Starting a sentence with “I” is discouraged at school, it’s frowned upon in journalism and, when followed by an expression of feeling, it’s traditionally problematic for men. I am making amends today, however, having learnt from psychotherapy how avoidance of the first-person singular can be used to interpose distance between ourselves and our troubled reality.
I should say I have been learning psychotherapy one step removed, thanks to a delightful new book, The Act of Living, by clinical psychologist and novelist Frank Tallis. Psychotherapy differs from philosophy or spirituality, he tells me, because "the whole of this tradition stands or falls according to the willingness of individuals to actually put it into practice. You only really get a feel of how useful it is if you say, 'Okay, I'm going to try this for a week...' I don't think an intellectual understanding of it is very useful."
Tallis is keen to say, “I’d never aspire to the mantle of a guru.” Instead he is seeking to act as “a conduit for a massive body of knowledge” that has been overlooked and misrepresented. “You have all these great thinkers, over hundreds of years, considering the issues we all wonder about – Why am I here? How can I live optimally? – and yet the face it presents the general public is either a rather empty and unappealing popular psychology or it’s just a bunch of competing schools instead of a coherent tradition.”
We are told to 'reach for the stars' but a lot of people don't have the capacity or opportunity to reach for the stars in the way we are told
There are some very practical tools people could learn from a young age, he notes, including how to interpret their own use of language, how to make sense of their life story, and how to appreciate their evolutionary needs, including the need to be “held psychologically” or to feel a sense of security. The latter has particular relevance in the context of the Covid-19 crisis.
Tallis says he has seen “thousands of words written about the pandemic” offering little in the way of advice on how to adjust to trauma. “The tradition I’m talking about can give you an answer and a very practical answer. You need to assimilate those memories, you need to re-establish continuity of narrative... The displaced event has to be reinserted in one’s personal narrative.”
Tallis explains further – in a five-minute therapy session, or, more accurately, session about therapy – as this week’s Unthinkable guest.
A motto of the pandemic is “lower your expectations”. Do we need to build on that thinking, taking on board Sigmund Freud’s advice to embrace “common unhappiness”?
“I think people are badly served by a culture of excessive positive expectation, and one of Freud’s great virtues was that he was a realist. He accepted that there is only so much you can expect from life and to work within rational expectations and rational parameters, and that is a good inoculation against perpetual disappointment.
“We do live in a culture that has probably been massively influenced by a wave of humanist, 1960s idealism – particularly coming out of America – where we are all encouraged to follow our dreams, cultivate a view of personal potency, and to aspire. There is nothing wrong with wanting the best but it just has to be tempered by a sense of reality.
“Just look at the modern mantras we are asked to flow, particularly the young. ‘Follow your dreams.’ Sure, but a lot of people never get to realise their dreams for all kinds of reasons. We are told to ‘reach for the stars’ but a lot of people don’t have the capacity or opportunity to reach for the stars in the way we are told. One of the most pernicious is ‘never give up’. As a mantra it makes no evolutionary sense.
“The idea of not giving up and persevering blindly in the hope that one is going to have happiness or wealth or some analogue of evolutionary resources delivered is very poor advice. We have to be flexible.”
The messaging for men seems particularly problematic. The "strong, silent type" is still revered, and it remains much more difficult to get men to talk about their feelings. How can we make progress on that?
“I think to some extent there is a problem in terms of the detail. People are just told to talk about their feelings without necessarily being given very much instruction or help in how to do that – and actually it’s a lot more difficult than you might think. One of the things I explore in the book is how many of the great psychotherapists pay very close attention to language and how we can sometimes use language to distance ourselves from ourselves, and from our own feelings.
Thinking about how you use language, about the specifics, can be very instructive and very helpful
"Fritz Perls observed that we often distance ourselves by saying 'you know how it is...' or 'you know how you feel bad...' when really what I mean is 'when I am in this situation I feel bad...' Modern neuroscience has shown that when we use words like 'I' rather than 'you', when we use personal language, patterns of activity are entirely different in the brain. We are making ourselves more accessible to ourselves and therefore to other people.
“This is where I think the whole tradition of psychotherapy, viewed as a unified philosophical school, can be instructive because it fills in some of the detail. One is getting away from the sometimes vague, not altogether helpful generalities of popular psychology or popular wisdom.
“We’re told men should feel more comfortable with their emotions or talking about their emotions, but how? Men do not automatically have an understanding of how it might be achieved. Thinking about how you use language, about the specifics, can be very instructive and very helpful. And I think it is the sort of thing that would make a very good syllabus in schools so that young men can be equipped to deal with their emotions.”
How would you do that in a school setting?
“Look at a body of knowledge and translate it into a language children can understand.
“I mention in the book Freud’s analogy that you can look at psychoanalysis like electricity. Electricity is something you can use in a medical setting like a hospital, but actually you can use it to power trams and do all kinds of other things with. And the intellectual tradition of psychotherapy should be viewed in the same way.
“We shouldn’t see it as narrowly as something that is useful to treat mental illness or to treat people who have psychological problems. We should see it as another great tradition along with philosophy or spirituality that is likely to appeal to a particular kind of person, probably someone inclined to a materialist view of the universe, someone who wants more practical answers that are based in neuroscience or evolutionary psychology – some kind of scientific rooting. That kind of person is likely to benefit from it the most.
“I think it’s quite sad, particularly as a professional myself, and having spent a lot of time talking to unhappy people, that a vast section of the public has a rather negative view of it as being either too mawkish, touchy-feely or too west coast American, or too psychiatric and too medical. There are a lot of these presentations which are misrepresentations, which is very sad because if you look at mental health statistics, and you look behind those statistics generally to see the number of people dissatisfied and looking for answers, sometimes desperately, it would be useful to know there is this other tradition there.”
One of the issues you explore in detail is how putting a narrative on your life can help overcome depression or trauma. But how good a plot do you need? Does my life story need be heroic?
“The issue is not so much how well it succeeds as fiction, or event. The issue is coherence. What you find is that people who can tell their own story in a coherent way usually have better mental health than people who can’t. It’s a curious thing: the inability to describe one’s own personal narrative is associated with delinquency, criminal behaviour, unhappiness. It’s almost like a prerequisite of mental health to be able to impose some kind of order on experience.
“You don’t have to have a dramatic story. You just have to have a coherent story so your various aspects of identity are stitched together so you have a feeling of who you are.
“I’m retired from clinical practice now, but when I was practising it was really quite extraordinary how people who were distressed often had disjointed stories, and you weren’t so much a psychotherapist as an editor, and you’d have to say ‘no, that chapter goes there’, and ‘this chapter goes here’, and then if you can get a coherent story your life makes more sense.”
The Act of Living: What the Great Psychologists Can Teach Us About Surviving Discontent in an Age of Anxiety by Frank Tallis is published by Little Brown
