The School of Life

by The School Of Life

  The urge to forget the primal wounds is not hard to understand. It is deeply implausible, but also humiliating, to imagine that events from so long ago might be influencing the bulk of our feelings and actions in the here and now. Blunt and cliché-sounding psychological determinism negates our hopes for a life of dignified adult liberty. It seems crushing and, from certain perspectives, plain daft to suppose that our personalities might remain forged by incidents that unfolded before our fifth birthday.

  Towards the past, we tend to adopt a sentimental attitude which is far more attentive to the occasional endearing exception than the more challenging norm. Family photos, almost always snapped at the happier junctures, guide the process. There is much more likely to be an image of one’s mother by the pool, smiling with the expression of a giddy young girl, than of her slamming the veranda door in a rage at the misery of conjugal life; there will be a shot of one’s father genially performing a card trick, but no visual record of his long, brutal mealtime silences. A lot of editing goes on, encouraged by all sides.

  With age, we naturally look at the world through the eyes of an adult rather than going to the trouble of recovering the distinctive and peculiar perspective of the child. To any grown-up, it is immediately obvious that a three-year-old having a tantrum in a hotel restaurant is irritating, theatrical and bad-mannered. But that is chiefly because we lack the encouragement or empathetic energy to try to recreate the strange inner world of a small person in which she might feel monumentally tired and bewildered, fearful that an unfamiliar dish was going to be forced on her, or lonely and humiliated by being the smallest person in a large and lugubrious dining room, far away from Lanky, the stuffed rabbit left by mistake on the floor in the room upstairs.

  Or when an adult locks a kitchen door to ensure silence during an hour-long business call, it is far from normal to picture the scene from the viewpoint of the very young child on the other side, for whom this endless exclusion may seem proof that everything good and kind has mysteriously suddenly died. It becomes difficult for us to keep in mind how much in all our characters was marked by what are (from a grown-up perspective) almost laughably minor yet hugely potent emotions.

  But it’s not simply that we’ve idly forgotten the past. We could in principle re-enter the emotional spaces we once inhabited. It is for deeper reasons that we push the memories aside and actively restrict reflection on our histories.

  We keep away from ourselves because so much of what we could discover threatens to be agony. We might discover that we were, in the background, deeply furious with, and resentful about, certain people we were meant only to love. We might discover how much ground there was to feel inadequate and guilty on account of the many errors and misjudgements we have made. We might recognize how much was compromised and needed to be changed about our relationships and careers.

  SELF-DECEPTION

  We don’t only have a lot to hide, we are liars of genius. It is part of the human tragedy that we are natural self-deceivers. Our techniques are multiple and close to invisible:

  ■ We get addicted. Not necessarily to heroin or whisky, but to everyday innocuous activities that attract no alarm or suspicion. We are hooked on checking the news or tidying the house, exercising or taking on fresh projects at work. It can look to the world as if we are just being productive, but the clue to our compulsiveness lies in our motives. We are checking the news to keep the news from ourselves at bay; we are working on a project as an alternative to working on our psyches. What properly indicates addiction is not what someone is doing, but their way of doing it, and in particular their desire to avoid any encounter with certain sides of themselves. We are addicts whenever we develop a manic reliance on something, anything, to keep our darker and more unsettling feelings at bay.

  ■ We lie by being very cheerful. It sounds, conveniently, almost indistinguishable from happiness. But with its remorseless and insistent upbeat quality, aggressive jolliness has very little to do with true satisfaction. The person who is relentlessly jolly doesn’t just want the mood to be happy; they can’t tolerate that it might in any way be sad, so unexplored and potentially overwhelming are their own background feelings of disappointment and grief.

  ■ We lie by attacking and denigrating what we love but haven’t managed to get. We dismiss the people we once wanted as friends, the careers we hoped at the start one day to have, the lives we tried to emulate. We reconfigure what a desired but painfully elusive goal meant to us in the hope of not having to register its loss properly.

  ■ We lie through a generalized cynicism, which we direct at everything and everyone so as to ward off misery about one or two things in particular. We say that all humans are terrible and every activity compromised, so that the specific causes of our pain do not attract scrutiny and shame.

  ■ We lie by filling our minds with impressive ideas which blatantly announce our intelligence to the world but subtly ensure that we won’t have much room left to rediscover long-distant feelings of ignorance or confusion upon which the development of our personalities may nevertheless rest.

  We write dense books on the role of government bonds in the Napoleonic Wars or publish extensively on Chaucer’s influence on the mid-nineteenth-century Japanese novel. We secure degrees from institutes of advanced study or positions on editorial boards of scientific journals. Our minds are crammed with arcane data. We can wittily inform a dining table of guests who wrote the Enchiridion (Epictetus) or describe the life and times of Dōgen (the founder of Zen Buddhism). But we don’t remember very much at all about how life was long ago, back in the old house, when our father left, our mother stopped smiling and our trust broke in pieces.

  We deploy knowledge and ideas that carry indubitable prestige to stand guard against the emergence of more humble but essential knowledge from our emotional past. We bury our personal stories beneath an avalanche of expertise. The possibility of a deeply consequential intimate enquiry is deliberately left to seem feeble and superfluous next to the grander task of addressing a conference on the political strategies of Dona Maria I or the life cycle of the Indonesian octopus.

  We lean on the glamour of being learned to limit all that we might really need to learn about.

  ■ We lie by pretending that we are simpler than we actually are and that too much psychology might be nonsense. We lean on a version of robust common sense to ward off intimations of our own awkward complexity. We imply that not thinking very much is, at base, evidence of a superior kind of intelligence.

  In company, we deploy bluff strategies of ridicule against more complex accounts of human nature. We sideline avenues of personal investigation as unduly fancy or weird, implying that to lift the lid on inner life could never be fruitful or entirely respectable. We use the practical mood of Monday morning 9 a.m. to ward off the complex insights of 3.a.m. the previous night, when the entire fabric of our existence came into question. Deploying an attitude of vigorous common sense, we strive to make our moments of radical disquiet seem like aberrations, rather than the central occasions of insight they might actually be.

  We appeal to the understandable longing that our personalities be non-tragic, simple and easily comprehended, so as to reject the stranger but more useful facts of our real, intricate selves.

  A defence of emotional honesty has nothing to do with high-minded morality. It is ultimately cautionary and egoistic. We need to tell ourselves a little more of the truth because we pay too high a price for our concealments. We cut ourselves off from possibilities of growth. We shut out large portions of our minds and end up uncreative, tetchy and defensive, while others around us have to suffer our irritability, gloom, manufactured cheerfulness or defensive rationalizations.

  THE EMOTIONALLY HEALTHY CHILDHOOD

  We can sometimes be so modest about our power to know what is good for others or ourselves that we forget it might be possible to hazard a few generalizations about what constitutes an emotionally healthy childhood. It can’t be pure i
diosyncrasy or good luck; there are distinct themes and goals to identify. With a map of optimal development in mind, we could more clearly appreciate where dislocation begins, what we have to be grateful for and what there is to regret. At a collective level, we would have a greater sense of what might need to be done to generate a more emotionally privileged, and therefore slightly saner, world.

  With that in mind, we could expect some or all of the following to occur:

  ■ In an emotionally healthy childhood, someone will put themselves profoundly at our service. If as adults we have even a measure of mental health, it is almost certainly because, when we were helpless infants, there was a person (to whom we essentially owe our lives) who pushed their needs to one side for a time in order to focus wholly on ours. They interpreted what we could not quite say, they guessed what might be ailing us, they settled and consoled us. They kept the chaos and noise at bay and cut the world up into manageable pieces for us.

  They did not, all the while, ask that we thank them, understand them or show them sympathy. They didn’t demand that we enquire how their days went or how they were sleeping at night (they weren’t much). They treated us like royalty, so that we would later on be able to submit to the rigours and humiliations of an ordinary life. This temporarily one-sided relationship guaranteed our eventual ability to form a two-sided kind.

  We may think of egoists as people who have grown sick from too much love, but in fact the opposite is the case: an egoist is someone who has not yet had their fill. Self-centredness has to have a clear run in the early years if it isn’t to haunt and ruin the later ones. The so-called narcissist is simply a benighted soul who has not had a chance to be inordinately and unreasonably admired and cared for at the start.

  ■ In an emotionally healthy childhood, we’re given the benefit of the doubt. We are assessed by what we might one day be, not by exactly what we are right now. Someone is on hand to put the best possible spin on our behaviour. Someone is kind.

  A harsh judge might, for example, say that we were ‘attention-seeking’. Our caregiver imagines that we just stand in need of some encouraging words. We might have acted rather meanly. Our caregiver adds that we must, in the background, have been feeling threatened. It looked as if we were negligent; the caregiver remembers that tiredness might account for the lion’s share of the explanation.

  Our carer constantly searches beneath the surface for a more sympathetic set of reasons. They help us to be on our own side, to like ourselves and therefore, eventually, not to be too defensive about our own flaws, the existence of which we grow strong enough to accept.

  ■ In an emotionally healthy childhood, the relationship with our caregiver is steady, consistent and long-term. We trust that they will be there tomorrow and the day after. They are boringly predictable. As a result, we are able to believe that what has gone well once can go well again and to let such an expectation govern our pick of available adult partners. We aren’t mesmerized by people who are offhand and frustrating; we don’t relish being punished. We can locate candidates who are kind and nurturing – and don’t judge them as weak or deficient for being so.

  And if trouble strikes with our kindly partners, we don’t panic or turn away. We can confidently set about trying to repair a love we know we deserve.

  ■ In an emotionally healthy childhood, we aren’t always required to be wholly good boys or girls. We are allowed to get furious and sometimes a bit revolting – at certain points to say ‘absolutely not’ and ‘because I feel like it’. The adults know their own flaws and do not expect a child to be fundamentally better than they are. We do not have to comply at every turn to be tolerated. We can let others in on our shadow sides.

  This period of freedom prepares us to submit one day to the demands of society without having to rebel in self-defeating ways (rebels being, at heart, people who have had to obey too much too early). We can knuckle down and toe the line when it’s in our long-term interest to do so. At the same time, we’re not overly cowed or indiscriminately obedient either. We find a sound middle ground between slavish compliance on the one hand and self-destructive defiance on the other.

  ■ In an emotionally healthy childhood, our carer isn’t jealous of or competitive with us. They can allow themselves to be overtaken and superseded. They have had their moment in the limelight, or are having it elsewhere beyond the family. They can be proud rather than rivalrous of the achievements of the child.

  Equally, the good carer isn’t overly ambitious on the child’s behalf. They want them to do well, but for their own sake and in their own way. There is no particular script the child has to follow in order to be loved; the child isn’t required to support the carer’s frayed self-belief or burnish their self-image in the eyes of strangers.

  ■ In an emotionally healthy childhood, the child learns that things which break can be fixed. Plans can go awry, but new ones can be made. You can fall over and start anew. The carer models how to plough on and remain hopeful. A voice of resilience, originally external, becomes the way the child learns to speak to themselves. There are alternatives to panic.

  In the seventeenth century, the Dutch developed a tradition of painting that depicted ships in violent storms. These works, which hung in private homes and in municipal buildings around the Dutch Republic, had an explicitly therapeutic purpose: they were delivering a moral to their viewers, who lived in a nation critically dependent on maritime trade, about confidence in seafaring and life more broadly. Ludolf Bakhuysen painted Warships in a Heavy Storm around 1695. The scene looks chaotic in the extreme: how could the ships survive? But they were designed for just such situations. Their hulls had been minutely adapted through long experience to withstand the tempests of the northern oceans. The crews practised again and again the manoeuvres that could keep their vessels safe. They knew about taking down sails at speed and ensuring that the wind would not shred the mast. They understood about shifting cargo in the hull, tacking to the left and then abruptly to the right, and pumping out water from the inner chambers. They knew to remain coolly scientific in responding to the storm’s wilful, frantic motions. The picture pays homage to decades of planning and experience. One can imagine the older sailors on the ship saying to a terrified novice, with a laugh, that just last year, off the coast of Jutland, there was an even bigger storm – and slapping him on the back with paternal playfulness as the youth was sick overboard. Bakhuysen wanted us to feel proud of humanity’s resilience in the face of apparently dreadful challenges. His painting implies that we can all cope far better than we think; that what appears immensely threatening may be highly survivable. All this the caregiver teaches, usually without reference to ships and Dutch art – just by their way of keeping on.

  ■ Importantly, in an emotionally healthy childhood plenty goes wrong. No one has staked their reputation on rendering the whole story perfect. The carer does not see it as their role to remove every frustration. They intuit that a lot of good comes from having the right, manageable kind of friction, through which the child develops their own resources and individuality. In contact with bearable disappointment, the child is prompted to create their own internal world, in which they can dream, hatch fresh plans and build up their own resources.

  ■ In an emotionally healthy childhood, the child can see that the good carer isn’t either entirely good or wholly bad and so isn’t worthy of either idealization or denigration. The child accepts the faults and virtues of the carer with melancholy maturity and gratitude – and in doing so, by extension, becomes ready to accept that everyone they like will be a mixture of the positive and the negative. They won’t as adults fall deeply in love and then grow furious at the first moment of let-down. They will have a realistic sense of what can be expected of life alongside another flawed, good enough human.

  Ludolf Bakhuysen, Warships in a Heavy Storm, c. 1695.

  Soberingly, despite all our advances in technology and material resources, we are not much more advanced in the art o
f delivering emotionally healthy childhoods than generations before us. The number of breakdowns, inauthentic lives and broken souls shows no marked signs of decline.

  We are failing to offer one another tolerable childhoods not because we are sinful or indifferent, but because we still have so far to go before we know how to master that improbably complicated subject: love.

  THE MARKERS OF EMOTIONAL HEALTH

  One way to start assessing how badly we have been knocked by our early years – and where we might therefore need to direct most of our repair work and attention – is to identify a range of markers of emotional health and imagine how we fare in relation to them. At least four central ones suggest themselves.

  Self-Love

  Self-love is the quality that determines how much we can be friends with ourselves and, day to day, remain on our own side.

  When we meet a stranger who has things we don’t, how quickly do we feel ourselves pitiful, and how long can we remain assured by the decency of what we have and are? When another person frustrates or humiliates us, can we let the insult go, able to perceive the senseless malice beneath the attack, or are we left brooding and devastated, implicitly identifying with the verdict of our enemies? How much can the disapproval or neglect of public opinion be offset by the memory of the steady attention of significant people in the past?

  In relationships, do we have enough self-love to leave an abusive union? Or are we so down on ourselves that we carry an implicit belief that harm is all we deserve? In a different vein, how good are we at apologizing to a lover for things that may be our fault? How rigidly self-righteous do we need to be? Can we dare to admit mistakes or does an admission of guilt or error bring us too close to our background sense of nullity?