Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | The Childhood Patterns That Secretly Shape Your Adult Life | Alain de Botton #636

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

Many of the habits and reactions that shape our adult lives began as clever coping strategies in childhood. While they once helped us survive difficult situations, they can later limit our relationships and happiness. By becoming aware of these patterns, we can start to change them. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 495 of the podcast with author, internationally renowned philosopher, and founder of The School of Life, the wonderful Alain de Botton. Alain is known for his unique ability to apply philosophical concepts to everyday life. In this clip, he explains how our childhood can impact our adult relationships and behaviours and he shares some practical tools that can help us better understand ourselves and each other. Thanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠https://thewayapp.com/livemore Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/495 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts ⁠⁠https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore⁠⁠ For other podcast platforms go to ⁠⁠https://fblm.supercast.com.⁠⁠ DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website

Today's bite-size episode is sponsored by The Way. I have tried so many meditation apps over the years, but I've never come across one as good or as effective as The Way. I find it a fantastic way to start off each day, and it has really helped me feel calmer, relaxed and more present. In fact, I love this app so much that I recently decided to invest in the company and join them in their mission to get more people meditating. meditation has been shown to have all kinds of benefits, reducing stress, increasing calm,

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positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip, is from episode 495 of the podcast with author, internationally renowned philosopher and founder of the School of Life, the wonderful Alain de Botton. Alan is known for his unique ability to apply philosophical concepts to everyday life. And in this clip, Alan explains how our childhood can impact our adult relationships and behaviors

and shares some practical tools that can help us best. better understand ourselves and each other. Most things that adults are doing that is counterproductive, that is not in their interests and the interests of those around them, most of those things have a logic, a certain logic, a twisted logic, you might say, that dates back to their early childhood, where that behaviour made a certain sort of sense,

and they keep doing it because they're unaware that it once made sense, and they're also unaware that it now absolutely doesn't make sense. Let me give you an example. So let's imagine that you're a child growing up in a familial war zone. Mum and dad don't get on. They're throwing things at each other. There's violence, et cetera. One of the things that you might do as a child is disassociate.

You cut yourself off from your emotions. So you're in a high intensity emotional arena and you just cut yourself off. You just go off and you fantasize, you disappear. This is brilliant. If you are five years old, you can't disappear. You can't get rid of your parents. you will, you come up with this fantastic way of dealing with it. You disassociate, fantastic.

Scroll forward 20 years and that person's in a relationship. And suddenly things are quite intense. And what's that person doing? Disassociating. This is maddening for everyone around. They don't know what they're doing it. Their partner might not be able to explain it to them, but they feel it, but they don't have the words of vocabulary, etc.

And, you know, you can go through four divorces before you work out. I'm doing this thing that made sense. And so lesson of psychotherapy is to say, thank you very much to that very clever five-year-old that worked out that in order to survive there to dissociate, thank you for this, but now it's enough. Now we're going to move on because this is no longer helpful. And, you know, there are many versions of this. Take the person who can't stop making jokes. You know, we all know people who are a bit too lighthearted for their own good. It seems like they can't approach pain. They're all the time cracking jokes and there's a life of the party. But, you know, we all know people who are a bit too lighthearted for their own good. It seems like they're all the time cracking jokes and there's a life of the party. But, There's something plastic about their mood, we feel. If you scroll back, there are often people who've had to deal with depressed parents, where there couldn't be an acknowledgment of pain because the parent was sinking. So the child had to cheer up their parents. No child should have to cheer up their parents, but it happens a lot.

And that person then ends up being manically cheerful. Quite contrary to their own interest, they can't touch their own pain because that would have been too hard when they were six, seven and eight. But they may now be 42. So super important to understand the pattern and correct it. And that's what we mean by psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is a chance to observe your patterns. You know, people go through life projecting.

You know that word projecting. In other words, they take an emotional response that is based on a situation that they knew in their past and they layer it on to a situation in the present which might not be warranted. So someone might think, all men get very angry with me. And when I make a mistake, they can't forgive me, which is why I will try not to do anything in case I get it wrong. Now, that might be an implicit projection that you're layering on to your boss, to your friends, to your child, to your spouse, etc. Terribly unhelpful. It probably has its origins in your relationship with your dad, let's imagine.

But that was you and your dad. But you're carrying that story into an arena where it really doesn't belong anymore. So a lot of what psychotherapy is is repatriating stories and making sure that we're not operating with patterns that don't belong in the situation where we're putting them into action in. Yeah, I mean, you talk a lot about how our childhoods influence our adult lives, how we show up in relationships, how we feel about ourselves. And I think whether it's in terms of our mental well-being or our physical health,

it's undeniable that childhoods are crucially important. the nutrition we give at that age, all these things, you know, what happens in those other years are so influential. I mean, it's deeply insulting. I don't want to believe this. You know, we all have heavy incentives not to believe this story. Because who wants to show up age 30, 40, 50, 60, and be told that their first 10 years are determining their life. I mean, this is one of those awful stories that we've discovered. Doesn't mean to say it's not true, unfortunately. And, you know, look, if you look at anybody, if you look at any adult who is doing something, strange stuff. By strange stuff, let's imagine someone who's sabotaging their life. Every time that they get near to success, oddly, they blow themselves up. Or every time a relationship is

working well, they sabotage it in some way. And they go relationship, relationship after relationship. What's going on? Why are we doing this? Almost certainly you've got to look backwards. You have to look backwards. And this is what psychotherapy teaches us. Yeah, I mean, your book is called a therapeutic journey, right? By going on that journey, us as individuals can empower ourselves to change. Hugely, I mean, look, I think one of the great adventures that we can be on, individually and collectively, is self-knowledge. Again, come back to the ancient Greeks, they thought that knowing yourself was the imperative of every human. And, you know, therapy, self-exploration, reading, friendship, et cetera. You know, one of the things that we're all, we should always be looking for is to

understand ourselves better because being ignorant of ourselves is behind so many of our problems. It's because we don't know who we are, that we marry the wrong people, goes to the wrong jobs, respond in inadequate ways to situations, et cetera. We're not in command of our own minds. And one of the great insights of psychoanalysis of Freud originally is that the conscious mind is a tiny part of the mind as a whole. And we know this, you know, we know that our minds are, you know, planning how to walk and digest food and run various physiological processes without any conscious inquiry or knowledge. But that holds true also for our emotional lives, that most of our emotional life is unconscious. And, you know, I sometimes imagine it's like, we're like

a sort of person with a tiny flashlight in a vast, dark chamber. And we can illuminate just a tiny, portion of our lives. And most of us will, we will all die strangers to ourselves. We will all die with much of who we are still mired in darkness. We won't know who we have been. I mean, this is going to get sort of tragedies of existence. We inhabit a self which we only partially understand. But I think one of the greatest and most fun things to do is to expand the boundaries of knowledge. Now, it's quite a weird ambition. I mean, if you said somebody, you know, if somebody said, you know, what are you doing for your holidays? And you go, well, I'm just further self-knowledge because that's my great adventure.

Look at you, so you're highly strange. You know, the moment when you understand a little bit better, who you are, why you do the things you do, why you respond. This is always a joyful day and it makes you so much more of a safe person to be around because people who are able to flag up their behaviour to others are a blessing. Yeah. When I think about what I said before to you about helping patients change their behaviours, that idea that knowledge is not enough,

it's the self-knowledge that we need, that the deeper awareness. This is where I really feel we go wrong with our public health advice, or it doesn't work as well as it could work. A psychoanalyst looking at it would go, you guys have forgotten there's an unconscious, there's an unconscious mind.

And the unconscious mind does weird stuff. I mean, you know, we were talking about self-sabotage, right? Many of the things that go wrong in people's lives are not external. They are people behaving in ways that are contrary to their own interests for reasons that they don't really understand, but that often have something to do with

their past. I mean, so imagine somebody who every time they get close to success blows it up. Imagine that this person had an envious parent. It's just to sound really weird. Who's got an envious parent? Well, many of us do. Parents, sad truth,

can be envious of their own children. In other words, they can be threatened that by by a child's talent, beauty, etc. And though on the one hand, they want their child to be happy, on the other hand, not any happier than they've been. This is, you know, and children pick up on this. And so there can be a guilt sometimes to be able to bear, to have a better life than your parents.

It's a real psychological achievement. It's not natural. I mean, it's not a given. It may be something that you need to work at. So it's just a small example of, you know, somebody may feel that in order to feel balanced, they have to feel guilty, that guilt is an important part of their sort of mental economy. And again, this may come back to a feeling from childhood that they were only safe if they felt that they'd done something wrong. And if they knew,

if they'd be made to feel bad. So then the feeling of being bad accompanies them through life as a protective mechanism, very unnecessary, huge cost to themselves, but it can happen. If there's someone who's listening to that, Alan, someone who just heard that and has just had the self-awareness that they may be an envious parent. Okay? Because no one wants to be that envious parent.

The person who just had that insight doesn't want to be that person, but is again acting on their own child, and their own experiences, right? What advice would you give to that person? So, look, in the early days of psychotherapy, in psychoanalysis, the feeling was, if somebody knows this, they'll stop immediately. It's like, oh, I'm an avidstapar. Great. I'll stop tonight. Similarly, you know, let's say in a

relationship, somebody becomes aware that every time someone's nice to them, they hold it against them. They can only tolerate people who are nasty to them. And you point, they say, oh my God, that's me. And then it will stop. The truth is trickier. So what psychotherapy, what psychotherapy is realized, is that insight is part of the solution, but you also need to have a corrective experience. And this is what therapists spend time doing, that when therapists in a room with a client, they know that the client will probably play out with them patterns

that they will also be playing out somewhere else. So the envious parent might start to say to the therapist, do those curtains cost a lot? Or is that your car outside? They'll probably be bringing their envy to the therapist. And that the best way to solve this is in that room with a therapist, that you can explore that issue live in a relationship, in a relationship that's unfolding in the here and now, rather than simply bringing it in from the outside. And that if you correct it there, you'd have a good

chance of correcting it in life more broadly. So the classic one in therapy is that the person, let's say, who's always worried about other people at the expense of their own well-being. something that happens because of, you know, if you've had a certain sort of childhood and you haven't been able to worry about yourself, but other people have been going off the rails, you'll want tendencies that you'll grow up in somebody who's always worrying about other people, always putting other people first, et cetera, at your own detriment. And this might play out with a therapist. You might say to the therapist, something like, are you tired? Or I'm so sorry for bothering you. And you might have had this as a doctor. Some people who are sort of worried that they're bothering

you if I'm coming to see you. And you want to go, and, you know, the solution will be to say, why, why are you so worried about how much sleep I've had? Is this, is this, right? Is that, you know, you know, I notice that every time you come and visit me, you're worried that I might be inconvenienced by your presence. I'm not. Why do you think that is? And so by holding a mirror up to somebody and tracking their behavior, not just once, but over time. Remember what we're saying about sort of the analogy with physical exercise. It's not going to be just once. lifting up one weight one time isn't going to solve your muscle problem. Similarly, emotionally, you might need to, you know, work at a dynamic within a relationship

over time. And we tend to think in quite conventional ways. The task of the therapeutic often is to give ourselves a context in which our true complexity can emerge. There are exercises like journaling. You know, if you journal and you allow yourself to write whatever kind of. comes into your mind. Just, you know, there's a technique of automatic writing, where you just say for two minutes, I'm just going to write, I'm going to keep writing. I'm not going to stop, not going to take my pen off the paper, but I'm going to keep writing. It doesn't matter if it's

complete gibberish, but I'm just going to see what is in my mind. I challenge your listeners. I mean, literally, you know, do it. You're listening to this and you're tempted by it. Take two minutes, get a piece of paper and a pen and write and just force yourself to write for two minutes about whatever's on your mind, anything. And I would hazard, I would bet that probably at the end you will have learned something about yourself, that there will be something about what you've written that you weren't in conscious command of. It might be that you're much angrier about something that you've allowed for, or you're much more loving, you're much more tender, or you're more full of regret, or whatever it is, but something to the left or to the

right of your standard vision of yourself. And, you know, welcome to the unconscious workings of the mind. I mean, this is what we're talking about. The mind, we have a hard time understanding ourselves because we don't allow, we don't create mechanisms where we can unspool the tightly bound truths about who we are. This idea that we need time to allow the inner workings of our mind to emerge, I think is fascinating. I'm immediately drawn to something I say quite a lot, which is, I believe, the most important practice for our health and happiness. is solitude. Like I really, really believe

it's very hard to live that contented, fulfilled, even healthy life without solitude. And one of the things I believe that solitude gives us, whether it be journaling

or meditation or yoga, or whatever it might be, or a walk, is time for things to emerge. To be in a meditative frame of mind, I think it's enormously valuable, to allow moments when you don't know what you might want to say to yourself, to yourself, but you're allowing for a range of opportunities. And there's an odd way,

sometimes observed, in which some places are more conducive to this than others, a train carriage that's fairly empty and a long train journey is tremendously conducive, I think, to a conversation with yourself. Why is that? I think it combines just the right level of distraction and the right level of motion to keep your mind, as it were, from getting stuck and frightened of itself. Because the mind does get frightened of itself. Like, oh my God, if I open that door, I'm going to get stuck in a cul-de-sac where I realize that, you know, I'm in the wrong relationship. My job's awful. It's helpful to have movement. So the passing of those pylons outside and the quiet in the carriage are assisting your mind to lose fright of itself.

And you might find that, you know, at the end of two and a half hours, you haven't just gone to Manchester. gone into parts of yourself that you hadn't explored. Yeah. For someone who has heard our conversation and they feel like they're struggling in their life, they're lost, they feel unhappy, they don't have fulfillment, what would your final worse than be? You know, welcome to the suffering spirit in which, you know, we all share that we are all far more lonely than we need to be

because we buy into the self-presentation of others no one wants to present themselves in the way they do. We're just forced. We collectively keep lying to each other about what it means to be human and I think what we've been discussing is what does it actually like to be human and the reality is that we are far more silly, far more hopeful, far more desperate, far more sad, far more beautiful than we

admit to ourselves and to others. And if we just allow ourselves a broader sense of what it means to be human, our spirits will lift. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest. If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my bite-sized Friday email. It's called a Friday 5. And each week, I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity. Articles of books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think

you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it free of charge at doctorchatsy.com forward slash Friday 5. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe. and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of bite science next Friday.