Articles At The School of Life

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Relationships

Why We Love People Who Don’t Love Us Back

We are sometimes puzzled by how frequently we find ourselves in love with people we know are not going to be good for us, but who mirror the disturbing patterns of our attachments from early childhood.

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Self-Knowledge

The Five Features of Paranoia

There are perhaps five main features of the very sad, indeed hellish, condition we know as paranoia…

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Self-Knowledge

Why So Many of Us Are Masochists

As masochists, we ‘love’ pain for being profoundly familiar; we love it for taking us home.

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Relationships

Stop Avoiding Conflict

Conflict-aversion doesn’t just mean a distaste for a fight, it means a radical inability to get involved in a struggle of any sort because we are insufficiently on our own side.

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Calm

How and Why We Catastrophise

It may not be an encounter with a catastrophic event that we are worried about so much as a return of catastrophic feelings.

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Self-Knowledge

On Suicide

It’s commonly assumed that people kill themselves because something has gone dramatically wrong in their life. But the truth is more nuanced and more psychological: people take their own lives because of the way they interpret events.

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Self-Knowledge

The Agonies of Shame

It takes a very tough and very loving person to be able to get through to the shamed person and to tell them what they have always needed to hear: ‘You are not a bad person; you just had a very, very bad childhood.’

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