Articles by The School of Life 

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Self-Knowledge

What Does the Child in You Need Today?

We’ll accede to a fairer, kinder adulthood once we accept how close we remain always to the delicate, sensitive, tear-prone little person we once were.

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Self-Knowledge

Why We Can so Quickly End up Feeling Hated

We may be far more loved than we thought – once we remember the scale of the reservations that true love can encompass.

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Self-Knowledge

Why We Sometimes Need to Be Tied to a Mast

There are situations in which we have to concede that only the blunt removal of temptation can save us.

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Relationships

Good Endings in Love

Many relationships cannot be resurrected; all relationships deserve dignified and thoughtful burials.

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Relationships

On Castration Anxiety

If sex is going wrong, we may need to look beyond physical interventions and take an audit of the mutual suspicions that each side can be unconsciously carrying with them into the bedroom.

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Relationships

How to Find Out What Might Happen With a New Partner

When a new relationship is on the cards, we might greatly expand our sense of what could subsequently happen with our date by turning to one subject in particular…

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Self-Knowledge

Trust What You Knew Then, Not What You Feel Now

The further away we stand from the moment when we took a decision, the more our judgement is likely to be clouded and corrupted.

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Self-Knowledge

Four Explanations for Self-Sabotage

One of the most curious and dispiriting of all psychological behaviours goes under the title of self-sabotage. In our search for answers, we can identify at least four explanations…

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Self-Knowledge

Those of Us Who Need a War Zone

In our personal lives, we may be rather more drawn to ‘war’ – conflict, intensity, anxiety, fear and jeopardy – than we are to ‘peace’.

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Sociability

Why Introverts Are As They Are

Introverts lack an experience that they could be with others and have their needs met. Their history has taught them that the only person who could possibly understand their needs is them.

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Relationships

Those of Us Who Don’t Expect Kindness in Love

Why do we keep giving our partner so much leeway? Why do we hope against hope? Why don’t we cut our losses right now and leave?

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Relationships

A Dark Way to Predict What Might Happen in Your Relationship

A dark and frightening way to predict what might happen in your relationship with a new person is to ask them what happened to them in their childhood…

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Self-Knowledge

Naturally You Don’t Trust Anyone!

We are continually on our guard. Our alarm is always on – even around our closest friends and lovers. We are always anticipating an attack.

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Self-Knowledge

When It’s Extremely Hard to Choose

We are obsessed by the idea that a wise choice will help to prevent a nightmare, but considered soberly, there will be something pretty difficult about every route we take.

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Relationships

What We Can Always Do to Improve Our Relationships

Once we know we’re not facing a uniquely misfiring human, only another version of our own broken selves, we can abandon once and for all the delicious yet ruinous sense that there is only one mad person in the couple.

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Relationships

Who Actually Ends a Relationship?

The one who ends a relationship is not necessarily the one says it’s over. The one who actually ends the relationship is the one who ceases to love.

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Relationships

Why Some Of Us Are So Bad At Spotting Red Flags

We can put it like this: the ability to respond actively to red flags depends on having had a certain sort of childhood.

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Relationships

The Appeal of Rescuing Other People

We might say that everyone, at the start, longs to receive love. But when it has not been especially forthcoming, one way to handle its absence is to turn into a compulsive caregiver.

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Calm

On Feeling Manic

Many of us are prone to slip into states of mind we might call ‘manic’ – in which we run obsessively and at high speed away from something within us that asks for our attention.

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Relationships

Daring to Love

It might take some of us the greater part of our lives until we no longer hold it against someone that they can warmly adore us.

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Relationships

The Pains of Heartbreak

We should not try to be brave. This has to count among the greatest griefs of our lives. Only thereby can we give the love we had for them proper stature – and begin to let it go.

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Self-Knowledge

What Is It Like to Be Mentally Unwell?

Most states of unwellness are not radically different from those occasionally and briefly experienced by all of us; they are simply much, much more extreme.

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Self-Knowledge

How to ‘Grow’

What does ‘growing’ really involve? And, crucially, how might we train ourselves to grow a little more – and a little more quickly?

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Good Endings in Love

Relationships

Good Endings in Love

The pain exacted by the unwanted end of a relationship will always be significant for the abandoned party – but…
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On Castration Anxiety

Relationships

On Castration Anxiety

In an attempt to explain the often puzzling phenomenon of male heterosexual impotence, psychologists have at points offered us one…
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