0:00 Alanda Boton welcome to the show thank you so much where do bad inner voices come from well the way I like to think about it is that an inner voice is always an outer voice that got internalized you know we're very porous people the way in which we're spoken to becomes the way in which we speak to ourselves I mean if that if that sounds too weird think of language right all of us um arrive in the world not speaking any language and by the age of 3 4 5 6 7 you know we'll have learned a lot of words but the fascinating thing about human beings is um we don't know we're learning so we can be doing other stuff like you know doing handstands in the garden or drawing buttercups in the kitchen and we're becoming expert
0:46 grammarians hundreds of words are entering our minds complex um grammatical constructions are entering our minds now the way I like to think about it is that that language analogy um holds true for emotional life as well so at the same time as we're learning a language of you know words and declensions we're also learning a language of emotions um we're learning things like what's a man like what's a woman like what happens if you give somewhat something to someone what happens if you're vulnerable what happens if you want to play what happens if you say no what happens if you say yes all of these are the syntax they comprise the syntax of our emotional lives and um it's an invisible syntax just as our grammatical syntax is
1:32 invisible but it's there and it will operate throughout our lives and it will be immensely hard to change I mean you know what it's like if you're you know if you grew up speaking English and then you want to learn a foreign language you suddenly want to learn Italian well good luck to you you're going to be learning a long time it's not impossible can be done but I think it's helpful to think of how hard it is because sometimes people get very impatient in their attempts to change things about themselves they go I you know I want to change how I relate to people um in relationship say uh and I've read a book and I've I've been to three therapy sessions and um I'm really annoyed nothing works you want to go okay imagine this was Italian so you you you've looked at a book on Italian you've taken three classes and you don't speak fluent Italian and you're
2:18 complaining so we do need some modesty here just in order to be properly ambitious I mean as you know you know the the the root cause of sort of early Despair and early retirement from things is a false picture of what success demands in an area and I think in the area of emotional Improvement or maturation we sometimes let ourselves down by thinking it's going to have an ease which it won't have it's interesting thinking about how language shapes our experience of emotions and our experience of the world that German for instance has a colorful number of ways to describe certain emotions that you can't in other he said well does the fact that we have the word for it almost unlock that emotion in a way it allows us to do self investigation yes I I
3:06 think you know philosophers philosophers watching this philosophers of language may have um arguments prone in it's it's a big thing but I definitely feel that the more words we have the more we can attend to what we feel and in some cases the more we can feel um you know I I remember I remember learning the word anxiety when I was a teenager um and thinking wow that's a really useful word probably nowadays people learn anxiety a lot earlier but you know in those days um it was a fascinating word to learn and the more one's vocabulary stretches the more you're able to put a flag in bits of your psyche that are perhaps painful and I think if you think about why people go to psychotherapy or or even frankly what motivates a lot of friendship it's somebody else helps to
3:54 give you a vocabulary for bits of your mind and bits of your experience that have not till now um you that of eluded definition and that definition is not merely you know it's not really a fancy thing it's it's a life-saving thing because the more you can Define um the easier life gets um Freud speculated that the the the the origins of language lie in an ability to Bear frustration so that if a child can think um you know I'm currently frustrated but you know Mommy's coming back and I've got and the person's got those words then that can help you to Bear missing and and also bear excitement or you know
4:41 all sorts of things things can become more bearable the more you can put them into language and I think you know adults know this when we we go about journaling right you know what why why is it so helpful to journal um to you know because we we know it is all research shows it it is um what is it about translating a feeling into a word for that feeling that's helpful and I think it tames it um contains and it Narrows the spread of difficult emotions it's very ephemeral right you've got these thoughts up here moving around floating about and then they have to be concretized and it right almost feels like it squeezes it through an aperture of some kind you say okay this is what I meant by that it's not
5:27 this notion it's not this sort of ambient s somebody shouted a a noise in the Next Room like oh no it's here I can touch it you can see it yeah yeah that's right and and you know think of think of relationships couples the more their vocabulary for what they're going through increases the more they can say you know I'm feeling this I'm feeling you know when you do that I feel this Etc and the enemy you know the sort of normal word is people say communication but it's really language it's it's putting language to to feelings and and so much goes wrong in life because we're unable to do it it start it starts with ourselves we can't do it with ourselves um there's a useful phrase that psychotherapists use to disassociation it's a fascinating concept what would it
6:14 mean to disassociate and the way it's understood sort of therapeutically is that you could feel an emotion it's so difficult tricky in some way and you then stop feeling it you you disassociate from the feeling that's in you it's still in you but you're no longer registering it tricky tricky and the argument is always the more you can associate um and the less you can disassociate the better off you will be um but look there are many bits of life that are unbearable to us let's let's remember this um you there's a wonderful quote in Middle March George Elliott big fat 19th century novel where she says if we could properly register the
6:59 sound of the sounds the full sounds of life um we would lose our minds from the full richness of existence in other words if you were sensitive to everything that's around you would sort of go mad you know and I think if we think about what Madness is soal you what colloquially called madness think of people with severe mental illness very often what what has happened happened is that their ability to sequence thoughts is gone everything is coming at them and they can't grade thoughts they can't say this thought must go away now you know so they'll go I made a mistake 15 years ago and if you're balanced you'll go well that was
7:45 15 years ago and it's just it's not it's not a problem we can we we don't have to have it pressing down um if your if your reason is is buckling often everything that is alarming comes at you at once everything that is difficult at once and um so in a way I'm I'm sticking up for the ability sometimes to take distance from our feelings so you know I started off by going it's really important to to know what you're feeling but let's also remember at points the ability not to feel the full force of everything also belongs to health so it's it's double-edged sword there what's your advice for how people can heal a negative inner voice we've got this odd artifact that we've carried with us
8:30 this inheritance of our life but kind of almost some previous life of ours where should people begin if they want to have a more friendly inner voice such a good question I'd say you have to start by finding the inner voice because it doesn't announce itself as an inner voice so how are we going to you know we're not we're not talking here about literally hearing voices some people do but we're not talking about that here what we're talking about is a way of speaking to yourself or way of you know way of conducting yourself in your own mind that owes more to something from outside than from inside and that is more negative or you can put it this way unfair to you and your chances your hopes Etc so how do we how
9:16 do we detect this is even going on because I don't think it's necessarily obvious here I think that it's quite helpful to get people to do what are call sentence completion exercises where you start off with a sub sentence and then you have an ellipsis dot dot dot so men are women are life is I am I want if dot dot dot because dot dot dot and you say to people right here's a list these things without thinking too much very important important prompt without thinking too much just say the first thing comes into your head men are women are life is I am Etc um or or even beginnings of stories story completion exercises when I meet someone that die dot dot dot just finish finish that sentence and what people will come out
10:04 with is fascinating they'll go you know men are cruel wow wow wow men are cruel are they you know person might even be surprised that they've said that then you say okay why's that come from where what what led you to believe that and often what you'll find is a story that owes more to something outside there something inside you know or um you know when when I meet someone what will happen is dot dot dot you know um they'll be very friendly to me then they'll turn against me wow wow where did that come from it's it's going to be a specific story in the past that you know is is being carried forward isn't it interesting that we're talking about maybe the thing people identify with most you know the texture of their own
10:51 experience the landscape of their of their own mind but you're then saying well this may not fully be self-generated this might be something which you've absorbed from the past from society from Norms from cultures from the way that you've compensated for past traumas Etc or just habits yeah but it brings up an interesting question which is okay so who are you where are you in this are you that voice in some ways you are because you're inexorably linked to all of the experiences you've had yeah but then we have this sort of transcendent us which is better it's the better us yeah if only I could it's the me without the compensation the trauma the ETC such a good question you know we're not sometimes this idea of you
11:37 know the real me that is separate from everybody else we are penetrated by Society you know think of how we're speaking right we're using words as we speak to one another every one of those words is both spoken by us and was made by other people long before we were even a rumor in anyone's mind right we are we are penetrated by Society every one of the words that I am using is the result of generations and generations of people who've used those words refined their meaning Etc and then given them to me so that's literally the language we're permeated by social language um even our biology as we know you our gut bacteria is you know both us and not us so the the neat you know Chris Al we are we are these sort of um you know entities where
12:23 where you can put a strict circle around now we're we're we're interpenetrated by Society biology history uh you know Etc so then the question comes well is there anything you know that's that's more me less me and I think here absolutely absolutely and I think that one of the journeys you know life's full of Journeys one of the journeys that I think we all are on is to start to separate out a little bit well what I I can understand there's a lot in me that was just put there by Society by the context in which I was born which of those bits do I want to keep or focus on and which of those bits do not fully represent you know my
13:09 values my considered choices Etc and this is where life gets interesting because people start to say things like where I come from normal meant dot dot dot but the more I think about it the more I'm reflecting on who I really am the more I want to ditch that and that and that is a of editing process self authorship absolutely and you know I think that the more mature someone is I'll use that word I could have used others um the more mature someone is the more what they do what they think uh the values they hold are more to their own work their own sifting their own editing than it does to the context that they were born into
13:56 um I think you know it's interesting if if you look at the Arc of a life right a a very small child is often remarkably authentic which is why we adults in small doses at least have such a great time with little ones because they they come out with stuff and you think oh my God I can't believe they've just said that thing you know they've just said that Granny's nose is too big or that this restaurant's boring or this very expensive thing is a load of rubbish you know Etc they'll come out with stuff that is non-normative and that's very interesting because as an adult you recognize a kind of you know you recognize your own spontaneity that's been lost normally so it's kind of Bittersweet you think o you know you don't want exactly the child's version of it as that would lead you into
14:42 trouble but you want an adult version and it's very hard to get and and and probably the high Watermark of the opposite is when you're 14 and a half and you're at school and your most fervent wish is to be like everybody else you you want your parents to be like everybody else you want your name to be like everybody else you want your appearance Your Hair Etc you cannot bear difference and then slowly slowly you you individuate you know um and and that's a very exciting Journey seeing I don't think anyone everyone anyone individuates in all areas so I think the first choice is what are the areas that matter a lot to you um I'm interested in individuation but when it comes to clothes you might have noticed um I kind of you know it's a really interesting area but I just just that
15:29 one for another time you know I'm just not engaging with that um similarly food fascinating area you know very interesting yeah not quite on my radar yet but you know other areas what I'm reading very you know opinionated very individual so I don't think all of us can do it in all areas but we choose and that's also part of what makes someone an individual I love the idea of uh children being unencumbered by sort of expectation in that way and uh yeah trying to find the balance between what would the mature childlike version of ourselves do or say in this moment where we found ourselves too swayed by the opinions of others by
16:14 Expectations by societal Norms Etc do you remember that story of Picasso who was going around an art school like little kids were doing art and some kid was s scrolling you know mummy whatever and and this kid was seven and he Picasso said famously when I was this when I was his age I was painting like Raphael you know one of the great Renaissance artist and it was sort of true I mean young Picasso um and then he went and it's taken me all my life to remember how to paint like this unreal um now he didn't you know an adult painting like a child is not a child painting like a child it's something different you know which is why when people go oh a child could have done that well when a child does it it's one thing and when an adult does it it's
16:59 another thing and I think it's quite different and I think that's why you know when you look at Picasso and there are lots of artists and lots of figures you could sort draw that analogy with but you know when you're looking a a painting that Picasso did when he was 90 what 90 you know at the end of his life and it it's got elements of stuff that a child might do but it's gone through you know that this guy has been doing so much other stuff so he's got deeper reasons did you ever read his dark materials by Philip pman no okay uh of children's books sensibly I guess this was my favorite series when I was a kid uh and in it the protagonist Lyra um finds this truth teller uh it's called an leomer and for some reason uh this
17:44 particular device it takes an entire lifetime of study to be able to read it and as a child she can do it immediately so it's this beautiful Arc and it's the first time I ever thought about it and pman takes you through unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and one of the final scenes of the entire book at the very very end uh she goes back to the uh n where she was being raised 5 years ago before the Story begins and uh she's lost the ability to read it she hits puberty and it's kind of this fall it talks about kind of the awareness that her and her partner now have and she says I can't read it anymore and then none turns to her and she says uh my dear it's going to take you an entire lifetime but the depth of knowledge you have will be greater than never was before and it's
18:30 that Arc unconscious incompetence unconscious competence conscious incompetence conscious competence and that finishing side something that's been earned you found your way there through effort agency self-authorship is um yeah yeah it's it's it's special yeah and I think you know it's it's interesting isn't it when when people who read a lot thought a lot Etc come out with stuff and it sounds very very simple and I think our society gets a bit puzzled by that because the the sort of obvious respect goes to people that speak in a very dense way and you can't quite understand what they mean so you know philosophy discipline I started out in you know the heroes there or like Vicken Stein or um
19:17 Hegel K Etc it's very very hard not superbly accessible to make Headway and then you know you turn to the east you look at Eastern philosophy um you you look at the Poetry of someone like baso in um Japan medieval Japan it's so simple it's you know it's four words on a piece of paper and um very easy to go mumbo jumbo or or or or Child's Play or whatever and to be kind of mature enough to go okay I'm going to bear with the anxiety that this is very simple sounding simple sounding um in the East the idea is that um poetry
20:03 for example can sound very very simple the point is that it's an interaction between the reader and the work so not everything is in the poem or the saying you bring yourself to it and therefore the ultimate impact of that work is a collaboration between you and the work fascinating so the Western of you might be go there's not that much in there uh and it's the artist's fault job um whereas in East views well it's a collaboration so if you're not seeing anything it's because you're not bringing enough of yourself so very interesting to get you know lots of the Arts I me think of that Eno you know in in in in uh you know just a circle this is the whole of Life whole of life it's just you know you're just doing a circle
20:49 with your your brush and um amazing amazing the the courage to say okay we're going to go with this we're gonna you know the whole of existence is this circle and if you meditate profoundly enough on this you will see the world not just in a grain of sand but in a circle Etc and we really meet a fault line here in the western understanding of depth and profundity where this takes a bit of time for the Western mind to kind of get grips of that we're like come on is this a joke and they you know they just pedaling us something yeah probably not why do you think we struggle to connect with our emotions fully um come on let's be honest here with the audience and you know we know
21:35 what emotions are like they're not just lovely cuddly things they're absolutely terrifying a lot of the time um think of what it takes think about love right so people we think that people spend their lives looking for love and half true that's a half truth is spend a good deal of time running away from love as well in all sorts of forms we are as assiduous in our Escape From Love as we are in our Pursuit perhaps more so why because it's terrifying it's especially terrifying if you come from a childhood an A young world where there was some kind of disruption in your attachments in your you know in your
22:22 experience of Love um the next time you then meet love as an adult half of you is just wanting to run away away and I think people don't still not fully appreciate enough the the strength with which we are going to resist love if our earliest experience of it was in any way in any way difficult um and this explains a great deal of the misery of the world it's very interesting to think about how much we try and push away the thing that we're also wanting like how we are implicit in creating the scenario that was so terrified of having happened been thinking a lot about um second order emotions third order emotions so
23:07 um you have a thing that happens you feel agitated and then you begin to tell yourself a story and you become stressed at your agitation and then you become resentful at your stress about your agitation and then you become anxious about and I that additional layering uh this you know kernel that we began with with regards to the emotion sort of explodes out and before you know it you're feeling an emotion that's not only the thing that started but it's an entire Universal way yeah and this is now the problem not this yeah that's right and and I'm not sure if I understand you fully but is it is it really the case that you are not accepting the the Primary Emotion you know so let's say uh you go somewhere it should be nice you're disappointed you can't be disappointed it's meant to be
23:54 nice you you can't accept that disappointment and then you're angry with your yourself for feeling disappointed um and then you know and and on it whereas if one could just go okay maybe it's it's all right to be disappointed I mean it's not it's not brilliant but but there it is or I'm feeling sad okay well that's not wouldn't be what I wanted but let me not be sad that I'm sad or angry that I'm sad I think this is why we have certain signature emotions that feel like home base yeah there's ones that we're intimately familiar with and there's ones that scare us a lot more yeah and uh a unsat satisfactory but familiar emotion is often more safe to us than a slightly novel more exotic but uh scarier one and and also I think happier
24:41 one I mean you know talking just a minute ago people escaping love people also Escape happiness I mean the way I think about it is that very often we're in a situation of it's like being a prisoner you've been in kept in jail for a very long time your diet's been restricted it's not been much fun then the gate opens and you're allowed to walk out um it should be a great day fantastic you're free nah you know we know what happens uh let's say you've been on calor restricted diet suddenly someone says you know here's a buffet you can eat anything you like you don't want to eat it you can't you can't digest it you can't process it it's too much so you know something similar goes on in our attitudes to to happiness often I mean it's useful to say to yourself ask yourself in the circumstan in which I grew up what did it mean to be happy and
25:28 for some of us it meant upsetting a parent it meant challenging the dominant mood in a household it meant taking away attention from somebody else it meant it meant danger um and that's odd because we think why would it be dangerous to be happy well but there are all sorts of risks associated with it and so in our deep Minds sometimes in adulthood um we simply cannot um accept the circumstances of our lives and and therefore go back spoiling them um so that they so that we put them more you know there's a wonderful paper called something like a criminal psych but criminal in search of an offense um a sense that you've done something wrong if you carry that from your past
26:14 and you think how am I going to get rid of that feeling oh I know I'll do something wrong and then and then I won't feel that feeling anymore some you know it's a bit like that it's like saying um I'm feeling happy but I shouldn't be happy what should I do oh yes I'll make myself unhappy or you know I'm feeling love someone's offering me love that's not normal I don't I don't recognize that feeling oh what should I do oh I'll drive them away yeah I'll um I I'll I'll go and be rude to them or go and have an affair with somebody else or whatever it is something to spoil something that's nice so the impulse to spoil is really deep happiness and love are hard to bear I suppose if reality is not delivering our model of the world our expectation of the world our prediction of the world we have discordance between the two and there are two things that we can try and
27:01 do we can try and bring our model of the world up to reality or we can try and bring reality back down to our expectation exactly beautifully put is there a danger of intellectualizing challenges of emotion for smart people people that like to read and consume YouTube channels like yours or podcasts like mine and like to investigate ourselves we want to understand ourselves in the world around us and maybe we've even got the theory from evolutionary psychology that explains why this is adaptive and and and we ancestrally we are made up of blah blah blah blah how how much is that a prophylactic against us actually having to feel things and how can we better break through this intellectualizing of emotions and rationalizing of them
27:47 away let's start with compassion you know we are the way we are you know for poignant reasons not you know we didn't get to be that way you know think of the think of the bookish chart you know think of the child who's reading a lot um often it's cuz life's life RS quite difficult now it's great to read good to read Etc but if you spend all your time in books um it's often a sign things are things are challenging and so often the people who excel at intellectual Pursuits Etc are in flight from an overwhelming situation um I'd wish them well um in that in time the overwhelming situation could get a little less intense and they could get a
28:33 little more of reality into their intellectual world I mean I'm describing myself perhaps you you know you you want to try and see reality for what it is and if you're warding it off with intellectual structures um you know let's let's say thank you to those structures I think I think it's really important whenever whenever you look at people doing stuff that seems a bit suboptimal or a bit strange they're reading too much they're jogging too much they're trying to make too much money whatever um that they're feeling too much they're feeling too little all all of these departures from so-called Health normality Etc always ask yourself why are they doing it and it's normally a defense it is a defense against a situation that was very difficult at some point they learned that defense and even though it would be optimal now to
29:19 let go of that defensive structure they're still clinging on to it because that's what feels safe it feels safe to make jokes all the time it feels safe to be very serious all the time it makes it feels safe to be depressed it feels safe to give up um it feels safe to try and win at all costs including your own health ET all all these are defensive structures that once kept us safe that I think in order to evolve we almost want to say thank you thank you to your younger self for working this out for finding a way of coping with reality but but could we learn to cope in a slightly different way so great I'm interested just taking that one step further in the difference between knowing ourselves intellectually and knowing ourselves emotionally uh I
30:05 think even I I've in my less equanimous moments uh when I do journaling uh I find myself writing more of an essay than a personal inquiry and uh yeah the difference between knowing ourselves intellectually and knowing ourselves emotionally again for the cerebral minded praying at the altar of cognitive horsepower people yeah um yeah it's a coping mechanism it's a a way to distance yourself from this yes and I think I think our minds it's it's it is much easier to um have the the headline than the meat of the topic and very often we we reach a sort of uh an uncomfortable state of half knowing
30:53 ourselves and we think oh i' I've covered it I know in my childhood there was this and you know then there was this then there was that and you You' got to go to a headline you know tension with my dad or you know tricky with my mom or whatever it is and we think oh I've got that I've got that I know it now let's go back to the the Eastern you know Enzo Circle right and the East says meditate for hours repeatedly on the thing that looks obvious the thing that you know so they're saying the whole of life is that Circle so look at that Circle and keep coming back to it and the more more you look at it the more you will see in it now the Western approach is bit bit in it's too impatient it'll say all right yeah it was tense with my dad I know that and go
31:39 hang on hang on hang on that's an Enzo of its own I it was tense with my Dad we you could meditate around that for you know an hour a day or an hour a week or whatever is you can keep coming back to that it's never there are so many things still to be discovered there it's not dead and so I think I'd almost want to excite you know those who are listening to think okay I think I know something do I really know it might I go back there um are our real experiences tend to be so much richer than our work a day sense of them um think about think about a holiday right say have you ever been to Greece oh yeah I went to Greece um oh right have you been to Santorini yeah I've been to sanini okay so so we think we covered that one person's spe to Center really hang on first of all our
32:26 minds are am amazing mechanisms of capture you know we got cameras around sound equipment Etc nothing beats the human mind for capturing absolutely everything um often the time to explore this is is sort of Twilight um your mind is you're going to sleep or waking up if you say to yourself yeah centori what was that like what was it what was it really like and you realize oh my God I remember there was a tiled hallway that led to a blue door and I actually remember there was a flower in a little vase and there was a light coming in from I think it must have been from the left and actually if I looked to the right there was a little window and it's all there it's all in your mind just waiting to be asked waiting this is the famous can I talk about PR what muscle
33:13 PR great French novelist 19th early 20th century Etc came up with this fam idea of the prian moment some of you know it some of you won't it's basically a moment when you take something sensory like a sip of water or a smell imagine the smell of concrete after rain or the smell of snow just after a snowfall Etc and suddenly you you you get that sensory experience and a world opens up you think oh my God I'm 5 years old again and I've just gone outside of the garden of the yard where I grew up and there was a brick wall and there was that exact smell and I'm there again and suddenly your world becomes so much richer and these are just little moments of of of expansion around a topic like
34:01 after a snowfall or first a of spring or Santorini or whatever it is so in other words many of the things that are in our minds in intellectually compressed forms can be expanded with the addition of I mean you know the sort of fancy trendy modern word is meditation but but you know some people don't get on with the word meditation let's just say by giving it some time by allowing an experience to assume its proper shape and we we do Rush past our experiences things are very compressed and that's why at the end of an average day my goodness how much we've seen how much we've felt how many little things cross Consciousness if we were able to give some of that space how much lighter we would start to feel but we we live so
34:48 much and we experience so little we see so much and we notice so little what would you say to the obsessive person who wants to learn to let go a little more a lot of what I see in the circles that I move in is a need for control a desire to limit down the potential paths that the future could go down to sort of constrain how unpredictable reality could be and I think the optimization life hacking productivity world is very much a part of this plus a denial of death if I can fit more life into less time then maybe kind of like living longer um but yeah that that need to control that obsessive sort of uh requirement to be able to Wrangle
35:36 reality As You Wish can people learn to take their hands off the wheel a little bit more easily well I think I mean I think um the simple answer is that these people are running away from something um which is painful and difficult Etc and they're not allowing themselves to think about it they're not even allowing it inside ious so think of the think of mania you know but when we say so and so is in a manic mood or so and so is doing something manically what we really mean is that they're doing something in order not to do something else normally not think about something or feel something and we all end up in certain points in manic states where you know we're we're scrubbing the kitchen just a little bit
36:21 too assiduously or we're jogging a bit too hard or we're scrolling our phones a bit too much and really the question to ask ourselves at that time is a very simple one which is if you weren't able to do what you're doing now what might you need to think about or to feel and the answer is there waiting for you if you can if you can bear is could be a very very awkward question to ask yourself in other words you know if you weren't able to clean the kitchen manically or go jogging Etc but you just sit with something what what do you need to sit with you know the old saying you don't just sit there do something don't just sit there and think do something well imagine you don't just do something sit there and think you reverse it you reverse it and what is it that you need to think about yeah yeah uh the coping mechanisms that
37:09 we have and the inventive ways that we come up with alchemizing and and justifying well a lot of the time uh people will say better to be addicted to the gym than be addicted to drugs I don't think that's a particularly controversial stat if that's if that's the binary Choice yes of course um but then I realized recently but maybe over the last year so I spent a lot of time meditating toward the end of my 20s and um trying to turn myself out of the adult infant into maybe an adult Adolescent and um most people would look at meditation you know sort of an emotion arises inside of you you notice it you release and allow like that's you know a common sort of tempo that you have brilliant you know you you you are no longer as at
37:56 the mercy of this particular emotion uh but it was only when I started doing therapy uh as first ever suggested by Charlotte one of your ex staff from the school of Life uh it was only after doing quite a lot of that that I realized that even meditation or maybe breath work or going to the gym or whatever it might be is still another way of not having to actually investigate where that emotion has come from and meditation particularly or or something more like breath work perhaps is a not nefarious but it's a a very it's it's so close it's internal it feels sort of self- investigative uh it's mindful this is brilliant you go yeah but that is going to continue to come up
38:41 and you now have a coping strategy it's not drugs it's not even as obvious as you running 50 miles a week but there is another strategy which is not forcing you to turn the eye back down to where's this coming from and why does it keep on arising and if you have this very good strategy to release these things as they move through you uh that will that cycle will continue and I don't think I think that uh those emotions are worthy of Investigation so so Chris how do you define therapy or how do you how do you define what therapy might might bring you that's bit different from meditation in this I mean my my I did uh twice a week Psychotherapy for the last year or so um and it was I've said this before it I
39:28 learned more about myself in a year of twice weekly Psychotherapy than I did in 1500 sessions of meditation and if you could characterize what what was different how therapy operates you have another party investigating your statements the language that you use I used the analogy that it felt like um living in a house your entire life and then one day just inviting somebody else in yeah and they're walking around and they start pointing out doors in a house that you know intimately well every inch and they start pointing out doors that you never even knew existed and you go what's that over you go and you open the door and you realize that the back of the kitchen actually leads into I always wondered how those two things came together and it's this sort of odd it's
40:13 very humbling I found it very humbling experience to see somebody else who knows me for 100 hours yeah Point yeah and say what about yeah what about that that but I think I think one has to be really I mean that's a beautiful way of putting it um um why should be totally relaxed about that and just say in the same way that you you can't see the back of your head it's just one of those things um it's not it's not you know we just we can't see some very obvious things I mean a therapist a trained therapist can see within minutes things that have eluded someone for their whole life um very humbling very humbling but but but you know someone can do it for the therapist as well it's it everybody is like this we're just that's how we're wired and best thing to do is laugh it's it's funny I mean it's how inept we are um but as everybody's in on the joke um
41:01 we can we can laugh together you said uh talking about the emotion thing just from before and I think that this sort of comes into when you're regulating opening up with someone whether it be a therapist friend a partner or whatever the sort of Need for uh comfort and reassuring kindness look you can say these things yeah I I'm not running away I don't find you despicable it's actually kind of interesting maybe it's Charming for you to do this I mean this is so you know this is really very much at the core of what we could understand by the word love you know if a think of it in childhood a loving parent right the the the child a young child gets an experience that who they really are is acceptable to someone else so you know child little child will
41:47 go I hate the teacher and the parent you know good parent is able to bear that even though it's not perfect the parent is able to go oh okay what Wonder wonder why what what's you know why why they upset you sounds like they might have upset you rather than someone would go don't be so silly the teacher the teacher and they work very hard to give you an education so don't complain wow that's you know that's a tough comment your emotion is not valid your emotions not bad I mean you know parents do their best but goodness me stuff happens in in that Crucible of childhood that is a bit suboptimal um but you know love come back to love what love is is is accepting you know um I don't want to see granny okay you don't want to see Granny all right or or I really love you or I really hate my sibling or I really
42:32 like the dog or I want to live forever or you know all the stuff that little children come up with or I'm terrified of daddy actually I don't like Daddy oh okay well let's think about that you what does that mean so being able to accept and then in later life again having someone it could be a therapist it could be a friend um who's able to Bear the really difficult bits of our psyches which we all have I mean we're all so much weirder than we're supposed to be so much sadder so much more worried Etc and to be able to have someone you know it might only be one person or two if we're really lucky and three if we're you know God's Gift um who can bear and who we've allowed into that sort of private um sanctum that was
43:18 one of the realizations that Charlotte first taught me and then I learned through my therapy over the last year one of the the very unique uh parts of a therapeutic relationship is that you're allowed to be as small or boring or Petty as you want and those are areas that with a friend or a partner it's really difficult to do yeah because you're managing Optics in some way you're thinking well it's my job to kind of entertain this person even if they're there to to sort of sit and listen with me like not that not the fact that the way that the lady in the canteen ladled my beans today seemed a little bit disparaging or dismissive or something and like oh my God how shameful for me to think that that's something that should play on my mind so small I you know the story I tell the second third
44:04 fourth order emotions coming and um that is one of the very few it's that and your mom are kind of you know not even your M because most as you say most relationship it's all relationships you have to manage and you have to curtail the fear of being abandoned you know if you if you are too honest this again the the canteen lady and the beans again this is the third time in two months think of how this plays out in couples right so people come together um because they're fed up with being lonely right you know you you it's lonely so you try and find a special person and we we dignify this concept by saying I'm in a relationship you know I'm I'm a special friend I'm getting married Etc we got these words but really what this means is I'm no longer so alone in a terrifying world so you have a special person and in the early days of love it's thrilling that
44:51 you can say stuff that you wouldn't say to anyone else and it's so delightful you can say say things like you know I still long for my teddy bear and they go I long for them too and then you know hug to the teddy bear and it's so amazing because you know you're you're the CEO and you know you're an important lawyer doctor banker and actually you're clutching your teddy bear and it's it's amazing or you can go I really want to put you know mayonnaise on the pizza and that's great and then you know you you push it further and and and then you go I'm G to go to a museum but I don't like any of the art I don't like it either or I've never read that book but I always pretended I did and it's just thrilling and you know and then and then sex gets invited into you go I I like this strange sounding thing and they go I like it too I like this other thing Etc and you you're building a wonderful universe but um you know this is the the
45:37 challenging thing about love because you know let's imagine you're with this person and you shared all this stuff Etc and then you go to a a cafe say and you you say weight is hot and then you look at their face and they're like look really quite heartbroken that you've just commented on the you know visual appeal of waiting staff and they they feel hurt and they feel jealous and they feel upset and suddenly you think oh my goodness there's a choice here between you know kindness and honesty and I think that's what we're circling around which is can you be you know what what moment does honesty run up against the limits of kindness or the the you know the requirements of kindness I think what you're saying about therapy is you don't have to be kind to the therapist because it's
46:23 50-minute session you're giving them money and people go oh it's a boore that you're giving the money well you know Freud thought long and hard about this about the role of money in therapy and his view was it's an agent of Liberation it's a good thing you can pay the therapist and that's why you want people to bring cash and leave the cash on the table uh at the end of every session now nowadays you might you know put your card on but but the point is um it's it's a way of saying um I can be fully myself because I have earned this person's attention some people go but they don't really love you Etc and you go maybe they don't really love you but that's a Liberation correct there's no obligation no obligation obligation just
47:08 lingering on that uh balance between transparency emotional openness and um you said kindness but I think that there's other reasons to edit too is there a place for editing yourself in a relationship should we not be open honestly communicating all the time this is how I feel you want to see the inner texture of my mind don't you I mean you're putting your finger on on a big Paradox I I think the idea that you should be yourself in a relationship is one of the most disastrous ideas um because the untrammeled self uh is a frightening Spectre um Best Kept For You know you and your therapist you in the mirror you know um if you if you have to confront your partner with your stream of Consciousness at all times um you
47:57 can't do this you know parents don't do this with their children obviously our partners are not children but it's telling us something about love in a loving relationship at points you edit yourself you know it's 11: at night I'm not going to bring that issue up they're very tired I'm not going to bring that up um I'm feeling stressed and raw I'm not going to start a subject that I won't know how to handle Etc no all of us fail at points all of us fail in this area but as I think as an ideal it's it's a good ideal I mean I could stick up for a word which sounds very odd in the context of Love politeness you know it's it's a good idea to try and be polite I'm like oh that's fake that's fake well it's also kind you know to edit yourself to uh put a veneer of
48:42 civilization on certain things yeah why not there's a a very slippery slope with that though a lot of people especially if they have started doing therapy some self- inquiry some emotional work than God like I I I should push the uh amount that I'm emotionally open I should improve my transparency for so long i' played a role I was terrified of making my my needs known my desires putting myself first realizing I even have needs and putting those out there and now there's these odd bits of territory that I shouldn't stray into yeah what happens if I Stray over there and the tendency for you to overcorrect and go in the other direction uh Neil Strauss says uh unspoken expectations are premeditated
49:27 resentments right and you know we have this yeah balance between the two yeah you're absolutely right there are some people who need to work on being more transparent more communicative and others who need to be less technical where I think for it is reactive you know they're not you shouldn't come out with whatever it is that you that you're feeling at all times in its full force it just depends I mean you know that classic anxious avoidant attachment pattern we might say that on the whole avoidant people need to work on their communication skills you know and they need to to be more transparent and avoidant and anxious people need on the whole to contain certain feelings you know and it's just yeah horses for courses on this one what would be your advice to uh people in the classic
50:14 anxious avoidant relationship the two polarities coming together understand understand understand where each one's coming from I mean why is someone in avoidant they're not evil they're not mean they're not you it it it can be pretty horrible to be on the receiving end of certain kinds of pattern of behavior but let's TR remember why why does this exist uh someone becomes avoidant when they've grown up in a calorie emotional calorie controlled diet uh environment where they have had to get used to very little the way they survive is Mom's not so interested dad's not interested no caregiver around um lot of disappointment I'm just going to hunker down and get used to very little literally like a like an animal that gets used to a very very thin diet um that is what has happened to an avoidant
51:01 person um and then when they get to to love and someone goes I adore you let's spend every evening together let's you know um you're you're marvelous um they feel and but often they don't even understand that they're feeling it totally engulfed they feel overwhelmed they feel their very identity is in threat of dissolution by by something that's lovely but it's too much too soon and what they need is an experience of Love titrated they need the titration of Love um but often they don't know how to ask for it they don't even know often they they might smile through it and and go I'm I'm not really feeling this and then they can't bear they can't bear and then they run away um or just act become weird or something you know so so explanation you know hello I'm somebody who had to get used to a very you know calorie controlled diet emotionally um
51:49 uh you know I really feel warmly this relationship is matters a lot to me but the kindest thing is not to be too kind to me in an overwhelming way the most generous thing is not to be too abundant not because I don't want this but because I grew up in a situation deprivation so that's our avoidant friend anxious friend similar kind of story of explanation why did people become so-called anxious normally because unlike the avoidant person they have had an experience of love so some ways the anxious person's had a better childhood better journey through life in a way they have experienced love but they've also experienced loss and the disruption of that attachment so someone died someone went away someone had to go to you know the Army someone had some something happened to disrupt the bond it was very intense but
52:34 it was disrupted and um that person needs to understand that they are you know there a wonderful sentence from Donald winot great psychoanalyst who said the catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened and the key thing is it's been forgotten you forgot the catastrophe and that's why you keep seeing it in the future whereas actually it belongs in the past so what you need to do is understand this structure and repatriate the emotion um and put it back where it belongs so the avoidant person at dinner you know on an early date needs to go um you know I really want to believe in your love um but if you say you love me I might not be able to believe it very easily and what I will do is test it and
53:20 the person might go oh test oh fine fire away and the anxious person should go yeah this test can be quite healthy quite quite horrible you know it's it's going to mean that when you say um I love you I'm going to start to act up because I want to see if it you really do so I'm going to be really difficult around you because not because I don't want you but because I want to test whether your affection is really real and the only way I know how to do that CU I'm carrying this stuff from childhood is to act up play up and so when we're in a nice restaurant and you tell me that you know things are great I'm going to say actually the food's not that nice and I don't really like the clothes you're wearing and I'm going to cause a drama why to test whether the Love is Real very unfortunate so the
54:06 more the anxious friends can get on top of their anxiety the more they can translate everything I've just said into something that sounds like it's been processed and can be understood by another person then the better it can be so um you know anxious and avoidant people are walking wounded and they need to be able to explain the nature of their particular wound so that appropriate care can be uh set up awareness awareness which is why you know it's great for people to go to therapy it's great for people to explore themselves um it's not merely fancy it's not really whatever it's a serious indicator of an easier life with them I mean if you're if you're with a partner who's able to go okay hang on a minute I think I'm
54:53 slipping down I I I think I'm confusing you with my mother at the moment uh or I think I think an anger that actually belongs to my father is is weirdly in the room because that's what happens when you start to explore your past you see the intermingling of past and present all the time um and the more you're able to get a handle on that and warn your partner the easier it is I mean we don't need people to be perfect we need people to understand how they're imperfect and warn us of the coming imperfection or retrospectively apologize for it in relatively civilized terms that's what we need how malleable are our attachment styles are the foundations of them able to genuinely be moved or is it a case that the best we can hope for is to just compensate for
55:38 them in adult life um I'm hopeful here that you know we can definitely make progress from wherever we start we can make progress that you know a temperament where we're inclined to close ourselves off because we constantly think that no one will be able to understand us once we start to think okay this is what I do I feel very easily misunderstood and I go and essentially sulk once you notice that that's a big step you know and we're so good at marking Milestones it's somebody's birthday let's throw a party it's you know somebody's just run a marathon Let's uh give them a medal Etc we we need different kinds of medals you know the medal for the avoidant person who understood that they sulk rather than explain dong let's put them on
56:24 television let's give a game show in there honor these are major Milestones let's give a party let's give a party to the person who's understood that that's going on to Mark there's much more significant than their birthday you know what I mean which might not be tracking anything significant that's a significant Milestone so we we should you know give more public within our circles public recognition of moments of emotional maturation and how much is that you know I think lots of people uh Envy the other side if only I could have a little bit of a little bit more of that anxiousness if only I could actually lean in a little bit more if I could feel a little bit more easily if I could communicate or God if I could just be a little bit more distant if I didn't
57:10 need the reassurance in this way if I didn't have this requirement to feel safe in order to be able to feel comfortable I wasn't externalizing my own sense of selfworth onto somebody else quite in this sort of a way uh yeah I think it's a question you attachment styles are kind of the the hot new girl in school psychological emotional work at the moment very trendy um it's been around a while in a good way and it's based on very solid science you know it's we've been going at this for 50 years I looked at some really interesting stuff recently that um attachment Styles like everything psychologically uh genetically predisposed not necessarily predetermined but predisposed uh and given that you are raised in the environment which is probably the uh breeding ground for that very
57:58 predisposition it gets reinforced yeah so not only have you got the raw materials to make this thing happen but unless your parents have somehow managed to sort of pivot in the opposite direction you then get this additional boost which is oh well the environment uh nature came along and nurture then enhanced it yeah uh yeah it's um it's interesting it's going to be interesting I think over the next few years to see what sort of interventions we have to be able to help people to ameliorate yes and I think um not not trying to sound trendy and you know think but I think AI is going to have a real impact on us uh in the sense that so often what happens is we lose sight in the moment of things we know but are
58:45 no longer in our minds right and so people will have you know let's say a couple have a rather sort Torrid time difficult time and then each one goes to therapy in in the week and then they all come back and they're kind of they're starting to you know they're back on track they can they can see things more clearly again or they spent some time alone they've journaled Etc um I can imagine a world where we allow technology to nudge Us in the same way that you know we've learned that technology can nudge us awake nudge us asleep nudge us to eat this nud you know um you know Imagine A little nudge for an avoidant A little nudge for an anxious person Etc a little reminder hang on hang on hang on what you know you're slipping you're sliding um and you knows talk about the window of Tolerance where it's a window in which you're you're in charge emotionally or
59:31 you're kind of in control and you slip out of the window of Tolerance into something you know you you lose command of of yourself and and you can imagine a little AI helper just nudging you to stay within the window yeah your attachment strap has piped up and said notice you're a little bit stressed at the moment this might be because of X Y and Z yes and you know it sounds Supernatural and strange and you know a lot of people would say things like oh it's it's not you know I don't want to give my data blah blah okay I grant all of that and you know it could be spooky Etc it's no different from think of the people who got their first were religions religions understood that if you want to keep people on track you've got to get them repeating stuff it's not enough to tell someone something once you need rituals systems of memorializing the important things
1:00:17 that's why you know if you're in Islam um if you're Muslim you know you'll be praying a num multiple times a day you'll be saying the same words because those words have as it were been forgotten not intellectually but emotionally their full resonance has been forgotten um in Judaism uh you're reading the Torah every Saturday in synagogue you're reading the Torah and you you just go back over it you don't just read it once you keep reading you keep going back to to to to the same important text we're very bad at that in the modern world we think oh well I read this book on attachment it was quite interesting and and now that's it I know it now I know know it now no you don't you need to go back you need to read it all the time that's why you know the idea of nudging is not as strange as it might sound not as futuristic it's a
1:01:02 very old idea that you might give you life to one of the most uh shameful or humbling realizations of going down a personal development Journey for a while is that the tool that you're looking for to the problem you're encountering now is not only something that you know it's one of the first things that you ever discovered when you began this journey it's maybe something you wrote about it's maybe something that you practice for a very long time and I often get asked I was doing these Live Events recently and one of the most common questions is um what advice would you give yourself 10 years ago the interesting thing about that question I think is that the answer that you give what you would tell yourself 10 years ago is almost always invariably the answer that you right now need to hear as well because the big problems Remain
1:01:48 the big problems because they're so fundamental to who you are if they weren't fundamental to who you are they would probably not be the big problems if you were able to detox that it's it's the anciliary stuff it's the extraneous outsides that you end up tinkering with but the core you know the the middle of the cake is this chocolate is it strawberry uh that's really where it is and um yes to think not only is this challenge that I'm encountering you know to uh break the fourth wall I've used a number of videos from the school of Life over the last decade when I've encountered the same situations like I already I I've not only have I watched this there's been periods where I've learned entire passages from this as a little Mantra that I can reflect on I go
1:02:35 I'm going back to the same but that you're right this temptation novel new there is a there is a better answer well we're 5 years hence there must be something that's come out in the last however long and um I guess this is what art and Heritage History uh does that it helps to sort of strip that away yeah what's stood the test of time what's been sufficiently Lindy that it's still with us now yeah you know it's TSL is in the four CeX is you know we return to the place where we started it's the idea of that that's kind of part of every journey is you come back to the place where you started the entire story of The Alchemist by Paulo qua right right exactly and so I notic also when you were speaking just now you had a smile on your lips and and that's not coincidental I think the more you know
1:03:21 one Journeys through life um the more there's really only one may Maj solution which is a smile on one's lips at the sheer let's put it bluntly idiocy absurdity absurdity of oneself you at the school of life we we we did a class on confidence and we wrote a little book
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