as really pretty much anything that keeps us tethered to a sort of hamster wheel of attention outside of ourselves and draws us away from that kind of introspection.

25:57And that means it could be anything. I mean, it could be exercise, you can get addicted to exercise, you can get addicted to shopping, shopping, pretty much any food, chatting to people, anything, anything. It's not what it is. It's how it's being done. And I think the way to define addiction is that it's essentially trying to draw you away from your shadow side, what you can call the shadow side. In other words, the things about you that are essential, but are too hard to look at in broad daylight. And, you know, we have an epidemic of insomnia. People can't sleep. The way I think of insomnia is it's a kind of revenge for all those thoughts, and there are many, that we probably haven't dared or ruthlessly disowned during the day.

26:39We haven't dared to look at in the day. And they come back and haunt us because I think what we do all have is a kind of intellectual conscience, if you like. I think we're made up of two fascinatingly contrary forces. At one level, we want to forget everything. We want to get away from true stuff because we can't bear it. you know, that we might be angry with someone we're supposed to love, that we're humiliated by something that we're supposed to be above, you know, whatever it is, lots and lots of things that we want to disown. But there's also another part of us that is truth-seeking about ourselves and that won't really let us rest until we've done that inner work.

27:18And the two are constantly sort of in tension. And some of what goes, I mean, the way I like to think about it is the truth needs to be heard. if we push it away it'll come back somehow it might come back through insomnia other place it comes back of course is our bodies you know our bodies are a fascinating repository of disowned thoughts and we know this with our backs right let's say there's been a lot of tension in our lives we're angry with somebody we feel hard done by in some way something but we haven't been able to think about it because we're maybe supposed to be good boys or girls we're not supposed to be upset about this thing we've got a job to do whatever it is and then we get out of bed one day, oh, can't move.

27:56My back is rigid. What's going on? It's not a physical problem. You go to the GP, of course, they can see a physical thing and you put yourself in an MRI scan, you see a problem, the ribs are locked, the vertebrae are locked, but it's got a mental cause. And it's as though a message from within has not found an outlet and has gone into the body. And I think a very useful exercise to do to try and prevent some of these things is almost to interview your own body. Sounds like an odd thing, but last thing at night, lying in bed, go down your own body and say, what are my shoulders trying to tell me?

28:33If my ribs could speak, what would they want to say? What does my back want to get off its chest, as it were? What are my legs really pointing to? Because often it sounds like such a weird question where you're asking your back what it wants. I think it's great. But if you try it, you actually normally have an answer. It's kind of weird. Yeah, you've got it there because because we do know so much more than we allow ourselves to know but we don't stop to find out you know we're as you said we're addicted to being distracted and to not looking within part of that contemplation like you say can be asking your body questions and there was a very specific question that you suggest we asked ourselves that i really liked in the book which is what have i looked at but never seen that's so interesting how do we start to find new angles to situations we think we understand so we might go this happened in my childhood or this happened last week but we're not really seeing the full-bodied story how do we get a different angle of it that's so fascinating because we do become kind of prisoners of the stories we tell ourselves about things I mean we know we know it on a on a simple basis let's imagine you return from holiday somebody says oh what was Greece like and for a moment you've got a welt of thousands of impressions of what that holiday was like and you might be slightly fishing around you go oh it was sort of like this but it's sort of like that and maybe your answer is a bit diffuse and you feel your interlocutor looking a bit dazed whatever and then you gradually compress it or like it was really sunny the food was not that great but you know the you know we managed to do some really exciting things without animals or whatever it is and then it becomes a packaged sort of narrative from which which is very handy to manipulate very handy to get out to other people but it's completely devoid of feeling yeah the affect has completely drained out of it and i think that what can happen is we sometimes develop that in relation to our own childhoods.

30:21People go, you know, what was your childhood like? You might go, terrible, absolutely awful. But at that time, we're totally out of touch. But then sometimes those feelings track us and will find us so that maybe, you know, my old mate Marcel Proust wrote a book about him, you know, that thing, the Proustian moment, which is when you're jogged, your involuntary memory is jogged by a sight or a smell of something. You'll suddenly smell, I don't know, rain, concrete after rain, that distinctive, or earth after rain, or the light at dusk, and suddenly you're catapulted back to another period of your life.

30:56And suddenly you're back in touch with what something was really like. It's like funerals. Often we can't cry at funerals. Why can't we cry at funerals? Because the reality of the person we've lost is not present in our minds at that time, because we're so busy, you know, organizing the food and the cars and the this or that. We almost just are not, we know someone has died, but we're out of touch with that feeling. And that gives us a sense of the complexity, the difference between factual knowledge and emotional knowledge. The market's uncertain. Revenue's tied and hiring on hold. That's why results-driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving.

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33:36So how do we get to the emotional bit? How do we, if we are, if we know that parts of our life have been challenging, but maybe we haven't dealt with the feelings around it and they might still live in our body and we're not sure where to even start. How do you get in touch with that stuff? Well, look, let's take an ordinary day. Let's start with a day because it's the same principle. So every day we get so many sense impressions, feelings, et cetera, most of which we don't look at and we will forget and just tip into the sea, as it were. But a very useful exercise is, last thing at night, again, lie in bed and start asking yourself some very large but basic and simple but important questions like, what am I sad about?

34:17It's odd because every day we are sad about something. We all carry within us melancholy, grief, loss, and we all have an encounter with it every single day. Even a so-called happy day has got some loss in it, but we don't want to look at it generally. But asking yourself, last thing at night, what's been sad, right? There's always going to be something. And it's a weird question to ask. What's been sad? One might also ask something like, where am I hurt? Where's the hurt? Because again, there's always hurt. There's always something. Someone said something. Someone didn't, something didn't happen.

34:51Whatever it is, be giving that, that those feelings time to emerge, not thinking one knows the answer. I could also, you know, adopt a slightly more positive view. What am I excited about? What's thrilling me at the moment? You know, what's beautiful? What's nice as well? It's not just what's horrible, but what's nice? And again, the answers have been squashed by our experience and by our rush towards, you know, the next thing. You ask, you know, how do we do that about our childhood? Well, something slightly similar. Don't assume you know what your childhood was like. Imagine yourself, for example, when you were five.

35:25Put yourself in a certain room, maybe your room. Imagine the five-year-old you. Don't rush towards an answer and simply look at the five-year-old you. We all have got an impression. Even if you can't see in your mind's eye, you've got an impression of that five-year-old. Ask yourself a very simple question. What does that five-year-old want? A basic question. What does that five-year-old want? I mean, I should say, by the way, it can bring up a lot of emotion. Such questions are very simple question can bring up a lot of emotion because that five-year-old might not be that happy maybe but it might want something you know but daring to ask what's that five-year-old want what would i want to do with that five-year-old what would i want to tell it um what's it in need of immediately puts you back in touch with the past in a way that's simply going oh where did you live when you were young doesn't it's not the right kind of inquiry so and i guess you don't have to have an instant conclusion.

36:16These can be questions that you ask yourself often, and then maybe layers start to peel back and you start to uncover some of these feelings that have been there all along. Absolutely. You know, I'm a great fan of what psychologists call the unfinished sentence and those things that they call sentence completion tests, where you essentially start with a word and then have an ellipsis, dot, dot, dot. And you simply look at it and think about the first thing that comes into your head in relation to it. Classic one is men are dot, dot, dot.

36:51Don't laugh. Oh, many answers. Don't laugh. There's some great answers. But, you know, ask yourself that. Men are dot, dot, dot, right? Women are dot, dot, dot. I am dot, dot, dot. Very interesting, isn't it? Life is dot, dot. And we all have answers to those things. They change. and sometimes we really get taken by surprise. It's like life is, and we might say an unending struggle that's miserable and you think, oh, I thought I was cheerful. What's going on? And it's because that is a part of you that maybe you haven't given enough time to. And there's something beautiful about that open-endedness of those tests.

37:30And by the way, all these things I'm suggesting are so simple. They're almost insultingly simple, but they're not. You know, the real work is doing the thing, not setting it up. And you actually say in the book, you know, life or I think you say agony is baked into the human condition. It's when you're talking about the artist Rothko and the sort of feeling that his paintings evoke. I mean, that's that's that can be a helpful thing to land on so that we know that we're not meant to be cheerful all the time and everything's going to work out just OK. But also it can be quite bleak. How do you have a sort of acceptance that agony is baked into the human condition without falling into absolute despair?

38:11Yes. I mean, look, I, you know, think of the first tenet of Buddhism. First tenet of Buddhism, life is suffering. Now, whenever I hear that, I think, jolly good. I'm not alone. I've got friends. This is great. There's a lovely quote from the Stoic philosopher Seneca where he goes, what need is there to weep over parts of life? He says, the whole of it calls for tears. It's always been one of my favourite things. In other words, you know, don't cry about this or that, the whole thing. And oddly, that sort of pessimism is, I think it makes us laugh often because it's the laughter of relief. It's like, God, I thought I was the only one to think it's a bit of a strange old journey that we're on and nothing is really satisfying and everything's kind of miserable.

38:53But, you know, a lot of the time, the best solution to things is company, is solace. and some of the problem of the way in which we govern our friendships is that we tend to think might I make a slightly sexist generalisation particularly afflicts men I think that when you come together and someone says how are you you've got to go I'm great how are you and that you think that the only way in which you can bond over things is to bring good things to the table whereas of course you know true friendship it allows for even requires the confession of the more vulnerable sort of parts of us. Yeah, I mean, I've learned that doing this podcast.

39:28I've actually been able to find and forge a really nice connection with total strangers through pain. We've met at a place of pain. And we wouldn't have if we were like sat in the pub chatting about the weather and holidays and such. We wouldn't have had that level of connection where, you know, I've carried on talking to people for years after interviewing them because we've had that experience. I think it is this sort of strange myth that, you know, we can only meet in a place of joy and have this shared experience. But, you know, I think that some of that, you don't want to blame parents, being a parent, you're a parent, you know, lots of parents out there.

40:02But some of the problem comes down to the way in which many parents are quite frightened by their children's feelings of sadness, melancholy, rage, anger. And from the very best of motives, they censor their children. You know, I always remember seeing a parent saying that it was a holiday resort. child was acting up being really miserable crying in the middle of this lovely resort beautiful day exactly and um and the child was saying i hate it here it's horrible it must have been three four three um and the parent says to the child don't be silly it's a lovely resort it costs a lot of money and you're on holiday um what you want to say to the parent is it's true but your child's actually telling you something different for now the child is feeling out of sorts and they're miserable.

40:52And of course, the best thing you can do is to reflect back to them. Yeah, I'm sensing you're a little bit unhappy. And that's, you know, it has its place. But from the very best of motives, we sometimes don't allow our children. You know, this is what happens to so-called badly behaved children. They come home from school going, you know, I hate the school. All the teachers are horrible. I hate them. The parent says, no, they're not. It's a very nice school. You're lucky to be able to go there, at which point the child goes, no, you know, and then graffiti is on the wall in order to try and get heard.

41:24And then they have to up the volume until such time as hopefully someone will start to see that there is a problem. It's why, you know, a lot of so-called antisocial behaviour is a cry for help. It's, you know, a cry for attention. And there's a terrible thing in our culture that people go, some parents, it's not a great thing. You know, the child will start screaming and the parent will go, the child is looking for attention. I'm going to go into the next room and watch TV. And you think, oh, ouch. If somebody's under five and is trying to get attention, pay it, pay it, because otherwise they're going to want it even more.

42:02And I think so-called attention seekers are never people who've had an excessive attention. They're people who've not had any attention. And that's why they're on a mission to make sure the world notices them. It goes back to childhood again. I mean, you list lots of lovely things that I found very comforting in this book. You know, from the small things like eating figs and dark chocolate and lovely stuff like that, but also having a hot bath because hot water equals love and care, which we can see is the sort of antithesis of the whole Wim Hof thing where you plunge yourself into painful... Oh, my God.

42:36That sounded like ice. I don't know. The fridge is off. That's how it is. That is the ghost of Wim Hof. Yes, exactly. But we can see how it's the antithesis of something like Wim Hof saying, plunge yourself into icy cold water for your mental, physical well-being. What do you think about that? Because it is the direct opposite to what you're suggesting. Look, I think firstly, it's, you know, it takes a long time, I think, for all of us to realise the debt that our mental moods owe to our bodies. It's so strange and, if I could put it this way, humiliating. It's like, hang on a minute, I'm an adult.

43:11I've got thoughts. I've got ideas. They're rationally founded. They're based on collecting information from the outside world and coming to a sensible point of view on a topic, right? That's how we imagine that our brains work. And so we go around thinking we've got these solidly founded ideas. And then what happens is, well, we see it in children most clearly. You know, a child will suddenly go from thinking that the world's okay to the world's an absolutely awful place and everything's terrible. And one can panic and go, oh, my God, the child's gone mad. But a sensible parent will go, no, the child hasn't gone mad.

43:40They're just missing sleep. They need to go and have a nap or they need an orange juice. Their blood sugars run low. So what you need to do is to take them to bed or take them to the kitchen. and we tend as adults to have lost sight of that very basic kind of awareness that if we haven't slept very well right we are a liability to ourselves and to all those around us for the entire day let's put it frankly right because with not enough sleep things see and with a slightly catastrophic temperament we're in danger of you know looking at things the wrong way and so we owe ourselves and those around us to be able to go okay i haven't just reinvented the wheel or come to an entirely new perspective of my relationship or totally re-decided what my job is worth, I'm just tired.

44:25And therefore, I need to acknowledge this humiliating fact. I just need to go and have a nap. Or I just need to go and have a bit of chocolate or something, a lovely hot bath. But as I say, I think it's, if I can put it grandly, pride. We're too proud for our own good sometimes. We think, I'm not this sort of person. I'm a totally rational person and everything I think, you know, people get into arguments and they'll say, you know, Why are you arguing in this way? Do you really think that X, Y or Z? And you want to go, yes, I do, absolutely. And if the person said to you, I think you need to, maybe your blood sugar's low.

44:56You might go, that's not true. I'm absolutely, you know. But actually, we might be fairer on ourselves and others. If we just sometimes acknowledge, yeah, okay, maybe, maybe I just need to go off. But do you think we're also, we believe that we're undeserving of it? Because I can certainly look at moments in my week and go, I could have really done with a little rest there. or a moment of solitude, like something very simple. But I don't often believe I properly deserve it. I think people work harder. I should be pushing myself more. I don't give myself that opportunity to go just flop and don't worry about it.

45:28But I think behind that is a kind of model of what anyone deserves. And I think you're right. We do operate with slightly skewed notions. I mean, you get this in ideas of productivity that in order to be productive, you need to sit at a desk and sit there for eight hours and then you will do great things. You know, office life is based on this kind of very rigid notion of how people produce. But we all know intuitively that our productivity ebbs and flows throughout the day, that actually going out for a walk could be a good thing, that lying down for half an hour might be a part of productivity, etc.

46:02But the ways in which we structure our lives and our lives are structured for us doesn't allow for any of that sort of any of the vagaries of our bodies and our minds, you know, with these rather complicated machines. And as I say, this is slightly humiliating. And so we like to think, no, you know, we switch on the on switch and off we go and we forget. Yeah, back to our detriment, because you end up just feeling even worse and more stressed and more overtired. And I guess a lot of this plays into how much self-love we can cultivate or self-acceptance even. And it's a subject that I'm deeply interested in, something that personally I have to like have real discipline to think about it every day and how much I'm, you know, avoiding that subject altogether.

46:41and obviously you've talked at great length about self-love and there was again a part in the book I really liked where you say and this is probably the sort of more extreme end that it might be possible to fail in the eyes of the world yet remain valuable and deserving of love I don't think many believe that no because you know very few of us have enjoyed unconditional love either in the present or in the past but I think that you know it is an enormous gift and I think we all know people who've enjoyed that love because I think you can tell they have a kind of buoyancy of the spirit a resilience and at some level they don't care too much what the world thinks they're kind of able to have that sort of freedom of you know they'd like the world to think well of them but if the world for whatever reason doesn't they don't panic immediately they don't need to go and kill themselves or or create drama and you know I mentioned suicide not you know as throwaway comment.

47:35I mean, you know, suicide is often the result of someone who is so not able to be on their own side because they haven't had that experience of feeling sufficiently valuable. You know, in order to feel valuable to ourselves, we first have to have felt really valuable to somebody else. It's a horrible dependence that we've all had on other people. And what I mean by horrible is that, you know, many of us don't get it. And if we don't, it's, you know, it's a lifetime's work to ever make up for it. And so, you know, the terrible fear of being self-indulgent that kicks in is normally reflective of not having been, you know, that word indulgent is so such a double-edged sword, you know, you know, what do we mean by indulgent?

48:21And we started by talking about how people will declare something a luxury when actually it's not a luxury at all. It's a real necessity. And people will kind of falsely become stoic in some area and go, no, no, I've got no time to think about myself. I've got to go off and dig the garden or something. And actually you think, really? Really? Maybe you can reorient your priorities. So that ability to feel I can value myself enough to look after myself. I can value myself to endure the criticisms of others and the hatred of others, which is a universal experience. This is not a given. And it's an enormous gift to do it to somebody else and to have it done to one is one of the great gifts.

49:04And, you know, unfortunately you get families when no one's experienced this. And so that's a perpetuating cycle where the whole concept of unconditional love is alien to everyone in the family. And so the children, by a bit from the parent, and then everybody thinks I'm only as good as, and it could be all sorts of things. the later sport result, the financial result, whatever it is. But the point is, it's an external locus of valuation, nothing internal. And that makes for a very fragile life, because if you're constantly having to depend on others, you're so at the mercy of prevailing wins.

49:38You can't be very creative. I mean, we've seen so many people that I would deem extremely valuable to people en masse, like Robin Williams, who took his own life, but probably was valued by millions of people. So it shows it doesn't matter. It's not the volume of people that value you or how much they're valuing you. You've got to imbibe that somehow. And I guess for people that...

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51:38Self-loathings just run alongside their life for a long time. It's very hard to get used to sort of going, I believe them and I value myself. It's a tricky skill to learn. Really tricky, really tricky. And it requires so much, both contemporary here and now experience that contradicts that, that actually introduces someone to a different way of relating. Like, imagine if I could love you in spite of whatever it is you think you have to do to be loved. And imagine having a contrary experience. You think it's only your latest paycheck that deems love. you know there is such thing you know and we know it because we see it you know there are people who love people irrespective of how much uh you know money they're earning irrespective of how amazing they might be at science or technology at sport or whatever it is but we may not have had that experience we may not have tasted love i mean but you know if we really boil everything down there is a shortfall of love in this world and there's not enough love between family members There's not enough transgenerational love.

52:40These deficits of love then create cruelty, which is meted out to others. And so we're in a constant sort of sadomasochistic compensation for an absence of love. That's shit. It's a big problem. It's a big problem. It's really not good. It's really not good. When you boil it down like that, I mean, you can see why we're in trouble globally and on a micro level. Of course, and it's the same thing. It's very simple. You know, those words sadism and masochism are absolutely key. When there is a shortfall of love, you've got two options. When you are the victim of cruelty, you've got two options. Number one, the sadistic option, which is to go off and make somebody else unhappy.

53:17And these are the things we all do, unfortunately. To become an emotional adult is to have a real handle on that and try and minimise that. But we proverbially kick the dog and kick anyone else who's in our way. Someone has evacuated something negative into us, we evacuate it into others in order to alleviate our things. That's the origin of bullying. It's the origin. You know, the bullying child is always the child who's been bullied. They're just passing on. They're letting the world know what's happened to them, right? So it's a sort of transgenerational transfer of hurt. And then the other mechanism, which is slightly better for the world, but not much good for the individual, is the masochistic response, which is someone's hurt me and I'm going to treat myself like that hurtful person treating me.

54:00You will become your inner torturer. So you will call yourself a no good and, you know, a waster, et cetera, like you were called a no good and a no waste. And so you've got in your own head your own worst enemy. And that makes for a miserable life, too. So those sadistic and masochistic responses are, well, if we could get rid of that, we'd have a happy planet. But, you know, the problem is that we've got such an accumulation of hurt. You know, we've been doing this for centuries. We've come from a very fearful place. There's so much fear in everybody's system. And there's so much hurt. People talk about intergenerational trauma.

54:38It's there. You know, what we really mean is that we're all, we've all come through a world where there's been an immense amount of cruelty. And, you know, I was just in Spain recently, and I was just reading about the history of Spain. I mean, it's one thing. I mean, the history of every country is this. But, you know, if you look at the history of Spain, it's one thing after another. And no wonder that, of course, you know, when Spanish people ended up going to South America, They did extraordinary things. The people they found there who had also done extraordinary things to one another and cycles, endless cycles of pain and cruelty that are meted out.

55:09And, you know, sometimes people decide to go into therapy. People go, oh, that's very self-indulgent. You've gone into therapy. Well, therapy for many people is an attempt to stop the intergenerational transfer of pain. And it's pretty much the best thing you can do so that you won't be such a menace to yourself or to others. Yeah, breaking the chain. So looking at a therapeutic journey and looking at helping ourselves to cultivate a healthy mind, just to touch on a few things that we've covered, that sort of editing process seems to be vital, I guess something we can practice and perhaps get better at.

55:42also a level of self-inquiry and inventory self-acceptance and self-love probably again to be practiced and also a delve into childhood seems essential is there anything you would add to create a good framework because as you state in this book you don't read this book and just go that helped me with a one-off challenging period it's going to be undulating for life and we've to be able to create a framework so that when we are feeling a bit rubbish, we go, right, I'll have a bath, I'll do X, Y, Z, and there's a proper system in place. Look, I think it is about creating a framework. And I think one of the key things is to accept that this thing we've got on top of our spinal column is the most complicated organ system in the universe.

56:30Undoubtedly, there is nothing more complicated. And so if life is feeling complicated. Well, it's as it should be. We need to bring a sufficient amount of curiosity, I might say, compassionate curiosity towards this hugely strange business called being alive. And this hugely strange organ we call our brain, which is filled with experiences we don't quite understand, with responses whose origins we haven't tracked, with ideas whose validity we haven't really examined. And to be able to have this kind of compassionate curiosity to explore, examine, and at points edit this mind that might be causing us more trouble than we deserve.

57:17And that is a lifelong challenge. Socrates, supposedly the wisest person in antiquity, was once asked, what's the meaning of life? His answer was, know yourself. And it sounds pat, But it really is the challenge of a lifetime. And if we can go to our graves with just a little bit of the darkness back into the light, that will be the greatest achievement. Yeah, I love that because I think often we go, there's got to be one quick fix and I'm going to be fine. But it's absolutely all right. And there probably isn't another option for this to be an all day, everyday mission that we accept. And we're just going to keep doing it forever and hope that things feel at times a bit more manageable.

57:59And, you know, let's also emphasise, it's quite joyful and interesting. Yes, really interesting. It's not merely a sort of burden. I mean, once you set yourself the challenge of exploring your own mind, it also means you're exploring everybody else's mind because everybody else's mind plays into your understanding of yourself. It means that you look at history, culture, art, etc. And rather than thinking, oh, they're things you learn at school or to pass an exam or to sound impressive, you just think these are the testaments of other people's minds. And, you know, I can find bits of myself and bits of universal experience everywhere.

58:31And so life can also be tremendously exciting. And every time you're in pain, every time there's a reversal or disaster, you know, once the tears are past their most intense stage, there's always an opportunity to discover something you didn't know. And, you know, it's something to keep in mind. So curiosity accompanies us through pain. Yeah, I love that. I love that. Well, Alain, it's been a joy talking to you. I've been so looking forward to this chat. I adored this book. Thank you so much for coming on to Happy Place. Thank you. Such a pleasure. Oh, Alain, I had the best time chatting to Alain.

59:08I love his work because, as I said in that chat, I like that he talks about this stuff in a gentle way, in a way where we really focus on self-compassion and kindness. It was a constant reminder throughout that chat, but also reading his latest book, that that is the key to it all, being nice to ourselves and having a jolly good hot bath. Yes, please. A Therapeutic Journey, Lessons from the School of Life is out now, and it is beautiful. I'd love to know if hearing from Alain has made you want to be more compassionate to yourself. It certainly has me. It's never easy necessarily, but it's a good reminder.

59:46I wonder if it's made you feel more curious about the people around you as well. If so, do come and chat to us on Instagram. We're at Happy Place Official. Next week, something absolutely gorgeous and festive. I cannot wait. Until then, the biggest thanks again to Alain, to the producer Anushka Tate at Rethink Audio, and to you beautiful people. Be good to yourself.

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