Self-Knowledge
Articles by The School of Life
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Self Knowledge
On Feeling Obliged
For some of us, our lives are guided – and hemmed in – by one overwhelming imperative: we must never let people down.
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Yes, Maybe They Are Just Envious…
There’s a particular flaw to which modest, kind, self-punishing people are especially prone: an inability to believe that other people might be envious of them – and by consequence, an acute difficulty in making sense of certain forms of behaviour, let alone in knowing how to respond effectively to them.
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How to Recover the Plot
On a regular basis, as often as every few days, we are prone to lose the plot of our lives. We are not talking, here, of insanity, rather of a very understandable and reasonable tendency to forget quite why we do what we do, what matters, where we are headed and – to put it at its grandest – who we are.
Read ArticleLeisure
The Usefulness of Speaking Your Feelings to An Empty Chair
One of the simplest and most useful exercises that psychotherapy has gifted to us is known as the Empty Chair Technique.
Read ArticleRelationships
Questions To Ask Ourselves About Someone We Are Thinking Of Committing Ourselves To
Imagine that we are wondering whether someone is right for us or not. Certain feelings pull us towards them; others leave us unsure. In order to try to solidify our impressions, here are a range of questions we might ask ourselves about a prospective partner for the long term.
Leisure
The Beauty of Komorebi
It is one of the most charming aspects of Japanese culture that it offers up a specific word for what we would in most languages have to try to express with a whole clumsy sentence: komorebi.
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On Those Ruined by Success
We may complain a lot about our present situation and appear to want so much to move on. The reality – which we should acknowledge in order to overcome it – is that we might also secretly prefer the safety of habitual unhappiness to the novelties and awe of joy.
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Why We Have Trouble Getting Back To Sleep
For those of us who have a lot to run away from – and that frightens us – in our own minds, there is a period of the night that presents particular problems and powers the worst of our insomnia.
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We Are All Lonely – Now Can We Be Friends?
It’s in the very confession of our sense of isolation that we can find redemption. Once someone has said ‘I’m lonely’, there is never any further reason to believe in our singularity; it’s probably the most generous utterance of which anyone is capable.
Read ArticleLeisure
On Flying Too Close to the Sun – And Not Flying Close Enough
We shouldn’t allow ourselves to forget that, whatever the fate of poor Icarus, there are always equally potent risks bound up with never pushing ourselves a bit closer to our sun’s vital and warming rays.
Read ArticleSociability
The Need for Processing
If we are feeling tetchy and out of sorts, if work or love seem to have lost their flavour, it may not be anything greater, but then again nor anything lesser, than that we have not had sufficient chance to explain ourselves and to hear small echoes of our cries and joys.
Read ArticleCalm
The Need For A Modern Monastery
For too much of our own lives and for too long in the course of human history, we have left calm to chance. We owe it to ourselves to start more consciously to build the calm lives we so deeply crave and could so richly benefit from.
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How to Raise a Successful Person
A question not just for parents but for anyone reflecting on the constituents of a good life and on their own path through the world must be: how can one produce that most essential of things, a motivated child?
Read ArticleCalm
How to Make It Through
We can’t know how much a simple bowl of lemons may come to mean to us until life has shown us its properly difficult sides.
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Why Illusions Are Necessary to Achieve Anything
What if we had to lie to ourselves to have any chance of leading the lives we admire? Here might be some of the blind spots necessary to our flourishing.
Read ArticleSociability
The Loveliest People in the World
These are the kinds of people we need so many more of in our lives — and should try so hard to be for others.
Self-Knowledge
12 Signs That You Are Mature in the Eyes of Psychotherapy
Here are twelve elements of an adult identity as seen through the lens of psychotherapy.
Leisure
Eight Rules to Create Nicer Cities
Here are eight rules required to create the sort of cities we all love and deserve.
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We Need to Change the Movie We Are In
It takes a lot of talent to make a quiet film; it arguably takes a far greater talent to live as if we might be in one.
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Can Childhoods Really Matter So Much?
We can’t change our childhoods, but we can – with effort – alter their legacies.
Read ArticleLeisure
The Past Was Not in Black and White
They lived in a world as fresh and brightly coloured as ours – and were as worthy of pity and love as we are.
Read ArticleLeisure
You Are Living in the Greatest Museum in the World
We should not have to wait till our world has been lost to see its beauty.
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When Something is Beautiful
Nowadays, what we mostly do in the presence of beauty is – of course – take a photo. What if we were to try something else next time?
Read ArticleSociability
The Life Saving Role of Small Chats
We are creatures that need – far more than we typically realise – to chit-chat our way through the agonies of being human.
Read ArticleRelationships
When Your Partner Loves You – but Does Their Best to Drive You Away…
There are relationships which begin with great enthusiasm and love on both sides – but where after a while, one partner starts to act in ways that appear deeply puzzling and hurtful to the other.
Read ArticleLeisure
What’s the Bit of Therapy That Heals You?
It’s widely assumed that there is something about psychotherapy that has the power to heal. But exactly what this might be is not always necessarily very clear.
Read ArticleRelationships
A Rule to Help Your Relationship
A basic principle to guarantee the health of any relationship is that we should try always to stick as close as possible to the truth of what we’re really feeling – and to convey this to the partner in a way that they will understand.
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The Heroism of Leaving a Relationship
There are grave difficulties involved in realising that someone with whom one shares a bed might actually pose a vicious threat.
Read ArticleRelationships
The Problems of Miniature Adults
Children who lean on the sophisticated behaviours of grown-ups aren’t generally doing so for their own sakes, they are resorting to them as a defence against the immaturity of adults in the vicinity.
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What Some Childhoods Don’t Allow You to Think
There are circumstances in which we cannot think the truth – because the truth would break our minds.
Read ArticleRelationships
Those Who Have to Wait for a War to Say ‘I Love You’
That it should require the prospect of death before we can surrender to someone gives us an indication of exactly how frightening emotional unclothing can be.
Read ArticleRelationships
Exquisite Agony in Love
The intensity of the pain is directly related to the intensity of the loveliness. We find it hard to get away precisely because we adore being there.
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Why It Should Not Have to Last Forever…
We labour under an invisible societal edict dictating that things must last until we expire – or else cannot have had a jot of value to begin with.
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A Test to Measure How Nice You Are
A basic shame appears to hold us back from acknowledging the building blocks of our lives, as if we couldn’t bear to see ourselves as we are in all our sublime pettiness and ordinariness.
Read ArticleLeisure
It Isn’t About the Length of a Life…
One of the things which makes life worth living is that we are not continually terrified of its end.
Read ArticleCalm
Four Ways of Coping With Anxiety
There are pills that may help contain the anxiety but there are also ideas and therapies that aim, as ambitiously, to understand it.
Read ArticleRelationships
What Celebrity Stalkers Can Teach Us About Love
In the extremity of their position, celebrity stalkers shed light on an important phenomenon: how very frightening the idea of reciprocated love can be.
Read ArticleLeisure
The Drawer of Odd Things
How impoverished our lives will end up being if we leave room in them only for those things we presently know how to understand, use or love.
Read ArticleCalm
When Our Battery is Running Low…
What will kill us in the end will not be one big obvious thing but many decades of invisible minor aggravations and low grade frictions.
Read ArticleCalm
Preparing for a Decent Night’s Sleep
Given how much we value nights of good sleep, it is striking how seldom we ever make shrewd or thorough plans to heighten our chances of having one.
Read ArticleRelationship
What If the People We Could Love Are Here Already; We Just Can’t See Them?
We may find there are far more candidates at large once we have the courage and capacity to receive them into our hearts.
Read ArticleSelf-Knowledge
The Legacy of an Unloving Childhood
What happens to a child who is not loved properly? They become filled with shame.
Calm
Returning Anger to Where It Belongs
Frustrating things will occur every day. Few of them will ever need to make us furious
Read ArticleRelationships
Mothers and Daughters
There are women who have put little girls on the earth who at some level do not entirely want them to thrive – at least not in any uncomplicated way.
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When, and Why, Do We Pick up Our Phones?
We don’t pick up our phones to find out what’s going on. We pick them up to ensure that we are in no danger of finding out anything more about ourselves.
Read ArticleCalm
The Many Moods We Pass Through
Our spirits are constantly in motion, like the restless procession of weather fronts across a temperamental sky.
Read ArticleSociability
Why Losers Make the Best Friends
Of course it’s theoretically possible to be one of life’s winners, and also be reflexive, humble and attuned to the tender frequencies of existence. It’s just not – in practice – very likely.
Sociability
The Subtle Art of Not Listening to People Too Closely
Sometimes, to properly honour a relationship, we may need to do something that sounds very peculiar indeed: not listen to them at all.
Read ArticleSociability
The Origins of Shifty People
We’ll learn to forgive the shifty when we understand that they are principally scared; they’ll outgrow their shiftiness when they accept that the truth well-delivered can be borne.
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Why You Don’t Need a Very Bad Childhood to Have a Complicated Adulthood
We can be knocked from our optimal path by a breath of wind, we’re marked by the brush of a feather, we’re shattered by a sound at a certain frequency.
Read ArticleSociability
Our Very Best Friends
They don’t in any way try to ‘solve’ our problems; they manage simply to listen to them.
Read ArticleSociability
The Difficulties of Oversharing
We share too much when we have been too lonely; we fail to understand the risks of over-exposure when we have suffered in environments in which so little sincere or real was ever exchanged.
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What Hypochondriacs Aren’t Able to Tell You
We will have far fewer emergencies in our bodies once we have learnt to be clearer about, and better able to vocalise, the forgotten pains and panics of our minds.
Read ArticleCalm
Might You Be Hypervigilant? A Sombre Questionnaire
We may be a significant way through our lives before it starts to dawn on us just what distinctive people we might be. So it can help to have some questions to hand to bring matters into focus.
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What’s the Unconscious – and What Might Be Inside Yours?
In order to try to make more of our unconscious conscious, psychology recommends a range of strategies.
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Complete the Story – and Discover What’s Really On Your Mind
We’re offered the beginnings of a story – and are then invited to imagine the rest.
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Complete the Sentence – and Find Out What’s Really on Your Mind
The test involves taking a whole lot of unfinished sentences and completing them as fast as possible – in order that one discover a range of things about what one deep down really feels.
Read ArticleCalm
A Question to Ask Ourselves When We’re Feeling Low and Paranoid
Anger need not cause anyone injury; swallowed anger invariably will.
Read ArticleCalm
Controlling Insomnia – and Life – through Pessimism
It’s the wrong sort of hope that complicates our future; and the right sort of darkness that can liberate us.
Read ArticleRelationships
Our Unconscious Fear of Successful Sex
We might think that sex was something we would all straightforwardly want – but the number of sexual difficulties that dog our relationships point us in more complicated directions.
Read ArticleRelationships
Secret Grudges We May Have Against the Other Gender
There can emerge what we might term psychological grudges which can manifest in highly subtle ways solely in the context of heterosexual relationships.
Read ArticleCalm
When I Am Called to Die
Of course, we want to live forever. Yet, eventually, we’ll find ourselves on the edge of the precipice with only one direction to go in…
Read ArticleLeisure
The Secret Toll of Our Ugly World
The love of beauty runs deep in every one of us; its absence quietly breaks all our hearts.
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The One Question You Need to Understand Who You Are
There is one question that, perhaps more than any other, gets to the root of who we are and what motivates us…
Self-Knowledge
The Overlooked Pains of Very, Very Tidy People
They are not really ‘tidy’ at all. They are first and foremost extremely chaotic inside, as outer mess is always at risk of reminding them.
Read ArticleRelationships
The Demand for Perfection in Love
There is a certain sort of person who seems, on the surface, a great friend of love. The difficulty arises when something arrives to cloud the picture.
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When People Let Us Know What the World Has Done to Them
Imagining the ways in which people’s behaviour towards us reflects difficulties in their pasts allows us reflect on how we might ourselves be causing trouble for others.
Read ArticleCalm
The Importance of Not Knowing
What if selective ignorance were in reality to belong to one of the preconditions of a good life?
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Can Time Heal All Wounds?
The future might be a lot less terrifying to behold, once we allow ourselves to appreciate our genius for forgetting.
Read ArticleWork
The Dangers of People Who Have Been to Boarding School
Boarding schools can be exceptional places for children to learn certain things. Where they tend to lag is in instilling in their pupils any notion of the constituents of an emotionally viable life:
Read ArticleWork
Why Do We Work So Hard
Alongside the all pragmatic reasons, we know that there is something more complicated that we use the idea of work to avoid.
Read ArticleCalm
Why We May Be Addicted to Crises
We are addicted to crises because there are – deep down – simply so many benefits to being out of our minds with fear.
Read ArticleRelationships
The Importance of Swords and Guns for Children
The issue is not whether or not one has aggressive feelings, rather how one can, through intelligent modelling, learn to accept, handle and channel these feelings in fruitful, non-destructive ways.
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Maybe You Are, In Your Own Way, a Little Bit Marvellous
Everyone on the planet is, in their way, at points, a distinctly loveable proposition. You are allowed to feel – for a moment or two – just a little marvellous.
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On Feeling Painfully Different
When we find ourselves in a peculiar minority, where the differences between us and others seem stark, we might benefit from a few thoughts to alleviate the isolation…
Read ArticleLeisure
Why We Need Therapy When We Give Up on Religion
Religion and psychotherapy deal with very similar issues. Both are responses to suffering.
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On Feeling Guilty for No Reason
There are occasions when we find ourselves unable to think of anything we might be responsible for – even as guilt clings tenaciously to us.
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The Fear of Being Touched
The sensations we register when someone touches (or threatens to touch) us are profoundly historical, bearing memory of the ways in which we have been handled since the start.
Read ArticleRelationships
The Achievement of Missing Someone
Missing someone can be so unpleasant, it feels peculiar to suggest that it is also an extraordinary achievement and an important marker of emotional maturity.
Read ArticleCalm
If You Stopped Running, What Would You Need to Feel?
It can sound like an odd question, perhaps a rather irritating one too. But we might bring ourselves to circle it nevertheless.
Read ArticleLeisure
Why Middle-Aged Men Think So Often About the Roman Empire
The story of Rome provides an ideal vantage point from which to come to terms with some of the most painful aspects of being human.
Read ArticleRelationships
On Being Upset Without Knowing It
We ultimately lack knowledge of what we feel around our partners for a poignant reason: because their power to upset us is so great.
Read ArticleLeisure
African Proverbs to Remember
In sub-saharan cultures, wisdom is handed down in the form of short, acerbic, melancholy proverbs that can be put to use in everyday situations.
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On Parenting Our Parents
An unlucky child may spend as much effort unknowingly parenting their parent as they do attending to their own developmental needs.
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Six Fundamental Truths of Self-Awareness
Self-awareness might be said to involve a set of fundamental realisations about the relationship between past and present.
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Why We Are Haunted by Ghosts of the Past
The spirits of the past have the power to throttle the present – and the wise have always payed them enough attention to loosen their grip and get on with their lives.
Read ArticleCalm
How to Be Cool the Yoruba Way
For the Yoruba, agitation isn’t merely an offence to a proper understanding of the universe; it’s also just horribly unfashionable.
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Why Most of Us Feel Like Losers
Why does our inner critic exist? Why are they so remorseless? If they are inaccurate, why do they go on as they do?
Read ArticleRelationships
Our Two Great Fears in Love
Beneath all the turmoil and agitation of relationships, two fundamental anxieties stand out – and help to explain our worst antics and sorrows.
Read ArticleSociability
The Many Faults of Other People
When we next feel agitated by another person, we might learn to pause and wonder bravely: what if this flaw happened also to be somewhere in me?
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One of the More Beautiful Paintings in the World…
It hangs in a generally ignored room, where it doesn’t shout loudly for humanity’s attention. But if we spend a few moments in its company, we may be cracked open.
Read ArticleCalm
Why We Should Refuse to Get into Arguments
We should resist invitations to argue by recognising them for what they are: attempts by the other party to rescue themselves from unbearable feelings.
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The Origins of a Sense of Persecution
Many of us carry around an impression that others are not especially on our side, may be seeking to harm us – and that we may at any point be attacked, derided or destroyed.
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The Origins of Sanity
We may be prone to mental collapse not by random accident, but because we didn’t have the childhoods that would have properly solidified our minds.
Read ArticleRelationships
Who is Afraid of Intimacy?
There is a limit to how interested in intimacy anyone can be who skilfully picks out a partner who just happens to have precious little interest in the matter.
Read ArticleSociability
Why Nice People Give Us the ‘Ick’
One might want to take leave of a companion not because they are crude, dim or nasty, but because they have revealed themselves to be undeniably and conspicuously ‘nice’. Why might kindness be so hard to bear?
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Why We Should Practice Automatic Writing
Automatic writing will not make us into ‘great’ writers; but it will liberate us from some of the insincerities that are making us more troubled and restless than we should be.
Read ArticleCalm
Can We Live With the Truth?
There appears to be an inviolable relationship between remaining alive and not looking at many things too closely. Selective denial may just be the price we have to pay for enduring.
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Why We Deny Ourselves the Chance of Happiness
Faced with the possibility of contentment, many of us manifest a curious preference for despondency. Whatever the opportunities for fulfilment, we stay distinctly loyal to caution, suspicion and fear.
Read ArticleSociability
How to Become a More Interesting Person
To become a more interesting person for others, we must first become the best possible travellers inside ourselves.
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Why We Behave As We Do
A key principle governing the natural world is that animals adapt to thrive in particular habitats. We humans are – in the end, beneath a layer of civilisation – not so different.
Read ArticleCalm
Five Questions to Ask Yourself Every Evening
What can appease our troubles is self-exploration. We grow at peace the more we can finally allow ourselves to know who we are; the more we can feel the lives we actually have.
Read ArticleSociability
The Challenges of Hugging
Though hugs are everywhere, we should not suppose that they are for that matter universally straightforward or inconsequential propositions.
Read ArticleRelationships
The Pains of Preoccupied Attachment
Preoccupied attachment is simultaneously one of the most despair-inducing of behaviours and one of the most poignant: an acting out of a suspicion that love doesn’t work – which ensures it can’t and won’t.
Read ArticleRelationships
The Lengths We Go to Avoid Love
Though we all crave love in theory, our capacity to accept it in practice is critically dependent on the quality of our early emotional experiences.
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How to Overcome Psychological Barriers
In order to heal ourselves from our symptoms (and the wounds that lie beneath them), we have to learn to understand ourselves better. How then can we unpick the legacy of emotional wounds?
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Letting Go of Self-Protective Strategies
We need not continue our loyalty to our past protective strategies once we understood the particular circumstances that once made them so necessary – and that now no longer apply.
Read ArticleRelationships
Are You Afraid of Intimacy?
How might we learn to separate out a legitimate aversion for someone from an inhibition about intimacy? By asking ourselves some of the following questions…
Read ArticleRelationships
When Does a Divorce Begin?
There is almost always a large gap between the moment when divorce is spoken about and when the fuel for it started to accumulate.
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How to Tell If Someone Had a Difficult Childhood…
Whenever we see a struggling adult, without necessarily understanding much of their story, we can hazard a guess: somewhere long ago, there was a shortfall of love.
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Childhood Matters, Unfortunately!
We shouldn’t be shocked if we need to divert an unholy degree of time to unpicking the early years. We should make a graceful accommodation with our emotional knottedness and take all necessary measures to address it.
Read MoreSelf-Knowledge
Why Knowing Ourselves is Impossible – and Necessary
That the task of self-knowledge is fated to remain incomplete is no argument against it; it is the dedication that counts.
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Making Friends with Your Unconscious
We may never be able to empty the unconscious entirely, but the more we can drain it of its evasiveness, the less nervous and inwardly compromised we will feel.
Self-Knowledge
Mechanisms of Defence
Developing an understanding of the way Mechanisms of Defence work won’t magically save us from reliance on them but it may give us an inkling of what we are up to, and increase our tolerance to insight.
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The Always Unfinished Business of Self-Knowledge
We have no alternative but to go to our deaths having understood only a fraction of who we have been. We are – each one of us – fated to be laid to rest in an at-least-partially unknown grave.
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How to Live More Consciously
We don’t need to be poets or artists to digest our experiences more thoroughly, but we can learn from these disciplines about how to study the world and preserve its most valuable moments.
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On Always Finding Fault with Others
The sad part is why the fault finder came to be this way: because someone else constantly and intolerably found fault with them.
Read ArticleCalm
The Causes of Obsessive Thinking
Our minds may grow less consumed by obsessive thoughts the more we can interpret our preoccupations as symptoms of other concerns we are in flight from;
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For some of us, our lives are guided – and hemmed in – by one overwhelming imperative: we must never…
View
Self-Knowledge
Yes, Maybe They Are Just Envious…
There’s a particular flaw to which modest, kind, self-punishing people are especially prone: an inability to believe that other people…
View
Self-Knowledge
How to Recover the Plot
On a regular basis, as often as every few days, we are prone to lose the plot of our lives.…
View
Leisure
The Usefulness Of Speaking Your Feelings To An Empty Chair
One of the simplest and most useful exercises that psychotherapy has gifted to us is known as the Empty Chair…
View
Leisure
What Goes With What
When it comes to design and clothing, almost without noticing, we tend to operate with a strong background sense of…
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Relationships
Questions To Ask About Someone We Are Thinking Of Committing To
Imagine that we are wondering whether someone is right for us or not. Certain feelings pull us towards them; others…
View
Leisure
The Beauty of Komorebi
It is one of the most charming aspects of Japanese culture that it offers up a specific word for what…
View
Self-Knowledge
On Those Ruined by Success
For many of us, there is something (or many things) that we seem to really, really want. And then there…
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Self-Knowledge
Why We Have Trouble Getting Back To Sleep
For those of us who have a lot to run away from – and that frightens us – in our…
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Select themes
Self-Knowledge
Yes, Maybe They Are Just Envious…
Self-Knowledge
How to Recover the Plot
Leisure
The Usefulness Of Speaking Your Feelings To An Empty Chair
Leisure
What Goes With What
Relationships
Questions To Ask About Someone We Are Thinking Of Committing To
Leisure
The Beauty of Komorebi
Self-Knowledge
On Those Ruined by Success
Self-Knowledge