The School of Life

Rachel Heller and Amir Levine on Attachment Styles

How would you react to the following scenarios?

• You call your date/partner and after the first ring, you're transferred to voice mail.

Do you barely notice or do you assume s/he is purposely ignoring you?

• You're sitting in an experiment room and suddenly you notice smoke seeping out of the computer? 

Do you assume everything's under control or do you immediately alert those around you to  the imminent danger?

• Your spouse buys you your favorite brand of coffee on the way home from work.

Do you feel gratitude or are you more likely to take this gesture for granted?

What all these scenarios have in common is that your response is likely to vary depending on your attachment style. 

Attachment styles were first discovered by Mary Ainsworth in the context of the infant-parent bond.   She devised an experiment by which she observed children playing in a room with their mothers.  The infant's response to a series of separations/reunions from their mother determined their attachment style. 

Infants with a secure attachment style were able to use their mother as a secure base from which to explore the environment and derive comfort in times of stress. Anxious infants were too preoccupied with the mother's whereabouts to be easily soothed and Avoidant infants were too seemingly indifferent toward her to use her as a secure base.

A couple of decades later, researchers Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, both then from the University of Denver, set out to discover whether these three styles of relating in infancy continued into adulthood.  Their groundbreaking study confirmed that adults too fall into three attachment styles that influence the way they interact with their romantic partners:

• Secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving

• Anxious people crave intimacy, are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back

• Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness.

Every person, whether he or she just started dating or has been married 40 years, falls into one of these categories (or more rarely into a combination of the latter two). Just over 50% are estimated to be secure, around 25% are avoidant and 20% are anxious.  The remaining 3-5% fall into the mixed anxious-avoidant category. 

During the past two decades since Hazan & Shaver's seminal paper, hundreds of scientific studies in a wide range of countries have carefully delineated the ways in which adult behave in romantic ties.  Understanding these styles is an easy and reliable way to understand and predict people's behaviour in romantic situations.

One of the most fascinating aspects of attachment research is the discovery that people with different attachment styles perceive situations in different and often opposing manners: They pay attention to different aspects of situations, they interpret them differently; even their brain activity is often remarkably different.

Gaining insight into adult attachment styles is akin to a having a road map to romantic behavior, not only others' but also your own.

And in case you were wondering:

If you interpret the transfer to voicemail as a rejection, you may well be anxious

If you alert others to the smoke hazard, it's likely you're anxious or avoidant but not secure

If you're unimpressed by your partner's coffee gift, it's more likely you're avoidant.

[Of course, in reality, no one criterion determines your attachment style but rather a combination of factors.  To discover your attachment style, go to: http://www.attachedthebook.com/compatibility-quiz/ 

 

Rachel Heller, M.A and Amir Levine, M.D are authors of 'Attached: Identify your attachment style and find your perfect match' (Published by Rodale). Visit www.attachedthebook.com

Five Ways to Expand Your Empathy

It is usual, at this time of year, to make a series of earnest New Year’s Resolutions which – by tradition – you resolutely fail to keep. Why not try promising yourself some New Year’s Explorations instead and widen your personal horizons.

Expanding your empathy might offer just what you are looking for. Empathising is an avant-garde form of travel in which you step into the shoes of another person and see the world from their perspective.  It is the ultimate adventure holiday – far more challenging than a bungee jump off Victoria Falls or trekking solo across the Gobi desert.

Here are my five top tips for transforming yourself into an empathetic adventurer over the coming months.

1.  CULTIVATE CURIOSITY ABOUT STRANGERS

One of the best ways to develop your capacity to look through the eyes of others and escape the confines of your own worldview, is to have regular conversations with strangers, especially those outside your usual social circle. This doesn’t mean a brief chat about the weather. Rather, it involves a mutual exchange of thoughts on your most important beliefs and experiences, and – crucially – an attempt to understand the world inside the head of the other person. We are confronted by strangers every day – the heavily tattooed guy who delivers your post, the dignified elderly woman across the road who always wears a red beret, the new Thai employee who eats his lunch alone in the office canteen, the woman who sits in the underpass all day preening her dog. Set yourself the challenge of having a conversation with a stranger once a week. All it requires is courage.

2.  LEARN FROM YOUR EXPERIENCES

Ask yourself this question: When has somebody failed to empathise with me, and what difference has it made? Expanding your empathetic imagination requires recognising the impact that empathy – or its absence – has had on your own life. Perhaps you have a nasty boss who has criticised you for missing a deadline without considering that you are using every spare moment to care for your mother who has Alzheimer’s. Or maybe your partner enjoys spending each Sunday playing five-a-side football with friends, but just can’t see that it burdens you with yet another day of doing the childcare, just when you really need a break. Such experiences – when another person fails to take into account our feelings, beliefs, or daily realities – can upset us, make us angry and diminish our self-worth. Unless you happen to be a rare empathetic saint, you can also ask yourself a second question: When have I failed to empathise with other people, and why? And then a third: When have others empathised with me, and why did it matter? Exploring this triumvirate of questions is sure to help sensitise your empathetic soul.

3.  TACKLE YOUR FAMILY EMPATHY DEFICIT

The film The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy features an ingenious device called the Point-of-View Gun. When it is fired at someone, it causes them to see things from the perspective of the person who pulled the trigger. This singular weapon was designed at the request of the Intergalactic Consortium of Angry Housewives, who were tired of ending every discussion with their husbands with the statement, ‘You just don’t get it, do you!’ There is probably somebody in your family at whom you would dearly love to fire the Point-of-View Gun. But there is equally likely to be someone who would wish to fire it at you. The task before you is to identify a family member you have failed to empathise with and make an effort to do something about it. Give them a phone call or take them out for a meal and do your best to listen and understand where they are coming from. Try to get inside their skin, just like an actor attempts to inhabit their character, and grasp all the nuances of their thoughts and emotions. You might find that your irritating sister or heartless uncle do not deserve the harsh judgement you usually reserve for them.

4.  TAKE AN IMAGINATIVE JOURNEY

There is nothing wrong with a little armchair empathy – sitting down with a good book and letting it take you into the mental landscape and experiences of someone whose life is utterly different from your own. This is ideally done through first-person narratives, where you can hear the voice of the author or main character and let it become one with your own. These are five of my favourite empathy books, which will take you on unusual journeys into other minds:

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby (1997): enter the world of a man who is completely paralysed and can only communicate by blinking his left eye.

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (1933): find out how to become a tramp and what you can learn as a kitchen assistant in a fancy hotel.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (1970): a history of the American West as told from the perspective of Native Americans such as Sitting Bull and Geronimo.

May the Lord and His Mercy Be Kind to Belfast by Tony Parker (1993): interviews with ordinary and extraordinary people about the conflict in Northern Ireland, from bus-drivers to terrorists.

The Story of My Life by Helen Keller (1903): autobiography of the deaf-blind writer who reveals the beauties of the world by expanding our appreciation of the senses.

5.  CHALLENGE YOUR PREJUDICES

We all have prejudices or make false assumptions about others. These are frequently based on the collective labels we apply to people – like ‘single mothers’ or ‘Muslim extremists’ – without delving into their individuality and uniqueness. One of the most rewarding ways to expand your empathy is to gain direct experience of their lives, putting into practice the Native American proverb, ‘Walk a mile in another man’s moccasins before you criticise him’. How can we do this? It requires pinpointing the individual or social group who is the target of your strongest prejudices, and then inventing a way of stepping into their moccasins. So if you disdain people who live off the welfare state, spend a week trying to survive on Job Seeker’s Allowance, which currently stands at £64.30. If you detest wealthy bankers, see if you can shadow one of them at work for a day. If you are fervently religious, you might treat yourself to attending the services of religions different from your own. You get the picture. This experiential empathising is likely to be etched on your skin and memory forever.

These five ideas should provide a stimulating itinerary for your New Year’s Explorations. They may lead you to start new friendships, shift your values, rethink your ambitions and perhaps expand your moral universe. But there’s no need to let your travels stop there. Next time you are wondering where to go on holiday you might decide against a vacation in the sun and instead take the option of an escape into empathy.

By Roman Krznaric http://www.outrospection.org

Charles Fernyhough on our internal dialogues

We are fans of thinking, here at The School of Life. There’s nothing we like more than to take the phone off the hook, switch off the computer and come over all pensive. We find we can think anywhere: walking down Marchmont Street, lazing in the bath or crushed together with fellow thinkers on the Piccadilly Line. There’s nothing you need for a good muse other than to be conscious, not too intoxicated, nor in immediate mortal peril. Thinking is an eminently versatile pastime.
 
But what is it, exactly? Which bits of your mental life does the term ‘thinking’ usefully describe? We have certain ideas about what this under-examined activity involves. When know when we are doing it, for example, and we can always report (presumably accurately) on what we are thinking about. Above all, thinking seems inextricably linked to language. Imagery, music and memory play their parts, but thinking is nothing so much as a conversation with oneself.
 
I would argue that thinking comes to have the qualities that it does because of the particular story of its emergence in childhood. Here, the best theory around is that of the Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky. Vygotsky argued that the thinking we do as adults bears traces of its emergence from social interactions early in life. Our dialogue with the self is an internalised version of the dialogues we had with other people, back when we were small.

To my mind, this raises some fascinating questions about the phenomenology of thinking. If thinking is an internalised dialogue, it should have a lot in common with social dialogues. How are we to find out? For a long time it was assumed that describing the emotional, perceptual and cognitive minutiae of conscious experience was best left to novelists and poets; it could not be the business of replicable, verifiable scientific inquiry. That has changed, though, not least because of the rise of phenomenological approaches to cognitive science (see Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi’s recent book on the topic, for example). Psychologists and philosophers are now asking questions about the subjectivity of consciousness that would have raised jeers a decade or two ago. This is a research programme we can all get involved with. What are your thoughts like? Are you a word-thinker or an image-thinker? Or would you say that your thoughts happen in some non-symbolic medium, a pure language of thought?
 
I will be saying more on this in my New Generation Thinkers essay on Radio 3 today. There is much more on the developmental stuff in my book The Baby in the Mirror and its associated blog, The Ladybird Papers. Start ruffling those brows now.

Charles Fernyhough was involved in developing The School of Life’s family course which will run on 15 and 16 November. Find out more HERE.
 
Charles discussed children’s thinking on Radio 3 at 11pm on Wednesday 5th November. You can listen again HERE. He is The School of Life's expert on childhood.

Parents and Pets: The Impact Our Families Have On Us

Family life was never meant to be easy. According to latest YouGov data from a survey carried out for Channel 4, half of all families admit to arguing every day, with over a third of parents spending a full hour each day shouting. But as most of us know, there are definite upsides to this venerable institution - 69% of teenagers surveyed said the members of their family are still the most important people in their lives, while 98% of teenagers love their parents. These and other statistics have been researched by Channel 4 website for their programme The Family. Read more here.

So what makes families work, and how is the role of the family changing in 21st-century Britain? One way to find out is to join The School of Life's family course which runs over the weekend of the 15 and 16 November.

Combining insights from psychotherapy, history, visual arts, theatre, literature and economics, the course explores the impact of family on each of us. It will be led by award-winning journalist and author Rebecca Abrams with a session at the Institue of Family Therapy led by Robin Ewart-Biggs.

We are offering the chance to bring a family member or friend for free. To find out more clilck HERE.

How to Cheat at Happy Families

If you're curious to find out more about our Family course, we've just announced an event for Friday October 3rd, 19.00 here at The School of Life.

Alain de Botton will be talking to psychotherapist Brett Kahr and writer Rebecca Abrams about how families shape us. They'll explore the narratives of love, hate, loyalty, betrayal, revenge, sacrifice and conflict that influence each one of us, asking what makes some families happy and what can cause others to become pits of claustrophobia and resentment.

All three speakers have been involved in shaping the Family course and Rebecca will be teaching the course when it runs on 15 and 16 November. The School of Life is offering two places on this course for the price of one, enabling you to come with a family member or friend. To download a brochure click here or to book a place click here.

 

Alain de Botton on going to the zoo alone

People look at you strangely if you make a trip to the zoo without a child. You should ideally have a gang of children, evidence of dribbled ice-cream and some balloons as well. Contemplating zoo enclosures with oriental small-clawed otters or leopard geckos hardly seems an adult way to pass the afternoon.

 

But last week my five year old nephew pulled out at the last minute (he'd remembered it was his best friend's birthday), and I stubbornly decided to go through with our afternoon as planned. My first thought - after buying an ice-cream, though not a balloon - was how strange animals look. Apart from the odd cat, dog or horse, it's years since I've seen a real animal, an extraordinary, jungle-bookish sort of creature.

 

Take the camel: a u-shaped neck, two furry pyramids, eyelashes that seem coated in mascara, and a set of yellow buck teeth. There was a guide on hand with some facts: camels can go ten days in the desert without drinking, their humps aren't filled with water, it's fat, the eyelashes are designed to keep out sandstorms, and their liver and kidneys extract all moisture from food, leaving their dung dry and compact. They're some of the best adapted creatures on the planet, concluded the guide - at which point I experienced a childish burst of jealousy at the inadequacy of the human liver and kidney, and our lack of furry bumps to cut out the need for a midafternoon snack.

 

If creatures end up looking so strange, it's a sign of their adaptation to the natural environment, said Darwin, and no one would doubt it in Regent's Park. The Sri Lankan Sloth bear has long mobile lips and two missing upper incisors so that it can suck ants and termites out of their nests, a distinctive facial feature which no one who relied on lunch from a deli would bother with. I had some melancholy thoughts finishing my ice-cream staring at some tar-coloured, pygmy hippos wallowing in mud. The word dinosaur came to mind, not that they resembled them, but they evoked the dinosaur as a byword for fatally slow adaptation to an environment. There are only a few of them left in the world, the future in their natural African habitats lies with lither, more libidinous gazelle-like things.

 

A zoo visit proves the cliché that it takes all sorts. Every creature seems wonderfully adapted for some things, hopelessly suited for others. The horseshoe crab could never get in the pages of Vogue (it looks like a miniature military helmet with bow legs), and couldn't read Gibbon, but it's a star at surviving in deep water and not getting eaten by sharks. It lives quietly, sliding occasionally across the ocean floor to grab a mollusc.

 

It's hard not to identify with animals, not to land on creatures one might name if forced into an after-dinner round of what-would-you-be-if-you-had-to-be-an-animal game (sadly losing out to pictionary as evening entertainment). Flaubert loved the game; in his letters, he compared himself variously to a boa constrictor (1841), an oyster in its shell (1845), and a hedgehog rolling up to protect itself (1853, 1857). I came away identifying with the Malayan tapir, the baby okapi, the llama and the turtle (esp. on Sunday evenings).

 

A zoo unsettles in simultaneously making animals seem more human and humans more animal. "Apes are man's closest relative," reads a caption by the orang-outang enclosure, "how many similarities can you see?" Far too many for comfort, of course. Shave him, dress him in a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, and the one scratching his nose in the corner of the cage is a cousin of mine, except that Jo has a large flat in Belsize Park and spent two weeks in Dorset with his kids this summer. In May 1842, Queen Victoria visited Regents park zoo, and in her diary, noted of a new Orang Outang from Calcutta: "He is wonderful, preparing and drinking his tea, but he is painfully and disagreeably human." (Reading this, I imagine being captured and placed in a cage like a room in a Holiday Inn, with three meals a day passed through a hatch, and nothing to do other than watch TV - while a crowd of giraffes look on at me, giggling and videoing, licking giant ice-creams, while saying what a short neck I have).

 

Inevitably perhaps, I walk out of the zoo with a pair of Desmond Morris spectacles. Calling Sarah up for dinner loses its innocence, it's merely part of the mating ritual of the human species, not fundamentally different from what llamas are up to when they start to whistle strangely at each other on autumn nights.

Then again, there is relief to be found in the ability to view one's antics as complex manifestations of essentially simple animal drives; for food, shelter and survival of one's genetic off-spring. I may take out a yearly membership for Regent's Park zoo.

 

Pictures by Garry Winogrand, from The Animals.

Alain is leading a holiday to Heathrow airport with The School of Life and giving a sermon on pessimism on 22 March 2009.