An Emotional Education With Alain de Botton
— BY LAUREN TREND
Emotional intelligence affects every aspect of the way we live, from romantic to professional relationships, from our inner resilience to our social success. It is the ultimate soft skill of the twenty-first century. I’ve currently been reading Alain De Botton’s latest text, An Emotional Education. I’ve found enjoyed its plight to normalise human emotion, and lower our often unrelenting standards we set on ourselves to embark on a normal amount of self-identified success and fulfilment. I thought to sum up a few key points and noteworthy excerpts, for you all below, enjoy!
NOTES FROM THE TEXT —
“Self-love is the quality that determines how much we can be friends with ourselves and, day to day, remain on our own side.”
“Being properly mature involves a frank, unfrightened relationship with one’s own darkness, complexity and ambition. It involves accepting that not everything that makes us happy will please others or be honoured as especially ‘nice’, but it can be important to explore and hold on to it nevertheless.”
”Can we patiently and reasonably put our disappointments into words that, more or less, enable others to see our point? Or do we internalise pain, act it out symbolically or discharge it with counterproductive rage? When other people upset us, do we feel we have the right to communicate or must we slam doors and fall silent? When the desired response isn’t forthcoming, do we ask others to guess what we have been too angrily panicked to spell out? Or can we have a plausible second go and take seriously the thought that others are not merely wilfully misunderstanding us? Do we have the inner resources to teach rather than insist?”
“Given the enormous role of sadness in our lives, it is one of the greatest emotional skills to know how to arrange around us those cultural works that can best help to turn our panic or sense of persecution into consolation and nurture.”
“Breakdowns are hugely inconvenient for everyone and so, unsurprisingly, there is an immediate rush to medicalise them and attempt to excise them from the scene, so that business as usual can resume. But this is to misunderstand what is going on when we break down. A breakdown is not merely a random piece of madness or malfunction; it is a very real—albeit very inarticulate—bid for health and self-knowledge. It is an attempt by one part of our mind to force the other into a process of growth, self-understanding and self-development that it has hitherto refused to undertake. If we can put it paradoxically, it is an attempt to jump-start a process of getting well—properly well—through a stage of falling very ill.”
“In friendship, we know instinctively how to deploy strategies of wisdom and consolation that we stubbornly refuse to apply to ourselves.”
“We need to become better friends to ourselves.”
“We put so much effort into being perfect. But the irony is that it’s failure that charms, because others so need to hear external evidence of problems with which we are all too lonely: how un-normal our sex lives are; how arduous our careers are proving; how unsatisfactory our family can be; how worried we are pretty much all the time.”
“The journey to self-knowledge needs to begin with a better map of the terrain of normality.”
31 - 01 - 20