What a pleasure to be here to present my new book.
It is called A Therapeutic Journey.
It's a follow-on to a book that some of you might know, which I brought out a few years ago, and that was called A School of Life, An Emotional Education, and this is called A Therapeutic Journey.
And it's really following on from this exploration that I've been on, my colleagues have been on at the School of Life for a number of years into this very broad area which we might call mental well-being.
And it's obviously a vast topic.
I should say that I certainly don't believe that it's possible for anyone to be sane.
Does anyone in the room think that they are sane?
Let's just have a show of hands.
Thank goodness.
I'm very glad.
You're obviously a very, very sane audience because, in the paradoxical way in which these things work, the best marker of having at least a measure of sanity is a friendship with one's more insane sides and the ability to recognize the extent to which one isn't entirely well, and cannot be, by the simple facts of human nature.
This is about as good as we can ever get.
If any of you dating...
A very useful way to sift out those who you should continue a meal with or not is simply to turn to your companion at some point, normally after the start, or at least, and say so.
In what ways are you mad?
And if the person looks kind of puzzled and angry and defensive and says, how do you mean mad?
Just leave.
I mean, put a little bit of money down, but quit the restaurant.
But it's not going to work.
It's not going to work.
But if they're able to take the first steps into outlining some of the ways in which they may, you know, be tricky at points.
Another key question is to ask somebody if they're difficult to live with.
If somebody thinks that they're easy to live with, again, run, run.
It's just, this is a very, very bad sign.
So at The School of Life, we very much believe everybody's hard to live with and everybody's insane.
Very good starting point.
But in this book, A Therapeutic Journey, What we're looking at in particular is the darker side of mental experience.
And that is the process of getting mentally unwell.
It's taken us about 2000 years or so to even be able to mention what should have always have been an extremely, almost common sense point of view, which is that, just as we get ill in our bodies, we of course get ill in our minds.
There is no such thing as a life that can be spent in a mind that is entirely well.
We tend to like, because it's so frightening.
We tend to try and create a wall, a hard separation between the crazy and the sane.
Well, as you'll pick up from what I've been saying, I certainly don't believe that that's the case, that the border is shifting.
The border is permeable, and any good and sane life will include many moments of what one might as well call insanity.
This is not a one-way street.
It's a constant passage between states of distress of acute distress and states of greater wellness.
It's worth maybe just summarizing or just trying to look at some of the ways in which a healthy mind operates.
Because all of us have moments when we are able to think in healthy ways.
And it's, you know, especially when you lose that ability to think, to reflect on what healthy thinking is, it's really a miraculous thing.
First and foremost, what a healthy mind is, is an editing machine.
What it is able to do is to rank thoughts in order of importance and not present consciousness with the full unalloyed, uncategorized panoply of emotions that it could feel at any time.
Things are ranked, and things are sometimes compartmentalized and put far away.
I'm going to talk about defense mechanisms in their more pejorative sense in a minute, but it's important to know that the ability not to think of certain things at certain points belongs to health.
For example, if there were thoughts that I was having right now about being here on stage, I wouldn't be able to continue.
I may not be able to continue much longer, but I'm going all right for a few minutes.
But if I were to have certain thoughts, like what on earth am I doing here?
What about if people weren't nice to me?
What about if I didn't know what I was talking about?
All these things would quite quickly trip me up and bring me into a state where I couldn't do what I can do.
So, in other words, in order to function in the world, You need to prioritize categorize, keep certain thoughts at bay, particularly punitive thoughts.
We are all, in order to keep going, immense optimists.
We need a boost of optimism all the time to bear ourselves.
I mean all of us.
You know, When we are so-called down, we tend to have those realistic, depressive thoughts.
Goodness, I'm rather ugly.
Goodness, I'm rather strange.
Goodness, I'm so stupid, et cetera.
Now, if those thoughts were allowed to submerge us, we couldn't get out of bed.
There is, at the core of health, there lies a certain necessary dose of optimism.
And it's only when we lose that that we start to realize absolutely how key it is.
Not least, we have to forget on a daily basis that we're going to die.
Philosophers love to remind us of death and there are real advantages, sometimes in a focusing way, to remembering death.
But if we really had to keep that thought of death in mind, as perhaps we should, we couldn't keep going.
So there's a lot of thought, a lot of thinking that we need not to do in order to function as we do.
But sometimes these very healthy mechanisms of thought and processing start to erode and for a period, or perhaps a longer period, start to break down and we enter a state of mental unwellness.
We're no longer able to categorize our thoughts.
We're no longer able to prioritize.
We're no longer able to sleep.
We're no longer able to therefore benefit from that restart that a fresh morning endows us with, when we're able to look again at a topic in a certain way.
We become hyperrealists.
And that hyperrealism becomes unlivable.
And at its worst, life itself starts to seem unendurable.
I think that many of us have at least tasted a share of what this might mean.
Hopefully, it was only a little moment in life.
Sometimes it can be longer.
I would say that very few people get through an entire life without, at certain moments, slipping into these kinds of territories.
And this is really what the book is about those moments when we lose our grip on all those processes that the mind has in order to be able to get us through the day.
Now, why on earth does it happen?
There are stresses, undoubtedly, in daily life.
There are things that aggravate a fragile mind.
But at the School of Life, and this will annoy everybody, so I'm really sorry.
We are very focused unfortunately, on childhood.
Sometimes we leave.
We run a YouTube channel and almost every film we make seems to mention childhood.
And there's a few people in particular who, every time we make a film, go oh, look at them, they're going on about childhood again.
And I feel real sympathy.
Oh, my goodness.
I mean, we do seem to go on a lot about childhood.
It's really boring to have to think about your childhood.
Many of us are 30, 40, 50 years, decades out of childhood.
And still, here I am telling you that it's all about your childhood.
Well, that's extremely annoying.
And I really sincerely apologize.
But the only way to forget about your childhood is to go and explore it.
We're not exploring childhood for the sake of nostalgia, or because we love mommy and daddy, or because it was such fun, but in order to get rid of the thing once and for all.
You know, these ghosts of the mind tend to be ghosts that sprung on us in childhood.
And without the courage to go back and look at them, we're unable unlikely, to find the freedom, the calm, the creativity that we all seek.
You know, childhood took humanity an unbelievable length of time to recognize the role of childhood in adult development.
I mean, you don't find any medieval person going, the reason I lack confidence is my parents.
There's no ancient Greek who's on record explaining their behavior because of a parental shortfall of affection.
It just doesn't exist.
There is no record.
We have to wait until the 20th century before people speak in this way, which can, of course, lead us to a kind of suspicion.
Are we modern somehow uniquely pampered, obsessive in this area?
I don't really think so.
I mean, compare it to our discovery of certain kinds of bacteria.
It took until the late 19th century, until the age of Freud, to realize that, at a bacterial level, there are things that inhabit jugs of water, that on a bad day, could kill the population of an entire city, that there are macrobiotic biological, macrobiological organisms that you can't see with the naked eye, that have the capacity to kill millions of people.
And it's so implausible.
And something akin to this goes on in relation to our own childhoods where again, slightly invisible processes are at play that have the capacity to fell adult lives in ways that are as destructive as a certain kind of poisoning.
Part of the problem of human beings is they have such an inordinately long maturational process.
A horse, a foal, is up and running in an afternoon.
So if baby horses' mum and dad are slightly strange or they are suffering from all sorts of things, it doesn't really matter, because they're often about within the afternoon.
But we humans, we're at least 18, 19, 20, 25, until we can get away from these people.
And these people are likely to be carrying all sorts of distorted patterns which we learn with some of the same natural inevitability as we learn language.
None of us learn our native language by sitting in a classroom and slowly taking it in.
We simply imbibe it passively from the surrounding environment.
While we're doing handstands in the garden, drawing buttercups at the kitchen table, we are learning languages that people are speaking around us.
And it's not just languages in the grammatical sense.
We are also learning, at all times, emotional languages.
Who can we trust?
What is a man?
What is a woman?
What am I?
What is my worth?
What will happen if I reach out and try and communicate with another person?
All of these things, all of these conclusions.
The language that we learn is being taken in all the time.
And it becomes a very dense native language.
Now, of course, we know how hard it is in adulthood to start learning Finnish if we grew up speaking Korean.
And how hard it is when you're a native English speaker to pick up Spanish.
You know, we'll know that we've probably got to go to language school three, four times a week.
We might need to do it for years, etc.
People get very impatient when you start telling them you have learned certain languages, a certain emotional language, and if you want to try and correct it, it's going to be a huge labor.
You know, you might need, let's say, to go to therapy once a week, even twice a week and three times a week, and they go.
What are you kidding?
You think i've got time to do that?
Um, surely you can just, you know, read a book.
Just this book will give it.
Now, this book is a fantastic start, but the bad news, the bad news is not enough.
It's not enough, even though it runs to 400 pages and has, you know, a wealth of insights.
Not enough.
It's just the beginning of the journey you're going to have to go on.
But be patient with yourself.
As I say, think of how long it took you to learn English or whatever language is your native language.
Think how complicated it would be to change that language.
It's no easier to start to learn a new language of men and women and relationships and self-esteem and confidence.
All of these things are just as knotted and just as firmly embedded in us.
Many, many of us almost say all of us suffer from what nowadays is a little bit of a fashionable word, but like many fashionable words, it has its use traumatized.
We have all suffered trauma in childhood.
Now, what is trauma?
Trauma is essentially the experience, an experience that is both painful and, at the age and at the stage where it is experienced, it is incomprehensible.
We simply cannot fathom it. frame it, process it, digest it, or make sense of it.
So it is swallowed in an undigested form.
That is what it is to be traumatized.
And, as we know and this is one of the great discoveries of 20th century psychotherapy I think the only way in which trauma can be handled is if we go back and unpick it and understand it and thereby process it and work a liberation from its effect which we have not understood.
Most mental troubles come from things that have not been properly looked at.
Anxiety, for example, is worry that doesn't understand itself.
Depression is sadness that has become unknown to us and therefore has bled across the whole of our lives.
Irritability is rage that doesn't know its true target.
Why when you open the drawer and you can't open it and you get into absolute fury, you start hitting the drawer and you go where is the damn key?
It's not just me, you do this too, we all do this too, right?
And then you think, hang on a minute, it's not the drawer, is it?
Now, something else.
Why am I in such a rage?
And that terrible thing that we have to start to think, I'm not understanding myself.
I'm diverting rage which belongs in one place, and I'm kicking the dog, I'm kicking the drawer, I'm kicking the driver, whatever it is.
Many of our emotions do not find their correct targets.
And the reason is that their correct targets are extremely awkward to come to understand.
For example, it's really nice to think that your parents are lovely and you love them.
Of course, that's the way it should be.
So to imagine that you're in a real rage with them, that's kind of awkward.
Or maybe you're in a rage with your partner.
Well, that's a bit awkward.
You're supposed to love them.
Brief diversion into sex.
Why do people stop having sex?
Some of you have stopped having sex?
Well, the standard common sense view is this is just a sign of time passing.
We go off people.
No, no, no, no, we don't.
It's a sign of frozen rage.
All of us upset our partners all the time in quite small ways.
Your partner comes home and goes, I've got a really interesting story to tell you.
You go, oh, I've just got to make a phone call.
You pick up your phone and start looking at something.
Your partner's not going to, you know, scream at you, probably.
They'll just take it on the chin, because they've learned they're a good boy or girl.
They've learned to be brave and to be an adult.
But none of us are adults in relationships.
All of us come to relationships as essentially adult-shell, three- or four- or five-year-old inner being.
And so when partners say to each other, grow up, you want to go...
This is not the game where you grow up.
Growing up is for the office.
The domestic sphere is one where we can't help but bring a very small toddler with us, and that toddler is extremely vulnerable and it gets hurt all the time.
That slightly cutting remark that you made about your partner at a party quite funny.
Everybody laughed.
Well, they didn't laugh.
And now it's three weeks later and they're still pretty upset.
The problem is, they don't know they're upset.
Why don't they know they're upset?
Because anger does not communicate itself cleanly to us.
They are out of touch with their emotions.
All of us are constantly getting out of touch with our emotions.
And a lot of our so-called illnesses are the result of legions of emotions that have lost sight of their true aim, because we are not very well equipped to repatriate our emotions and find out who was that anger really meant for.
And, as I say, some of the reason for that is that the anger that is due to certain people.
We think I'm supposed to be nice, so how could I be in a rage with my mother?
She's really nice.
She's very lovely.
She gave me a Christmas present, et cetera.
How could I be angry with my partner?
They seem so, you know, I'm married to them, et cetera, et cetera.
All these things that stop us from understanding the complexities of our own lives and therefore end us up in these kind of knots.
Come back to sex.
You know, one of the things that happens then is when a lot of accumulated anger that doesn't know itself has come to lodge in our minds.
The last thing we want is to be touched.
Why would we be touched by someone we're in a rage with?
I don't want to be touched by someone I'm in a rage with.
The thing is, we don't know we're in a rage.
The partner definitely doesn't know we're in a rage.
No one knows what's going on.
Everyone's reading a lot of books.
Good for Penguin.
But other than that, not such a great time in bed.
You know quite, quite boring, because no one knows what on earth's going on until maybe slowly, you find your way to something that says might I be in some ways in a rage?
School of Life, we make these cards, these dating cards.
We're supposed to take them on a date and ask your partner all kinds of questions.
And one of the questions, which is phenomenally useful, such a simple question.
You go on a date night with your partner and you say to them is it possible that I might have annoyed you recently and how?
How have I annoyed you recently?
And the thing is, everyone annoys everyone recently.
So it's a fantastic question you can ask.
And if you're able to get it out over dinner without hitting each other joke, joke.
We're not condoning all sorts of bad behavior.
But if you can do it politely, with grace, with humor, with kindness, you know, none of us need perfect partners.
We need partners who are able to have an insight into their imperfections and to communicate these imperfections before they've done us too much damage, in a way that we can absorb, and vice versa.
That is a good relationship.
So anyway, I'm trying to evoke the idea of a landscape in which so much of what we feel is outside of our conscious command.
A very useful exercise to do to try and win back more of the emotional territory in the name of processing is to at night last thing at night to just make a little bit of time to go back through the day and just go.
What's coming up for me here?
What am I feeling here?
What are the emotions that I haven't sufficiently felt?
And it could be a rather surprising thing.
It doesn't always have to be bad things.
You could say you know, I was totally moved by the sight of a tree at midday and I just want to think a little bit more deeply about this.
Or maybe there is a kind of regret that I felt and I've not been able to process it all day.
So being able not just to live but to make time to process the act of living seems at the heart of trying to do that process of mental hygiene.
That seems so, so important.
I was gonna tell you about difficult childhoods.
And sometimes people say, We don't know what a good childhood is.
Who knows what a good childhood is?
It's so subjective.
No one knows what a good parent is.
We can't tell.
Well, I think there are a lot of generalizations.
Loose, it's not a scientific study, but there are things we can broadly say will be going on in a good childhood.
A childhood that sets us up well for mental well-being in later life.
And conversely, things that might be missing from a childhood, which will at least aggravate the possibility of reaching adult life in a more fragile state.
Number one and, most simply, to feel that you are at the center of the parental world for a time.
For a time is absolutely essential to a feeling of well-being.
There's a terrific anxiety in some parents You know, you can spoil a child.
Well, look, you can't really spoil a child when a child is six months or a year or two years.
You know later on.
Yes, there are moments when, of course, you can start to put boundaries on the child's, if you like egomania.
But the egoists, the so-called narcissists, the proverbial narcissists of adult life, the people who are grandiose.
These are not the people who were made to feel like a little emperor when they were one.
The people who were made to feel like little emperors when they were one are very happy in adult life to take their place among everybody else and not stand out.
The disturbed people need to build careers where they come on stage and they speak to lots of people always.
A sign if you're a good parent.
A sign that you're doing a good job is that your child has no desire to be famous.
If your child has a desire to be known by anyone other than three or four people, something's going wrong.
Pay them more attention.
They're lacking, right?
They're compensating.
So in a way that whole narrative that to give a child too much attention creates an egoist I don't believe is true.
In the early years.
What children need to feel is that the universe has opened up to produce them And they are at the center.
They are the sun and the moon and the stars.
And every time they walk into the kitchen, everybody's delighted.
And every time they utter something, it's fantastic.
And every time they do a drawing, it's great.
Now, this doesn't go on forever.
But in the very early days, this belongs to solidity.
That is how you, I believe, how you solidify a personality.
And part of what that means is that a parent has to attune themselves to the needs of a small person.
And that's really weird and difficult because small children are really quite bizarre creatures.
The things they care about, the things they're invested in are really surprising to an adult mind.
But A good enough parent gets down on the level of a child and tries to see the world through their eyes.
A world in which you know if Nunu's eye has fallen off.
You know Nunu the pet rabbit.
If his eye has fallen off, it's a tragedy.
It is actually a tragedy.
Now, if you stand back as an adult and go, that's not a tragedy, son.
It's going to be, you know, there's going to be a lot more tough stuff coming your way.
It's true, but it's not helpful.
Stoicism is a fantastic philosophy, not for the under ones.
It's just not brilliant.
This is what went wrong with Great Britain.
This is the history of Great Britain writ large.
Boarding schools, fantastic when you're 40.
It's called the army.
Before that, no.
Spare us that.
So, attunement to the needs of a small child.
You know, parents have a very bad habit of not quite listening to their children.
And the reason.
If you have a child that's very, very noisy, it's often a sign that you think you're listening, but you're not quite.
I was...
I was at a holiday resort a few months ago and there were some parents, objectively very nice, and there was a child having a little bit of a difficult time on holiday.
Quite a sort of nice resort by the beach, all very nice, nice buffet, breakfast buffet.
And the child at breakfast was saying the child must have been I don't know three and it was saying I hate it here.
I want to go home.
This place is poo.
Quite loudly, everybody was hearing this nice dining room was poo.
We all looked at our plates, a little bit worried, right?
And the mother was saying obviously she meant well, you know we all mess up as parents.
But the mother was saying, don't be silly.
You're having a lovely time.
It's the holidays, and this hotel's very expensive.
I mean... kind of sensible, but it's not really listening.
And similarly, you know, a child returns home from school going.
Mommy daddy, I want to kill the headmaster.
I want to blow up the school.
And the parents will go, don't be so silly.
That's ridiculous.
You know, the police would get you if you did that sort of thing.
That's not really what the kid is saying.
Really what the kid's saying is, I'm really unhappy.
I want to let off steam.
I'll be OK tomorrow.
But, you know, I want to be in a rage for a minute and then I'll get better.
And, you know, the ability to gift the child that kind of airtime is that is love.
That is the work of love.
And we can't do it all the time.
Anyone who's been a parent, I've been a parent, you cannot do it all the time.
But if you can do it sometimes, that is a wonderful gift.
Incidentally, wonderful gift for adults too.
We live in a culture where people are always going, everyone's speaking, no one's listening.
What on earth is listening?
Well, listening is the great thing.
By the way, it's Christmas coming up in a few months and many of you will be thinking what do I get for my partner, et cetera.
Good news is, here's a gift you can give them.
Simply write them an IOU saying, I will listen to you for half an hour every day for a month.
And you could say hour a day a month, that's not very good, but this is really.
This is the luxury of luxuries, but you've got to do it properly.
Now, what is it to listen properly?
So when the partner comes home and says god, i really hate my boss, they're so annoying and they're so you know and and the other things, that person in marketing is an idiot.
And then the sales people are awful and blah blah and i hate everybody and i feel terrible about myself, etc.
And not listening is to say look, you know, it happened to me a few years ago.
I was in sort of the same position as you.
Let me tell you a few things.
First thing you need to do, get out a pad.
First thing you need to do is just like write down who the people are that you're not getting on with.
And then, and then get a chart.
What you need to do is do a very simple thing, but very hard thing, which is to reflect back what they're saying.
You simply need to find other words to capture what they've just told you.
So you need to go, I'm hearing that work's a nightmare for you at the moment.
I'm hearing that a lot of people that you're working with are sort of driving you to distraction and that you're feeling that it's not very good for you and that you're feeling kind of low about that.
And you'll be having sex tonight if you do that.
Definitely, definitely.
And it's going to really, you know, buoy things up, right?
And it's so simple, but we go to the ends of the earth, we do almost anything other than do that.
So try that.
What are the other things that parents do?
They understand that childhood is full of odd phases, that children want all sorts of things, but they're not threatened by the childishness of the child.
It takes immense inner maturity to be able to tolerate the immaturity of a child.
Also, You know it's a painful thing to acknowledge, but many parents do fall for envying their own children.
It's very taboo.
What does it mean, envy your own children?
You're going to envy your child?
You know, yes, yes, it happens a lot, in small ways and large.
And it's just.
You know, probably all of us who are parents, who've been parents, have had moments where we thought, hang on a minute, this kid is having a better life than I am.
I'm not sure I'm entirely happy.
And we may, in small ways, just want to make sure that we're not too left behind.
And you know it's a dark truth, but the ability to gift a child a better life than the one you've had it requires a lot of maturity and a lot of courage.
It doesn't come easily.
The other thing that a good parent is able to do is to be a little bit boring.
No one wants an exciting parent.
The role of mother or father.
You want to be seen by your children as predictable as having no particularly.
You're having a very simple sort of life.
All your complexities that you wake up at three in the morning, your kids don't want to know.
You are a complicated human being.
To be a parent is at some level to be a skillful act. or an edited down human.
Because we simply, in order for a child to come into its own full complexity, it doesn't need to have the parent's complexity always in front of it.
And this is, as it were, a gift not to have to reveal too much of the agony of being human too early to a child.
If a childhood goes well.
The number one outcome of a childhood going well is how the child feels about itself, not about the parents.
I mean, parents, that's the other thing, all sorts of factors come in.
But all you need to do is to wonder.
It's a very simple exercise, right?
How do you feel about yourself?
Whether you're a decent person, a good person, an okay person, deserve to be on the earth, or not, right?
Out of 10 who basically feels that they're in the kind of eight to ten group, like more or less.
They feel good about being them.
Who feels that they're more or less in that category?
A little show of hands of those people.
Okay, good, good.
And who's maybe in the zero to three?
You know, their life may be going well, but somehow they just don't really like themselves.
It's like the whole thing is rather, who's in that group?
Okay, okay, so this gives you a flavor.
All of us have had different childhoods.
The story of childhood is refracted in one's own estimation of oneself.
That's where you pick up, as it were, how we feel about ourselves.
And you know, broadly speaking, A lack of love has made us ill, and it's only really the presence of love that can heal us.
And by love, I don't just mean romantic love, though romantic love could be part of it.
It could also be friendship, and it could also be psychotherapy.
And let me talk a little bit about psychotherapy.
At the School of Life, we're very keen on psychotherapy.
This book is called A Therapeutic Journey.
But let me start by saying there are probably one or two psychotherapists in the room.
So, with apologies to them many, many psychotherapists are not quite how do I put it suitable for you?
They might not be right for you.
And so I know many people who've said well, I tried that and the guy was so weird, or the whole thing was so odd, I'm never going back there again.
And I understand that.
I think we have to look at therapy a little bit like we might look at dating.
In other words, you don't go off the whole subject of a relationship because you've been on one date, one bad date or two bad dates.
You have to keep searching.
But many therapists don't suit many clients.
And so you have to kind of look around to get a good fit.
But if there is something that's really good about psychotherapy, it's this.
So, because of childhood, because of the language that we learned in childhood, All of us have acquired expectations of how the world is and how the world will respond to us, based on certain things that happened in the microcosmic world of the family.
So we extrapolate from what happened in the family and generalize outwards to the whole world.
It's a natural thing that we do, but it means that, because our families of origin are generally carrying a lot of warps and a lot of distortions, we're likely to approach adult life full of expectations that are not necessarily very fair, either on ourselves or on other people.
So, for example, we may think that everybody thinks we're boring, or everyone's out to get us, or anyone that we try to love is going to humiliate us, or that in order to win anyone's favor, we'll always have to agree with them, or whatever it is.
We carry stories of what we need to do to get loved and also what we can expect from the world.
And these stories carry distortions.
And normally we play out these distortions in the busy world of relationships and the office and our friendships and no one quite notices.
And also they're doing their stuff back to us, so everyone's kind of projecting wildly into one another.
You know, someone's going, everyone hates me.
And the other one's going, I want to aggress everyone.
And it's just a mess of projections and counter projections.
And no one sees what's going on.
And there's no reason or ultimately forgiveness or reconciliation.
But what can happen in therapy is you take your issues and when it's going well, you play them out with the therapist.
So you become really convinced that the therapist hates you because you're so boring.
And because therapy is just a room with a therapist, the therapist can actually observe that and go.
No, I don't think that's necessarily right, but I think I'm finding you quite interesting.
The therapist can see, in a kind of Petri dish, things that are normally just lost in the complexity of the day-to-day world and therefore there's a chance to correct what's going on.
So that all those slightly strange ideas like you know, that in order to get anyone's love we have to entertain them all the time, or whatever, that these things are not necessarily correct.
So we have a chance, in the sort of clinical and clean confines of a therapy room, to see what we're doing and gave a chance to question whether it still makes sense.
It has an origin, but that origin may no longer be fair to reality as we have to live it.
And one of the key things to reflect on is that you know, we often see people who do things that look a bit crazy, right?
Like we see somebody and they're all the time I don't know not succeeding at things they could succeed at, or they are, you know, pulling out of relationships that looked promising, or they are putting up a wall when anyone tries to love them, or they're sabotaging their chances, or you know whatever.
And we think Why does that person do it?
It's completely crazy.
There's no logic to it.
Here's a very important point.
There is always a logic.
Those behaviours which look, in inverted commas, crazy, once upon a time, made great sense.
I want to go further.
Not only did they make great sense, they were very often the difference between life and death, between managing to continue with life and giving up on life.
We needed those patterns.
Imagine the following scenario, right?
Imagine somebody who grows up with a parent who is suicidal, right?
They are threatening suicide, they may even commit suicide, right?
How on earth does a child survive that experience?
Well, one of the ways that they might learn to survive that experience is to shut down completely.
They will never, ever let anyone in because to let someone in is to risk their own annihilation.
And that, when you're five years old, to work that out, that is near-on genius.
To work out that in order to survive, you need to shut the drawbridge very tight.
Fast forward to 25 35, 45.
Family situation's resolved itself in whatever way And you've moved on and you're trying to have relationships or whatever.
But in a horrible way, that defense mechanism is still active.
And now it's trouble, right?
Because now it means that when somebody comes along and says, oh, we could have a relationship.
No, not possible because the drawbridge is still shut.
So a lot of the behavior that is suboptimal in adult life once had a logic which we don't understand and we're not sympathetic to.
We don't even see it.
But if we can learn to see that logic, we can largely then come to unpick it.
Or imagine somebody who, let's say, we all know these people who can't stop joking around.
Somebody who let's say, is completely optimistic and sunny.
And even when something's sad they're at a funeral, they're like oh yippee, and they're making a joke about the casket and whatever.
And you want to go, where's your sadness?
Why are you not able to get in touch with your sadness?
That's what one feels, right?
There's a sort of unreal relationship to the world.
Again, imagine that that former child has come through a journey where once upon a time it was...
It's absolutely essential that that person be the clown and cheer up.
Maybe a depressive mother or a father who is, you know, very angry and couldn't find anything optimistic.
That child needed to become a clown to get to the next stage of life.
But now, that precise behavior starts to be extremely negative.
Another thing that children constantly do.
When children are brought up in suboptimal surroundings, with parents who are maybe not that nice to them, it would be devastating to the child to have to see that the fault lies with their parent.
To imagine, when you're a four-year-old, that your father or mother is really not a very nice person and maybe really quite disturbed and kind of awful right.
This is an unbearable thought.
And this was the work of a pioneering Scottish psychoanalyst called Ronald Fairbairn, wonderful psychoanalyst who discovered he was working with very deprived people in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the 1930s.
And he arrived at a fascinating conclusion.
He talked to children from the most deprived, most violent, most abusive families.
And he discovered that those children spoke very highly of their parents.
They would say, my father, he's a great man.
This is the guy who was hitting the child.
My mother, she's amazing.
Mother left the kid unclean, unfed for days.
What was going on?
Well, in Fairbairn's view, it's better to think that you are the problem than that you've been born into a problematic situation.
So what happens when you're in a suboptimal parental situation is you start to hate yourself and blame yourself and feel bad about yourself because it is preferable to the other bit of really bad news, which is to think that you've been born into such an inadequate family that you may not survive it.
So this is the way in which the mind twists itself, buys itself peace, but at great cost for the long term.
Many of our symptoms, it should say, end up in our bodies.
Our minds are very frightened of insight.
And most of the time, they will try and ward off insight.
But there's also another part of our minds that wants to know the truth about our childhoods, about our parents, about our caregivers, about who we are right.
And there's a constant push and pull between the forces of repression and the forces of honesty right, and it constantly is a kind of tussle, and you know, you can imagine it as a knock on the door.
Please please, think a little bit more, give me some time to process.
And if we're constantly busy um well, most obvious uh symptom is insomnia.
What is insomnia other than the mind's revenge, if you like, All those thoughts that you tried so hard not to have in the day that have come back at 3 am because they need to be heard?
What are certain kinds of bodily symptoms, other than messages from the mind that haven't found a verbal, conscious mechanism of expression?
When you're doubled up with back pain, with lower back pain, what's your back trying to tell you?
What are your shoulders trying to tell you?
What's your stomach trying to tell you?
Our organs are very often the emissaries of messages that we haven't found a conscious way of addressing.
So the body starts to be an organ through which we are having to speak to ourselves, in a kind of code.
It's very painful.
Doctors can't work it out.
Because, for a doctor, what is lower back pain other than a physiological event, when of course it is a psychological event?
Or sometimes, of course not always, but sometimes it's a psychological event that hasn't had a chance to understand itself.
I think we can have some time, quite a lot of time, for questions and answers and a chance to have a discussion.
But really ultimately, just to kind of sum up the sort of drift of where I've been taking you think of Socrates who, at the dawn of Western civilization, he's asked What is the goal of life?
What is the highest purpose of human beings?
Answers, rather paradoxically, very beautifully, know yourself, right?
And follows it up with the thought, the unexamined life is not worth living.
Why is it not worth living?
Because the unexamined life is that bit more painful.
It's that bit less creative.
It's that bit less stuck in patterns that we didn't ask for and that are limiting who we can be.
So liberation awaits us when we can have the courage to see that most of us are in some ways bent crouching, hedged in by aspects of the past that we haven't yet had the opportunity to know.
And that the prize of self-knowledge, the real prize of self-knowledge, is to be a little bit less afraid, a little bit kinder to oneself and a little bit more connected to other people at an authentic and sincere level.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Alaa.
We're gonna take questions in groups of three, so I'll begin on that side.
Great, so I can't quite see you, but I'll hear you.
So whenever you're ready.
First of all, thank you very much for being a person bringing inspiration and perspective in my life personally, and relationship too.
My question is related to your initial remark around anger and rage, particularly in regards to fear of abandonment.
So I wonder if you have any thoughts or perspectives you can share in that regard, how to nurture sort of embracing that aspect of emotions.
Yes, look, it's such an interesting question.
You know, we hear nowadays a lot about people pleasers, right?
I sometimes think that issue of anger is quite connected to the issue of a people pleaser.
What is a people pleaser?
It's really somebody who hasn't been gifted the opportunity to see that their own reality could be acceptable to many, many people at many, many junctures.
Of course, not always at all times, but that...
They've got such a low threshold for accepting their own ideas, perspectives on things, that the only way in which they feel they can be loved is to submit to whatever authorities are around to agree.
And, you know...
I think you'll be picking up from just what I've been saying.
What's going to be the history of people-pleasing?
Again, trying to educate you in the role of looking backwards.
We don't know exactly, but the history for people-pleaser generally has a situation where the truth of the growing child was not acceptable to an adult and therefore the child imbibed a view that the only way in which to prove acceptable was to shut up and accept whatever happened to be around.
The Nazis are good people.
Oh, yes.
Yes, very nice.
Thank you very much.
You know, it's a great idea to murder children in their bed.
Oh, yes, thank you.
Yes, because you don't have any courage to stand up for your own truth.
And you know that lack of confidence, which many of us know I mean, you know it's tragic comic is really the legacy of not feeling that we could be ourselves and accepted.
You know the wonderful psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott.
It makes this great distinction between the true self and a false self.
And he says that a functioning adult life has those true selves and false selves in a good balance.
The true self is what you really think, what you really believe, what you really want.
Some of it is quite difficult.
And small children, especially if they're in a loved environment, will let you know their true self quite quickly.
You know vociferously from a young age.
They'll scream.
They want more video, they want the TV, they want to eat something, they want to stay up all night, have a pillow fight, etc.
But they're letting you know what they really want.
Of course adults can then have to accommodate that in different ways, but the way in which Winnicott interpreted it is that A false self should then grow up on top of the true self right.
The false self is designed to mediate between the true self and the outside world.
So when your boss comes along, yeah, you might not want to tell them the whole truth.
When an important guest comes to your house, you may want to slightly fake certain things, et cetera, et cetera.
Right,
We need a false self to function in the world.
But in order to be able to tolerate the demands of the false self, the true self has to have been allowed a little bit of a runaround.
And a compromised life is when that balance is sort of out of sync.
So health means getting that true self, false self balance in order.
So, to answer your question, what do we need to do in order to have a better relationship to our anger?
First of all, understand, how is it that anger came to be so frightening to us?
How did our own anger?
I'm not talking here about violent expressions.
Sometimes we shoot so far to the other end.
We're not talking about doing anyone harm.
We're talking about registering a deep unhappiness with the situation.
There's the act of anger, and there's the feeling of anger.
And the more we disallow ourselves from the feeling of anger, the more that feeling then has to emerge as symptoms, as symptomatic anger.
And that is irritability, that is insomnia, that is bowel troubles, et cetera, et cetera.
So make friends with your own shadow side.
Think of that very useful Jungian idea of the shadow side, that there are many bits of us that is currently in shadow, The side of us that has slightly strange sexual thoughts, that is sometimes angry, that wants to give it all in and move to another country, that has odd thoughts about their friends, et cetera.
These things are in shadow in most of us.
And the goal of life is to try and move as much of what is currently in shadow into the light, not in order to act on it, Because some of the reason why we don't want to bring things out of the shadow is that we think that if we do, we'll have to act on it.
No, no, no.
There's an enormous difference between tolerating a thought and acting on a thought.
And to come back to anger, the ability to tolerate the thought of one's anger is the beginning of an easier relationship to one's very legitimate sense of frustration with the world.
I've heard it said that the end of suffering is the beginning of wisdom.
And I'm wondering what you would advocate to get us there.
Does everybody need to be on psychotherapy?
Does everybody need to be in psychotherapy?
Yes and no.
I mean no in the sense not everybody needs to go to an actual therapist.
You know, 50 minutes a week or more.
Not necessarily.
But I think everybody has to be involved with a word which is in the title of the book, what you might call the therapeutic, which is, in other words, an aliveness to therapy.
Well, number one, what's the bedrock of psychotherapy?
The unconscious, right?
That very sometimes it's so ubiquitous we forget what an extraordinary idea Freud bequeathed the world at the beginning of the 20th century when he posited And it sort of sounds odd.
Surely humans had realized this before.
And they sort of ish had, but not really, that most of mental functioning is unconscious.
In other words, there's an enormous amount of who we are, what we want, what we feel that we don't know about.
And Freud's again, the bedrock of the psychotherapeutic is a lot of the material that is unconscious causes us trouble.
It has been driven into the unconscious in order to spare us pain.
But long term, we buy that avoidance of pain at a very high price.
And that a good life is one where we are able to stomach as much of our own truth as possible.
And the only way in which we'll be able to do that is, another word that's key, love.
Love for ourselves, love that we've been shown by others, kindness.
That is the tool that's going to allow us to tolerate ourselves, rather than tear ourselves apart or build walls in our mind between what we can see and accept and what is simply too appalling, given how we feel about ourselves.
Hi, thanks Alan.
That was a really brilliant talk.
I just wanted to know to what extent do you think people can wake up and just have a bad day?
And the reason I ask that is because there are some days where I wake up and feel that my neurochemicals are off balance and I seem to just hate the world.
So yeah, I just wanted to know what are your thoughts about that?
Yes, I mean, absolutely.
And, you know, you talk about an imbalance at a sort of chemical level.
You know, I think one of the things, one of the many things that we have to kind of accept, is that we are these strange creatures where our big brains cohabit with a body which has certain needs and demands.
And you know, sometimes it's a particular error of sort of people who spend a bit too long in their own brains that you know suddenly at a certain point they'll go.
There is no meaning to life.
All humans are cruel.
There is nothing worth living for.
All of my careful reasoning leads me to suppose that existence has no purpose or meaning.
And thinking, why is this person reasoning in these sort of thoughtful ways towards such negativity?
And the reason could be that they're really taking a survey of reality and that's their conclusion.
Or they're missing three hours sleep.
They're three hours short of sleep.
And that's why they're coming up with all these theories.
That the relationship's broken, they hate their children, the nation's going to pot, etc.
It could be that they need an orange juice quite fast.
And sometimes, especially as thoughtful people, we underestimate the claims on the body.
So we should never get so clever that we deny the possibility that our clever, clever thoughts are really just the outcome of, as I say, a shortage of glucose or something like this.
I mean, parents of small children know this.
When a formerly sunny child who's dancing around and doing wonderful things suddenly goes, I hate mummy, I hate daddy, I'm going to kill myself.
They don't quite say that, do they?
But that sort of thing, you know, it gets very tragic.
A sort of novice parent might panic and go oh my goodness, I've got to try and help the child to make the world.
And a more experienced parent goes right nap time, straight to bed.
Half an hour nap, it'll all be better in half an hour.
So we remain, you know, key point, key point, you know, key...
We're Russian dolls, right?
And there is, there remains an infant within us.
And that infant, unfortunately, gets tired.
And when it gets tired, it gets very tragic.
And the best thing that the parental side of us can do is go, right, we're going to go to bed.
We're not thinking any more of this.
I'll address this in the morning.
If it's still so pressing, okay, we'll call Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, we'll read Descartes, etc.
But probably it will have blown over and we can move on.
Thank you for that.
That was as insightful as always.
But I wondered, what do you think are the drawbacks of psychotherapy?
Because as a society, we're constantly sort of incentivized to look inwards.
Oh, if you're feeling bad, do some mindfulness, do some yoga, have a gratitude journal and so on.
So these are the kinds of solutions that were given to us to things like the pandemic.
And I wonder it kind of promotes this belly button view of the world where we're constantly looking at ourselves in the mirror, in the mirror, in the mirror.
And there is some step where you have to look outwards and act in the world and actually help your neighbor and do some volunteering and do things that don't necessarily focus on you and what you are, but how we can change the world and things out there.
So where does the boundary lie between introspection and action?
Yes, look, such a good question.
And, you know, I couldn't really give it justice.
But look, I'd say that the goal ultimately of psychotherapy is not more psychotherapy.
It's to be done with the whole thing precisely so that one can then look outwards.
The thing is that there's no point saying to somebody who's mentally unwell pull yourself together, stop thinking about yourself so much.
It's like you know, the last thing the person wants to do who's in a wretched state of mind is think about themselves.
The reason they're thinking so much about themselves is because they're desperate.
You know they would love to forget all about themselves and to go off and be an active member of society.
So we have to be a little bit careful in saying you know, because then it gets to boarding school stoicism of like you know, a person should just pull their socks up and get on with life.
You know they would love a mentally unwell person, would love to get on with life more than anything.
They just can't.
And then the question is, what do we do with that person?
And yes, sometimes an orientation towards outside can jog the mind towards you know, a new perspective absolutely.
But if a problem is rooted somewhere in the psyche and somewhere in a story of trauma and difficulty,
I'm revealing my prejudices.
I think that the only game in town probably is going to be to take that on board.
Because, if I come back to the language acquisition theory, we have acquired a language and we're going to have to try and correct that language.
And the only way to do that is to notice we're speaking it.
And simply, as it were, changing the subject.
While sometimes helpful, I think you know could be tricky.
But look, I'm aware this is a very difficult subject.
And, you know, I am generalizing.
And you know if some of you are thinking hang on a minute, that didn't work for my friend, or blah blah, blah.
I get it, I get it.
This is me generalizing, and it's the sort of perils of standing up on a stage and coming up with clever-sounding sentences.
It's very nuanced and I think you know it's important to say the field of mental unwellness is incredibly complicated and requires huge sort of care as we move across it, and it's something that you know.
I try never to forget that there are so many angles, so many different cases, et cetera, et cetera.
And so part of it is just having as much experience, trying out as many things, as a right for you, because it is hard at some point for an outsider to say that's going to make you better.
That and only that.
Very, very hard.
Very hard.
Yeah.
Hello.
Hi, Alain, and thank you for the wisdom.
Thank you for the questions.
I have a practical one.
Now that I have your book, I'm wondering, who did you write it for?
Did you write it for the parents to make sure that we're not traumatising our kids?
Or did you write it for the kids to try to deal and rewrite the story and the patterns?
Well, you know...
It's going to be a sort of silly-sounding answer, but both, both.
Because, you know, what is a parent other than a former child?
And what is a child other than a future?
Maybe parent or at least caregiver or person you know, who will one day have authority over somebody and a capacity either to harm or to help.
And, you know...
One of the painful things about life is that of course there's intergenerational transmission of problems.
And many of us are really dealing in our adult life with the problems with which our parents were grappling.
I mean, interesting thought exercise.
Think about.
You know you won't have a scientific answer to this, but if you just sort of, as it were, try and imagine maybe tonight, lying in bed, shut your eyes and think what were my parents grappling with, If I had to try and sum up, what were the main challenges of my parents' life,
Maybe they had to I don't know achieve a certain kind of status or free themselves from their parents, or assert their identity or create a relationship, whatever it may be.
And then think, well, what's my relationship to the parental struggle.
And there's a sort of eerie frightening, poignant way in which very often the kids are trying to help their parents in some way, or the problem that was in the parent has found a form within the child and the child is trying to deal with it and trying to heal the parent.
The parent may be long dead, but still the child is trying to think about what might have helped the parent.
So I wrote this book for my parents.
Hello.
Yeah.
Thank you for your talk.
I found your insight on being therapeutic in examining the unconscious very, very insightful.
My question is the way we frame mental health compared to physical health today.
And tell me if that comparison is wrong.
When we talk about physical health, we talk about physical health, but when we talk about mental health, we're talking about mental illness.
We don't talk about physical health just about diabetes or heart diseases or knee problem.
We talk about endurance, flexibility, strength and all sorts of that.
But when it comes to mental health, we're just talking about problems.
No good markers to no... how we are progressing with other equivalence to strength endurance.
So would you share some thoughts on what do you think is a good mental health, not talking about traumas and others.
Yes, I mean, such a good question.
It sounds ridiculous, but we do have a list in this book on what mental health is.
Because I couldn't agree with you more.
Absolutely.
100%.
You know, it's such things, it's such maneuvers as, for example, the capacity to forgive oneself.
And this could sound odd.
What does that mean, forgive oneself?
Well, literally, to not relentlessly return the mind to its worst moments.
This belongs to health.
The capacity to achieve perspective on things.
In other words, to grade issues and to assign a 1 to 1, a 3 to another, a 10 to another, but not to have everything as a 10.
The ability to grade problems, the ability to sequence thoughts so that not everything is coming at you at once, that you're able to create, as it were, an orderly line for your thoughts and that you're able to devote sustained energy to unpicking certain things without being overwhelmed by the whole lot.
I mean they sound rather banal and they are quite banal, but they're the bedrocks of mental well-being.
And it's only when mental health goes that we think.
Oh my goodness, I cannot stop thinking as if it were today about an incident 12 years ago.
Now and 12 years ago have stopped, or that you're unable to stop having an argument with someone who died 30 years ago.
You are still having the argument in your head.
You might be waking up in the middle of the night saying that's unfair, and you're speaking to a dead person.
This is what happens to people whose minds have slipped out of their normal control that time and the ability of time to sequence emotional events has disappeared.
Um so anyway, there's a whole long list of factors, but you're absolutely right to draw our attention to it.
You know, can we, as it were, go to the gym and do exercises in this area?
As we can?
Yes, and the book has some um, but also it's it's also about gratitude to just work.
You know, when you are feeling okay, notice what you're doing, notice what you're doing that you're able to say ah, I'm going to get onto that tomorrow morning.
I don't need to do that now.
Or, ah, I don't need to give myself such a hard time.
This is mental health in action.
And, you know, sometimes we think of mental health in such weird terms, such diverse terms.
You know whether it's going to a clinic or an everyday form of mental ill health, some of the same factors are at play.
And it is about essentially destroying oneself.
And there are many, many ways of destroying oneself.
Just a couple more questions.
Hi, yeah, I was wondering how much you think these ideas can be taken to a societal level.
You started your talk by saying how fundamental optimism is to mental health and it feels like part of what's so broken in society at the moment is that we have fundamentally lost the faith, we've lost the ability to collectively imagine a better future and indeed that it feels like a deliberate political tactic to prey upon that malaise and that overwhelm to produce the worst forms of paralysis or nativist politics, or a kind of defensive and cruel politics, even in the worst cases.
And I'm wondering how you think a society can examine its shadow self, what that looks like in practice and how you come out of the other side.
Look, I feel your passion, and unfortunately, I share it.
You know, unfortunately.
I mean, I wish I didn't, but I fear you're absolutely right.
The causes are many, but, you know, we know that bad news sells.
We know that alarm gets eyeballs, etc., etc.
So the forces of kindness, the forces of calm, the forces of perspective are now more endangered than ever.
The forces of optimism, the forces of utopianism, the forces of imagining a better world, all of these things are in retreat.
Look, I would say it's individual by individual.
If you're a parent, every child that you manage to raise in the world, who is self-possessed, who is calm, who has a measure of optimism, who has not been so badly treated that they need to treat others badly, is a win.
Let's really try and understand this.
We live in a society of widespread sadism.
Sadism is a defense mechanism.
What is sadism?
Sadism is something bad happened to me.
It's intolerable that it happened to me.
What's the way that I'm going to deal with it?
I'm going to make life hell for somebody else.
I will take my injury, and I will put it on somebody else.
Masochism is also difficult, but there's less masochism around.
We're much more a sadistic society where we're constantly doing pass the parcel with our wounds.
And I think you know, at a psychological level.
I mean, I noticed that your question is political and I could answer it politically.
I'm going to, because of where we are today, I'm going to answer it psychologically.
And if you're psychoanalytically, every time that a human being enters adulthood, having felt a reserve of love, they don't need to be sadistic towards somebody else.
They don't need to get their kicks from passing on cruelty.
And that's the beginning of societal change.
And a good society is one ultimately, where the balance between those who need to make others suffer and those who feel good enough about themselves that they will be enriched through kindness when that balance is entrained.
So I've answered it psychoanalytically, as I say.
I know there's a political angle as well.
So I hope I can articulate my question well, but please correct me if I don't.
My question is about trauma and childhood.
And I was just wondering if our bodies sort of pick and choose the traumas they want to basically keep the score of and remind us of 30, 40 years later.
And the reason I ask is because I would be talking to someone and I'd mention what I think is a normal and just general thing that happened in my life and they'd be appalled.
But then I would be really hung up on things that other people would find ridiculous.
Does that make sense?
I didn't fully understand.
So you think that people's assessment of what is a traumatic incident feels quite subjective?
I think you're saying right.
There is no sort of rule book about what is considered a trauma.
And I think that's correct.
You know it is.
You know, what matters is how an incident was interpreted and felt by an individual.
And different things will affect different people because the context is very different.
For some people, you know a parent will leave and that's okay, because the surrounding environment was such that you know that could be born.
That absence could be born.
For others it may be, you know a a tear through their life which they'll be wrestling with until the day they die.
A lot does depend on the susceptibility of the individual and what else is going on, which is why I think we should be very careful to grade other people's traumas, for them to say that's not serious.
And again, parents do that.
Parents will say, baby tiger toys lost its tail.
And the parent will say to the child, Don't make such a fuss.
It's only the tail.
It doesn't matter.
It's only the tail of a toy.
For the child, when you're two, maybe that tail is everything, right?
So careful because we just don't know how others are kind of taking things, particularly very small people.
And it's very, very subjective.
On that note, time is ticking by.
So...
What I really want to say is an enormous thank you to all of you for coming by.
I want to thank my editor, a man called Simon Prosser, who works at Penguin Books.
He is a genius among publishers.
I'll tell you why.
He publishes more people who for a long time no one's ever heard of, until they become superstars for years.
Simon Prosser published a writer called Bernardine Evaristo, who's one of the most famous writers in Britain now who win prizes etc.
For years Simon published Bernardine and no one noticed.
And Simon said this person is worthwhile.
For years he published a writer called Ali Smith, one of the most distinguished, amazing writers in modern English literature.
No one read her for years, and Simon said, this author matters.
Why am I mentioning Simon?
Simon is an example of a man with a true self, right?
He has to work within a publishing conglomerate.
He's got bosses, et cetera.
But basically, he gets a hunch and he sticks with it.
Because somewhere in Simon's past sorry Simon to think about your childhood.
Someone probably said yeah, your intuition is right.
He was able to hang on to his true self, and that's how he publishes.
And I'm immensely grateful.
My whole career is really owed to him, a few others too, but was really owed to Simon.
And it was he who said you could take some of these ideas from the School of Life.
You can put them in a book.
So thank you, Simon, for making a therapeutic journey possible.
And thank you to all my colleagues at the School of Life for doing what they do.
It's an institution that day in, day out helps people in therapeutic ways.
Come and visit us.
You'll find us online at schooloflife.com.
And if you get this book, hope you enjoy it.
And I hope in some way it jogs your mind on a therapeutic journey.
Thank you also to everybody at the How To Academy for making tonight possible.
Most of all, thank you to you.
