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

Today's bite sized episode is sponsored by The Way. I have tried so many meditation apps over the years, but I've never come across one as good or as effective as The Way. I find it a fantastic way to start off each day, and it has really helped me feel calmer, relaxed, and more present. In fact, I love this app so much that I recently decided to invest in the company and join them in their mission to get more people meditating. Meditation has been shown to have all kinds of benefits, reducing stress, increasing calm, improving focus, and over time, has even been shown to result in positive structural changes in the brain in areas linked to memory, focus, and emotional regulation. But, of course, you only get those benefits if you actually do it. And that's one of the main reasons I love the way so much. It makes it really easy to establish a meditation practice that sticks. The Way are offering my podcast listeners an incredible 30 free meditation sessions to get you started with your practice. To take advantage, all you have to do is go to thewayapp.com forward slash live more. 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 Beaufort. Alain is known for his unique ability to apply philosophical concepts to everyday life. And in this clip, Alain explains how our childhood can impact our adult relationships and behaviors and shares some practical tools that could 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. Yeah. 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. Mom and dad don't get on, they're throwing things at each other, there's violence etcetera. 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. You just go off and you you fantasize, you you disappear. This is brilliant. If you are five years old, you can't you can't disappear. You can't get rid of your parents. You will you come up with this fantastic way of dealing with it. You dissociate. Fantastic. Scroll forward twenty years and that person's in a …