Alain de Botton, the popular philosopher and author, encourages us to be “generous” with ourselves when we instinctively put up a barrier, don’t act the way we know we should, or want to act, and generally have odd behaviours that make life for ourselves a little harder. He asks you to consider this:
When in your childhood would that behaviour have made sense?
“Let’s image somebody who can never be sincere,” he says by way of example. “You always feel they have a jokey, buoyant, plastic manner and you think, where is the real them? But you can never reach it.”
This might keep that person away from forming deeper connections, he says, but “if you’re five and in a different environment; maybe you’ve got a depressed parent who is really looking to a child to carry the hope for the family, then you get assigned that role. Maybe you’re five and you’ve got to become the joker, the ‘up’ person, and then you find in later life, you can’t shed that.”
At the time, that five-year-old you was helpful. The behaviour you adopted then got you through to being nine, then thirteen, and into adult life. But if that five-year-old shows up when you’re thirty-five and in a serious situation that warrants a deeper response to stay close to someone you love, it becomes a problem.
If you find yourself reacting in a way that isn’t helpful to you today, Alain’s advice is to “search for the logic which makes that behaviour really sensible [and] be compassionate towards why you might have developed that strategy. Then learn to let go of it on the basis of having understood why it arose and why it might no longer be useful”.
Where multiple versions of you at different ages will show up from time to time, the most helpful thing you can do to keep your mind healthy is acknowledge them, first of all. Then, when you’ve “got them all around the table,” says Alain, “let’s be kind and understand where they’re all coming from, and herd them towards a coherent direction which serves the you in the here and now.”
Socrates, supposedly the wisest person in antiquity, was once asked: ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ His answer was: ‘Know yourself’
Alain de Botton
Watch Alain talk about Introspection, defence mechanisms, and ghosts on the Happy Place podcast.
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