How To Fix Your Negative Patterns - Alain de Botton - #898

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Alain de Botton, welcome to the show.

**Alain de Botton** (0:01)
Thank you so much.

**Chris Williamson** (0:03)
Where do bad inner voices come from?

**Alain de Botton** (0:06)
Well, the way I like to think about it is an inner voice is always an outer voice that got internalized. We're very porous people. The way in which we're spoken to becomes the way in which we speak to ourselves. I mean, if that sounds too weird, think of language, right? All of us arrive in the world not speaking any language, and by the age of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, we'll have learned a lot of words. But the fascinating thing about human beings is, we don't know we're learning. So we can be doing other stuff like doing handstands in the garden or drawing buttercups in the kitchen, and we're becoming expert grammarians. Hundreds of words are entering our minds. Complex grammatical constructions are entering our minds. Now, the way I like to think about it is that that language analogy holds true for emotional life as well. So at the same time as we're learning a language of words and declensions, we're also learning a language of emotions. We're learning things like what's a man like? What's a woman like? What happens if you give someone something to someone? What happens if you're vulnerable? What happens if you want to play? What happens if you say no? What happens if you say yes? All of these are the syntax, they comprise the syntax of our emotional lives. And it's an invisible syntax just as our grammatical syntax is invisible. But it's there and it will operate throughout our lives and it will be immensely hard to change. I mean, you know what it's like if you grew up speaking English and then you want to learn a foreign language, you suddenly want to learn Italian. Well, good luck to you. You're going to be learning a long time. It's not impossible, it can be done, but I think it's helpful to think of how hard it is because sometimes people get very impatient in their attempts to change things about themselves. They go to things like, I want to change how I relate to people in relationships, say, and I've read a book and I've been to three therapy sessions and I'm really annoyed, nothing works. You want to go, okay, imagine this was Italian. So you've looked at a book on Italian, you've taken three classes and you don't speak fluent Italian and you're complaining. So we do need some modesty here, just in order to be properly ambitious. As you know, the root cause of early despair and early retirement from things is a picture of what success demands in an area. I think in the area of emotional improvement or maturation, we sometimes let ourselves down by thinking it's going to have an ease which it won't have.

**Chris Williamson** (2:45)
It's interesting thinking about how language shapes our experience of emotions and our experience of the world. German, for instance, has a colourful number of ways to describe certain emotions that you can't in other. He said, well, does the fact that we have the word for it almost unlock that emotion in a way that allows us to do self-investigation?

**Alain de Botton** (3:05)
Yes.
Philosophers watching this, philosophers of language may have arguments prone in it. It's a big thing, but I definitely feel that the more words we have, the more we can attend to what we feel, and in some cases, the more we can feel. I remember learning the word anxiety when I was a teenager, and thinking, wow, that's a really useful word. Probably nowadays people learn anxiety a lot earlier. But in those days, it was a fascinating word to learn. The more one's vocabulary stretches, the more you're able to put a flag in bits of your psyche that are perhaps painful. And I think, if you think about why people go to psychotherapy, or even frankly, what motivates a lot of friendship, it's somebody else helps to give you a vocabulary for bits of your mind and bits of your experience that have not till now, that have eluded definition. And that definition is not merely a fancy thing, it's a life-saving thing. Because the more you can define, the easier life gets. Freud speculated that the origins of language lie in an ability to bear frustration. So that if a child can think, I'm currently frustrated, but mummy's coming back, and the person's got those words, then that can help you to bear missing, and also bear excitement, all sorts of things. Things can become more bearable, the more you can put them into language. I think adults know this. When we go back journaling, why is it so helpful to journal? Because we know it is, all research shows that it is.