Did you have a proper childhood?
Where we're is rooted in where and how we started. Our emotional clouds form from the water of the distant past. The School of Life book might help us in travelling back for consolation.
This is the first post of the year where I’m going to gaze fundamentally at the importance of being emotional beings. For this, my torch bearer shedding light on the basics is Alain De Botton of the School of Life. I'm in awe of the wordsmith in him. I began reading Alain for the first time in 2023 with his ‘How Proust Can Change Your Life’. It felt like an experience because the title appears to be a self-help one but it's not a ‘how-to’ guide. It enriched me with classic prose knitted so well, reflecting over the life of a famous writer of the yore, that my heart felt in place and warm. The School of Life (SoL) book was first published in 2019, and it found me at the end of 2023. (I’ve presented some of his prose within quotations for your taste.)
Having read the Proust book prior, Alain’s work became my first choice to deep dive into the ocean of our minds. This choice feels immensely satisfying now. There are two ways to look at us: how we ought to be and how we are intrinsically without having to be just one thing. The former puts us in a race while the latter puts us at ease. Alain focuses on the latter and he offers nuanced wisdom on how to make the best of what we already are, no judgments. So, I’m beginning the understanding with a philosopher rather than an academic. I’ll shift to academics later because there are plenty, but the likes of Alain De Botton are rare.
The idea of Emotional Education
Alain expresses concern about the state of our emotional maturity at the outset. I present below his main concern about our emotional attitude as a species in his words.
“WE are not individually much cleverer than the average animal…but the knack of our species lies in our capacity to transmit our accumulated knowledge down the generations. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed towards material, scientific and technical subjects- and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety is about how good the next generation will be at maths, very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness…We devote very few hours fathoming shame and rage .... The assumption is that emotional insight might be either unnecessary or in essence unteachable.”
Our lack of knack in deep emotional seas traces back to certain traits of the past. These, among others given in the book, are: -
Romanticism- This idea sprouted in 18th century Europe which divorced reasoning from feelings. It would prefer you to bond with someone based on the immediate feeling rather than pondering over the nature of that feeling and the person.
“We are, in terms of wisdom, little more advanced than the ancient Sumerians or the Picts.”
Emotional Intelligence- Our penchant for unitary measurements like intelligence pushed us to put all aspects into one basket. But everyone can possess a unique intelligence. There shouldn’t be an intelligent or dumb person per se. Emotional intelligence metric divides and stresses while true emotional maturity lies in accepting and adjusting for nuances in our nature, not fleeting feelings or judgements.
Contemporary education system- It works under 02 assumptions: 1) how we are taught matters more than what we are taught and 2) what has been taught once, sticks. (It doesn’t.)
“Our memories are sieves, not robust buckets.”
Alain suggests that we can counter akrasia (Greek for ‘weakness of will’) to better educate us emotionally in 02 ways:
Art- Our sense of history owes much to art. Without it, rich interpretations and proper visualisation wouldn’t be possible. Art has served well to educate the curious ones that came after. Historical traditions, royalties or religion, understood that “the point of art was to render tough or knotty lessons easier to absorb .... the power of beauty to persuade us into particular patterns of thought and habits of the heart.”
Ritual- We invented rituals, defined as structured repetition of important concepts, to balance one of our weaknesses: “Our problem isn’t just that we are in the habit of shrinking important ideas. We are also prone to forget them immediately even if we have in theory given them our assent.”
“Best rituals take us back to ideas that we are in deep agreement with yet have allowed to lapse: they are an externally mandated route to inner authenticity.” (Quite beautiful!)
There are aspects of our psyche which holds us from realising emotional richness:
Our view perhaps that emotional knots are too small to be worth addressing. The pressure of 200 years of scientifically mandated faith in the possibility of progress bears with it the greatest enemy of ‘contemporary satisfaction’ which is our belief in human perfectibility.
“All substantial endeavours- marriage, child-rearing, a career, politics- were understood to be sources of distinctive and elaborate misery.”
We have to understand that humanity is flawed by design, not by accident. Alain rightly says that, “What we can aim for, at best, is consolation.”
In my view, the challenges set in our paths are hurdles we are supposed to endure to find our potential selves rather than cribbing over their existence. There is a reason for things, some known while others unfathomable.
This brings in us the possibility of profound understanding and companionship. Why companionship? Because of our flaws, we are similar to many; we run away from many parts of us when we run for the acquired or desired part of us. That’s mimetics and I’ve written a poem about this aspect of our being.
Our blindness towards the idea that suffering and disappointment are at the heart of the human experience. (I’ve covered similar wisdom by one of the leading psychiatrists Phil Stutz (Tool-10) in an article.) Melancholy isn’t a blot to discard but a feather to realise the humaneness in us.
We are enamoured by the concepts which adorn the hat of obscurity but happily pass over what’s simple yet profound like interpersonal or emotional. Our affinity for the things that keep us guessing and theories of grandiosity hooks us but the most tangible and touching aspects are often ignored because they don’t appear extraordinary. There is more realisation in the simple yet often ignored realities of our lives. Sit with yourself and have an inner chat about what’s brewing deep down. No one is going to do that for you. Escaping too much into the leisure and pleasures of our modern world delinks you from the actual you; then there is burnout and return to the fundamentals (careful reflection regularly can avoid this loop).
There is an immense need for emotional education but the rat race won’t give us the time to halt and hear ourselves. The School of Life by Alain De Botton is that very idea which our species needs to remain sane.
The Self
We are strangers to ourselves. Most people I’ve known through personal life or professional life, including me to an extent, have been the ones, like so many, to move through life worrying outwardly but rarely concerned with the inner world. More than emotional intelligence, we should have sleepless nights over emotional ignorance (EI). EI is hard as a matter of pursuit. It doesn’t form the part of our curriculum, nor has it been a mainstream awareness topic since ages and neither it is considered by its bearer i.e. a homosapien. We are in the age of skyrocketing AI and shallowing EI.
Almost universally, without anyone intending this to happen, somewhere in our childhood our trajectory towards emotional maturity can be counted upon to have been impeded…We can be counted upon not to have passed through our young years without sustaining some form of deep psychological injury- what we can term a set or ‘primal wounds’.
As part of our social conditioning, we learn to make sense of circumstances based on what the adults imbibe in us and we take this as unavoidable truth. Childhood is a “gentle open prison.” We are grown by those around us in a way that rare time is spent getting to know us through them but since they also grow up less inwardly, it’s reasonable not to find fault in them.
What’s an emotionally healthy childhood?
When we are tendered to with utmost care and profound service by the caretakers. Where our emotions- tantrums, curiosities, eccentricities-are properly understood and communicated to us with maturity. We deserve to be treated with royalty to face the future rigours of our lives well.
“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.”
We are given the benefit of doubt by valuing what could be in the future rather than what we have done in the moment. We are given deeper listening by helping us delve deeper into ourselves. This also helps us in learning to articulate ourselves better.
The relationship with our caregivers is steady, consistent, and long-term. It’s not valued much; people around should strive to stay predictable to us.
WE don't have to worry about being an ideal boy or girl. A sense of freedom in allowing ourselves to learn and express with open endedness, without having to rebel, lets our personalities naturally find our voice. The core values of being a better human should be fundamentally our ammo in learning to meander through social dictums.
Our caregiver isn’t competitive with us in the way that we are allowed to overtake or supersede them for they had their period of limelight or they will separately have their own. Further, a good caregiver doesn’t get ambitious on the child’s behalf but an emotionally healthy childhood should be allowed to build themselves for their own sake and not as per the idea of a caregiver.
An emotionally healthy child is allowed to understand that if things go wrong or if they have broken something, it can be redeemed or repaired. Learning that there are options to do better than panic makes us stronger and problem solvers.
Plenty goes wrong even in an emotionally healthy childhood and that’s ok. It’s also important to understand that rosy picture-perfect reality is mostly utopian. Friction is fine. Learn to look at the tough aspects and find acceptance. That’s important to imbibe during an emotionally healthy childhood.
Important to learn not to put your caretaker into a good or bad bucket. Everyone has their own strengths, weaknesses and failures. Accept the faults of those who have accepted yours during childhood.
How to assess if you have not gone through the above eight?
Self-love
Candour
Communication
Trust
That’s it. If you see yourself troubled with these aspects of you, you’re, like many, perhaps bludgeoned by ignorance of those who were not able to offer you an emotionally healthy childhood. No one is to blame because your caregivers most likely had their caregivers just like that.
The point of this article is to start the emotional journey at the beginning and offer a helping hand to allow ourselves to break through our own heart breaks, mostly ignored or perhaps oblivious to our eyes, to understand that fault lines make our life’s lines and those lines can help you write good stories too.