How to Overcome Your Childhood

Alain de Botton, Alain de Botton

• Publisher: The School of Life
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781912891221
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A guide to breaking free from the enduring, and sometimes damaging, behavioral patterns we learned in childhood.

As we try to navigate the complexities and anxieties of adulthood, considering our childhoods can feel like a daunting task. They happened so long ago; we can probably barely remember, let alone relate to, the little person we used to be. But one of the most powerful explanations for why we struggle as adults is that we were denied the opportunity to fully be ourselves as children.

Whether our parents or caregivers were strict disciplinarians, overly fragile, or distant and preoccupied, the way we were taught to act as children deeply influences how we behave as adults. We might have assumed the role of caregiver, become people pleasers, or learned to tell lies to protect ourselves, burying our true needs and desires deep underground.

When we thoroughly examine our upbringings, the larger implications for our adult selves become clear. Once we understand the roots from which our flaws stem, we can begin to correct the harmful behaviors we mistakenly believe to be innate.

This book is a guide to better understanding our younger selves in order to shape who we wish to be today. It explores to what extent we can pin our actions in the present to our experiences in the past, and how we can break free from the learned patterns of our childhoods.

• CONSTRUCTIVE ADVICE for moving on from our childhoods.
• DRAWING FROM THE PSYCHOLOGICAL teachings of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott.
• EXPLORES POPULAR CONCEPTS such as "The Golden Child, " splitting, and emotional inheritance.
• UNLEARN PROBLEMATIC CHILDHOOD HABITS to improve our current emotional condition.

III.
Ways Forward

The Importance of a Breakdown

One of the great problems of human beings is that we are far too good at keeping going. We are experts at surrendering to the demands of the external world, living up to what is expected of us and getting on with the priorities, as others around us define them. We keep showing up and being an excellent boy or girl – and we can pull off this magical feat for up to decades at a time, without so much as an outward twitch or crack.

Until, suddenly, one day, much to everyone’s surprise, including our own, we break. The rupture can take many forms. We can no longer get out of bed. We fall into a catatonic depression. We develop all-consuming social anxiety. We refuse to eat. We babble incoherently. We lose command over part of our body. We are compelled to do something extremely scandalous and entirely contrary to our normal selves. We become wholly paranoid in a given area. We refuse to play by the usual rules in our relationship, we have an affair, ramp up the fighting – or otherwise poke a very large stick into the wheels of day-to-day life.

Breakdowns are hugely disruptive – not just for those afflicted but for family, friends and work colleagues – and so, unsurprisingly, there is an immediate rush to medicalise the problem and attempt to excise it from the scene, so that business as usual can restart.

This is to misunderstand what is going on when we break down. A breakdown is not merely a random piece of madness or malfunction; it is a very real – albeit very inarticulate – bid for health. It is an attempt by one part of our minds to force the other part into a process of growth, self-understanding and self-development which it has hitherto refused to undertake. If we can put it paradoxically, it is an attempt to jumpstart a process of getting well, properly well, through a stage of falling very ill.

The danger, therefore, if we merely medicalise a breakdown and attempt to shift it away at once is that we will miss the lesson embedded within our sickness. A breakdown is not just a pain, though it is that too, of course; it is an extraordinary opportunity to learn.

The reason we break down is that we have not, over years, flexed very much. There were things we needed to hear inside our minds that we deftly put to one side, there were messages we needed to heed, bits of emotional learning and communicating we didn’t do – and now, after being patient for so long, far too long, the emotional self is attempting to make itself heard in the only way it now knows how. It has become entirely desperate – and we should understand and even sympathise with its mute rage. What the breakdown is telling us, above anything else, is that it must no longer be business as usual – that things have to change or (and this can be properly frightening to witness) that death might be preferable.

A crisis represents an appetite for growth that has not found another way of expressing itself.

Why can’t we simply listen to the emotional need calmly and in good time – and avoid the melodrama of a breakdown? Because the conscious mind is inherently lazy and squeamish and so reluctant to engage with what the breakdown has to tell it with brutality. For years, it refuses to listen to a particular sadness; or there is a dysfunction in a relationship it is in flight from; or there are desires it sweeps very far under the proverbial carpet.

We can compare the process to a revolution. For years, the people press the government to listen to their demands and adjust. For years, the government makes token gestures but shuts its ears – until one day, it is simply too much for the people, who storm the palace gates, destroy the fine furnishings and shoot randomly at the innocent and the guilty.

Mostly, in revolutions, there is no good outcome. The legitimate grievances and needs of the people are not addressed or even discovered. There is an ugly civil war – sometimes, literally, suicide. The same is true of breakdowns.

Yet a good mental physician tries hard to listen to, rather than censor, the illness. They detect within its oddities a plea for more time for ourselves, for a closer relationship, for a more honest, fulfilled way of being, for acceptance for who we really are sexually… That is why we started to drink, or to become reclusive, or to grow entirely paranoid or manically seductive.

A crisis represents an appetite for growth that has not found another way of expressing itself. Many people, after a painful few months or even years of breakdown, will say: ‘I don’t know how I’d ever have got well if I hadn’t fallen ill first’.

In the midst of a breakdown, we often wonder whether we have gone mad. We have not. We are behaving oddly, no doubt, but beneath the surface agitation, we are on a hidden yet logical search for health. We haven’t become ill; we were ill already. Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.

The Drive to Keep Growing Emotionally

We know well enough that we are equipped with an innate drive for physical growth; that the human animal is geared to keep developing towards its outward mature form, adding muscle, bone and fatty tissue, in a spontaneous process of development that begins in our earliest days in the womb and ends around our sixteenth year.

What is less obvious is that we are marked by an equally innate, equally powerful, although in this instance life-long, drive towards emotional growth. Without anything mystical being meant by this, unless we are impeded by internal or external obstacles, we are set on an ineluctable path towards emotional development.

An obvious conceptual difference between the two drives is that we can easily grasp what it means to be fully grown physically, but it is rather harder to pin down what emotional maturity might look like.

We can hazard a twofold answer. Our emotional drive is made up of two strands: the first is a will towards ever greater and deeper connection; the second comprises a will towards ever greater and deeper self-expression.

To consider connection first; we are marked by an intense wish to move away from loneliness, shame and isolation and to find opportunities for understanding, sincerity and communion. We long to share with friends, lovers and new acquaintances an authentic picture of what it means to be us – and at the same time to enter imaginatively into their feelings and experiences. What we call ‘love’ is merely a subsection of the drive to connect, which extends across a range of activities and types of relationship, stretching to encompass the body and our desire for physical intimacy, touch and sexual play. We can count ourselves as emotionally healthy in large measure according to what degree of connection we have in our lives.

By the drive to self-expression, we mean the desire to fathom, bring into focus and externalise our ideas and creative and intellectual capacities – a drive that manifests itself particularly around our work and our aesthetic activities. We seek to gain an ever-greater understanding of the contents of our minds, especially of our values, our pleasures and our way of seeing the world, and to be able to give these a kind of expression that makes them public, comprehensible and beneficial to others. We will feel we have had a rich life whenever we have been able to give a voice and shape to some of the many perceptions that course through us – and in some way, however modestly – left a fruitful imprint on the world.

These two aspects of the drive for emotional growth help us to get a handle on our most acute moments of unhappiness. It is because of the primordial urge to connect that it hurts so much when a friendship is broken off, when an established relationship starts to lack physical contact or when we can’t find anyone we see eye to eye with in a new city. And it is because of how powerful the drive to self-expression is that we suffer so much when our studies fail to engage our minds, when a job ceases to reflect our interests or when, on a Sunday evening, we feel in a confused way that our talents are going to waste – just as the same drive can explain the envy we feel when we hear of a friend’s success in an area we aspire to excel in.

Calling this aspect of human nature a drive, and equating it with that towards physical maturity, emphasises its non-negotiable nature and hence its power over us. It is as misguided, painful and nonsensical to try to stop someone growing emotionally as it is to bind their feet. The drive takes precedence over all manner of more convenient options: the longing for respectability, money or stability. It won’t leave us alone until it has been heard.

It is as misguided, painful and nonsensical to try to stop someone growing emotionally as it is to bind their feet.

It might make us leave a marriage that would have been – from many perspectives – so much easier to remain in, or to quit a job that had huge financial rewards in order to take up another that more properly answers the call of our deep selves.

If the drive to emotional growth continues to be unattended, and perhaps even unknown to us, it can short circuit our whole lives in a bid to be heard. Fed up with waiting, it may simply throw us into a paralysing depression or lock us into a state of overwhelming anxiety. By breaking us in these ways, the frustrated, stymied drive is trying to be interpreted and accommodated. What it lacks in eloquence and focus, it makes up for in persistence and strength. A breakdown can be a roundabout attempt to create opportunities for a break through, that is, a new stage of emotional growth.

By understanding more clearly how essential the drive to emotional growth can be, we may come to better recognise the symptoms of its frustrations and the logic of our longings. At points, when we upset the otherwise steady course of our lives in its name, we can be readier to explain to ourselves and those who care for us what might be behind our puzzling behaviour. We have not forever lost our minds, we recognise the role of respectability and status, we would love to ...