A (3:59)

I mean, just to explain that title, it was an ironic title, basically saying, everyone's going to be slightly wrong. Everyone, even the best person that you get together with will be slightly wrong. And if you can accept their wrongness, you're actually much further along the way to rightness. That, as it were, the basis of a good relationship is to accept the humanity and the flawed nature of whoever it is that you are together with. And the insistence on a right person is a kind of deification of other human beings, which actually tends to get you into trouble. So a gracious acceptance of our flawed humanity is actually a better basis with which to approach relationships.

B (4:39)

That was the most read article, I believe, on the New York times back in 2016 when you wrote it. What does that say about us?

A (4:49)

It was quite remarkable because also the year of Trump, the year Trump got elected. So more people clicked on that article than Donald Trump becomes president. So it was quite a striking thing. And I would say that ultimately it has to do with our loneliness around the compromises that we all endure in relationships. I think a lot of us are thinking, is this normal? Is this level of scratchiness, discomfort, complexity normal? And the simple answer is yes. So if you're in a scratchy, complex relationship, welcome to relationships. I mean, there is still an enormous gap despite all these methods of communication. There is still an enormous gap between what we know from the inside about what it is to be human, and what is generally spoken about. There is still enormous areas of silence and therefore enormous areas where we go through the world thinking, is this right? Is this normal? Is this level of whatever it is normal? And almost always the answer is yes. I mean, if you're feeling it, it's a human condition. But we tend to, you know, the word shame comes in, we tend to experience it with a lot of shame. We think, I can't hear an echo of what I know is inside me, inside everybody else, from what I'm picking up, therefore, where have I gone wrong? And I think there's Nothing more normal than to think that we have gone wrong in relationships, when in fact we have simply having relationships. And relationships will involve a lot of complexity. I mean, let me expand on some of the themes. It's been one of the great insights of psychotherapy that when we are guided by instinct towards a certain sort of person, what's often happening is we are refinding our way to a quality of love and affection that we knew in early childhood. That when we fall in love, we're actually refinding love, a love that we once knew as children. It'll have some of the quality, inevitably it'll have some of the qualities. And, you know, occasionally this bubbles up to consciousness and people will joke and go, huh, you know, my partner remind me a bit of my mother or my father. Everybody around the table sort of laughs. And we think it's very funny. Like many funny things, there's a deep truth in that. Undoubtedly there is an echo. The reason why it gets complicated is that for many of us, perhaps almost all of us, the love that we enjoyed in childhood was not merely an unalloyed joy, not merely based on generosity, attunement, sympathy, all the good things that should be there in love. There might also have been distance, unpredictability, fear, a lack of safety, a yearning for a degree of acceptance that was never quite within reach. And I think that very often what happens is we then seek those things in the relationships that we pursue most avidly in adulthood. And that ultimately what we're doing in love very often is not so much searching for fulfillment as searching for searching for a sense of familiarity, which may be the same thing, but may importantly not be the same thing if we happen to have childhoods where affection was not particularly linked to our flourishing.

B (7:56)

Yeah, it's interesting. That was one of the most read asked course on the New York Times, which is of course an American publication. Yes, it's a publication that is read all over the world. But that sort of cultural understanding of what a relationship is is deeply fascinates me. So America, the sort of bastion country of the West. Okay, what is it, let's say, broadly speaking, in the west, we perhaps get wrong or misunderstand about relationships, which then leads us to this often constant disappointment. High divorce rates, high levels of frustration. Is it that our expectations of what a relationship is are fundamentally flawed?

A (8:43)

Look, the United States is a very difficult country for people to understand. Outside it, it has a very particular history, and one ignores that history at one's peril. It was founded, the nation was Founded by people who believed that we could make life perfectable in this life. And that's quite odd because for most other nations, in most other cultures, that's not at all the way it is. It's, you know, if you look at Buddhist culture, Hindu culture, or the old European version of Christianity, which was not the American version of Christianity, it's the next world, it's the other world. That's where you can achieve perfection. In this world, it's all broken. There is, you know, first Buddhist stricture, life is suffering, you've got it all there. The foundation of Catholic Christianity, original sin, notion of life is broken. Now, these things could be seen as too pessimistic, too extreme, et cetera. But I often think that, taken in the right way, they offer us something quite unusual and something that we might need to be alive to in the modern world, which is an acceptance of our flawed nature and of the imperfect nature of everything, including human to human relationships. Now back to the United States. This is a country founded by people who think that human life is perfectible. It's an amazing ideal. It's produced, you know, moonshots, it's produced artificial intelligence, all, you know, lots of extraordinary things that, that a more settled view of human possibility would not countenance. This has been possible in the United States, but most people in that nation are also still struggling with the ordinary business of living and dying that hasn't gone away. And also the ordinary business of forming relationships. And it's possible that some of the beautiful perfectionism has at the same time bled into a kind of intolerance, which is, what's wrong with my life, what's wrong with my partner? There's an issue. Rather than thinking, welcome to existence, one thinks something's gone fatefully wrong with my life.

B (10:46)

Yeah, it kind of goes beyond relationships, doesn't it? It's what's wrong with my partner, what's wrong with my job, what's wrong with my life. You know, perfectionism is incredibly toxic for so many aspects of our lives. And what you said was really interesting to me, that it was founded on the idea of perfectionism. So it's kind of woven into the culture. It's, you know, you're the fish swimming with this idea of perfectionism around you. And let me contrast that with something that I didn't really understand growing up, but I really do now, and I actually have a Newfoundland respect for it. My own parents and how they got together. So my parents grew up in India. They were immigrants to the UK in the 1960s, the 1970s. I was born in the UK and I learned as a child that my mum and dad met for the first time the day before they got married. Okay. So my dad came to the UK, I think, in 1962. And in the early 70s he took two weeks annual leave, okay. Because his family had found him, his wife. So dad flies back to India. I don't know what day, I think it was a Saturday. He meets mum. Well, you know, he meets his then to be wife on the Saturday, right. They have a little meeting. The next day they get married. Dad comes back like a week later back to work. And a few months later my mum comes over. Right. Now, growing, growing up in the West, I didn't know what to make of that growing up. I don't think I really thought about it. A lot of these things you think about as you become an adult, you think, you know, maybe I was a little bit embarrassed to admit that growing up in the west, you know, that my parents had an arranged marriage. But I guess the point I'm trying to make is I would imagine that for my parents, the idea of compromise was built in right from the start. It's not I'm choosing who I want to marry, it's the person's chosen for me. Therefore, I know going in that I'm going to have to compromise. It's interesting, isn't it?

A (13:02)

Sure. And of course, you know, the inevitable thing that happens in any relation, any new relationship, is at some point you stumble on a problem. So you've been having a great time, it's been, you know, very jolly for the first couple of weeks, something. And then suddenly someone says something and you think, oh, I don't agree with that, et cetera. Now, in the modern world, we have this language of red flags. I mean, Instagram is full of this language whereby if there's a problem, the relationship is toxic. If there's a problem with somebody, it's a red flag. And if there's a red flag, you just jump out. You immediately jump out. And obviously there are behaviors that no one would want to condone and that are genuinely problematic. But I think there is also an excessive version of this. I mean, if you really have to eradicate from your life everyone who shows any form of problematic behavior of any kind, you'll have a very easy life. But you also have a very lonely life. I mean, you simply, you know, you've got rid of everybody. So if every last red flag has to be exited, you know, welcome to solitude. And I think that, you know, there is something beautiful about saying, okay, there is an incompatibility here, there is a problem here, but let's try and work it through. Let me try and align my understanding with your understanding. It doesn't mean to say that we're ever gonna agree, but we're at least gonna see where the other one's coming from. And that's a discipline, a knack, a skill.

B (14:21)

And skill. Yeah, it's a skill, isn't it? Sure, it's a skill that you have to learn.

A (14:26)

And we've got this emotion based view of love. We think that love is an emotion rather than a skill. It's a feeling that can't be questioned, that's either there or not there. Rather than the fruit of labour, which just sounds perverse, but it's, I think, acutely true.

B (14:41)

Where do these false expectations come from, do you think?

A (14:45)

I think we're prey to an unhelpful notion of romanticism which kicks in in the early 19th century and it starts off as a movement of ideas in the worlds of poetry and literature and then spreads to infect or at least affect the whole of humanity. And there are all sorts of assumptions behind this romantic ideal. The notion of a soulmate, the notion that there is person out there who will fully understand you, that when soulmates are together they understand each other wordlessly. It's a huge trope in 19th century poetry that true lovers do not need language. So language is being used to say that if you really love, you don't use words, you just understand. Beautiful idea goes right back to childhood. Because of course our earliest experience as children is being understood by our parents or by caregivers without speaking. Children can't speak in their infancy and they are on a good day, understood. But children are also very simple. All they need is milk and, you know, burp or whatever it is. Of course, by the time you reach adulthood, the notion of another adult fully understanding your views on politics, your taste in curtains, your sense of what a good holiday is, your vision of your mother, your hatred, but also loyalty towards your older sister, but, you know, your complex feelings towards your brother in law, et cetera, et cetera, they're not going to understand this wordlessly. They're going to need to be educated. And that sounds like a really weird word. It sounds, if you like, unromantic. And whenever something sounds unromantic, in my view, it's almost always a sign that it is actually conducive to love. We've twisted our vocabulary. So if you said, here are two lovers. They're talking at quite a lot of length about what each of them thinks about how to arrange a cutlery drawer or the bathroom towels. You might think, oh, God, what are they doing spending all that time? That's not very romantic. But it is romantic if we allow that word to be used to describe things that are aiming to help the flourishing of a relationship defined like that. It's really romantic to discuss money, to discuss education, to discuss expectations around, you know, how to spend holidays, how to manage family, et cetera. These are so called boring topics. But we're impatient with them. And I think that romantic culture has helped us to become impatient. So I was just discussing some of the preconditions of a romantic worldview. One of them is two people who love each other, understand each other without speaking. That is obvious nonsense. The notion also of one soulmate. There's one person for you. Also the idea that you will know that person totally by instinct, that you will find your person, you know, you will be ineluctably drawn to them by a force that you don't understand and can't account for. Is that true? Let's also remember that many, many of the ideals of Romanticism were. Were delivered by people who had no jobs. I know this sounds kind of weird, but think of all the poets, et cetera. They didn't seem to have to go to the office or the factory or anything. They were just. They devoted themselves entirely to the business of love. That gave them quite a skewed view of relationships. They had a lot of time to go and see waterfalls and cliffs and, you know, the evening sky. Very lovely things to do, but not necessarily representative of a full life.

B (17:56)

Yeah.

A (17:56)

Also, many of these guys died young. Think of Keats, you know, meets his beloved and then develops a cough and then has to go to Italy to try and recover and then dies. And it's so easy to fall madly in love and love someone forever if you've only got six months with them. It's really easy to love someone forever if you're on your last breath. So, I mean, I'm being facetious, but I'm trying to deliver an important point, which is, you know, if love is meshed with practical things, if love is going to go on for a long time, if love involves being in a community that. Managing family, et cetera, you're not going to be able to follow these romantic tropes.

B (18:34)

Yeah. Something I've been thinking about over the past week, I think in some ways it's a silly thing, but it kind of speaks to what you just said about these mundane things. It's these small mundane things that are everything actually. So don't know if I should be saying this on a microphone or not really, but my wife and I, I would say, have a different view on how dirty pans should be left in the kitchen. Okay. So on the face of it, the most ridiculous thing. Okay, But I'll tell you where my mind went when you were just going through that sort of list of mundane things. If a pan has been used and it needs cleaning but we're not going to clean it immediately, I like to put it at the side of the sink soaked, so that when the time does come, it's all soaked and the dirt comes off easily. I did that the other day and I came down in the morning and my wife had moved it and it was in my eyes, higgledy piggledy in the sink, left dry. I thought, that's interesting because now I have to soak it again. That was really interesting. I had a really fun chat with my wife the next morning. This is what I've Learned after nearly 18 years of marriage that actually said, hey, babe. So it's interesting. That's why I left it like this. And she goes, well, actually I don't like it there. I think it gets in the way. I'd prefer that it's in the sink. I was like, yeah, but if you put it in the sink at an angle like that, we can't stack anything else in the sink. Okay, But I've been thinking about this during the week and I've been thinking, okay, that's interesting in many ways. That example is micro, but represents the macro. We are two individuals who see the world completely differently, right? Who have legitimately in our brains a reason for why we will put the pan in a different way. And so the thing I'd be thinking about this week is I don't necessarily need to change that. What would life look like if I accepted that? But actually, you know what? That's how Vid likes to do it. Okay? Now it could be that we have a conversation and come up with a mutual agreement of how we're going to do that. But it's kind of funny, isn't it, that these little things often cause big fights, right? Well, what do you think? Is that mundane? Is me discussing that or thinking about that? Is it truly a little mundane thing that has no value? Or in some ways does it represent a big picture view of long term relationships? Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to the brand new formulation of AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Yes, you heard correctly. I am delighted to announce that AG1, the daily health drink that has been in my own life for well over six years, has now updated and improved its formulation based upon the latest science. And to celebrate, they are giving my audience a very special September offer. 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A (25:23)

I think in love there are no small things. The details always evoke and are connected up with something very large. Which is why when you're falling in love with someone, you think, God, I'm really charmed by the way, you know, they're eating their breakfast cereal or the way that they, you know, are buttering their toast. Whatever it is, it's a small thing. And you think, is it possible that some very powerful big feeling is emerging from a small thing? And the answer is yes. Just as later on in the relationship, irritation and resentments can again coalesce around so called small details. These things are the conduits to very large themes of life, that the large is present in the small. And it also evokes that in order for a relationship to function properly, one of the skills that we need in order to be a good lover is, is the capacity to teach. Now we think, oh, teachers are a specialized subsection of the population. They go to training, college and they stand in front of classrooms, et cetera, in order to have a good life, in order to have a good romantic life, you have no option but to become a teacher that all of us need to skill up in the area of teaching. And what that means is an ability to take someone into your experience and convey it without threat, without hysteria, without viciousness, at a time when your audience is likely to understand and likely to be receptive, which means, you know, not at midnight when two people are a bit scratchy and exhausted, et cetera, but, you know, maybe at the beginning of the day when it's not so, you know, as we know, good teaching. If you want to try and teach someone something, be very sure that you don't need them to understand it. In order for you not to lose your composure, you have to be able to tolerate that they won't understand. And I think some of the reason why lovers get into such terrible arguments is because they have this. They box themselves into a position of thinking, I need you to understand this and I need you to understand it now and fully. And if you don't understand it, it's catastrophic. It will evoke for me that I'm alone, that I am completely abandoned, that you can't love me, et cetera. And these things are exaggerations of understandable positions, but they are massive exaggerations. And so we box ourselves in and it spirals. And I think if you're going to have a good relationship and starting right from the start of a relationship, you have to be able to. To explain who you are to the other person. I have a friend who recently met someone. She'd been single for a while, and she met someone who loved going sailing on a lake near his house. He loved going sailing. And he said to her something like, you know, my last relationship, my partner didn't like sailing. And that really cost us, you know, that was damaging. So automatically a sort of an atmosphere started taking hold of, like, if this is gonna work, you have to like this. So she dutifully went out and tried to show what a good sailor she was. And, you know, even though the boat was actually quite tiny and it was leaking and all the rest of it, very uncomfortable, sure, I've got to keep going. And so she started to suppress her needs. And after three days of this sailing trip, she broke down and she said, I can't take this anymore, you know. And of course, then things got heated and there was an argument, et cetera. They get back on track. But what it shows is in order to be a good lover, you have to be able to say, this is what I can tolerate. This is what makes me happy. This is what I like. This is what I don't like. And to be able to say it gently, compassionately, calmly, but also quite firmly, quite firmly, this is me. This is me. I don't like going for long country walks. I'm not into cold water swimming. I don't like the poetry of T.S. eliot. I like to be in bed quite early. You know, these are things. And of course, all these things have an antecedent, you know, if we've had a childhood where it's always somebody else's needs that came first, if we'd never be able to express who we really are, we don't have a training in this. A good parent will be able to say to their child, if you need to go to the bathroom during class, put up your hand, just ask the teacher, explain what's going on, and, you know, they should be able to understand. Or when you go to your friend Sophie's house for her birthday party, if you don't like the cake, ask a mum for a slice of bread. That'll be fine. In other words, it's okay to be who you are if you can explain it politely. That's fine. And another person should understand. And as importantly, if they don't understand, you've got every right to politely, gently say, I'm not sure I'm happy here. I might need to walk away here. And these are skills that, again, I mean, they should be teaching us this alongside, you know, geography and physics from a young age.

B (29:57)

This idea of being a teacher, it's quite an interesting one. I know in some of your previous work, you've written about the ancient Greeks and their sort of belief system about relationships, this idea that actually each of you is teaching the other person to become their best selves, which I thought was a really aspirational notion of what a relationship could be. And in some ways, then I thought, it sounds like your partner is almost your coach in some ways, and your.

A (30:30)

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

B (31:24)

So is it. Is it us teaching our partners how to be the best version of themselves? Because the way I think about it, and if I think about my own marriage, I would say that what I've learned over the years is that it's not necessarily about me teaching Vedic or her teaching me. I feel if I use her as a mirror to find out where I can improve, then I can become a better version of myself. Not because she's teaching me, but instead that she's actually reflecting back to me where I can improve. Sure, it's a subtle difference, isn't it? I don't think I'm. And then I think then she might change. Not because I'm trying to change her, but because I've changed. And therefore we. You know, in relationships, you know, none of us exist in isolation. We're constantly being influenced by the other person.

A (32:30)

It sounds like you guys are very evolved and I think you, I think I'd like to hold onto the idea that you are actually teaching and learning, but you're doing it in a very gentle, almost invisible way. But I think it's going on, you know, when you, when you talk about mirroring that, you know, she might mirror a behavior I'm imagining. Let's say, you know, you speak in a certain way and it upsets her. She doesn't need to say, you know, let me give you a lesson in how you've overstepped a boundary. You just notice that she's upset and that helps you to think about. And you take that away and you reflect on it. So there is a lesson going on, but it's, it's a very silent and a very generous, you know, it sounds like you're both learning, but without, you know, delicately. Delicately. But I'd still look. I think our partners have a ringside seat on our flawed sides. And all of us are flawed, obviously. We are, we come into a relationship having not learned all sorts of things we might have learned as we developed, you know, through, through life. All of us have a lot to learn. By the way, that's a very good starting point. I mean, if two people on an early dinner date can accept that each of them is a work in progress and each of them has a lot to learn, that's a fantastic starting point. There's nothing less romantic than two people who think that they are totally accomplished as they are.

B (33:50)

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

A (34:42)

Absolutely. And also an inability to admit the terrors of love. You know, this is a big theme, I think, that we always say everybody wants to fall in love. Everybody wants love. Let's accept that for a large section of the population, love is as frightening as it is exciting. Love is something that we want to run towards, but also run away from. We can't explain behavior in couples without acknowledging that there is a huge desire for closeness, but also a complicated desire for distance. And every relationship has, you might call, element of distance management, where people are trying to find the level of distance which makes them feel comfortable. A psychologist once wrote that there are two fears in love, that all love stories can be read through polarity of, on the one hand, a terror of being engulfed, being swallowed by another person. And on the other hand, a terror of being abandoned and of being totally solitary. So love happens somewhere between the space where of terror of engulfment and terror of solitude, terror of loneliness. And we, each of us have to navigate and within a couple have to navigate how much we can hold these two elements in check. And many relationships collapse because one person is in danger of trying to swallow the other person or make the other person feel swallowed, and the other one is in danger of making the other one feel totally abandoned. And then you get, you know, terrible tensions.

B (36:13)

Yeah. And we see that certain dynamics build up in relationships over time that help them to work. And I remember in the COVID era where many relationships suddenly were put on the new strain because there was a dynamic. You know, I guess this is almost the cliche, but the guy in retirement who plays golf three times a week, so is out of the house for six hours three times a week, and then going for a drink with his golf buddies afterwards, which we didn't think about. But then suddenly, when that's not on the table and that husband is constantly there, there was real issues in relationships because they'd built up a dynamic that worked, that allowed them to have the closeness and the distance.

A (37:02)

And there are many things like that that seem to be obstacles to love but are quietly supporting love.

B (37:07)

Exactly.

A (37:08)

So you get situations, let's say, with long distance relationships, where people go, oh, it's such a pity that you live in New York and I live in London. What a pity. If only we could live together. And they yearn and they, you know, and this goes on for years and years, and then finally they find themselves able to live in the same city and boom, it breaks up. Or you get this with affairs. Two people might be, you know, one person might be married and they're longing for the person to get a divorce so they can be together. And this goes on for years. And finally the divorce comes through and it looks like they can live together and announce their love in front of the world and boom. The one person leaves and can't take it because their love was actually being held together by distance, by an element of distance. And this speaks of the complexity of our attachment patterns, that we need a certain amount of distance in many cases as much as we need closeness.

B (37:54)

Yeah. In terms of these cultural expectations, these ideas we grow up with, which then causes us problems perhaps when we actually do get in a long term relationship, if we choose to, which of course, not everyone chooses to. I think about, do we need to. Do we need to have a better idea of the stages in a long term relationship? And I'll tell you, for me, one thing that really helped me when my mother was seriously unwell a few years ago when I actually thought she might die, was the Japanese concept of wabi sabi. And it really helped me at that time because there was a brutal honesty within it that all living creatures undergo this cycle, you know, creation, birth, growth, decay and death. And the brutality of that really helped me. I thought, oh, this is the natural cycle of all living beings. This is what we go through. And maybe mum at this moment in time is in the penultimate stage and decay before death. Okay. And although that's not something we like to talk about because we don't like to talk about death much in this society, it really helped me. I thought the brutal honesty of this is actually helping me deal with the situation. I think a similar concept could potentially apply to relationships where, if I think about my own relationship with my wife, I feel we're probably on our third or fourth relationship now. You know, 18 years in, there's different stages. And although we don't have the, you know, the kind of intensity of the first few months where, you know, basically screw everything else, all that matters is when are we gonna see her next? What are we gonna do? Like an amazing few months, which led to me proposing after three months, it was just total, wild, you know, romantic, lost in the bliss of early romance. Obviously our relationship is better than ever before now, but it's much more grounded and calm and it's different. So I guess, you know, what do you think, Alan? Do you think we need to also do a better job at actually defining the various stages that one goes through in a long term relationship? Might that be helpful for people instead of expecting it all to be that kind of intensity forever, which is never gonna be.

A (40:32)

I think, you know, if a relationship survives, it's gonna be calling upon a different set of resources at different stages. And I think the reason why relationships collapse at certain junctures is because One or other, or both parties are lacking some of the skills that would be required to keep things going.

B (40:51)

Skills, again, that word comes up, right?

A (40:53)

Absolutely. So, for example, you know, in the very early days of love, communication is not that necessary because you're finding intuitive agreement, you know, romantic intuitive agreement. But then comes the era where you're going to need to start to speak up and use language and you're going to be called upon to negotiate with your partner about certain things. So negotiation skills, communication skills also forbearance, an ability to understand yourself, your own gremlins, your own dynamics, etc. You know, you could make a long list of the skills that are required and they'll tend to be. And you could almost put a timeline to it. You could say, you know, on the whole, after two months you're going to start to need this skill. After four months, this skill, after three years, this skill. And then you can start to see where do people's relationships tend to collapse? Ah, they tend to collapse at the six month juncture. Or this is somebody who, you know, by two or three years they're always, you know, the thing breaks up and you know, more tragically, you get relationships that manage to survive 10, 20 years, but they don't last 30 years, they don't last 40 years. There's, there's still something that one or other is not able to learn in time and to have resources for in time inside themselves.

B (42:01)

Yeah, it's interesting that in this idea that in the early days intuition might be enough. Okay. But over time those other skills that you were never even being called on to use initially suddenly starts to become more and more important. I think in many ways that speaks to the ideas in your latest book, From Trauma to Healing. Okay. Because trauma and our own traumas clearly play a role in our relationships. You talk about this idea that unprocessed trauma gets projected onto our partners, but then there's also this idea that actually a lot of those skills that we need to speak up for ourselves, to say what our needs are, are often skills that we've never ever developed, maybe because of our childhoods. And you, I know you've probably been asked this several times before, but you've written, again, quite provocative, but I think a very accurate statement about marriage. In your previous work, Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't yet know who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a failure they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating. That is so Profound. So true. And kind of speaks to this idea of unprocessed trauma is something we will end up projecting onto our partnership unless we do something about it.

A (43:35)

I mean, it's worth just stepping back and going, what is trauma? Because it's obviously a word that people are using more and more. It used to be a very technical term used really just among psychologists and psychotherapists, and now it's entered general circulation. People will speak about their trauma and, you know, sometimes critics will go, you know, everything's a trauma nowadays, et cetera. What is a trauma? Trauma is really a pain that has left a legacy that's been unexplored and that's having a consequence in present behavior. So trauma can be large or small. It can be as small as, you know, you fell off a chair in childhood and you were not comforted in time, or as large as, you know, you witnessed abuse or severe neglect, etc. So it ranges right across the board. But one thing is common that all traumas have in common is that there is a lack of understanding of what the traumatic dynamic was. And then off the back of that mystery comes an inability to. To explain, either to oneself or to other people, what the difficulty is. So people who are so called traumatized go through the world unable to account for some of the things that they do, either to themselves or to others. And so they'll be, for example, always failing at challenges. Whenever an opportunity comes around, a big opportunity, they'll find that somehow they manage to miss that opportunity, spoil that opportunity. They won't know why. They'll blow up a relationship, blow up a job prospect, something. And they don't know, no one else knows. And it seems quite strange now that can be traced back to, let's say, a trauma around the consequences of succeeding in an environment, an early childhood environment, where that would bring about the rage or jealousy or competitiveness of a parent, which can happen quite often. So that then failing becomes a way of surviving. I've got to fail in order to hold onto the love of someone I care about. Sounds like a perverse dynamic, but it happens. And I think that, you know, that qualifies as a trauma in the sense that it's a dynamic that's painful, it's difficult, it's not understood, and it's going on to have a legacy in adult life. And, you know, one feels immensely for people with something like this.

B (45:40)

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

A (46:20)

I mean, a really key question is, how do you feel after something's gone right for you, right after you've succeeded, after you've heard some good news, etc. Some of us, great, we celebrate, there's absolutely no problem. Some of us, we think, hang on a minute, something feels a bit eerie, something feels a bit worrying, that there is something about a beautiful situation. Let's say we started a new relationship, things are going well, or we're promoted at work, or we get some good news from a friend and rather than thinking, oh great, we get a bit worried. And that's often a sign that we've been. There's an association somewhere in our minds between powering forward, winning and upsetting somebody. And it is one of the great secrets, one of the great taboos of parent child relations that you know, in a way, as a parent, you want the best for your child. But there are many things that children do that will discomfort a parent unless they are very, you know, honest and quite self aware. You know, let's imagine that you as a parent have grown up in quite a deprived setting and you want to give your child everything you want them to have what you didn't have. And so you manage to give that to them. And then lo and behold, you suddenly think you see your child and they're really smiley and happy and content and you think it's great, but at the same time something might be niggling at you and you think, my child's maybe a bit entitled, or they don't really understand someone like me, or they've never bothered to see how painful life is in my childhood, et cetera. And you might get resentful, resentful of your own child, for whom you would lay down your own life. Very peculiar, but psychological life is full of these peculiarities and we have to be ready to catch them and we have to be imaginative enough to allow them space. There are very unfamiliar and quite alarming sounding dynamics between parents and children. That's fine. The thing that's not fine is to brush them all under the carpet.

B (48:16)

Yeah, that's the key thing, isn't it? If you just heard that and it resonated with you, don't push it away. Don't then distract yourself. Don't go and start scrolling something else or pouring yourself a glass of wine. There's the opportunity, there's the opportunity to learn something about yourself. Right.

A (48:33)

Do you want to go somewhere really dark and complicated?

B (48:35)

I would love to.

A (48:36)

Let's talk about Freud and sexuality in families. Okay. It's a really delicate topic. Freud's enormous insight. I mean, the cliched version of Freud is Freud said little boys fall in love with their mothers, little girls fall in love with their fathers. And that sounds quite patterned, just quite strange, looked at more imaginatively. What Freud is telling us is a story about healthy human development. He proposes that in order to develop well, a little boy or girl has to feel from its opposite sex parent that it has a capacity to charm and delight. Using those words carefully. Charm and delight, not seduce. Charm and delight. In other words, there will be a moment in an ordinary development where a child will get a terrific sense of validation and that their mum thinks that they're really, you know, really a charming and lovely little person. And ditto with a daughter. Now there are two dangers in this. The parent is not able to give validation to their child. They're unable to recognize the child's strengths and charms. They just hold them at bay and they have to be very cold. This robs a child of confidence and makes the child feel that they don't have legitimate powers in the world. But there's another extreme which is that the parent, God forbid, physically, but much more commonly emotionally, slightly seduces the child. Slightly says, oh, you know, let's not tell mum about this, we're just having a special moment. Or your dad doesn't like us chatting like this. But well, you know, maybe the marriage is not going well and the child is invited to compensate the parent for some of its missing emotional nourishment. Very dangerous territory. The child then grows up with a feeling of I've got too much power here, that's not comfortable. The child will then have to rein in that power and will feel that there's a boundary that's being. There's in danger of being crossed. And that child then won't be able to grow into someone who feels expansive and powerful. So these are just some of the delicate things that are going on in so called ordinary families. And they're reliant on a lot of maturity and a lot of health, which is not always present.

B (50:53)

Yeah. Have you read the book Silently Seduced no, no, it's, it's a pretty provocative book, but it's come on with the author now. It's absolutely fantastic. It really sort of showcases, in a very blunt way some of these dynamics that can exist. And again, there's no blame, right, about this stuff. I mean, even, you know, if when this stuff happens, it's often driven by unconscious needs and sort of parents own traumas from their young age, right? Once you get into trauma, you're like, you know, your parents are playing up their trauma, you're playing out your parents. You know, it's all gets passed on. But these things I think are really, really important to talk about. Flipping it then onto parents. Because if we're saying that a lot of the reason that relationships or long term relationships in the 21st century are fraught with problems is because we project unprocessed trauma onto our partners, then following on from that, it's important to think about, well, what can I as a parent do to prevent traumatizing my own children? This episode is brought to you by whoop. Now, you may have heard me talk about WHOOP on previous episodes of this podcast, but if not, WHOOP is a screen free wearable Health and Fitness Coach. Now, I've been wearing a whoop band for over 12 months now and it really has had a transformative effect on on my health and well being. I've gained so many insights how different types of exercise and life stress affect my recovery, how different evening routines affect my sleep quality, and overall, I would say that wearing it has helped me understand my body much better. The all new WHOOP has many fantastic features including hormonal insights and on demand ECG readings. But I would say my favorite is healthspan, a clever feature that tracks how your daily behaviors affect your health using two metrics, WHOOP age, a measure of your physiological age, and pace of aging, which shows if you're aging faster or slower over time. For me, seeing this healthspan score regularly helps to keep me motivated and on track with my desired habits. Now, I've been a doctor for over 20 years and honestly, I don't think that health wearables are necessarily for everyone, but for many people like myself, they can be absolutely game changing. I think it's really important to use your WHOOP data as a tool to help guide you, not something to dictate your life. And it's also important to correlate what the data says with your own subjective feeling and what else is going on in your life. If you join Whoop today they are giving my listeners the all new Whoop 5.0 device. Plus they are giving you the first month completely free. And if you're still not sold yet, there's also a 30 day money back guarantee so you can try Whoop out for free. To get your free Whoop 5.0 plus your free 30 day trial, head to join.woop.comlivemore that's join.woop.com livemore Today's episode is sponsored by Vevo Barefoot Now More and more of modern life disconnects us from what is natural. Our food supply, our lack of movements, the constant distraction, but also our shoes. Now, much of modern footwear is actually a false promise. It markets comfort as freedom, but what it actually does is restrict natural function and dull your ability to feel. Vivobarefoot makes footwear uniquely designed for how humans are made to be three they fit, flex and feel. Made for the wild or the wild at heart. An active choice, not a convention. Because when we're free to do what's natural, it changes how we live. Now, I myself have been wearing Vivobarefoot shoes exclusively for over 12 years now, and I absolutely love them. I've also been recommending them to my friends, family and patients for many years as well. And I can tell you that so many people find that when they start wearing Vivos, their movement becomes more enjoyable and free and often can help us move without pain as well. Why don't you start to free your feet so that you can feel more and Therefore live more? Vivobarefoots are giving my listeners an exclusive 20% off your order. All you have to do is head to vivobarefoot.com livemore so what are you waiting for? Head to vivobarethought.com livemore right now and get started.

A (56:30)

First of all, if you're even asking that question, that's a fantastic starting point. There's an idea which is very dangerous, that the only thing you need to do to be a good parent is to provide materially and show up every now and then. Of course, these things are extremely important and great accomplishment and many people haven't had even that. But that's only the beginning of the story, not the end. An awareness that you might be passing things onto your children, that there are unresolved things in you which will transmit to the next generation. Let's just look at some of the things that parents can be doing without knowing they're doing. Let's imagine a parent who at a young age had to shut down their vulnerable sides. And they had to be very brave, very stoic and powerful through life. We can be sympathetic to that. But let's imagine that they are then in charge of a very tiny, very vulnerable person. A great temptation of that parent can be to bully their own vulnerable child for their fragility and to start to say, essentially, don't cry, you're a little boy, you're a little girl. This is not allowed. It's not right. Let's go and do athletics together. Let's go and be strong together. In a way, they're so worried about their own weakness that when they see weakness in a child, they turn against it. Children are a kind of mirror to us. Everything that we're afraid of, all of our shadow sides show up in a child. So if you're worried about being weak or not intelligent or not popular or not sporty enough or not intellectual enough or whatever, it's all going to appear in your relationship to your child. It's just going to appear. So you will be threatened by certain things in your child. A good exercise might be to say, just imagine if you hadn't had children. You stop and say to yourself, what might I be threatened by in my own child? Just in the abstract, ask yourself that question. See what comes up for you. And those are things almost inevitably that you've not dealt with in yourself or that you've had to shut down because your own development was challenging.

B (58:36)

Yeah, it's interesting before we're talking about long term partners potentially being teachers to each other, but I would argue that you could even go one step beyond that and say that your children can be the very greatest teachers you will ever come across if you allow them to be, you know, and certainly on my own, in my own life, I would say from a young age, as a father, a real drive for me to sort out my inner world and my unprocessed traumas was, oh, wow, I don't want to pass this on to the kids. Right. You know, sometimes children showcase a behavior that you don't like, but you're like, well, you know, I've sort of got that behavior myself. Right. So I can either tell them not to do it or I can work on myself so I no longer display it. And I think, yeah, children can be the best teacher, can't they?

A (59:34)

Absolutely. You know, we have to notice what's triggering us in their behavior. In other words, what's provoking an outsize level of emotion. And it might be, you know, my child is sobbing, they're crying, why Are they doing that? I'm getting annoyed with them. Or my child is a bit slow in some area, or they're a bit precocious in an area, and that seems to be provoking us. So there'll be all sorts of things, different things, but almost always they relate to something in you. And there is, you know, let's talk about the psychology of bullying. Parents bully their children, not necessarily overtly, but covertly. And what do we mean by bullying? We mean, you know, we know, bullying from the playground. What happens in bullying is something intolerable is occurring inside you, and you can't bear to see an echo of it in somebody else, and you just evacuate it. And you say, that person's got the problem, rather than I've got the problem. You make a scapegoat. And this. This happens in relation to people's own children, and it can be very subtle, but nevertheless a kind of bullying.

B (60:38)

A lot of children's sports coaches will, you know, talk about parents often putting their unrealized dreams onto their children, which is really interesting, isn't it, that people didn't achieve what they wanted to, and somehow they're trying to make up for that by overly pushing their children. And you can see this quite a lot when you go to children's sporting events. And I think there's a real toxic side to this. One thing I've realized I've shared this on the podcast before. Due to certain things in my childhood, I was very much driven to succeed. Okay? I very much needed past tense, external validation to feel good about myself. I thought that's what I need to do in order to get love. And I would only play sports growing up where I could be the best. I wouldn't play anything where I couldn't do that, where I couldn't dominate and win. Because I realized, actually, over the last years that it's not that I actually enjoyed winning. It's the pain of losing was too much. I didn't enjoy winning. I just. I couldn't stand to lose, which is very toxic way of living, you know. And what I've noticed because, you know, I would like to think my wife and I, I think we do a good job with our children. Certainly, I would say one of the things that is most important to us is how we bring our children up. I've noticed when I go running with my son or do parkrun with him, I just love this. The fact that actually sometimes he'll just go and chill. He'll go, yeah, I'm just having an Easy run today. And sometimes he'll push himself and sometimes he just, you know, he'll be like, yeah, I could have sprinted at the end. Didn't feel like it. That's interesting. That's great. Cause I never would have done that as a kid. I would have always pushed myself because it said something about who I was as an individual. And I've had to restrain myself from putting that onto my son. And I love it. I just go, wow, maybe actually you love yourself enough that your time doesn't reflect who you are as a human being. I didn't have that as a kid, but I'm really glad that you do.

A (62:56)

But then again, I think, you know, there's always a pendulum in this. And you can be traumatized by a parent who can only give affection in relation to achievement, that they've got something in their system, which means that, you know, I will only love you in relation to what you, how you perform. But those people can then produce in the next generation someone who will then have children, who will be denied a legitimate engagement with competitiveness. So there's a certain kind of modern parent now who's the fruit of very competitive parenting, who now sets their child, I'll love you whatever you do. It doesn't really matter where you perform in the exam. It doesn't matter where you are in the race. That can also deny a child something. So we have to be so careful. And this is where you laugh, but.

B (63:45)

No, I laugh because I think there's a truth to it and there's almost an inevitability that humans sort of react to what has gone before them and we go to the other extreme again.

A (63:57)

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

B (64:38)

Yeah, it's interesting when you observe a lot of these so called heroes and idols in society, like your Tiger woods or your Michael Phelps who by one metric, have achieved greatness. Okay, the greatest ever, for example. Those things came at a huge cost, a huge cost. With Tiger, for example, you know, if I ever have the opportunity to talk to Tiger on the show, one of the questions I would love to ask him is, was it worth it? You know, was the cost that you had to pay, the price you had to pay for those 15 majors and the title of greatest of all time worth the marital strife, the painkiller, addiction, the inner torment, Michael Phelps, 26 or something, gold medals at the Olympics, greatest of all time, and multiple mental health struggles? And I think that's also an uncomfortable truth that many of us don't like to look at in society. That actually some of the people, whether it's sporting success, business success, political success, a lot of those things came at a huge cost, didn't they?

A (65:52)

I think we get into trouble because we have this one word called success. And it tends to cover, we say, is so and so a success. And we tend to mean in our culture, financial success, fame, success, sporting success, et cetera. What we tend not to mean, the metric we're not applying is a broader human based idea of success at the really the most important game in town, which is satisfaction. Satisfaction with oneself and with the life that one's creating. And this has got to be the true prize. And I think that, you know, we get any amount of legendary athletes, politicians, artists, etcetera, in the room, and you say, you know, has it been worth it? And I think the honest answer is generally no. You know, would you swap all of this for a bit of ordinary happiness? The poignant answer is God, yes, God, yes, I would that, you know, I wasn't enjoying this level of self sacrifice. I wasn't enjoying this. I felt an inner compulsion normally, because these people would have grown up in extremely conditional, love conditional environments, exactly where there was no way of surviving emotionally without reaching a level of perfection. And I think, you know, the universe perhaps won't really mind so much if there are fewer amazing golf performers or if our, you know, swimming teams don't, you know, hit exactly the right second. You know, maybe the universe doesn't really care about that. Maybe the thing that does really matter is could you sleep at night? You know, were you able to be tender with those who loved you? Are you able to live comfortably with yourself? These are the true prizes. This is the true wealth of life. It really upsets our notion of wealth, you know, that if we were to reassign that word, wealth to encompass happiness, contentment, Generosity, not of a financial sort. If that could be wealth, then how many of us would be poor without knowing that we were poor? And how some of us might be quite rich without ever having been given permission to think of ourselves as rich? There's a major realignment that's on the offing.

B (68:00)

One of my favorite phrases or quotes is from the Tao Te Ching. True wealth is knowing what is enough. I love it and it certainly resonates with me on a deep level. Parenting, in your experience, both your professional experience and your personal experience as a parent, what do you consider the most important things we can do for our children?

A (68:29)

Look, at some level we are hosts to them, we invite them into the world. And I think to give them a sense that they are welcome, that they were wanted, that they didn't happen, as it were, by accident, or when they arrived, they had a place in our hearts. This gives a basic sense of validation, is absolutely important. I think another really important thing is to give the child a sense that though we know many things, though we're accomplished in some ways, we don't even begin to know it all, or even a fraction of all. We are stumbling around. We're good parents, but we're not perfect parents. You know, no one needs a so called perfect parent. And I think there's a terrific drive in the modern world for parents to think that they are serving their children by trying to be the perfect parent. If you aim for perfection, what you're really doing is humiliating your child, because no child is perfect. They're flawed. And then they look at the person they love and admire and think, goodness, I've got to be perfect in order to match up. No one wants that. We need not gods and goddesses. We need ordinary, flawed humans to be looking after us in order that we can then accept our own humanity and that of others.

B (69:46)

Yeah, you've spoken before about the cost of good parenting in the context of this idea that in front of our children, we will often edit ourselves, we won't say certain things, or if we have conflicts with our partner, we may not engage in that conflict in front of our children, which is admirable, which has many upsides, but one of the potential consequences is that they then get an unrealistic idea of what an adult relationship really looks like.

A (70:20)

That's right. I mean, you can get poignant scenarios where someone will be together in adulthood with a partner and they'll be thinking at the back of their minds. It's funny, my partner's often crossed. Not like my dad, my dad was always calm or my partner's not like my mum, not always so helpful and so generous with their time and affection. And they'll think something's gone wrong here. I think this is not the way that I was brought up. These are not the sort of people that I'm expecting. And of course these are precisely the people that their parents were. Their parents just took enormous pains, inordinate, perhaps not very wise pains to hide everything from them about their reality. They weren't always calm, they weren't always generous, they weren't always sympathetic. They were striving very hard at limited periods to do this. And for a parent to be able to signal to a child maybe you know, when they're reaching adulthood, late adolescence, to say, you know, I tried very hard bringing you up, I'm a complicated person, you don't need to say it. You can teach it without, you know, you can just in a calculated way, lose your temper, be a bit grumpy, etc. Show that you are both lovable and sometimes a bit of a pain. And that's such a generous thing for someone. You know. I know people who are unable in adulthood to form relationships because they have an idea of who their parents were and what their parents marriage was like, which is not true. So they are sacrificing themselves on the basis of an illusion.

B (71:53)

Going back to this idea of expectations in relationships potentially causing problems, especially if those expectations are unrealistic, based on Hollywood and romance and poetry. I think one thing we don't often talk about enough in public is the role of sex in relationships. And it's interesting as a parent now of children who are 15 and 12, it very much seems to me that society, even at that young age, it's become quite a sexualized society. I think that the media people are consuming even what is shown on so called family shows on television. I think there is a, certainly to me an over sexualization going on that kids are being exposed to at younger and younger ages. I'd love to get your perspective on that. But also, you know, more broadly, what do you think the role of sex is in a long term relationship?

A (73:06)

Look, sex is incredibly, incredibly serious topic that we don't yet fully know how to talk about as a society. There's incredible shame around it. There's a sense also the topic is either obvious or silly or not worthy. So it kind of, we hit this topic from many different angles but the sum total is that we often don't discuss it properly. It is a conduit to intimacy True intimacy. And it's also one of the strangest things that people do. If you think about what kissing is. I mean, the very act of a kiss is hugely bizarre. A mouth that's normally used to either chew mashed potato or utter words is for a moment open to another person that they can enter your mouth and you, I mean, you laugh, but it's. I mean, if you were showing a visiting alien from, you know, planet Kepler 32b and you said, you know, this is what we do here on this planet, they would think this is highly alarming. But also, why is this being fetishized? Why is this more interesting than eating an oyster or playing tennis? What's going on here? And we'd need to explain. There is always serious, there are always very important and serious things going on in all sexual activity. I think that, you know, intimacy is based on the idea of doing something with someone in a very privileged way that could be shocking, disgusting and repulsive with anyone else. It's a way of marking out someone as unique to you that you're able to do something that you wouldn't think of doing with anyone else. So many things are very cathartic that go on in the sexual realm. If you think of the whole area of kinks, you know, why does somebody have a kink? People will tend to discover that there are certain things that turn them on more than others. And it's quite mystery, you know, and we know some of the sort of classic ones. Oh, so and so likes to dress up in this kind of uniform or likes to have this sort of practice and you know, we've got sort of a map of what that might look like. But in fact, if you boil it down, people tend to have really particular areas of excitement, et cetera. Let me give you my theory of where these zones of excitement come from. I think that excitement is almost always sitting on an area of life that was once quite painful and is an area of tension and what sex allows two people to do, or more. But let's imagine a couple, two people to do is to revisit an area of difficulty without some of the limitations of ordinary life in order to have a little cathartic, joyful moment. Let's imagine somebody who has to assert authority all day, every day in their day to day life. It's exhausting, it's tiring, it's kind of difficult, kind of traumatic. They might enjoy in sex letting go of all their authority and of surrendering to somebody else in order to refind a kind of balance that's been lost in ordinary life. Let's imagine somebody who has a really hard time with some of the gender roles that's been assigned. Maybe they feel that they're being asked to play the role of a man or a woman in a way that's ended up feeling quite uncomfortable for them. It's excessive. But again, in their sexuality they're able to find a better balance where they can visit a less gendered, a less stereotypical role and rediscover a kind of balance.

B (76:29)

So you're saying that could be a good thing?

A (76:31)

I think at its best, sex allows people to rebalance themselves and to refind qualities that are absent from day to day life. And so one of the things to always observe is in people, what is it that's turning them on particularly and how does that relate to areas of deprivation or struggle or difficulty in their day to day life? Because you can draw very interesting lines of connection. And as I say, behind every so called turn on tends to be something that was unusually difficult for that person.

B (77:02)

My wife and I were discussing this week kissing and the idea that it really speaks to what you just said actually about the actual act of kissing. And what we were discussing is.

A (77:14)

Is.

B (77:15)

Kissing there in all cultures or do we kiss because we've seen it in films? Right. So I don't know if you've done any research on this, but do all cultures around the world kiss or is it unique to certain cultures? Because you're right on the face of it, it's quite a bizarre thing.

A (77:35)

Yeah. There's a lovely quote from the French 17th century philosopher Laroche Foucault who said, there are some people who would never afford fallen in love if they hadn't heard there was such a thing. So that speaks of the socialized nature of love. That love, of course sets parameters. It says, you know, when you're in love, you will feel this and then you think, oh, do I feel this? And sometimes you might feel it, but not have a word for it. And your culture provides that word. And sometimes you may not feel it at all, but pretend you're feeling it because you think, oh, that's what I'm supposed to feel. And is there some of this in relation to something like kissing? Sure, there probably are some people who don't like kissing at all and they end up doing it because that's what you're told that you like to do. And one of the great struggles in life is to try and find a way of loving that is true to us. And Even if you don't like kissing, you'll probably like something that's a bit intimate and cozy and private. And it might be in lacing your toes, whatever it is, or holding hands or something like this. But it is important to be able to think, am I enjoying this or am I not? Many couples I've spoken to recently have had this issue around sleeping together. It's seen as an absolute proof of love that you're able to share a bed with someone. But many people privately think this is really difficult, really annoying. I like to wake up in the early morning, do some reading, whatever it is, and they can't tell their partner because they're under an ideological sort of stricture that says if you love, you must share a bed with someone, even if they snore, even if it's uncomfortable. And I think one of the freedoms of true adulthood should be able, that you're able to articulate how what love is for you. And it might include separate bedrooms.

B (79:20)

It's, you know, it's something that's prevalent in, I would say certainly British culture and maybe Western culture is this idea of independence. Okay. And I think it speaks to what you just said about sleeping. So there is something I would say in this culture that is very much prioritising. Let's get those kids independent early. I've got friends who actually who literally the first day their child came back from the hospital after being born was, we are not bringing them into our bedroom because we need to make sure that there's a boundary right from the start. Okay? So the child must know that that's their bedroom. And this bedroom is for mummy and daddy, okay? And the more you sort of learn about the world, and this is one of the best things about travel is you realize that actually there's many different ways of living in this world. The Japanese, you know, the mums, to my understanding, they sleep with the kids. The dad does sleep somewhere else. And I think it's very freeing to know that there is no one way. Every method has a consequence. What method do you want? What consequence do you want? And I think that's a really awesome one to think about is, you know, not sleeping in the same bed doesn't necessarily say something about the state of your relationship. It might do, but it doesn't necessarily need to. But then it circles back to what we were saying about sex. I think in some ways some people would say that sex is an essential need, it's an essential component of a long term relationship. But I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that. I've been thinking that an essential ingredient for a long term relationship is intimacy. There are many ways to experience intimacy. One way might be through sex. But there are many couples that I've come across in clinical practice over the years who, you know, no longer have sex, but seem to have a great relationship. So I kind of feel there's something in the air in society today about, oh, you know, everything's hypersexualized. You know, the reels and the social media videos about sexual tend to go viral. Everyone wants to know about it, but I think there's a real complexity to sex. I don't think every couple needs to have sex in order to be happy. But at the same time, a lack of sex could pose a problem in certain relationships.

A (81:56)

I mean, just to step back to what we were saying about children being very close to their parents and all of that, I think in our culture there's this idea that a good childhood, that you'll know that your child is having a good childhood. It's if they grow up fast, right, that people will say, oh, my child's doing really well. They're really old for their years. A little alarm bell always rings for me. I think we need to allow children to grow up at their own pace, which might be quite slow. Everyone's going to get there in the end. Generally, children who grow up fast are compensating for parents who are still children inside a parent. A child needs to step forward and become as adult as a parent is immature. The more immature a parent is, the more mature a child has to be. So bless the children that have got the luxury to be as immature as they want to be for as long as they need to be, and they can then grow up at their own pace. That's a luxury. Come back to the idea of sex and intimacy. Let's talk about sexual perversion. So you might know this from your work. There's something called sexual perversion. Sexual perversion. Let's take something like flashing. All right, somebody, a flasher. What are they doing? They're opening their raincoat and they're showing themselves naked to a stranger. What on earth's that about? Why are they doing that? Right. It's always very good to look at the extremes and then think backwards of what's going on. The reason they're doing that is, I mean, if you went up to that person and went, oh, you know, good for you. Can we go head off to a hotel? They would run for the hills. They would be terrified they would be. What are they terrified of? Why are they doing this? They're terrified of intimacy. They're terrified of the intimacy that accompanies, that can accompany the sexual act. And therefore they're trying to do this thing which is flashing, which will prevent, by its very structure, any intimacy being possible. Think of the voyeur who's got a telescope and they're getting off on looking at people in the apartment across the road. Again, if you knocked at their door and said, don't look at, you know, throw away your telescope, let's, let's have a tumble in bed, again, they would be terrified. They need that element of distance. And that's telling us something really important about sex in general, which is sex is a very intimate act. And it can be. If your experience of intimacy is fraught with danger, which it can be, come back to trauma, then sex can also be rather threatening, which is why you get the phenomenon of people who have sex and then need to end a relationship immediately. You know, run away like they have sex, and then they go away. Not because they're necessarily playboys or girls, they may be that too. But really what it is is they've taken somebody into a very close relationship to them and then they need to get away really fast because it's too close. And a lot of what we call sexual perversion is essentially a fear of the closeness that sex asks for. At its most tragic. Not to frighten the listeners, but, you know, why do people murder people? Why is this thing called sex murder? What is that? What's going on there? If you talk to clinicians about this, this is again about a fear of intimacy, that somebody has sex with someone and then feels a compulsion to murder them right after the sexual act. And the reason is that they've been witnessed, they have been seen. There is a danger of a relational bond. And that is intolerable to somebody who is disturbed, traumatized enough in their mind not to be able to tolerate. Why do people have sex with animals? Again, it's one of the great mysteries. What on earth's going on? The thing about an animal that is sought for by people who do this is the animal is a non reciprocal being. It can't understand you. There is no danger of a reciprocal bond. And that's why people seek that kind of release, because intimacy and mutuality is impossible for them.

B (85:50)

It's really interesting, Alan, you've gone into some areas which a lot of people would regard as taboo or very dark. But actually what I'm hearing as you talk about them as a real compassion, as a real understanding, as a real sense that actually all behaviors serve a role. Too often we try and judge the behavior without really understanding the role that that behavior is playing in that person's life. And although these things may be uncomfortable to talk about or to discuss, it's really important, isn't it? It's really important that we try and have that more compassionate sort of approach to the world and go, look, people are playing out their trauma, people are playing out their complex internal world. And maybe we should be a little bit less judgmental and a little bit more understanding also.

A (86:45)

You know, it's provocative, which is why people don't want to think about it, because we are all on a continuum.

B (86:49)

Yeah.

A (86:50)

And you know, even though we may never have flashed at someone, we will have known, probably the fear of intimacy around sexuality. It may have been a brief moment. A brief moment after we'd kissed somebody, we thought, oh, I need to go and read a book and be on my own. We might have felt that. And if we felt that, that's on a continuum with a much more extreme version. So the world becomes more interesting the more that we can see the link between who we are and the link between behavior which we might describe as abhorrent or beyond the pale. This is why people tend to box their opponents off into a zone called the monster. And they don't see that there's always a connection between who they are. Let's imagine somebody who's got a political opponent and they think, I would never do that. That person is just a mad person. Steady on. Try to ask yourself a more challenging question. What bit of you is present in the person that you think is beyond the pale? That's a provocative question. That's a question that will help your own growth. Don't simply go, that person. I've got nothing to do with them. Go, right, we're all human beings here. What bit of you is in there?

B (88:00)

Yeah. I remember speaking to a well known actor on this podcast many years ago. And one of the things he said to me really, sort of really, really caused me to reflect for quite a few weeks afterwards. And it was this idea that when he's playing a role, I thought, he's trying to get into character. He's trying to think, what is, you know, what would someone, who is this person that I'm playing in the. How would they think? How would they walk? You know, what would they say? No, no, no. When I'm playing a character, I'm trying to find where does that character exist? Within me. So it's really fascinating that we all have love and hate, light and dark within us, if we can acknowledge that to ourselves.

A (88:52)

And of course it makes us, if we can travel in these zones, it makes us much more interesting people to be around. And I think one of the great mysteries of social life is why do some people feel interesting to us, even though they're not saying anything particularly interesting, but they make us feel interesting in their presence, we feel able to share all sorts of things, we feel interesting with them. And then other people, we think, I have nothing to say to them or around them, we feel a bit dull. And often that's because we're registering unconsciously how much room they've got in themselves, how much they've explored themselves, and therefore how much of us has room to land in them. And I think, you know, the more you've gone into, more doors you've opened in yourself, the more other people will feel, oh, okay, in their presence. I'll open some doors. Yeah, yeah.

B (89:41)

Do you think a good quality long term relationship can help us heal our trauma?

A (89:50)

It's essential. I mean, really what we're saying is that the cure for trauma is love. And you know, what does that mean? Love? Love means somebody who's in tune with us, somebody who follows us. What's the most romantic thing you can say to somebody is listen, I hear you. To say, I hear you, I'm listening to you. I hear you. To feel heard and to feel that all the difficulties, all the shameful bits of our A meeting with an audience, this is emotional nectar. This is what we all need. This is what we go crazy without. Why solitude? Difficult because there's no one mirroring you, there's no one hearing you, there's no one confirming that what you're feeling is okay.

B (90:32)

When you say solitude, can I just clarify what you mean? To me, there's a difference between solitude and loneliness. When you say solitude, what exactly do you mean by that?

A (90:42)

That's a good distinction. I mean I do, I mean loneliness. I mean loneliness because you're right, of course, there is the good sort of solitude. But you know, loneliness is an enormous problem both in relationships and outside of relationships. And it's important to stress it exists in relationships as well. You are lonely whenever you're sitting with someone and they say, I don't understand or that's wrong, or you're illegitimate for feeling that, etc. And you're also lonely when you have no one at all. But it's Both those things. There are as many lonely people in relationships as there are outside of relationships.

B (91:17)

If love can heal trauma, or if love is really the only thing that truly heals trauma, I guess we need to specify what kind of love we're talking about. If indeed there are different types. So the love we would ideally have for our children is unconditional love. I love you without any conditions. And the more you sort of sit with that statement, the more you realize that many people did not actually feel unconditional love growing up. But I guess I'm really fascinated by the difference between. You know, there's some obvious differences between the love we have for our children and romantic love. Okay. You know, obviously, in terms of intimacy, for example, or what that intimacy may look like. Right. But is it possible, do you think, to unconditionally love your romantic partner?

A (92:20)

I think that conditions don't always have to be the bogeyman in this. I think it's possible that a condition is a loving thing to lay down, to be able to say to someone, there are things that you could do that would break my trust. That's actually a way of respecting the other person's intelligence, possibilities for maturity and so on. I think to say anything is possible as an action is a difficult and slippery slope. I think that.

B (92:51)

Can you do that with your children?

A (92:53)

Well, I think that children are not made happy by boundaryless childhoods. If you say to a child, I love you so much, you can go to bed at any time, you can eat anything you like, you can do anything you like, they will panic. It's an act of love to say, bedtime's at 7 and no later to say, you can't. You know, children will panic if they feel they have got so much power over their parents that they could allow anything to happen. It's hugely containing to know that the other person will at some point, say stop. And a little bit of that happens in an adult relationship as well. To know a lot of the way in which people treat us is to do with the signals that we've unconsciously sent to them about the kind of behavior that we will tolerate. And if we send out a signal, we'll tolerate anything. The other person is almost frightened by our level of license. You know, it's scary to be with someone who has no boundaries. It's a relief to know that they have boundaries because that helps us to discover our boundaries. And a boundary is a very important part of psychological health.

B (93:57)

Is there a risk that in talking about love and trauma and relationships, using Words that we over intellectualize things.

A (94:11)

Look, I would love that we could get there by intuition alone. I would love that we could just ditch words and all this chat, et cetera, and just do it by instinct. But I don't think, you know, I think, you know, we've left the Garden of Eden where things just happen spontaneously. We've got to till the soil. And part of that is tilling the soil of language and making that effort to say, I'm going to put a word to a feeling and I'm going to try and convey that feeling to you. It's very hard and on a bad day it's very boring. But we've got no other option. We are, you know, we have mouths for a reason and they're there in order that we be able to share who we are so the other can understand us.

B (94:50)

And can I provide perhaps not an alternative perspective, but a perspective that continues on from what you're saying? I think a lot about these ideas that certain things apply at certain times in our life or certain times in our relationships. So in the first few months, as you've already said, intuition seems to be enough. We're falling in love, everything's amazing, we're wonderful and blissful. Okay? Then after a period of time you realize, oh, I need some new skills here. I now need to find words. I mustn't try and expect my partner to mind read me. Perhaps I should actually be able to express my needs in a non confrontational way. Okay, so you have to develop the new skill of communicating better. I'm wondering whether there's a further stage than that and whether again, we're all biased because we look at our own relationships to sort of quantify these things and think about them. And I think I'm at the stage with Vid, my wife, whereby we've really improved the way that we communicate. And I think there is a deep knowing within us that we're gonna be together for life. I can't prove that to you with words, okay? I can't predict the future that something won't happen whereby that may change things. Right? Because of course when everyone's getting married they're believing it's going to be for life as well. But I no longer think it's a belief. I think it's an inner knowing that we're committed to each other for our life. What's your perspective on that?

A (96:43)

First of all, you're a very, very lucky man, you know, and I think don't underestimate how fortunate you are. This is one of the major blessings. You know, there will be people who are richer than you. There are people who are more famous than you, There are people who are cleverer than you. But I don't think there are many people who are as blessed as you in having that relationship. And I think that people who've got that sort of love sometimes can forget that. It's truly something that is monumental and that will be giving them a confidence, a security, an anchor every day of their life. You know, if, God forbid, your partner were to die or to meet somebody else and leave you, et cetera, your life would be in bits, possibly for a very long time. You would be unanchored, unable to cope with things, doubting yourself, et cetera. And, you know, it's a horrific situation. So, you know, like many kinds of privilege, we're apt to forget it. And I think there is no greater privilege than emotional privilege. And I'd simply want to say to you, count your blessings. It's an amazing thing. And I think it puts you in a true elite. I think the only elite that anyone should ever aspire to, which is the emotional elite.

B (98:04)

Alain, I truly appreciate what you just said there, because it is quite easy to take things for granted. And I guess just hearing you say that gave me a newly felt gratitude for my relationship with her.

A (98:22)

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

B (99:06)

Yeah. It's interesting what you say there, because I wouldn't want to give anyone the impression that it's been easy to get there. It certainly hasn't. And I've said before on this show that the first year of my marriage was probably the toughest year. We had, you know, a whirlwind romance. I proposed after three months. We got married after eight months. The world's amazing. Everything's great. First year of marriage. Wow. We're like, oh, I didn't Know this, you didn't know this like you're learning about each other. But I also think we had very good modeling in different ways from our parents that, you know, we grew up with the idea that marriage is for life.

A (99:44)

Life.

B (99:44)

Okay. So both of us, you know, my wife's parents are still both alive. They're deeply in love and have been married for many, many decades until my dad died in 2013. You know, I think my parents had a very different relationship from my in laws in terms of how they express their love. But that's been our modeling, which I think we're very fortunate to have. If you regard long term relationships as normal or even optimal. At the same time, we've gone through these various stages and I would say one of the most profound realizations for me is something I shared in my last book. So I won't go into all of it, but in essence, a few years ago my wife was about to go on a course, a seven day course, to process some of the traumas she experienced as a young girl when she grew up in Kenya. And I think it was the day before she left. And I think this is the most mature thing I've ever done in my relationship. I said to her, if at the end of these seven days you change so much that we can no longer be together, I'm okay with that. This is something you have to do for you.

A (101:00)

Beautiful.

B (101:02)

And I don't think before that I'd had the maturity to look at our marriage like that. But I feel that, you know, a lot of things you talk about in this, in your latest book, From Trauma to Healing. Me and Ved have gone through that stuff on our own, on our own journeys. We've gone through a lot of our pre existing traumas. And one thing I've learned is that the less needy I can be in this marriage, the better it will be, the more I can take care of myself. Then I can come together with her without a need, without this pull, without this unhealthy reliance. Now, I appreciate this may not be the norm. Right. Or it may be it's very hard to know what is going on in other people's relationships. And clearly what you just said is that is that I seem to be in a very fortunate place. But I would also argue that me and Vid have put our relationship first and foremost. Right? I will. Although people would regard me as very so called successful. Right. I would say I turn down lots of opportunities for more societal success because I realize it would be worthless without my relationship. With my wife. So I've got very good over the years at saying no to self. No. You know. Yeah. I told you before we started recording, I still live five minutes from where I grew up. Okay. I still live five minutes away from my mum, 30 seconds away from my brother. I have a very grounded, important family life. And so when I get invited to come down to this or that in London, half the time I'm like, you know what? I'd rather sit on the sofa and have a cup of tea. And my wife. Yeah, yeah.

A (102:45)

A couple of things. From what you were saying. I mean, we got this idea that if love is true, it's got to last forever, that you have to hold on to someone forever. I think sometimes one of the most generous things that we can do if we're with somebody who needs to grow or develop in a way that might not encompass us, and sometimes it doesn't. To be able to let them go with grace, to be able to say, I know what you need and I can't provide it for you. We often look at breakups always as a tragedy rather than sometimes, at least as two people realizing they can't give each other what they need to grow. What makes breakups so difficult is that very often people can't explain this to one another. They haven't got the words to say. But if you are more emotionally mature and evolved to be able to say, go off into the world, leave me. Don't feel guilty about that, but grow. What a gift that is, to be able to give that to someone and also to receive that kind of message. There's something else I want to talk about that just came to mind about love and trauma. You know, I was saying earlier, we've got this idea that love can heal trauma. That if you've had a traumatic past, to be the recipient of love is a beautiful and lovely and healing thing. I agree. But let's not forget that when that tends to happen, what can occur is that the first and instinctive response of the traumatized person in the face of love is to reject love, to eject love, because they can't metabolize the goodness that's in love. It's like people who've been kept prisoners in a camp. The doors are open. They've been leading a life with a very deprived diet. Suddenly they're given a banquet and they rush towards the food. That food can make them ill and even kill them, because they can't. Their stomach has had to shrink so much, it can't deal with the richness on offer. And what can fatefully happen is if you try to love someone who's come from a place of trauma, what you can find is that even though they want to love you, they want to be with you. What they end up doing is ejecting you from their life. And they don't even know why. It just feels too much. It feels uncomfortable, it feels stifling. They can't even quite put words on it. But if they were able to phrase it, what they'd really say is, please don't love me so intensely because I've had to survive. But in order to survive, I've had to reduce my need for love so much that I'm being asphyxiated by something that's so beautiful and so necessary.

B (105:33)

Alain, may I read you something from your latest book? Chapter one. The Very Start Causes of Trauma. Few of us can hope to get through love unscathed. The threats to us are so numerous and so stubborn, we are rarely far from opportunities for suffering, terror, agony and despair. Arrayed against us are awkward parents, treacherous friends, chaotic societies, disturbed exes, sterile workplaces, errant lovers, unreliable bodies and ungrateful children. The odds of making it through the obstacle course substantially unharmed are negligible. Are you a pessimist?

A (106:22)

I sometimes think I might even say it. Somewhere in the book, you know, there's a cup of human sorrow. Imagine there's a cup holding tears or a poison. I think that all of us probably have to drink from that cup of human sorrow at some point in life. We probably have to take a big gulp of human sorrow. And it tends to happen at different moments over different things for different people. The chances getting through this life substantially unscathed are minimal. Remember the famous last line of Oedipus Rex call no man happy till he dies. Great wisdom of the tragic Greeks. In other words, think of the Greek worldview. The gods are watching all of us, and they don't think that anyone is a God. Any human is a God. And the lot of human beings is to suffer and to be open to suffering. And the Greeks were very live to the concept of hubris. Hubris is getting too big for your boots, thinking you've cracked it, thinking you know what's going on. And you know all the Greek. You know the story of Daedalus and Icarus, et cetera. All the Greek stories are about people who forget that they're human beings. They're not gods, and they are vulnerable. We are all so vulnerable to disaster, which is why we need to be so grateful every single day that we don't have a catastrophe on our plates. We need to be grateful and we need to be so kind, so kind to others who do not have the fortune that currently we might enjoy because it's all temporary and life really has a habit of turning things over. How old are you?

B (108:00)

47.

A (108:01)

Okay, you're 47 and your life's been charmed in many ways. You've worked extremely hard. You've got to an amazing place, but you're still young and goodness knows what the gods have got in store. Now we're going to touch some wood here and say, you know, we hope it all goes well, but your level of exposure to accident is enormous because you're a human being and all of us are in that position.

B (108:24)

Yeah, it's interesting. I'm 47, right? And obviously I've shared a couple of things with you which are a reflection of my life today. There's been many struggles along the way. I've had sick parents for much of my adult life. I've had huge amounts of adult caring responsibilities for much of my life for a variety of different people. My dad died in 2013, which I really, really struggle with for a long, long time. But I would argue that it's all those experiences that suffering, if you will, which has led me to the place that I am today. You often reference the tenet of Buddhism, life is suffering. And I'm certainly not here to say that Buddhism got it wrong. Right. I'm definitely not as arrogant to think that. Having said that, I believe that, well, that's one way of looking at the world. I actually feel very content a lot of the time. Allah. Right. So I would say I'm an optimist. So it's not that I disagree with those words. I think they're beautiful words. At the same time I think, I wonder. And maybe it goes back to what you said about my relationship with Vid. Maybe I don't realize how lucky I am. Maybe that foundation that I've got that I feel I have allows me to go, yeah, life is great, don't get.

A (109:58)

Me wrong, to believe that life is suffering, that life is dark, that there's a lot of pain coming our way, et cetera. This is not a one way ticket to grief, sorrow and despair. It's actually a ticket to lovely things. Appreciation, joy, giggling, dancing in the kitchen late at night, hugging those who are close to you, taking pleasure in small things. Cinnamon buns, hot bars, the first day of spring. We will love these with all our heart, not because our life is without suffering, but because we know suffering. It's when we know that there's darkness that the light stands out and, and so therefore there's nothing incompatible between feeling intensely that life is full of suffering and also experiencing every joy that it can provide us.

B (110:46)

Yeah, it's interesting, one of my best mates a few years ago found out that his son had a non malignant brain tumor. And one of the things he's done since then is he always says yes. So whenever his child says, oh, hey daddy, can we do this or can we do that? He says yes. And I remember hearing that going, wow, that's lovely. I very much tried to then apply that with my own children, you know, take the suffering and turn it into appreciation and go, well, what would life look like if every time my daughter said, hey daddy, can we throw the netball in the garden? Even If I've got 20 emails to write and get back to and people are expecting them from me, what if I just thought, yeah, actually, you know what, let's go and play that well, but of course you can go to another extreme, can't you? Like you were saying before, you can go pendulum the other way. But I definitely want to just highlight the point that I think my dad dying, you know, seeing my mom nearly die three years ago and you know, with my mom now, mom is still alive and every time I go around and see mum, which is most days because I live five minutes away, I have an appreciation now that I didn't have four years ago because I'm like, oh my God, I never thought I'd have these moments again. So every time that was special, but it needed the suffering in order to give me the appreciation.

A (112:16)

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

B (113:08)

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

A (113:35)

Sure. I mean, the environment has a huge influence on our state of mind. And very often people will say, I'm not in a good frame of mind. And you say, oh, just tell me what you've been up to for the last week or so. And they'll go, all right, okay, well, I flew to Berlin and then I flew to New York, and then I'm just back from a conference, and then I've got written three papers, and then one of my children needed to be driven halfway across the country, etc. And they're still only at Wednesday. And you think, hang on a minute. And you're worrying about why your mind is not as steady as it should be. We take extraordinary risks with our mental sense of balance by stuffing our calendars full of events and not noticing when we're slipping out of our minds. I mean, we are sensitive, very sensitive instruments, you know, all of us sharing a brain with the person who, you know, Mozart wrote his symphonies, van Gogh made his painting, etc. We all have those sort of brains, brains of infinite sensitivity. And so even if we're not great musicians or great artists, we should share in their receptivity to the ups and downs of life and to the color and the beauty and the horror and the pain. And we tend not to give our lives the time that they deserve to be properly felt. And I think one of the ways of defining mental well being is a life where you are able to let events resonate as they need to. If something's happened, they always carry resonance. Five minutes of living might require 10 minutes or 20 minutes of processing. Something might have happened in five minutes that needs to reverberate properly through our system. If we're constantly onto the next thing, then we're accumulating these stifled resonances. And in the end, what you get is mental illness.

B (115:20)

Yeah, too many commitments, you know, things to avoid. That was the first thing you raised about. Too many commitments And I think it very much piggybacks on what we were saying before about success. And what does the modern world tend to value? What does a capitalist society tend to value? And the amount of us who are over committed. And I guess that's one thing I've become acutely aware of and I'm being pretty ruthless with trying to address, you know, I'd love nothing more than an empty day on the calendar. Which yes, can be a privilege as well. Not everyone has the agency in their job to be able to do that. I understand that. But that everything's got a cost, hasn't it? Everything has a cost.

A (116:07)

And the whole idea of doing nothing, we're not, you know, when we haven't got any external commitment, we're not doing nothing. We've got an opportunity to go inside ourselves, to explore ourselves and do that hugely important work of processing things that have happened normally when we've been in the company of others. So solitude is a necessary state in relation to a busy life with others. People have an enormous impact on us. They upset us, they enliven us, they trouble us, they cause us anxiety and we need time with ourselves to discuss. You know, all of us have got a five year old child inside of us and that's us. And if you had a five year old child, you would know that that child needs a nap, that that child shouldn't do too much, it shouldn't stay up too late, it might get quite tearful if it's got to do something quite complicated, it might be quite shy in front of strangers. Our problem is that we're more robust for a while at least than we should be. And so we forget that we're carrying this vulnerable five year old child and we jostle this five year old child until eventually he can't take it anymore. So think of yourself always as you steer through life as being responsible for a much more vulnerable version of you that you need to make sure gets to bed relatively early.

B (117:21)

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

A (117:28)

I mean, well, the thing is that we're still one of the early generations to be able to feel that in order to be a well informed person, we should be in touch with all the tragedies and disasters that have happened to anyone in our species over the last 12 hours. That's both a privilege and an enormous burden. I mean no one previously in history had to deal with so many catastrophes, had to fill their minds with so many examples of human failure on a regular basis and to feel that they were not properly informed and they didn't properly belong to humankind unless they had that capacity to take on the disasters of others. And I think that sometimes we can't really serve people well who are close to us and depend on us if our minds are so filled with tragedies and disasters that we can't actually help with that are happening somewhere else around the world. So it's not about shutting your eyes to human need. It's about being selective about the sort of needs that you can take care of and attending really to those who are close to you, where the difference can be made.

B (118:33)

Yeah, because often when we expose ourselves to all these negative news stories, they make us feel powerless. There's an inertia within us, a sadness within us that then permeates around everyone, you know, in our lives, in our actual immediate environment. So we're actually powerless to even change those people or influence those people. And, you know, I very much try and live by, you know, I think the quote that I think has been attributed to Gandhi, although I believe there's controversy over who said this first. You know, be the change that you want to see in the world.

A (119:06)

So we've got this idea that it's always better to acquire more knowledge. More knowledge. You know, it's always better to know more. But I think at a certain stage, we think, might it be important sometimes in some areas to know a bit less? Might a certain kind of awareness get in the way of serving those who depend on you? And when it comes to things like modern media, yes, there are certain things which it doesn't help you to function, to know this. It's not personally affecting you, and it will, in fact, SAP your spirit and energy to be a good citizen.

B (119:39)

Take that to the lens of health and sort of, let's say physical health. Not that, but I think really you can separate physical health and mental health and emotional health in the way that we try to do it. But I would argue that most people, when it comes to improving their health, they don't actually need more knowledge. They've already got enough knowledge. They're not actually applying the knowledge that they've got. So they're under the mistaken belief that a newer book, another podcast telling me about this is somehow gonna give me new insights or new information that I can apply. And actually, the truth is, you know, you probably already know enough. You've got to uncover the reasons why you're not actually doing it.

A (120:24)

I mean, people will say things Like I've not read enough. That's why I'm not, you know, creative enough. Or that's why I'm not, you know, getting on. And I always want to say, look, you've read more than Plato. You've read about five times as much as Shakespeare. You're not using the stuff you've already got. Your problem is not that you don't know enough, it's that you're not making use of the stuff that you already know. And adding more isn't going to help. It's absorption that's the trick, not ingestion.

B (120:50)

We cover things to avoid. At the end of the book, you talk about things to aim for and you write about things like nature, therapy, retreats, modesty. Are there any that you want to just elaborate on a little bit?

A (121:03)

I mean, look, nature is a classic one. The great thing about nature, the reason why nature brings us so much, is that it doesn't care about us. It provides us with a stunning, normally visually sublime lesson in the indifference of the universe and eternity in what we're up to. And so often the reason why we get unwell is that we get burdened by a sense of the unbelievable importance of everything that we're doing, thinking, feeling and going through. And it's hugely salutary. It's a real relief to be told, you don't matter. You are a speck in the vast universe, in the cosmos, and far from this humiliating us, it can actually lighten our spirits because we think, thank goodness, you know, a lot of what I'm going through, it doesn't matter. So again, really important perspective in a walk in a forest or a look at the night sky. These are delivering philosophy lessons about the way that we don't really matter.

B (121:58)

We don't really matter. Ain't that the truth? Ain't that the truth? Alan, I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, as I did our first conversation. I think the new book From Trauma to Healing is stunning, as are all of your books. It's beautiful, succinct, you know, thought provoking writing at the end of this conversation. For someone who stumbled across it today and has had some insights about their own life, they've had some realizations that perhaps they're in a relationship that is not going the way that they want it to and they're wanting to change things. How would you advise them to start?

A (122:46)

Can I blow my own trumpet? I wrote a book called the Course of Love, and that book is the study of a relationship. And it's both a novel but also an essay. And I think it's a book that many readers have been comforted by and learnt from, et cetera. I poured a lot of love into that book. I run this thing called the School of Life, which exists online and in the real world, and a lot of help and assistance is given there about relationships. I'll tend to write something for the School of Life every day and post it on our channel and on our blog, et cetera. So that's an area where you can keep up with us. I'm constantly encountering new problems and the way that I help myself is to turn difficulties into ideas. That's what I've been doing ever since I was a young man, and that's what I most love. And if it helps and resonates with others, what I've tended to find is if I'm doing the work on myself, if I've gone somewhere honest in myself, it should ring a bell in the other person. Not always true, but that's, you know, sometimes people go, ooh, you know, how did you know that about me? I go, I've got no idea about you. I'm just trying to find out about myself. And if I'm an accurate scribe of what's going on in me, might ring a bell in you.

B (124:00)

The most personal is the most universal.

A (124:03)

Lovely. Love that.

B (124:05)

Alain de Botton. It's an absolute pleasure. I love what you do. I love your writings. Thank you so much for coming back.

A (124:11)

Thank you. Pleasure. Thank you.

B (124:17)

Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or video videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free@drchatterjee.com Friday 5 if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world covering all kinds of different topics, Happiness, food, stress, sleep, behavior change and movement, weight loss and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks and as audiobooks which I am narrating. If you want enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the Episode Episode notes in your podcast app and always remember you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better you live more.