Hello and welcome to Happy Place with me, Fearne Cotton. This is the show that asks how we can be kinder to ourselves and others. Today I'm chatting to Alain de Botton. When there is a shortfall of love, you've got two options. Number one, the sadistic option, which is to go off and make somebody else unhappy. Someone has evacuated something negative into us, we evacuated into others. In order to alleviate our things, that's the origin
of bullying, so it's a sort of transgenerational transfer of hurt. And then the other mechanism which is slightly better for the world, but not much good for the individual, is the masochistic response, which is someone's hurt me and I'm going to treat myself like that hurtful person to me. You will become your inner torturer. If we can get rid of that, we'd have a happy planet. Alain is the best-selling author of 15 books. His writing is basically
a philosophy for everyday life. He's also the founder of The School of Life, which is a platform dedicated to bringing about health, growth and self-understanding in various ways through psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy and art. And my god, it's helped me a lot. His latest book is A Theorpeutic Journey, and it basically looks at the whole arc of mental health from crisis to recuperation. He's amazing at taking what feels absolutely huge, complex
subjects and writing about them in a really clear and really kind way. And that's the way he talks about it in this chat too. And we talked about some big stuff, intergenerational transfer of trauma, the logic behind defense mechanisms, what a healthy mind actually is. That one was huge. But honestly, he just makes it all feel so manageable. Hey, Cass Powers, the world's best podcast. Here's a show that we recommend.
Hey y'all, I'm Taryn Finley, host of a new podcast from HealthPost called I Know That's Right. Each week, I'll be taking you on a ride where mainstream media and the depths of internet culture collide. Join by a rotating cast of Franz Angus. We'll be breaking down the weekly what's what and who's who of pop culture. You need a show that separates the mess from the stuff that makes you say, I know that's right. Don't worry, girl, I got
you. Check out I know that's right. Wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Cass helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Hey, Cass.com. All right. Thank you. We've got a lot to talk about today. First of all, I'd like to say thank you for writing this brilliant book, which I loved reading. You see many doggered pages throughout. It's
a very gentle and beautiful book, a therapeutic journey. And there is a real mission in this book because you start at the top by stating that this book insists that we cannot allow terror, self-hatred and sadness to overall us and to bring us down. And I wonder if you think those particular troubles are more prevalent today or are we just talking about them more?
I think they're pretty much constant in human nature. And of course, they pass down the generations so that one of the most awful things that happen is that terrified people, breed terrified children, people who've been terrorized will go on to terrorize, etc. So there's this terrible intergenerational transfer of difficulties. And I think we are, you know, there is hope on the horizon and that we are starting to understand how the
psyche works and do things about it. I mean, we're still at the beginning of learning how to parent, for example. And a lot of this is how generations are brought up. You know, we know so much more than we did a hundred years ago. And some of that knowledge at least is filtering down so that, you know, in the real world, people are taking action that's very different and informed by the best knowledge of how you, you know, educate the next generation.
I mean, you question this in the book, you know, is it a modern luxury to look into this stuff, to have self-inventory and to have a sort of explorative keenness to find out who we are and why we are like we are? Why do you think it's a bad thing to assume that it's self-indulgent to have any form of self-expiration? Well, I think there's always a guilt about doing some of the most necessary things. So I'm always struck by how people will say, oh, looking into yourself, that's self-indulgent,
but then they're going book a skiing holiday. And that's somehow not self-indulgent or something, you know, it's very odd. Or people go, therapy, that's very expensive and then they'll go out to a very expensive restaurant. But somehow they'll think that the therapy bit is, you know, the self-indulgent bit. So that feels very British as well. Yes, I mean, I think there's, look, it's very frightening to look inside yourself. So
I've got a lot of sympathy for that. All of us are in flight from aspects of ourselves. There's so much, you know, fear, doubt, regret in ourselves. And who wants to spend a lot of time with that? So, you know, we are so well armed with all kinds of distractions that can keep us buoyant and can feed us a sort of impression that things are okay, which is why often people keep going for a long, long, long time until finally they hit a wall
because something is, you know, bigger than their destructive kind of resources. But, yes, we are, we're odd in assuming that something, which is not a luxury, is deemed a luxury, in other words, introspection and self-exploration. Yeah, I mean, like you've just suggested there, people go lifetimes without being diagnosed or without taking any time to look at what's going on. And a lot of the time they'll be undiagnosed because whatever's going on for them mentally or otherwise becomes their
normal, even if it's really, really negative. And I guess then it becomes extremely difficult to work out if something needs adjusting, if something's wrong. How would you suggest we decipher when our normal is perhaps not quite okay? I mean, look, that's such a good question because what we're really talking about here
is defense mechanisms. And, you know, we all have these things called defense mechanisms, which are ways in which we've adapted normally to slightly suboptimal environments that we grew up in. And, you know, it's easy to knock defense mechanisms, go, well, that's just, you know, that's just nonsense and we need to get rid of them. But usually they have a real logic to them. And at some point in our life, they're really, really important.
Take, you know, something that people go on on about is the fear of intimacy. Take, take the fear of intimacy. Now, it's easy to say, and I know in certain circles, people go, oh, fear of intimacy, it's often a male thing. It's seen as a, as a sort of bit of nonsense that we only need to get over. But let's be a bit generous towards this thing we call
the fear of intimacy. Let's imagine you've grown up in an abusive household. Household where someone is raging, a household in which someone is alcoholic, a household in which someone is humiliating you, bullying you, et cetera. How wonderful. And I mean, it's genuinely how wonderful to develop a fear of intimacy that gets you through to the next stage, that is not just some sort of work designed to annoy your partners. It's
actually a survival strategy. So when you're four, five, six, et cetera, to have that in place, to have that as something that you can draw on will help you to survive. The problem is what happens to that adaptive strategy decades later when you're in your 30s, your 40s, your 50s. And let's say you're trying to form relationships, maybe with a partner, maybe with your children, maybe colleagues, whatever it is. And you find that there is
a barrier between you and other people. Then it becomes a problem. What I'm trying to say is I think we need to be generous towards a lot of the stuff that we end up doing. Because when you see people doing crazy stuff and we all do crazy stuff, I'm sure it's awesome stuff, friends, et cetera. Don't just sort of shrug and say, oh, why are they doing that? It's nonsense. Say in what circumstances might this rather peculiar behavior have
made a lot of sense? And almost always, you can either know the answer because you know bit about the history or you can guess. I mean, look at me, if you have other examples, let's imagine somebody who could never be sincere. You always feel that they have a jockey, boy and plastic manner. And you think, where's the real them? And you can never feel that you reach it again, bit annoying, hard to get to know such a person, you know,
keeps them away from deeper connections with people, et cetera. But if you're five and you're in a difficult environment, maybe you've got a depressed parent who is really looking to a child as depressed parents sometimes are to carry the hope of the family. Then you get assigned that role. I've got to be the hopeful one. And maybe you're five and you've got to become the Joker, you've got to become the up person, et cetera. And then
you find that in later life, you can't shed that. So I guess what I'm saying is don't just describe people's behavior as crazy. Search for the logic, which probably once made that behavior really sensible. And then gently, gently, and it's good be, you know, it's
all of us as well. It's not just other people. All of us, you know, it helps to be really compassionate towards why you might have developed that defense strategy, but then learn to let go of it on the basis of having understood why it arose and why it might no longer be necessary. Yeah. I mean, it's a hard thing to do, but it's essential if you want to change with a better and experienced deeper relationships and everything that you've just spoken about.
And I've heard you talk on for the School of Life doing these talks about how we have to look at childhood. And nobody necessarily wants to be quite painful or it can, or some people are bored by the concept of it, but it's essential. We have to go back there to figure out why we are, how we are today. Yeah. And, you know, I'm really sympathetic to people who say, oh, no, not childhood again. You know, and I hear that a lot from people, your friends, acquaintances, et cetera.
They go, surely not that childhood thing. And I do appreciate it. I mean, who wants to be in their 20s, 30s, 40s on and be returned to a few years when, you know, you didn't have much reason. You perhaps can't even remember those years. Why? Why do we need to do this? And I think, well, look, several things. Think about learning language, right? None of us really remember what it was like to learn the language that we speak our first language.
We don't really remember because it happened unconsciously while we were doing other stuff like playing in the garden, going swimming, drawing buttercups in the kitchen, whatever it was, we were actually taking in tens of hundreds of words, grammatical structures, laws of grammar, et cetera. We don't remember any of it, but we speak that language now.
We speak English, Korean, Finnish, et cetera, whatever it may be. Something similar, I believe, goes on in the emotional sphere without us noticing in our home of birth, in our environment of birth. We are learning an emotional language, not of grammatical expression, but a language that teaches us, you know, what men are, what women are, what trust is, what love is, what betrayal is, what hope is, all of these things. And it goes inside us. And we have
absolutely no idea that we're speaking a very, very particular language. And families are all these families are always these fascinating units that don't let on how odd they are. They don't even know how odd they are. They kind of, everyone bolsters everybody else in a kind of normalizing effort. Occasionally, you know, you go to university and you think, yeah, mum, dad, be odd. But you know, it doesn't even begin to cover. We all have come
from quite strange, quite local places. And then what happens is that we take these strategies that we learned in our families of birth and we play them out with other people. And this is, you know, our old friend projection, which is one of the most vital words. You
talk about this, we all talk about it. It's one of the most vital words in the kind of therapeutic lexicon, the idea that what we're all engaged with is projecting onto a often fairly neutral reality, scripts and stories and expectations that were created in us in very local scenarios. And sometimes they're very good scripts like, you know, script that we might trust people or that we might put the best of ourselves forward. You know, that
can be very useful and helpful assumption to go through life. But very often and unfortunately, they're more trauma-laden scripts where we imagine that, you know, if we tell someone a secret, they'll immediately betray us or that the only way to win someone over is to seduce them when actually maybe we don't want to seduce them. You know, all these are other complicated scripts that we might have learned. And to kind of unpick that and
look at reality is a life's work. It's a life's work. And also, I guess it's not particularly helpful to just go, well, I blame my parents, you know, all I'm a parent, you know, we're all going to project onto our children and that will cause, you know, problems. And I think there'll be beneficial moments in our parenting as well. But we can't just sit there and go, well, this is how I am. My parents have ruined everything. That's not helpful.
What do we do if there is an uncertain amount of rage or resentment about childhood? Do you need to unpick that before you start looking at your own behaviour? I mean, look, I'm really sympathetic, you know, we're recording this few weeks for Christmas. It's relevant to talk about Christmas. This is when families are absolutely pitch. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, there is particularly in grown up children returning home after having, you
know, been living an adult life. There's a sort of thing feeling of I want to get things off my chest and confront the people who molded me in certain ways that might have been causing trouble. And I'm really sympathetic to that wish. I'm also really cautious about whether it can work. You know, there are wonderful stories of parents and children who are
able to really enter into kind of deep dialogue. It's rather like the reconciliation between countries, countries who acknowledge that they've seen things in a different way and can it. But this is a rare thing. Yeah. Very rare thing. And very often we damage ourselves when we go to parents and say, you know, there's three things you didn't understand, etc. And then we get hurt all over again. And then the parent gets hurt and, you know, everybody's
getting hurt. And that's why Christmas is often a sad affair. But, you know, it's my acceptance, then. Well, often I think it's about taking those feelings to somebody else. Right. It's my friend, it's got a therapist, you know, who's probably better equipped to deal with them. It's, you know, it's a real temptation to return the hurt to its sender. But I think it's probably more mature to take the hurt to someone else and to unpack it.
And of course, look, you know, if one was the Buddha or Jesus or, you know, Freud, one can say, it's very easy to say, they didn't do it on purpose. And no one does it. No, in a sense, no one does anything on purpose, even a mass murderer doesn't do anything on purpose if looked at from a sufficient distance. But, you know, when you're up against someone
or something that's hurt, you was very hard to adopt that thing. But I think the key principle should be make sure you look after yourself and make sure you ask yourself before confronting someone is confrontation with them ultimately in my own interest. Or is it simply maybe playing out an appetite for drama and suffering in myself that, you
know, actually, I should probably let go. Yeah. And I guess one of the other reasons which could motivate us to look at our childhoods if we haven't already is the fact that, you know, you talk about in the book, we have sort of the ghost of our childhood walking around with us quite often. And I'll notice that probably more actually could be in my
working life and outside of my working life. But if I look at specifically my working life, sometimes sort of 14 year old Fern turns up, who's at state school not doing very well. And I think everyone else is just so much smarter and they've got it all sorted. And I as a 42 year old have to sort of gather her up and go, I know you're there. And
I hear you, but just chush for a bit because 42 year old Fern needs to do this bit. We've all got that younger self sort of skimming around the outskirts of our movements through the day. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things, one of the lessons is that 14 year old
Fern, it was really good that she did what she did when she was 14. That was probably really helpful to have a certain kind of attitude, a certain kind of way of maneuvering through the world that got you through to being the 16 year old, the 18 year old, the 18 year old, et cetera. So it's not a case of saying, you know, that 14 year old was a total idiot and completely irrelevant. It's just if she shows up, you know, in the board meeting,
it could be troublesome. And so I think we need to make friends and be quite compassionate towards the different parts of us that coexist. You know, the eight year old who's outraged and maybe, you know, sticks up for their interest a bit too loudly. Well, it was probably really good that they knew how to be outraged and knew how to stick up for themselves aged eight. Is it the best strategy when you're 20 or 30 or 40? Well, maybe not. Maybe that's when
it gets difficult. So again, it's not about sort of chiding oneself for not being clever enough. It's about, you know, I think you put it really well that there are these different parts of us constantly coexisting. And it's, you know, it's almost like you've got more around the table. Let's learn to be kind and to understand where each one's coming from and heard them towards a coherent direction, which serves the you in the here and now.
Yeah, I think it's game changing when you can get your head around that one. It really is at the start of the book, what I found to be really helpful was how explicit you were in what a healthy mind is. And I don't think I'd ever, you know, I'm deeply interested in this stuff. And I'll read as many books as I count these subjects, listen to all the TED talks. I don't
think I'd ever stop to go, what's a healthy mind? It's the simplest of questions. Would you mind sort of running through a few of those outlines so that we can all hear what makes a healthy mind? Sure. I mean, yeah, you know, you raise a really good point. We always talk about mental health and mental ill-health. But what do we people? What do people mean? Okay, here's a few things in no particular order. I think one of the things that a healthy mind is able to do and sounds a little
odd is bracket. What I mean by bracket is the ability to sequence thoughts in order of their validity to you at a particular moment so that you don't get a thought which, while true, while legitimate, has no place at a particular point in time. So for example, let's say you're trying to get up on stage and make a speech, right? Do you need the voice that says, so and so really criticise me when I was at school and said I was an idiot? Do you need that voice right then and
there? Or actually, do you need another kind of voice which is, I'm going to do this in its fine? Do you know what I mean? And so the ability to sequence thoughts and arrange them more or less in the way that we need them arranged to do what we need to do is a really important part of mental health. And when you speak to people who are unhealthy of mind, and this is everybody at some point, what they're unable to do is is kind of simply say, yes, thanks very much,
I don't need to hear that right now. Able to kind of create a hierarchy of what it's important to know. So that's one thing, you know, related to that is the ability to be kind to oneself. And it's going to sound odd or sentimental, but there are always many interpretations that we could bring to bear on who we are and what we're doing. And they range from the, you know, very indulgent to the very punitive. And there's no one truth about who a human is. There's a range
of truths and perspectives. And health depends on interpreting who we are and what we happen to be doing with some of the generosity of a friend. Now, a good friend isn't a liar. They're not saying you're fantastic. We're actually there. Things are messed up, but they're putting the most generous interpretation on whatever it is that you've done. It could be good or it could be bad. So they're not, you know, they're not deceiving you, but they're putting a helpful gloss, a kind gloss,
but a helpful gloss. And the helpful is the key word here, which is we need to survive and live. So, you know, it's in our interests that we find a way of making life bearable for ourselves at any point. And the mentally unwell mind, you know, we could ask why does a mind get unwell? It's because the negativity that is in everyone and that drives from negative experiences becomes simply overpowering.
We have no resource left to combat the darkness that's in everyone. It normally does have a developmental origin that we simply haven't been shown enough positivity for long enough to remain on our own side and on the side of hope, which means that our kind of attachment to the
light is just that bit more fragile. It doesn't take that much to kind of tip us over. And, you know, that's why people who have had challenging developmental paths do need to pay more attention than others to making sure that they can surround themselves with voices, internal and external arguments, if you like, in favour of keeping going in favour of, you know, sustaining themselves in life. Yeah, it's interesting because I really like the bit in the book where you were talking about,
you know, we're bombarded with news and media and most of it is negative quite frankly. And we've sort of, I guess put that under the guise of I'm keeping up with everything I'm informed, but at the cost of our sanity, and I think like you just said there, if we have a mind that might be slightly on the fragile side and could tip into despair quite easily, watching just incredible amounts of news all day long or catching up on your phone, probably isn't the best idea. So you're
essentially saying it's okay to not be informed. Absolutely. I mean, look, it's, you know, that word informed is such a fascinating word because it's informed of what. Yeah. And you know, we have to say just about stuff. Right. Or even just the external stuff, you know, because someone who is an old, old debate throughout philosophy and someone who sits on a rock and contemplates is also getting a
lot of news, but where are they getting news from from within rather than use from without. And, you know, in the West today, in modernity, we hugely privileged the acquisition of information from the outside. And we also hugely privileged new information. So that's something that's happened today. I mean, you know, it's the clues in the word. We have this thing called the news. In other words, the news stuff is more important than the old stuff. I mean, somebody said, you know, what's
the headline news? Headline is news is, you know, something that came up two thousand years ago and was invented. You know, we'll go, I know that's all we've heard about that. As though, you know, the important and the novel belong together, but you know, as we all know, it's very interesting. Yeah, because I, I guess I've concentrated so much on the connotation being negative, news, negative,
but the new element of it, I hadn't really thought about that. And it's really a scientific notion, you know, science is an area where, unlike lots of other areas, the new really does tend to be better. In other words, because science is based on a constant evolution towards, you know, greater precision and greater understanding of reality, you know, the new paper on penicillin is
likely to be better than the hundred year old paper on penicillin. And that really works for the scientists, but, but what's happened is that that scientific model has spread across all areas. So we think that the new, in all areas is going to be superior. But, you know, in order, even in order to understand something that's happening now, the best way to understand it might be to go to a library and pick out a book written 500 years ago, which will give you a clearer insight into
the dynamics than watching, you know, CNN on and on and on, which won't show you anything. And, you know, psychologically, the same thing is true that many of the things that we most need to know have not happened today, they might have happened, come back to the childhood thing, they might have happened 30 years ago, they might have happened when we were three. And, you know, a culture that keeps
on drawing us out of ourselves. I mean, you know, I think we really do live in an addictive culture. Yes. And we're very used to that word addiction being used in quite specific things, drugs, alcohol, etc. And I think we need to broaden it, you know, I think we need to redefine addiction as really pretty much anything that keeps us tethered to a sort of hamster wheel of attention outside of ourselves and draws us away from that kind of introspection. And that means it could be anything.
I mean, it could be exercise, you know, get addicted to exercise, get into gardening, you can get addicted to shopping, I mean, food, chatting to people, anything, anything. It's not what it is, it's how it's being done. And I think the way to define addiction is that it's essentially trying to draw you away from your shadow side, what you can call the shadow side. In other words, the things about you that are essential, but are too hard to look at in broad daylight. And, you
know, we have an epidemic of insomnia, people can't sleep. The way I think of insomnia is it's a kind of revenge for all those thoughts. And there are many that we probably haven't dared or ruthlessly disowned during the day, we haven't dared to look at in the day. And they come back and haunt us because I think what we do all have is a kind of intellectual conscience, if you like. There are, I mean, I think we're we're made up of two fascinatingly contrary forces. At one
level, we want to forget everything. We want to get away from, you know, true stuff because it we can't bear it. You know, that we might be angry with someone we're supposed to love that we're humiliated by something that we're supposed to be above. You know, whatever it is, lots and lots of things that we want to disown. But there's also another part of us that is truth seeking about ourselves and that won't really let us rest until we've done that in a work. And the two are
constantly sort of intention. And some of what goes I mean, the way I like to think about it is the truth needs to be heard. If we push it away, it'll come back somehow. It might come back through insomnia. Other place it comes back, of course, is our bodies. You know, our bodies are a fascinating repository of disowned thoughts. And we know this with our backs, right? Let's say
there's been a lot of tension in our lives. We're angry with somebody. We feel hard done by in some way, something, but we haven't been able to think about it because we're maybe supposed to be good boys or girls. We're not supposed to be upset about this thing. We've got a job to do whatever it is. And then we get out of bed one day, oh, can't move. My back is rigid. What's going on? It's not a physical problem. We did the GP. Of course, they can see a physical thing and you put
yourself in an MRI scan. You see a problem that the ribs are locked, the vertebrae are locked. But it's got a it's got a it's got a mental cause. And it's as though a message from within has not found an outlet and it's gone into the body. And I think a very useful exercise to do to try and prevent some of these things is almost to interview your own body. Sounds like an odd thing. But you know, last thing at night, lying in bed, go down your own body and say, what are my shoulders
trying to tell me if my ribs could speak? What would they want to say? What does my back want to get off its chest as it were? You know, what are my legs really pointing to? Because often it sounds like such a weird question. You're like, you're asking your back. I think it's great. But if you try it, right? You actually normally have an answer. It's kind of weird. Like, yeah, you've got it there
because because we do know so much more than we allow ourselves to know. But we don't stop to find out, you know, we're as you said, we're addicted to being distracted and to not looking within part of that contemplation like you say can be asking your body questions. And there was a very specific question that you suggest we asked ourselves. I really liked in the book, which is what have I looked at? But never seen. That's so interesting. How do we start to find new angles to situations we
think we understand? We might go, this happened in my childhood or this happened last week. But we're not really seeing a full bodied story. How do we get a different angle of it? That's so fascinating because we do become kind of prisoners of the stories we tell ourselves about things. I mean, we know it. We know it on a on a simple basis. Let's imagine you returned from holiday. Somebody says, oh, what was Greece like? And for a moment, you've got a well to thousands of
impressions of what that holiday was like. And you might be slightly fishing around. You go, oh, it was sort of like this minute, solid. And maybe your answer is a bit diffuse and you feel you're into locutor looking at a bit days or whatever. And then you gradually compress it. Oh, like it was really sunny. The food was not that great. But you know, the, you know, we've
managed to do some really exciting things without animals or whatever it is. And then it becomes a packaged sort of narrative from which, which is very handy to manipulate, very handy to get out to other people, but it's completely devoid of feeling. Yeah. The affect has completely drained out of it. And I think that what can happen is we sometimes develop that in relation to our own childhoods. People go, you know, what was your childhood like? Might go terrible, terrible,
absolutely awful. But at that time, we've completely, we're totally out of touch. And, but then sometimes those feelings track us and we'll find us so that maybe, you know, my old mate Marcel Proust wrote a book about him, you know, that thing, the prusty and moment, which is when you're jogged, your involuntary memory is jogged by a sight or a smell of something, you know, you're suddenly smell, I don't know, rain concrete after rain, you know, distinctive earth after rain or the light
at dusk or something. And suddenly you're carried, catapulted back to another period of your life. And suddenly you're, you're back in touch with what something was really like. It's like funerals. Often we can't cry at funerals. Why can't we cry at funerals? Because the reality of the person we've lost is not present in our minds at that time. Because we're so busy, you know, organizing the food and the cars and the this or that we almost just are not, we know someone has died,
but we're out of touch with that feeling. And that gives us a sense of the complexity, the difference between factual knowledge and emotional knowledge. Have you ever Googled your own name? Prepare for a shot because your personal info, including addresses and phone numbers is all out there. It's all harvested by data brokers and sold legally. ORA is a personal digital security service that scans the internet for your
sensitive information and provides a full suite of privacy enhancing tools. For a limited time, ORA is offering listeners a 14 day free trial at aura.com slash safety. That's a-u-r-a.com slash safety to learn more and activate the 14 day trial period. So how do we get to the emotional bit? How do we- if we are- if we know that parts of our life have been challenging, but maybe we haven't dealt with the feelings around it and they might still live in our body and we're not sure
where to even start. How do you get in touch with that stuff? Well, look, let's take an ordinary day. Let's start with the day because it's the same principle. So every day we get so many sense impressions, feelings, etc. Most of which we don't look at and we will forget and just tip into the sea as it were. But a very useful exercise is last thing at night. Again, line bed and start asking yourself some very large but basic and simple but important questions like what am I sad about?
It's odd because every day we are sad about something. We all carry within us melancholy grief loss and we all have an encounter with it every single day. Even a so-called happy day has got some loss in it but we don't want to look at it generally. But asking yourself a last thing at night, what's been sad? There's always going to be something and it's a weird question to ask. What's been sad? When I also asked something like where am I hurt? Where's the hurt? Because again, there's always
hurt. There's always something. Someone said something. Someone didn't something. Whatever it is, beginning that, those feelings time to emerge, not thinking one knows the answer. I can also adopt a slightly more positive view. What am I excited about? What's thrilling me at the moment? What's beautiful? What's nice? It's not just what's horrible, but what's nice? And again, the answers have been squashed by our experience and by our rush towards the next
thing. You ask, how do we do that about our childhood? Well, something slightly similar. Don't assume you know what your childhood was like. Imagine yourself, for example, when you were five, put yourself in a certain room. Maybe your room. Imagine the five-year-old you. Don't rush towards an answer and simply look at the five-year-old you. We all have got an impression. Even when you can't see in your mind's eye, you've got an impression with that five-year-old. I asked myself a very simple
question. What does that five-year-old want? Basic question. What does that five-year-old want? I mean, I should say, by the way, you're simply bringing up a lot of emotion. Such question is a very simple question. We have a lot of emotion because that five-year-old might not be that happy, maybe, but it might want something, you know, but daring to ask, what does that five-year-old want? What would I want to do with that five-year-old? What would I want to tell it? What's it in need of?
Immediately puts you back in touch with the past in a way that's simply going, oh, where did you live when you were young? Doesn't? It's not the right kind of inquiry. And I guess you don't have to have an instant conclusion. These can be questions that you ask yourself often, and then maybe things may start to peel back, and you start to uncover some of these feelings that have been there all
along. Absolutely. You know, I'm a great fan of what psychologists call the unfinished sentence, and those things that they call sentence completion tests, where you essentially start with a word and then have an ellipsis dot dot dot, and you simply look at it and think about the first thing that comes into your head in relation to it. Classic one is men are dot dot dot. Don't laugh. Many answers. Don't. There's some great answers. But you know, ask yourself that.
Men are dot dot dot, right? Women are dot dot dot. I am dot dot dot. Very interesting. Life is dot dot. And we all have answers to those things. They change. And sometimes we really get taken by surprise. It's like life is, and you know, we might say an unending struggle is miserable. And you think, oh, I thought I was cheerful. What's going on? And it's because that is a part of you. Yeah. But maybe you haven't given enough time to. And there's something beautiful about that open
endedness of those tests. And by the way, all these things I'm suggesting are so simple. They're almost insultingly simple, but they're not. You know, the real work is doing the thing. Not setting it up. And you actually say in the book, you know, life or I think you say, agony is baked into the human condition. It's when you're talking about the artist Rothko and, and the sort of feeling that his paintings or vote. I mean, that's that's that can be a helpful thing to land on so that we know
that we're not meant to be cheerful all the time and everything's going to work out just okay. But also it can be quite bleak. How do you have an acceptance that agony is baked into the human condition without falling into absolute despair? Yes. I mean, look, I, you know, think of the first tenet of Buddhism. First tenet of Buddhism, life is suffering. Now whenever I hear that, I think jolly good, alone. I got friends. This is great. Yeah. There's lovely quote from the Stoic
philosopher, Senna, where he goes, what need is there to weep over parts of life? He says, the whole of it calls for tears. It's always been one of my favorite things. In other words, you know, don't cry about this or that old thing. And oddly, that sort of pessimism is, I think it makes us laugh often because it's the laughter of relief. It's like, God, I thought I was the only one to think it's a bit of a strange old journey that we're on and nothing is really satisfying and
everything's kind of miserable. But, you know, a lot of the time, the best solution to things is company is solace. And some of the problem of the way in which we govern our friendships is that we tend to think might I make a slightly sexist generalisation, particularly if it's men, I think that when you come together and someone says, how are you? You've got to go, I'm great, how are you? And that you think that the only way in which you can bond over things is to bring good things to
the table. Whereas, of course, you know, true friendship allows for even requires the confession of the more vulnerable sort of parts of us. Yeah, I mean, I've learned that doing this podcast, I've actually been able to find and forge a really nice connection with total strangers through
pain. We've met at a place of pain. And we wouldn't have, if we were like sat in the pub, chatting about the weather and holidays and such, which wouldn't have had that level of connection, where, you know, I've covered on talking to people for years after interviewing them because we've had that experience. I think it is this sort of strange myth that, you know, we can only
meet in a place of joy and have this shared experience. But, you know, I think that some of that, you know, don't want to blame parents, being a parent, you're a parent, you know, lots of parents out there. But some of the, some of the problem comes down to the way in which many parents are quite frightened by their children's feelings of sadness, melancholy rage, anger. And from the very best of motives, they censor their children. You know, I always remember seeing a parent saying,
there was a holiday resort. Child was acting up, being really miserable crying in the middle of this lovely resort, beautiful day. Exactly. And the child was saying, I hate it here, it's horrible. You must have been three, four, three. And the parent says to the child, don't be silly, it's a lovely resort, it costs a lot of money and you're on holiday. We want to say to the parent, it's true. But your child's actually telling you something different. For now, the child is feeling
out of sorts and they're feeling miserable. And because the best thing you can do is to reflect back to them, yeah, I'm sensing you're a little bit unhappy and that's, you know, it has its place. But from the very best of motives, we sometimes don't allow our children. You know, this is what happens to so-called badly behaved children. They come home from school going, you know, I hate the school, all the teachers horrible, I hate them. The parent says, no, they're not, it's a very nice school,
you're lucky to be able to go there. At which point the child goes, no, you know, and then graffiti's on the wall in order to try and get heard. And then they have to up the volume until such time, as hopefully someone will start to see that there is a problem. It's why, you know, a lot of anti-social behavior is a cry for help. It's, you know, a cry for attention. And there's a terrible thing in our culture. The people go, some parents, not a great thing, you know, the child will start
screaming and the parent will go, the child is looking for attention. I'm going to go into the next room and watch TV and you think, oh, Ouch, if somebody's, you know, under five and is trying to get attention, pay it, pay it because otherwise they're going to want to even more. And I think, you know, so-called attention seekers and never people who've had an excessive attention, they're people who've not had any attention. And that's why they're on a mission to make sure
the world notices them. Mm, goes back to childhood again. I mean, you list lots of lovely things that I found very comforting in this book that, and, you know, from the small things I eat in figs and dark chocolate and lovely stuff like that. But also having a hot bath because hot water equals love and care, which we can see is the sort of antithesis of the whole Wim Hof thing where you plunge yourself into painful. Oh my god. That would sound like ice. No, the fridge is off. That is
the ghost of Wim Hof. Exactly. But we can see how it's the antithesis of something like Wim Hof, saying, you plunge yourself into icy cold water for your mental, physical, well-being. What do you think about that? Because it is the direct opposite to what you're suggesting. Look, I think firstly, it's, you know, it takes a long time, I think, for all of us to realize the debt that are mental moods owe to our bodies. It's so strange. And if I could put it this way humiliating,
it's like, hang on a minute, I'm an adult. I've got thoughts. I've got ideas. They're rationally founded. They're based on collecting information from the outside world and coming to a sensible point of view on a topic, right? That's how we imagine that our brains work. And so we go around thinking we've got these solidly founded ideas. And then what happens is, what we see in children, most clearly, you know, a child will suddenly go from thinking that the world's okay to the world's
an absolutely awful place and everything's terrible. And one companion can go, my god, the child's gone mad. But a sensible parent will go, no, the child hasn't gone mad. They're just missing sleep. They need to go and have a nap or they need an orange juice. You know, their blood sugar is run low. So what you need to do is take them to bed or all tend to the kitchen. And we tend as adults to have lost sight of that very basic kind of awareness that if we haven't slept very well, right?
We are a liability to ourselves and to all those around us for the entire day. That's pretty frankly, right? Because we're not in our sleep. Things see and with a slightly catastrophic temperament, we're in danger of, you know, looking at things the wrong way. And so we owe ourselves and those around us to be able to go, okay, I haven't just reinvented the wheel or come to an entirely new perspective in my relationship or totally re-decided what my job is worth. I'm just tired. And
therefore I need to acknowledge this humiliating fact. I just need to go and have a nap or I just need to go and have a bit of chocolate or something or a hot, lovely hot bath. And but as I say, I think it's, if I can put it grandly pride, we're too proud for our own good sometimes. We think, I'm not this sort of person. I'm a totally rational person and everything I think, you know, people get into arguments and that's why you are arguing in this way. Do you really think that
X, Y or Z and you want to go, yes, I do absolutely. And if the person said to you, I think you need to maybe your blood sugar is low. You might, you might go, that's not true. I'm absolutely you know, but actually we might be fairer on ourselves and others. If we just sometimes acknowledge,
yeah, okay, maybe, maybe I just need to go often. But do you think we're also, we believe that we're undeserving of it because I can certainly look at moments in my week and go, I could have really done with a little rest there or a moment of solitude, like something very simple, but I don't often believe I properly deserve it. I think people work harder. I should be pushing myself more. I don't give myself that opportunity to go just flop and don't worry about it. But I think behind that is
a kind of model of what anyone deserves. And I think you're right. We do operate with, with slightly skewed notions. I mean, you know, you get this in ideas of productivity that in order to be productive, you need to sit at a desk and sit there for eight hours and then, you know, you will do great things. You know, office life is based on this kind of very rigid notion of how people produce.
But we all know intuitively that our productivity ebbs and flows throughout the day that actually going out for a walk could be a good thing that lying down for half an hour might be a part of productivity, et cetera. But the ways in which we structure our lives and our lives are structured for us doesn't allow for any of that sort of any of the vagaries of our bodies and our minds,
you know, with these rather complicated machines. And as I say, this is slightly humiliating. And so we like to think, no, you know, we switch on the on switch and off we go and we forget. Yeah, but to our detriment, because you end up just feeling even worse and more stressed and more over tired. And I guess a lot of this plays into how much self-love we can cultivate or self-acceptance
even. And it's a subject that I'm deeply interested in, something that personally I have to like, have real discipline to think about it every day and how much I'm, you know, avoiding that subject altogether. And obviously you've talked at great length about self-love. And there was, again, apart in the book, I really liked where you say, and this is probably the sort of more extreme end, that it might be possible to fail in the eyes of the world yet remain valuable and
deserving of love. I don't think many believe that. No, because, you know, very few of us have enjoyed unconditional love, either in the present or in the past. But I think that, you know, it is an enormous gift. And I think we all know people who've enjoyed that love, because I think you can tell they have a kind of buoyancy of the spirit, a resilience. And at some level, they don't care too much what the world thinks. Kind of able to have that sort of freedom of,
you know, they'd like the world to think well of them. But if the world for whatever reason doesn't, they don't panic immediately. They don't need to go and kill themselves or create drama. And you know, I mentioned suicide, not, you know, as a throwaway comment. I mean, you know, suicide is often the result of someone who is so not able to be on their own side, because they haven't had that experience of a feeling sufficiently valuable, you know, in order to feel valuable to
ourselves, we first have to have felt really valuable to somebody else. It's a, it's a horrible dependence that we've all had on other people. And what I mean by horrible is that, you know, many of us don't get it. And if we don't, it's, you know, it's the lifetimes work to ever make up for it. And so, you know, the terrible fear of being self-indulgent that kicks in is normally reflective of not having been, you know, that word indulgent is so such a double edged sword, you know,
what do we mean by indulgent? You know, we started by talking about how people will declare something a luxury, when actually it's not a luxury at all, it's a real necessity. And people will kind of, you know, falsely become stoic in some area and go, no, no, I've got no time to think about myself. I've got to go off and, you know, dig the garden or something. And I actually think of
really, you know, really, maybe you can reorient your, your priorities. So that, that ability to feel I can value myself enough to look after myself, I can value myself to endure the criticisms of others and the hatred of others, which is a universal experience. This is not a given. And it's an enormous gift to do it to somebody else and to have it done to one is one of the great gifts. And, you know, unfortunately, you get families where no one's experienced this. And so that's a perpetuating
cycle where the whole concept of unconditional love is alien to everyone in the family. And so the children, but in private from the parent, and then everybody thinks I'm only as good as, and it could be all sorts of things. The latest sport result, the financial result, whatever it is, but it point is it's an external locus evaluation, nothing internal. And that makes for a very fragile life, because if you're constantly having to depend on others, you're so at the mercy of,
you know, prevailing wins. Yeah, you can't be very creative because I mean, we've seen so many people that I would deem extremely valuable to, you know, people on mass, like Robin Williams, who took his own life, but probably was valued by millions of people. So it shows it doesn't matter. It's not the volume of people that value you or how much they're valuing you. You've got to
imbibe that somehow. And I guess for people that, you know, self-loathings just run alongside their life for a long time, it's very hard to get used to sort of going, I believe them and I value myself. It's a tricky skill to learn. Really tricky, really tricky. And it requires so much both, you know, contemporary here and now experience that contradicts that, that actually introduces someone to a different way of relating. Like imagine if I could love you in spite of whatever it is,
you think you have to do to be loved. You know, imagine, have a contrary experience. You think it's only, you know, your latest paycheck that deems love. You know, there is such thing, you know, and we know it because we see it, you know, there are people who love people irrespective of how much, you know, money they're earning, irrespective of how amazing they might be at science, at technology, at sport or whatever it is. But we may not have had that experience,
we may not have tasted love. I mean, fun, if we really boil everything down, there is a shortfall of love in this world. And there's not enough love between family members, there's then not enough transgenerational love, these deficits of love, then create cruelty, which is meted out to others. And so we're in a constant sort of sadomasticistic compensation for an absence of love. And it's very, it's a big problem. It's a big problem. It's really not good. It's
really not good. You boil it down like that. I mean, you can see why we're in trouble globally and on a micro level. Of course, and it's the same simple. It's very simple. You know, there's words sadism and masochism are absolutely key. You know, when there is a shortfall of love, you've got two options. When you are the victim of cruelty, you've got two options. Number one, the
sadistic option, which is to go off and make somebody else unhappy, right? And these are, these are things we all do, unfortunately, to become an emotional adult is to have a real handle on that and try, try and minimize that. But, you know, we could probably kick the dog and kick anyone else. It was in our way. Someone has evacuated something negative into us. We evacuated into others in order to alleviate our things. That's the origin of bullying. It's the origin, you know,
the bullying child is always the child who's been bullied. They're just passing on. They're letting they're letting the world know what's happened to them, right? So it's a sort of transgenerational transfer of hurt. And then the other mechanism, which is slightly better for the world, but not much good for the individual, is the masochistic response, which is someone's hurt me. And I'm going
to treat myself like that hurtful person, treat me. You will become your inner torturer. So you will call yourself a no good and, you know, a waste or et cetera, like you were called a no good and a no wisdom. So you've got in your own head, your own worst enemy. And that makes for miserable life too. So those sadistic and masochistic responses are, well, if we could get rid of that, we'd have a happy planet. But, you know, the problem is that we've got such an accumulation of hurt.
You know, we've been doing this for centuries. We've come from a very fearful place. There's so much fear in everybody's system. And there's so much hurt. People talk about intergenerational trauma. It's there. You know, what we really mean is that we're all, we've all come through a world where there's been an immense amount of cruelty. And, you know, I was just in Spain recently and I was just reading about the history of Spain. I mean, it's one thing. I mean, history of every country is
this. But, you know, if you look at the history of Spain, it's one thing after another. And no wonder that, of course, you know, when Spanish people ended up going to South America, they did extraordinary things that people they found there, who had also done extraordinary things to one another, and such, cycles endless cycles of pain and cruelty that are meted out. And, you know, sometimes people decide to go into therapy. People go, oh, that's very self-indulgent. You go
going into therapy. Well, therapy for many people is an attempt to stop the intergenerational transfer of pain. And it's pretty much the best thing you can do so that you won't be such a menace to yourself or to others. Yeah, breaking the chain. So looking at a therapeutic journey and looking at helping ourselves to cultivate a healthy mind, just to touch on a few things that we've covered, that sort of editing process seems to be vital. And I guess something we can practice and
perhaps get better at. Also, a level of self-inquiry and inventory, self-acceptance and self-love, probably again, to be practiced and also a delvin to childhood seems essential. Is there anything you would add to create a good framework? Because as you state in this book, you don't read this book and just go, that helped me with a one-off challenging period. It's going to be unrelating for life. And we've got to be able to create a framework so that when we are feeling a bit rubbish,
we go, right, I'll have a bath. I'll do XYZ. And there's a proper system in place. Yes. Look, I think it is about creating a framework. And I think one of the key things is to accept that this thing we've got on top of our spinal column is the most complicated organ system in the universe. Undoubtedly it. There is nothing more complicated. And so if life is feeling complicated, well, it's as it should be. We need to bring a sufficient amount of curiosity, I might say,
compassionate curiosity towards this hugely strange business called being alive. And this hugely strange organ we call our brain, which is filled with experiences we don't quite understand with responses, whose origins we haven't tracked, with ideas, whose validity we haven't really examined. And to be able to have this kind of compassionate curiosity to explore, examine, and at points edit this mind that might be causing us more trouble than we deserve. And that is
a lifelong challenge. Socrates, supposedly the wisest person in antiquity was once asked, what's the meaning of life? His answer was know yourself. And it sounds packed, but it really is the challenge of a lifetime. And if we can go to our graves with just a little bit of the darkness back into the light, that will be the greatest achievement. Yeah, I love that because I think often we go, there's got to be one quick fix and I'm going to be
fine, but it's absolutely all right. And there probably isn't another option for this to be an all day, every day mission that we accept. And we're just going to keep doing it forever and hope that things feel at times a bit more manageable. And you know, let's also emphasize, it's quite joyful and interesting. Yes, really interesting. It's not merely a sort of burden. I mean, once you set yourself the challenge of exploring your own mind, it also means you're exploring everybody else's
mind because everybody else's mind plays into your understanding of yourself. It means that you look at history, culture, art, etc. And rather than thinking, oh, there are things you learn at school, at a passing exam, what's that impressive, you just think these are the testaments of other people's minds. And you know, I can find bits of myself and bits of universal experience everywhere. And
so life can also be tremendously exciting. So and every time you're in pain, every time there's a reverse learning disaster, you know, once the tears are passed there, they're in their most intense stage, there's always an opportunity to discover something you didn't know. And you know, it's something to keep in mind. So curiosity accompanies us through pain. Yeah, I love that. I love that. Well, Alan, it's been a joy talking to you. I've been so looking forward to this chat. I adored
this book. Thank you so much for coming on to a happy place. Such pleasure. Oh, Alan, I had the best time chatting to Alan. I love his work because as I said in that chat, I like that he talks about this stuff in a gentle way in a way we really focus on self-compassion and kindness. It was a constant reminder throughout that chat, but also reading his latest book that that is the key to it. Oh, being nice to ourselves and having a jolly good hot bath. Yes, please.
A therapeutic journey, lessons from the School of Life is out now and it is beautiful. I'd love to know if hearing from Alan has made you want to be more compassionate to yourself, it certainly has me. It's never easy necessarily, but it's a good reminder. I wonder if it's made you feel more curious about the people around you as well. If so, do come and chat to us on Instagram. We're at a happy place official. Next week, something absolutely
gorgeous and festive I cannot wait. Until then, the biggest thanks again to Alan, to the producer, and to Shkotate at Rethan Cordio and to you beautiful people. Be good to yourself. 8 Cast Powers the World's Best Podcast Here's a show that we recommend. Hey y'all, I'm Taryn Finley, host of a new podcast from
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