Your Attachment Style Was Shaped Before You Turned 10 | Alain de Botton

Many of us, sadly, have come through childhood with suboptimal emotional acquisition. And we take that into adulthood unconsciously, and we walk into dates, and we put on our best suit and our best dress, and we go to restaurants and we eat small plates, and we have a nice time, but we have no clue what we are doing when we're entering a relationship. We have no clue where we've come from. And because we don't know where we've come from, we don't know how to plot a sensible course. My name is Alain de Botton. I'm a philosopher, psychotherapist, and founder of the School of Life. How childhood shapes our love life. I think we need to split history into phases. The phase of the dynastic relationship, where people would get together for dynastic and financial and family reasons. That ended, that's behind us. Then we moved into the Romantic Age, and that caused a lot of problems, and it lasted 250 years or so. We need to draw a line under that. We need to move towards something that I call the therapeutic age. The age of the therapeutic relationship. What on earth is a therapeutic relationship? Let me try and explain. A therapeutic relationship begins with the insights of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy has been with us for 120 years or so. It is the most sophisticated understanding of how human beings function emotionally. It's based on the insights of Sigmund Freud and all those who've come after him. It is not going away. Some people say, oh, isn't that old hat? Wasn't Freud proved wrong? Sorry, no, he wasn't. I mean, of course, many, many areas of Freudian thought are wrong, but the fundamental insight, that we have an unconscious, that how we love as adults was shaped by our childhoods, that there are defenses that we put in place to protect ourselves as children that cause difficulties for us as adults. This is indisputably true. And that's not going anywhere. All of us are the result of a very slow and long process of emotional education that took place between the ages of zero and 10. This is extremely hard to perceive. Most of us are like, I never went to an emotional education school. I just grew up. You know, my parents lived in Idaho or Milton Keynes or Frankfurt or Yokohama. There's no sense that we've learned anything in particular, but my goodness, we have. All of us reach adulthood having learned very complicated languages of love and relationships. Languages that tell us whether a human being can be trusted, whether we are worth something, whether communication is good. What happens when somebody is angry? What happens when we are shy? What happens when we sulk? How do we tell someone something important? All of these things will have been imbibed in us. Let me give you a metaphor. Very few of us, I'd say none of us, remember what it was like to learn language, to learn to speak. And yet most of us know how to speak, but it went in invisibly. While we were in the kitchen drawing buttercups or in the garden doing handstands, all of us will have learned incredibly complex patterns of language, of grammar. We have learned about the pluperfect. We'll have learned about the subjunctive without even knowing such things exist. We'll have learned tens of thousands of words and all sorts of ways of expressing ourselves and without knowing a thing. I want to say that a similar process goes on at the level of emotional language. In the same ways we learn a grammatical language, we learn an emotional language. As I say, a language about trust, about kindness, about communication, about self-worth, about dialogue, et cetera. All these things that we take with us into adulthood, we learned and we learned from one place in particular, our families of origin, our mother and our father, or whoever our caregivers happen to be. These people are immensely, immensely important in shaping our emotional grammar in the same way as they shaped our linguistic grammar. I mean, anyone who's had a parent with a regional accent of one kind or another will know that that sticks. You will pick up that regional accent from your parents and you will, it might stick with you all of your life. Same thing goes on with, as it were, the regional accents of emotional intelligence. You may speak a regional accent where every man is extremely frightening or every woman has a tendency towards alcoholism or everyone who is kind is also slightly sadistic or everyone who you depend on is also depressed. And these are all very, very difficult languages to have been exposed to and to pick up on. Many of us, sadly, have come through childhood with suboptimal language acquisition, emotional acquisition, if you like. And we take that into adulthood unconsciously. We have no clue where we've come from. And because we don't know where we've come from, we don't know how to plot a sensible course. And I'm gonna mention something very important, which is attachment theory. One of the most useful tools for working out why relationships work and why they don't was formulated by two researchers of near genus, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, two researchers working in the United Kingdom in the 1950s. They'd been very marked by a phenomenon that took place in the 40s during the Second World War. In the Second World War, huge numbers of children were separated from their parents at a young age and were sent to families outside London to escape the German bombing of British cities. What researchers soon realized was that this was a catastrophe for the children. The children began to exhibit extremely distressed behavior. They would wet the bed. They would get very angry. They would not be able to eat. They would be in states of almost cataclysmic meltdown. Why was this? Materially, they were well looked after. Psychologically, emotionally, they were bereft. And researchers, this is one of the most moving stories in the history of the Second World War, researchers realized that if this carried on, this would do more damage for the next generation than any number of war dead, that the risks of German bombs were actually smaller than the risks of ruptured emotional attachment. And on that basis, these psychological researchers wrote to the Ministry of Defense and the Home Office and got the children transferred back into their homes in the cities of the United Kingdom. And thereby, a great tragedy was averted, so that after the height of the crisis, children were returned to their birth families and looked after again by their closest figures of attachment. Why are we talking about this? Because this was the birth of attachment theory. From watching how children were around their close caregivers in childhood, it was discovered that all of us are, in a sense, tethered to a story that we first have in childhood around our caregivers. And the researchers in attachment theory began to divide human beings into categories, highlighting their characteristic ways of behaving around relationships. To give you a few of the categories, they identified something that we now know as avoidant attachment. Avoidant attachment is a way of relating to a troublesome and troubling caregiver who in some ways lets you down. And by the way, caregivers, it's estimated, let down around 50% of children. So around half of the population of any nation you care to mention has got children wandering around with attachment wounds. It's an important statistic to bear in mind when you go on a date. You know, 50% chance you've got somebody with an attachment wound. That's not the end of the story. We can work with attachment wounds, but we need to know that those attachment wounds are there. That's how we're gonna try and solve the problem, by knowing that the problem is there. An avoidantly attached person is somebody who responds to the insecurities in their relationship with their caregiver by essentially moving away, by pushing away intimacy. The classic sentence that an avoidantly attached person will say to their partner after a few beautiful weeks, a few mini breaks, a few lovely times they'll go, this is feeling a bit too intense, and then they will withdraw in some way. They'll start causing a problem. They'll say, oh, I need to spend a weekend with my friends or my mother really wants to see me. They'll pull away from a relationship because it's getting too intense. And really what they mean is, I'm so afraid of love, and the way that I deal with my fear of love is to pull away. So that is avoidant attachment, and we see it all over the place. Some of your viewers will be avoidantly attached. Some of your viewers will have recognized this with a partner that they had. It's not that the avoidantly attached person doesn't want love. They want love. They're just terrified of it. Why are they terrified of it? Because it didn't go well for them in childhood. And this is something that we need to really keep in mind. We've got a culture that thinks that everybody's looking for love. They're not. They're ostensibly looking for love, but they're just as busy pushing love away when it comes, running away from it, and making sure it doesn't succeed. Why? Because love is a threat. If you've grown up in an environment where love was not possible, where relationships between caregivers and children were not safe, you will have defended yourself against the risks of disappointment. You will have insulated yourself. And then when love comes your way in adulthood, what you will do against your knowledge, against your conscious knowledge, is make sure that love does not succeed. You will sabotage your own chances of a successful relationship. Let me give you a metaphor. Imagine that you've grown up in a prison camp. You were never fed, or the diet was very meager. You didn't have much food. And then suddenly, one day, the prison gates are opened, and you get to go to a banquet, and you get to eat anything you like. And what might be the response? Panic. You might make yourself sick. You might try and eat the food. It might even kill you, or threaten to kill you. Because why? You cannot metabolize the goodness on offer, because you have learned to function with an emotionally restricted diet, an emotionally restricted diet where you've made do with very little. And so when there's a lot suddenly on offer, you panic. And you think this is too intense, in the same way that somebody who has been going with almost no food will think it's far too intense to eat a rich chocolate cake. And sometimes, healthy love is like a rich chocolate cake which we cannot bear. And some of your viewers will know the phenomenon whereby you offer somebody love. You love them. You feel that you want to give them a good life. You want to be a good partner to them. And they sort of accept it, and then suddenly they run away. They put dynamite under it. This is a very common occurrence. What's going on? It's not that it's too bad. It's too good. And for some of us who had to get used to very poor relationships, the greatest threat is not a bad relationship. That's fine. It's a good relationship. And you get patterns, horrific patterns, where people have had an unstable and violent father, let's say, an uncaring and absent mother. And you think that these people are gonna get to adulthood and they're really gonna make it up for themselves. They're going to find the love they yearn for and they're gonna make it work. And what happens to them? Maybe a nice lover comes along. Someone kind offers them a home, as it were, an emotional home. And maybe at the beginning, they can bear it. It's easier at the beginning. You can bear it at the beginning. But then the problem starts setting in when it really becomes clear that love may work. That's when the traumatized attachment lover gets their sticks of dynamite out and starts to blow the foundations of the house up so that they can return to the suffering that feels more familiar. What you need to understand is that in love, we don't look for what will make us happy. Absolutely not. We look for what feels familiar. For some people, happiness and familiarity are one, but for many of us, they are not. For many of us, what is most familiar is a sense of not being loved properly, a sense of not being sure where we stand, a sense that someone may threaten us, a sense that someone may abandon us. That is our true home. And if that's our true home, we will be guided with a kind of honing instinct to re-find that, which is why you find again and again that the children of alcoholics do not head for sober partners. They head for people who are struggling with alcohol. Why the offspring of violent parents do not head for calm and kind partners. They head for people who are struggling with their temper. Now, what do we do about this? One optimistic story is to be found in the work of Sigmund Freud, who in many ways, everything returns to him. He observed something which he called He observed that human beings are not guided by a search for pleasure. They are guided by a search to repeat patterns, a repetition compulsion often of pain. And he proposed an ingenious and I think optimistic answer to this. He argued that what many of us are doing when we repeat traumatic experiences, for example, getting back together with a violent partner or an alcoholic partner, what we're really doing there is not simply suffering ad infinitum for no reason. What we're trying to do is to master a challenge that we couldn't master in childhood, and we're trying to master it with the resources of adulthood. In other words, we're trying to get the alcoholic partner to stop drinking in a way that we couldn't when we were children. We're trying to get the distance, emotionally uncommunicative partner to start to talk in the way that our mother or father didn't. We're trying to make it up in the present. And Freud realized that for many of us, we wouldn't find the kind of excitement that we need until we locate a partner who does suggest that they suffer from the very problem that our crucial caregivers suffered from, until we find a little bit of an echo of the original suffering. But the optimistic story is perhaps we can work with them in the relationship to heal the pain. It's a very optimistic story. It works sometimes, and sometimes we may need to cut our losses. Love is not always about keeping going. Love is also sometimes about knowing that you are in a pattern, and that pattern is driving you to destruction. And when that happens, it's also important to know how to save yourself from sure destruction. Wanna support the channel? Join the Big Think members community where you get access to videos early, ad-free.