Heartbreak (The School of life Love Series) - Hardcover

The School Of Life

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1912891018 ISBN 13: 9781912891016

Publisher: The School of Life, 2020

Synopsis

Almost no one gets through life without, at some point, having their heart broken. Advice at such a dark moment tends to focus on letting time do the healing. But there is also a vital role for understanding and perspective. We sometimes make our situation far worse than it needs to be through certain ideas we develop about why we’ve been left. We start to tell ourselves that we are not good enough, that we fail at everything, that this one rejection means we will always be maltreated... Our thoughts make our sorrow a great deal more intense than it could be.

This is a book to help us over heartbreak by offering us some context, some history, some psychology and a little philosophy. We learn about how our responses to abandonment are formed, what the best way to think about an ex might be and how to envisage future relationships when we are in despair. We come away gently cheered that we are not alone, consoled that our suffering will have an end―and intrigued by the endless and subtle sorrows and joys of relationships.

"Everyone we admire, everyone we find interesting has had, or will have, their heart broken. Our heartbreak seems to cut us off from the rest of humanity; secretly it brings us closer together."

About this title

About the Author

The School of Life is a global organization helping people lead more fulfilled lives. It is a resource for helping us understand ourselves, for improving our relationships, our careers, and our social lives―as well as for helping us find calm and get more out of our leisure hours. They do this through films, workshops, books, and gifts―and through a warm and supportive community. You can find The School of Life online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the globe.

The School of Life Press was established in 2016 to bring together over a decade of research and insights from The School of Life’s content team. Led by founder and series editor Alain de Botton, this is a library to educate, entertain, console, and transform us.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Psychology of Our Exes

In the immediate circumstances of a break-up, we are likely to be focused on what happened in the last few weeks or months to explain the end of a relationship.

But the clue to the failure often has nothing to do with us, and indeed little to do with the actions and feelings of the ex in the present moment. The reason why it all collapsed may lie in their childhood and in the long and typically unexplored path of their psyche towards emotional maturity. Frustratingly, the way people love as adults sits on top of experiences of love in their early years – and the capacity to be a reliable and contented partner is in part due to things having gone well with parental figures at the start of their lives.

Unfortunately for relationships, at least half the population is walking around with, and falling in love while beset by, a host of uncharted psychological issues that will make it hugely difficult for them to be predictable and well-attached in relationships. Often, what they ostensibly seek in love is exactly what, in the long run, they cannot accept, for it feels unfamiliar, threatening to their defences and unearned. There is a conflict – of which we end up the unwitting victims – between what they say they seek in a partner, and what they are in fact psychologically capable of accepting.

Perhaps a beloved parent was rather aloof or often absent in their childhood. When they grew up and began seeking love, the ex may have been drawn to the warmth we offered them, but at the same time, our tenderness would have felt unfamiliar and been perceived as extremely threatening to parts of their personality. They may have struggled to understand what was going on inside themselves when they went cold and had to take their distance from us, but they lacked the tools. It may in the end have felt easier for them to blame us for being ‘needy’ rather than explore the complicated reasons why their own need was frightening to them. They were replicating a past, doomed and painful version of love, without either of us quite knowing.

Or maybe our ex had a parent who was rather fragile or depressed, or who was impatient or easily irritated. As a result, they learned to be exceedingly cautious around them, always pleasing and putting others’ interests first – and never quite letting on what was happening in their hearts, growing isolated and resentful instead. They gravitated towards us, hoping that we would allow them to be themselves. But, while we did our best, dynamics kicked in which meant that they never dared to explain their desires to us properly. They hid what really worried them, they buried away their hurts, they didn’t complain as and when they should have done – and eventually, they lost the capacity to feel alive in the relationship.

These thoughts chip away at our worst, most self-punishing interpretations of what happens in our relationships that fail. It is not, as we so quickly fear, that we are invariably revealed as defective; but rather that we have been co-opted into another’s fateful private love-dramas, which had their beginnings long before they met us. They didn’t manage to love us, but they probably couldn’t, at this stage in their emotional evolution, love anyone that well, given the burden bequeathed by their unexplored past.

About this edition

• Publisher: The School of Life
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 1912891018
• ISBN 13: 9781912891016
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 96