Articles by The School of Life 

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Self-Knowledge

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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Self-Knowledge

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.

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Relationships

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.

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Sociability

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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Self-Knowledge

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.

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Calm

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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Self-Knowledge

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.

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Sociability

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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Self-Knowledge

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.

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Calm

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.

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Sociability

The Challenges of Hugging

Though hugs are everywhere, we should not suppose that they are for that matter universally straightforward or inconsequential propositions.

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Relationships

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.

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Relationships

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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Self-Knowledge

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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Self-Knowledge

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.

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Relationships

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…

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Relationships

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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Self-Knowledge

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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Self-Knowledge

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.

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Self-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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Self-Knowledge

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.

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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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Self-Knowledge

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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Self-Knowledge

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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Self-Knowledge

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.

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Calm

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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Self-Knowledge

How Psychotherapy Might Truly Help Us

The beauty of psychotherapy is that we will without trying end up rehearsing around the therapist many of the same peculiarities as we manifest in the world outside.

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Self-Knowledge

How History Can Explain Our Unhappiness

A proper understanding of our situation cannot be complete without considering the highly peculiar era in which we exist. We are troubled in part because we dwell in highly unbalanced times:

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Self-Knowledge

The Sinner Inside Us All

The more we understand of ourselves, the more we necessarily reach a humbling realisation: most of what we condemn in other people is present in ourselves.

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Calm

Why Things May Need to Get Worse Before They Can Get Better

Our lives are often less than they could be because we are – strangely – too good at making things just about bearable for ourselves.

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Self-Knowledge

How Should We Define ‘Mental Illness’?

We might define mental illness as a failure in the capacity to be kind to oneself. This gives us a clue as to the likely cause of this form of suffering: a deficit of love.

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Calm

The Limits of the Conscious Mind

To know ourselves properly is to learn to separate out a problem that manifests in the mind from one that is caused by the mind.

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Relationships

The Logic of Our Fantasies

Our sexual fantasies may shed considerable light on themes in our lives; they may hold the clue to central, challenging aspects of our biographies.

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Calm

What Our Bodies are Trying to Tell Us

When our conscience has done everything it can to alert our minds, it has a tendency to set to work on our bodies. Lack of awareness returns to haunt us as physical ailments.

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Relationships

Three Questions to Help You Decide Whether to Stay in or Leave a Relationship

All love involves compromise, but this truism masks that not all compromises are equally legitimate or fair.

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Relationships

Our Secret Wish Never to Find Love

The process of locating a partner to love is so hard, it may for a long time disguise a more complicated reality: that whatever we claim, it would be a lot easier for us if we never found them.

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Self-Knowledge

Do You Believe in Mind-Reading?

Few of us explicitly sign up to a belief in the occult art of mind reading. Nevertheless, we often behave exactly as though we do.

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Relationships

What We Really, Really Want in Love

We don’t want someone to worship us. We need someone to do something far more difficult: see us as we are and still keep faith.

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Relationships

Why Good Manners Matter in Relationships

Successful relationships may require us to be – far more often than we’d like – substantially affected, stilted and unnatural.

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Self-Knowledge

How to Be Less Defensive

We will be past defensiveness when every nagging insecurity has been pulled squarely into the centre — and there examined and defused.

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Self-Knowledge

Learning to Laugh at Ourselves

We don’t need people to be perfect; we need people to know they are imperfect and then not to blame us for our grief and irritation at finding them so.

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Relationships

How Love Can Teach Us Who We Are

One reason why relationships are valuable is that they enable us to know ourselves better; being part of a couple can help us to understand who we are.

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Relationships

When Parents Won’t Let Their Children Grow Up

There are certain parents who – in private – rely on their children to satisfy a range of emotional needs: the need to feel powerful, to have an audience, to play a role, to exist.

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Self-Knowledge

Are You a Sadist or a Masochist?

Why do we seem to delight in inflicting suffering – or, even more strangely, to take satisfaction in enduring it?

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Self-Knowledge

The Hidden Logic of Illogical Behaviour

The most fruitless and counter productive behaviours of adulthood all reveal a logic, once we cease to search for this logic in the present.

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Relationships

The Fragile Parent

The fragile parent will turn against the child for reminding them of insufficiencies they are secretly in flight from in themselves.

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Self-Knowledge

A Simple Question to Set You Free

Liberation awaits us if we have the courage to ask a deceptively simple yet pointed and mind-expanding question…

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Self-Knowledge

Our Secret Longing to Be Good

The route to satisfaction lies in vigorously pushing thoughts of ourselves aside for a while in the name of trying to make others less afflicted.

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Self-Knowledge

How Lonely Are You? A Test

We might take an unusual test that seeks to probe at the more dignified and generous reasons one might have for being lonely.

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Sociability

Is It Okay to Outgrow Our Friends?

We might outgrow a friend precisely because they have fulfilled their brief perfectly.

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Sociability

Why Everyone We Meet is a Little Bit Lonely

We need to battle the fatefully modest part of our minds that reads our isolation as a selective punishment. What holds true for us must and will hold true for others

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Sociability

On ‘Complicated’ Friendships

We start to properly value our friendships when we grant that they are often every bit as tricky as our most meaningful love stories.

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Sociability

The Art of Good Listening

In a world where everyone seems to talk past one another, to genuinely listen is one of the most constructive and warm-hearted things we can ever offer another person.

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Sociability

Don’t Be Too Normal If You Want to Make Friends

Real friendship is not so much threatened by disclosures of vulnerabilities and compulsions as built out of them.

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Sociability

The Friend Who Can Tease Us

At its worst, teasing means mocking things another person can’t do anything about. But there’s a more artful, adult version, in which humour is recruited to sweeten the task of correction.

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Sociability

The Forgotten Art of Making Friends

We don’t need to stop talking to friends, but if we really want to grow close, we might also need to start doing something with them – preferably laundry.

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Sociability

The Friend Who Balances Us

We may seek in friendship to correct our imbalances of character; to locate in another the missing piece of ourselves.

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Sociability

The Purpose of Friendship

Friendship ends up delivering the intimacy and security of romantic relationships without the jealousy, control, exclusivity and foul temper.

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Sociability

Why the Best Kind of Friends Are Lonely

Those most suited for company will probably have spent a lot of time by themselves.

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Self-Knowledge

Locating the Trouble

We should not be discouraged by the monstrous scale of our forgetting. There is much that we can do to infer crucial things from the past.

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Self-Knowledge

You Might Be Mad

It’s a long and arduous game we play with others, pretending not to be mad. We would be so much wiser to give up the act and square up to the truth

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Relationships

Rethinking Gender

Outward life continues to demand forbidding levels of conformity. The life of the spirit, revealed in the imaginings of religions and mythologies, points us in more diverse directions.

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  • Relationships
  • Romanticism

The Buddhist View of Love
In the Eastern tradition, love is first and foremost an emotion we must cultivate in ourselves – and then bring to bear on anyone we meet.
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Disassociation
The disassociated person stands out by all that they are not doing, saying and feeling; all that they can’t register or express in relation to the upheavals and joys of life.
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Self-Knowledge

The Wisdom of Tears

We are in our essence and should always strive to remain cry-babies, that is, people who intimately remember their susceptibility to hurt and grief.

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Self-Knowledge

Fears Are Not Facts

This small sentence, in which so much wisdom is compressed, can helpfully jolt our minds into greater ease. Nevertheless, we are left with a question: if a fear is not a fact, what is it?

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Calm

Why Life is Always Difficult

It isn’t necessarily difficulty that sinks us; it’s misconceived notions of what a task should legitimately demand.

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Self-Knowledge

Who Knows More, the Young or the Old?

Time must at least theoretically offer us the potential for degrees of maturation and insight to which the young are inherently, through no fault of their own, denied.

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Sociability

How to Lose Friends

We hear so much about the loneliness we feel without others; but far too little about the loneliness we have to suffer with the wrong sorts of people.

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Relationships

Stop Repeating the Same Mistakes

What leads us to keep repeating a story isn’t that it’s challenging to begin with, but that we’re not managing to alter how it ends.

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Self-Knowledge

Beyond Sanctimony

The opposite of goodness isn’t evil, it’s sanctimony: the belief that wickedness could, through sufficient shaming and hectoring, one day be magically be expunged from the species.

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Relationships

A Role for Lies

Many lies exist for a noble reason: people are continually trying to shield one another from pains that would devastate them if they saw things as they are.

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Self-Knowledge

We Are Made of Moods

We are malleable creatures of mood who dare to mistake themselves for people of conviction.

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Self-Knowledge

Taking Childhood Seriously

We’re among the first people who have been able to take our childhoods as seriously as they need to be taken – and to have had the intellectual strength to locate most of our adult ills in them.

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Self-Knowledge

Why We Overreact

We never set out to be such inveterate exaggerators. It’s just that no one ever showed us that there might be another, more bearable way to be.

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Calm

Anxiety-as-Denial

We are worrying about everything, continually, in order to stop ourselves from understanding, and feeling sad about something specific in our pasts. Anxiety has grown into an alternative to self-knowledge.

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Self-Knowledge

Why Everyone Needs to Feel ‘Lost’ for a While

To have any chance of one day reaching something substantial, we may need first to give up all hope that we will ever in fact do so.

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Relationships

Falling in Love with a Stranger

We know deep down that crushes are a demented illusion, but it is not always entirely realistic or mature to try to live as though we should never daydream.

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Self-Knowledge

You Don’t Always Need to Be Funny

It can sound odd to suggest that some of us should try to become a little less funny about ourselves, and aim for more frequent moments of solemnity and grief. We shouldn’t – for our own sakes – be quite as comedic as we are.

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Calm

Our Anxious Ancestry

We carry fear in our bones. We are – to all intents – in the ancestral mind, somewhere 17,000 years ago in an underground shelter, while outside sabre-tooth tigers howl.

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Sociability

Abandoning Hope

Our dips in confidence can have an unlikely-sounding source: hope. We become hopeful that things can turn out well – but then, when life turns out to be trickier than we’d budgeted for, fall prey to grave panic, despair and anger.

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Relationships

The Secret Lives of Other Couples

Despite all our recording devices, and all the ways we have of sharing information about ourselves, one of the things that remains as hard as ever is to know what it is like, really like, for other people in relationships.

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Self-Knowledge

Why It’s Good to Be a Narcissist

Narcissism is one of the more misunderstood terms of our time. We’re so aware of the bad narcissist that we are at risk of missing the central role that narcissism should play in the development of any healthy human.

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Sociability

How to Leave a Party

People need a lot of self-love before they can find their own needs acceptable – and by extension, dare to try to transmit these to others.

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Sociability

On Becoming a Hermit

Hermits fascinate us because they are who we might be if only we learnt to be braver. They have unearthed the courage to be unusual.

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Calm

Why We May Need a Convalescence

The business of living is a sickness enough; it can take half a lifetime to realise it isn’t weak or indulgent to take very gentle care of ourselves.

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Calm

Auditing Our Worries

We should use the reams of data about the unreliability of fears gone by as a guide to the future. If we got it so wrong in the past, it’s highly likely we’re getting it rather wrong now too.

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Sociability

How to Have a Renaissance

One of the great cities of the world arose off the back of an inspired mood. It wasn’t coal, guns or wealth that did it: it was a movement of the mind.

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Work

Giving Up on Being Special

It can take a lot of pain before we make our peace with so-called ‘ordinariness’ and accept it for the wonder it is.

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Relationships

Why You Will Never Quite Get it Right in Love

Whatever intelligence, foresight, dedication and effort we bring to the task, perfection is almost certainly going to elude us. There is simply so very much that can go wrong.

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Calm

What is a Transcendental Experience?

In the grip of a transcendental experience, we willingly let go of the compromised ‘I’ in order to become, for a privileged while, a part of the timeless, beatific whole.

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Self-Knowledge

Am I a Bad Person?

No one is ever straightforwardly nice. The route to true benevolence flows through the door of a candid acknowledgement of ill temper and vanity.

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Calm

The Perils of Making Predictions

The only prediction we can rely on is that life will – with ceaseless ingenuity – outrun our finest predictions.

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Relationships

Understanding Attachment Theory

An unusual realisation that lovers may eventually make is that it is hard to envisage successfully navigating any relationship without some understanding – and mutual discussion of – Attachment Theory.

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Self-Knowledge

Why Some of Us Are So Thin-Skinned

Why do some of us end up unable ever to forget mean things people say and do while others sail on unmolested? The central explanation is: the degree and sort of love we received in childhood.

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Sociability

Think Like an Aristocrat

We limit the concept of aristocracy unhelpfully when we identify it simply with a restricted franchise and country houses. We may be able to become something far more relevant and more flexible than an aristocrat of the blood: an aristocrat of the spirit.

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Calm

Building the Cathedral

When despair stalks us, we should – like that mason – step back and imagine ourselves as part of a larger whole that can redeem us through its scale, logic and beauty.

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Self-Knowledge

How Music Can Heal Us

Intuitively, we know that music can heal but rarely is it asked to do so as directly and explicitly as it has been here. These extraordinary musical pieces carry the listener on a representative journey from psychological distress to understanding recovery and liberation.

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The Origins of Sanity

Self-Knowledge

The Origins of Sanity

Though politeness tends to stop us from dwelling on the point, all babies start off – as we might put…
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Why We Behave As We Do

Self-Knowledge

Why We Behave As We Do

A key principle governing the natural world is that animals adapt to thrive in particular habitats; what we call an…
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