BITESIZE | The Childhood Patterns That Secretly Shape Your Adult Life | Alain de Botton #636

Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of 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. Alain 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 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 behavior 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, etc. 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 you're in a high intensity emotional arena and you just cut yourself off.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (19 minutes, 3,395 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.