What They Forgot to Teach You At School by The School Of Life

Author:The School Of Life
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The School of Life

11.

Listen to the Adult Within

It’s natural to think of ourselves as a single person. We have, after all, only one body and answer to only one name. Inside our minds, though, we are, in truth, far more like an assemblage of voices or – as we might put it at its starkest – of ‘people’.

We could picture our minds like a theatre, much of it sunk in darkness, with a brightly illuminated lectern and microphone at the centre of the stage. At different moments of our days and nights, contrasting characters will seek to step up to speak and interpret the world unfolding before our eyes. Sometimes, it will be the panicker, a prominent figure alarmed by everything, who always knows it will all go wrong and quickly resorts to weeping and wailing in the face of even minor difficulties. Sometimes it will be the self-flagellator, the one who speaks very sternly, insists that everything is our fault and berates us that we don’t, ultimately, deserve to exist. Sometimes it is the depressive, who knows that existence is an appalling error, that hope cannot survive and that our direction is towards doom and catastrophe. What unites these characters is that they are, in their diverse ways, very keen to speak and very, very unhelpful.

We need to keep a surprising idea in mind, that we all also have – though we are not quite aware of the fact and therefore rarely do anything to encourage them to come forward – an adult inside us. The adult may be lingering in the wings, they may be in a seat at the very back of the theatre or in some dark winding corridor backstage, but they are there. We have – over the course of our lives – all had just enough experience of other kindly, impressive adults for this character to have taken shape and developed a capacity to interpret life, even if only in somewhat tentative form.

When we can allow them on stage, the adult brings some key virtues to the microphone in our minds. They are, above anything else, resourceful. In the face of trouble, they look for solutions. They know there can be some way through. They don’t despair at the first hurdle. It might be hard right now, but things will work themselves out eventually; they always do. What’s more, the adult is kind: they extend compassion to us for our difficulties; they know our troubled histories and how easy it would have been for anyone to slip up in our position. They can bring perspective to bear on questions. In the wider scheme, something may be of only miniscule importance; the adult applies distance to problems. They have a sense of how long life can be and how much time there is for us to recover. They are practical too: at times they will simply but authoritatively tell us to go to bed, not to think about it till morning and to make sure we are eating properly.

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