Name: How To Fix Your Negative Patterns - Alain de Botton on Chris Williamson
Uploaded: 2025-08-03T18:48:38.000Z
Duration: 1 h 48 min 18 s
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Well, the way I think about it is that an inner voice is always an outer voice that got internalized.

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 three, four, five, six, seven, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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're, you know, if you grew up speaking English and then you want to learn a foreign language, if suddenly you want to learn Italian, well, good luck to you.

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 things like, you know, 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.

You want to go, okay, imagine this was Italian, so you've looked at a book on Italian, you've been in 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.

I mean, as you know, you know, the root cause of sort of early despair and early retirement from things is a false picture of what success demands in an area, and 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.

It's interesting thinking about how language shapes our experience of emotions and our experience of the world, that German, for instance, has a colourful number of ways to describe certain emotions that you can't in other.

You said, well, does the fact that we have the word for it almost unlock that emotion in a way?

Yes, I think, you know, philosophers watching this, philosophers of language may have arguments prone, you know, 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.

You know, 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, you know, in those days, it was a fascinating word to learn, and 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, until now, that have eluded definition, and that definition is not merely, you know, it's 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, you know, I'm currently frustrated, but, you know, mummy's coming back, and a person's got those words, then that can help you to bear missing, and also bear excitement or, you know, all sorts of things.

Things can become more bearable the more you can put them into language, and I think, you know, adults know this.

When we go about journaling, right, you know, why is it so helpful to journal, because we know it is.

What is it about translating a feeling into a word for that feeling that's helpful?

And I think it tames, it contains, and it narrows the spread of difficult emotions.

You've got these thoughts up here moving around, floating about, and then they have to be concretized, and it almost feels like it squeezes it through an aperture of some kind.

You say, okay, this is what I meant by that.

It's not this sort of ambient, it's somebody shouted a noise in the next room.

And, you know, think of relationships, couples, the more their vocabulary for what they're going through increases, the more they can say, you know, I'm feeling this, I'm feeling, you know, when you do that, I feel this, et cetera.

You know, the sort of normal way that people say communication, but it's really language.

It's putting language to feelings, and so much goes wrong in life because we're unable to do it.

There's a useful phrase that psychotherapists use, disassociation.

And the way it's understood so therapeutically is that you could feel an emotion, it's so difficult, tricky in some way, and you then stop feeling it.

You disassociate from the feeling that's in you.

It's still in you, but you're no longer registering it.

And the argument is always the more you can associate and the less you can disassociate, the better off you will be.

But look, there are many bits of life that are unbearable to us.

There's a wonderful quote in Middlemarch, George Eliot, big, fat 19th century novel, where she says, if we could properly register the sounds, the full sounds of life, we would lose our minds from the full richness of existence.

In other words, if you were sensitive to everything that's around you, you would sort of go mad.

And I think if we think about what madness is, so-called, what's colloquially called madness, if you think of people with severe mental illness, very often what has happened is that their ability to sequence thoughts has gone.

Everything is coming at them, and they can't grade thoughts, they can't say, this thought must go away now.

So they'll go, I made a mistake 15 years ago.

And if you're balanced, you'll go, well, that was 15 years ago, and it's not a problem.

If your reason is buckling, often everything that is alarming comes at you at once, everything that is difficult at once.

And so in a way, I'm sticking up for the ability sometimes to take distance from our feelings.

So I started off by going, it's really important to know what you're feeling.

But let's also remember, at points, the ability not to feel the full force of everything also belongs to health.

What's your advice for how people can heal a negative inner voice?

We've got this odd artifact that we've carried with us, this inheritance of our life, but kind of almost some previous life of ours.

Where should people begin if they want to have a moderate inner voice?

I'd say you have to start by finding the inner voice, because it doesn't announce itself as an inner voice.

So how are we going to, you know, we're not talking here about literally hearing voices, some people do, but we're not talking about that here.

What we're talking about is a way of speaking to yourself or a way of conducting yourself in your own mind that owes more to something from outside than from inside, and that is more negative, or put it this way, unfair to you and your chances, your hopes, etc.

So how do we detect this is even going on?

Because I don't think it's necessarily obvious.

Here I think that it's quite helpful to get people to do what are called sentence completion exercises, where you start off with a sub-sentence, and then you have an ellipsis, dot, dot, dot.

So men are, women are, life is, I am, I want, if, dot, dot, dot, because, dot, dot, dot.

And you say to people, here's a list of these things, without thinking too much, very important prompt, without thinking too much, just say the first thing that comes into your head, men are, women are, life is, I am, etc.

Or even beginnings of stories, story completion exercises.

When I meet someone that I, dot, dot, dot, just finish that sentence, and what people will come out with is fascinating.

They'll go, you know, men are cruel, wow, wow, wow, men are cruel, are they, you know, a person might even be surprised that they've said that.

And you say, okay, where's that come from?

And often what you'll find is a story that owes more to something outside than something inside.

Or, you know, when I meet someone, what will happen is, dot, dot, dot, you know, they'll be very friendly to me, then they'll turn against me, wow, wow, where did that come from?

It's going to be a specific story in the past that, you know, is being carried forward.

Isn't it interesting that we're talking about maybe the thing people identify with most, you know, the texture of their own experience, the landscape of their inner mind.

But you're then saying, well, this may not fully be self-generated, this might be something which you've absorbed from the past, from society, from norms, from cultures, from the way that you've compensated for past traumas, et cetera, which is habits.

But it brings up an interesting question, which is, okay, so who are you?

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How To Fix Your Negative Patterns - Alain de Botton on Chris Williamson

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