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BITESIZE | The Childhood Patterns That Secretly Shape Your Adult Life | Alain de Botton #636
00:19:16
Many of the habits and reactions that shape our adult lives began as clever coping strategies in childhood. While they once helped us survive difficult situations, they can later limit our relationships and happiness. By becoming aware of these patterns, we can start to change them.
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- [00:00]
A
Today's bite sized episode is sponsored by the way, I have tried so many meditation apps over the years, but I've never come across one as good or as effective as the Way. I find it a fantastic way to start off each day and it has really helped me feel calmer, relaxed and more present. In fact, I love this app so much that I recently decided to invest in the company and join them in their mission to get more people meditating. Meditation has been shown to have all kinds of benefits. Reducing stress, increasing calm, improving focus, and over time has even been shown to result in positive structural changes in the brain in areas linked to memory, focus and emotional regulation. But of course you only get those benefits if you actually do it. And that's one of the main reasons I love the Way so much. It makes it really easy to establish a meditation practice that sticks. The Way are offering my podcast listeners an incredible 30 free meditation sessions to get you started with your practice. To take advantage, all you have to do is go to thewayapp.com livemore welcome to feel Better Live More Bite Size your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 495 of the podcast with author, internationally renowned philosopher and founder of the School of Life, the wonderful Alain de Botton. Alain is known for his unique ability to apply philosophical concepts to everyday life. And in this clip, Alain explains how our childhood can impact our adult relationships and behaviors and shares some practical tools that can help us better understand ourselves and each other.
- [02:09]
B
Most things that adults are doing that is counterproductive, that is not in their interests and the interests of those around them. Most of those things have a logic, a certain logic, a twisted logic, you might say, that dates back to their early childhood where that behavior made a certain sort of sense. And they keep doing it because they're unaware that it once made sense and they're also unaware that it now absolutely doesn't make sense. Let me give you an example. So let's imagine that you're a child growing up in a familial war zone. Mom and dad don't get on, they're throwing things at each other, there's violence, etc. One of the things that you might do as a child is disassociate. You cut yourself off from your emotions. So you're in a. You're in a high intensity emotional arena and you just cut yourself off. You just go off and you fantasize. You disappear. This is brilliant. If you are five Years old, you can't disappear, you can't get rid of your parents. You will. You come up with this fantastic way of dealing with it. You disassociate. Fantastic. Scroll forward 20 years and that person's in a relationship and suddenly things are quite intense. And what's that person doing? Disassociating. This is maddening for everyone around. They don't know they're doing it. Their partner might not be able to explain it to them, but they quite. They feel it but they don't. The words of vocabulary, et cetera. And you know, you can go through four divorces before you work out. I'm doing this thing that made sense. And so lesson of psychotherapy is to say thank you very much to that very clever five year old that worked out that in order to survive they had to disassociate. Thank you for this, but now it's enough, now we're going to move on because this is no longer helpful. And you know, there are many versions of this. Take the person who can't stop making jokes. You know, we all know people who are a bit too light hearted for their own good. It seems like they can't approach pain. They're all the time cracking jokes and there's a life of the party. But there's something plastic about their mood. We feel. If you scroll back, there are often people who've had to deal with depressed parents where there couldn't be an acknowledgment of pain because the parent was sinking, so the child had to cheer up their parents. No child should have to cheer up their parents, but it happens a lot. And that person then ends up being manically cheerful, quite contrary to their own interest. They can't touch their own pain because that would have been too hard when they were 6, 7 and 8. But they may now be 42. So super important to understand the pattern and correct it. And that's what we mean by psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is a chance to observe your patterns. You know, people go through life projecting, you know that word, projecting. In other words, they take an emotional response that is based on a situation that they knew in their past and they layer it on to a situation in the present which might not be warranted. So someone might think, all men get very angry with me and when I make a mistake they can't forgive me. Which is why I will try not to do anything in case I get it wrong. Now that might be an implicit projection that you're layering onto your boss to your friends to your child, to your spouse, et cetera. Terribly unhelpful. It probably has its origins in your relationship with your dad, let's imagine. But that was you and your dad. But you're carrying that story into an arena where it really doesn't belong anymore. So a lot of what psychotherapy is, is repatriating stories and making sure that we're not operating with patterns that don't belong in the situation where we're putting them into action.
- [05:42]
A
Yeah. I mean, you talk a lot about how our childhoods influence our adult lives, how we show up in relationships, how we feel about ourselves. And I think whether it's in terms of our mental wellbeing or our physical health, it's undeniable that childhoods are crucially important. And the nutrition we give at that age, all these things, you know, what happens in those early years are so influential.
- [06:08]
B
And I mean, it's deeply insulting. I don't want to believe this. You know, we all have heavy incentives not to believe this story. Because who wants to show up age 30, 40, 50, 60, and be told that their first 10 years are determining their life? I mean, this is one of those awful stories that we've discovered. Doesn't mean to say it's not true. Yeah, unfortunately. And, you know, look, if you look at anybody, if you look at any adult who is doing strange stuff by strange stuff, let's imagine someone who's sabotaging their life. Every time that they get near to success, oddly, they blow themselves up. Or every time a relationship is working well, they sabotage it in some way, you know, and they go, relationship, relationship after relationship. What's going on? Why are we doing this? Almost certainly you've got to look backwards. You have to look backwards. And this is what psychotherapy teaches us.
- [06:57]
A
Yeah. I mean, your book is called A Therapeutic Journey. Right. By going on that journey, us as individuals can empower ourselves to change hugely.
- [07:06]
B
I mean, look, I think one of the great adventures that we can be on individually and collectively is self knowledge. Again, come back to the ancient Greeks. They thought that knowing yourself was the imperative of every human. And therapy, self exploration, reading, friendship, et cetera. One of the things that we should always be looking for is to understand ourselves better, because being ignorant of ourselves is behind so many of our problems. It's because we don't know who we are that we marry the wrong people, get into the wrong jobs, respond in inadequate ways to situations, et cetera. We. We're not in command of our own minds. And one of the great insights of Psychoanalysis of Freud originally is that the conscious mind is a tiny part of the mind as a whole. And we know this. You know, we know that our minds are, you know, planning how to walk and digest food and run various physiological processes without any conscious inquiry or knowledge. But that holds true also for our emotional lives, that most of our emotional life is unconscious. And I sometimes imagine it. We're like a sort of person with a tiny flashlight in a vast dark chamber. And we can illuminate just a tiny portion of our lives. And most of us, we will all die strangers to ourselves. We will all die with much of who we are still mired in darkness. We won't know who we have been. I mean, this is one of great sort of tragedies of existence. We inhabit a self which we only partially understand. But I think one of the greatest and most fun things to do is to expound the boundaries of knowledge. Now, it's quite a weird ambition. I mean, if you said somebody, you know, if somebody said, you know, what are you doing for your holidays? And you go, well, I'm just furthering self knowledge because that's my great adventure. They look at you so you've highly strange. You know the moment when you understand a little bit better who you are, why you do the things you do, why you respond. This is always a joyful day. And it makes you so much more of a safe person to be around because people who are able to flag up their behaviour to others are a blessing.
- [09:14]
A
Yeah. When I think about what I said before to you about helping patients change their behaviors, that idea that knowledge is not enough, it's the self knowledge that we need, that the deeper awareness. This is where I really feel we go wrong with our public health advice or it doesn't work as well as it could work.
- [09:39]
B
A psychoanalyst looking at it would go, you guys have forgotten there's an unconscious. There's an unconscious mind.
- [09:43]
A
Exactly.
- [09:44]
B
And the unconscious mind does weird stuff. I mean, we're talking about self sabotage, right? Many of the things that go wrong in people's lives are not external. They are people behaving in ways that are contrary to their own interests for reasons that they don't really understand, but that often have something to do with their past. I mean, so imagine somebody who, every time they get close to success, blows it up. Imagine that this person had an envious parent. It's gonna sound really weird. Who's got an envious parent? Well, many of us do. Parents, sad truth, can be envious of their own children. In other words, they can be threatened by a child's talent, beauty, et cetera. And though on the one hand they want their child to be happy, on the other hand not any happier than they've been. This is, you know, and children pick up on this. And so there can be a guilt sometimes to be able to bear to have a better life than your parents is a real psychological achievement. It's not, it's not natural. I mean, it's not a given. It may be something that you need to work at. So it's just a small example of, you know, somebody may feel that in order to feel balanced, they have to feel guilty. That guilt is an important part of their sort of mental economy. And again, this may come back to a feeling from childhood that they were only safe if they felt that they'd done something wrong and if they knew if they'd be made to feel bad. So then the feeling of being bad accompanies them through life as a protective mechanism. Very unnecessary, huge cost to themselves. But it can happen.
- [11:19]
A
If there's someone who's listening to that, Alan, someone who just heard that and has just had the self awareness that they may be an envious parent. Okay? Because no one wants to be that envious parent. The person who just had that insight doesn't want to be that person, but is again, acting on their own childhood and their own experiences. Right? What advice would you give to that person?
- [11:47]
B
So look, in the early days of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, the feeling was if somebody knows this, they'll stop immediately, oh, I'm going to be parent, right? I'll stop tomorrow, I stop tonight. Similarly, you know, let's say in a relationship, somebody becomes aware that every time someone's nice to them, they hold it against them. They can only tolerate people who are nasty to them. And you point this out, oh my God, that's me. And then it will stop. The truth is trickier. So what psychotherapy has realized is that insight is part of the solution, but you also need to have a corrective experience. And this is what therapists spend time doing. That when therapists in a room with a client, they know that the client will probably play out with them patterns that they will also be playing out somewhere else. So the envious parent might start to say to the therapist, do those curtains cost a lot or is that your car outside? They'll probably be bringing their envy to the therapist and that the best way to solve this is in that room with a therapist that you can explore that issue, live in a Relationship in a relationship that's unfolding in the here and now, rather than simply bringing it in from the outside, and that if you correct it there, you'd have a good chance of correcting it in life more broadly. So the classic one in therapy is that the person, let's say, who's always worried about other people at the expense of their own well being. This is something that happens, of course, to, you know, if you've had a certain sort of childhood and you haven't been able to worry about yourself, but other people have been going off the rails, you'll. One tendency is that you'll grow up into somebody who's always worrying about other people, always putting other people first, et cetera, at your own detriment. And this might play out with a therapist. You might say to a therapist something like, are you tired? Or I'm so sorry for bothering you. And you might have had this as a doctor. Some people who are, who are sort of worried that they're bothering you, if I'm coming to see you and you want to go and you know, the solution will be to say, why, why are you so worried about how much sleep I've had? Is this, is this right? Is that, you know, you know, I noticed that, I noticed that every time you come to visit me, you, you're worried that I might be inconvenienced by your presence. I, I'm not. Why do you think that is? And so by holding a mirror up to somebody and tracking their behavior, not just once, but over time. Remember what we were saying about sort of the analogy with physical exercise? It's not going to be just once. Lifting up one weight, one time isn't going to solve your muscle problem. Similarly, emotionally, you might need to work at a dynamic within a relationship over time. And we tend to think in quite conventional ways. The task of the therapeutic often is to give ourselves a context in which our true complexity can emerge. There are exercises like journaling. You know, if you journal and you allow yourself to write whatever comes into your mind, just, you know, there's a technique of automatic writing where you just say for two minutes, I'm just going to write, I'm going to keep writing. I'm not going to stop, I'm not going to take my pen off the paper, but I'm going to keep writing. It doesn't matter if it's complete gibberish, but, but I'm just gonna see what is in my mind. I challenge your listeners. I mean literally do, you know, do. If you're listening to this and you're tempted by it. Take two minutes, get a piece of paper and a pen and write. And just force yourself to write for two minutes about whatever's on your mind. Anything. And I would hazard, I would bet that probably at the end you will have learned something about yourself. That there will be something about what you've written that you weren't in conscious command of. It might be that you're much angrier about something than you've allowed for, or you're much more loving, you're much more tender, or you're more full of regret or whatever it is, but something to the left or to the right of your standard vision of yourself. And, you know, welcome to the unconscious workings of the mind. I mean, this is what we're talking about, the mind. We have a hard time understanding ourselves because we don't allow, we don't create mechanisms where we can unspool the tightly bound truths about who we are.
- [15:52]
A
This idea that we need time to allow the inner workings of our mind to emerge I think is fascinating. I'm immediately drawn to something I say quite a lot, which is, I believe, the most important practice for our health and happiness is solitude. Like, I really, really believe it's very hard to live that contented, fulfilled, even healthy life without solitude. And one of the things I believe that solitude gives us, whether it be journaling or meditation or yoga or whatever it might be, or a walk, is time for things to emerge.
- [16:38]
B
To be in a meditative frame of mind, I think is enormously valuable to allow moments when you don't know what you might want to say to yourself, but you're allowing for a range of opportunities. And there's an odd way, sometimes observed, in which some places are more conducive to this than others. A train carriage that's fairly empty and a long train journey is tremendously conducive, I think, to a conversation with yourself. Why is that? I think it combines just the right level of distraction and the right level of motion to keep your mind, as it were, from getting stuck and frightened of itself. Because the mind does get frightened of itself. Like, oh, my God, if I open that door, I'm going to get stuck in a cul de sac where I realize that I'm in the wrong relationship, my job's awful, it's helpful to have movement. So the passing of those pylons outside and the quiet in the carriage are assisting your mind to lose fright of itself. And you might find that at the end of two and a half hours. You haven't just gone to Manchester, you've gone into parts of yourself that you hadn't explored.
- [17:42]
A
Yeah. For someone who has heard our conversation and they feel that they're struggling in their life, they're lost, they feel unhappy, they don't have fulfillment, what would your final words of them be?
- [17:57]
B
You know, welcome to the suffering spirit in which, you know, we all share that we are all far more lonely than we need to be because we buy into the self presentation of others. No one wants to present themselves in the way they do. We're just forced. We collectively keep lying to each other about what it means to be human. And I think what we've been discussing is what's it actually like to be human. And the reality is that we are far more silly, far more hopeful, far more desperate, far more sad, far more beautiful than we admit to ourselves and to others. And if we just allow ourselves a broader sense of what it means to be human, our spirits will lift.
- [18:40]
A
Hope you enjoyed that Bite sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest. If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my Bite Sized Friday email. It's called the Friday five and each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short videos, doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good. To get you ready for the weekend, you can sign up for it free of charge@drchatterjee.com Friday 5. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science. Next Friday.