The following section includes works that have been valuable sources in the writing of this book, and also additional ideas to help you understand emotional health. They are all recommended further reading.
Introduction: Are You Emotionally Healthy?
Leo Tolstoy’s short story The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a brilliant evocation of the importance of waking up and smelling the coffee, for those of us living in affluent societies. A conventionally successful member of the Russian ruling elite discovers he has cancer. By the time he is on his death-bed he realizes that his life has been spent in empty social exchanges and that he feels no authentic intimacy with any of his family members. His epiphany challenges what it means to be normal or sane or happy, and offers the potential for something more profound.
Erich Fromm’s book To Have or To Be is a view of emotional health that is anchored in his Buddhist, psychoanalytic Marxism. A member of the Frankfurt School of psychoanalysis, Fromm shows how both one’s childhood history and modern capitalism can prevent us from understanding what really matters in life. He offers an alternative to conventional existence.
Mike Leigh’s 2008 film Happy-Go-Lucky portrays a young woman whose emotional health seeps out into the life of those around her.
Listen to Gary Jules’s version of the song ‘Mad World’. Its sadness at how dead too many people feel is heartbreaking, and can be a launchpad for seeking a better way.
1. Insightfulness
Edward St Aubyn’s five Melrose books, Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk and At Last (Picador), are about the life of a man who was sexually abused by his father as a child and neglected by his mother. Struggling with drug addiction and unstable relationships, the central character battles to carve out some capacity for choice in his life, as he overcomes the legacy of his difficult childhood. It offers a realistic picture of what redemption might consist of.
Many people have written to me saying that they found my book, They F*** You Up – How To Survive Family Life (Bloomsbury 2006), very helpful in making sense of how different components of their childhood history have affected their adult personality. Linda Hopkins’s biography of the psychoanalyst Masud Khan, False Self (Other Press, 2006), describes a man who fought to have insight into his flawed character and who failed. Using the journal Khan kept of his secret thoughts and feelings, she shows how he struggled to cope with his sense of powerlessness and insignificance. Oddly enough, in his failure to achieve insight there is a hope for all of us – it is not easy to make sense of your past and to really change how you behave in the present, but just because Khan failed does not mean we cannot succeed. Hopkins suggests some of the ways in which insight can elude us. The book also provides an interesting account of how the psychoanalytic movement developed between the 1950s and the 1980s.
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound beautifully, as well as entertainingly, shows how careful exploration of one’s past – in this case using a dream (including sets designed by Salvador Dali) – can help a person to alter their behaviour in the present, based on understanding how childhood trauma is being enacted.
John Lennon’s song ‘Mother’ is a plaintive cry to his mother for leaving him. It can be found on the album John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band, which includes several other moving songs about the impact of his childhood on him. Another song, You Choose, on the Pet Shop Boys album Release is an amusing attempt to encourage the listener to accept responsibility for a state of mind which we usually assume is beyond our control: falling in love.
2. Living in the Present: A Sense of Self
Almost anything written by P. G. Wodehouse – but especially the Wooster stories – has vibrant characters who live in the present, and that vibrancy can rub off on the reader. Although thought of as a children’s book, Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie also powerfully conveys what it feels like to be in the present – few fictional characters do so more than Peter Pan himself. The novel Engleby (Vintage, 2008), by Sebastian Faulks, subtly explores the multiple personae that a seemingly quite normal person might have. It also conveys the problems of living at second hand.
Mark Williams’s book on Mindfulness (Piatkus, 2011) offers a guide to how to get in touch with the present moment, and a CD which can be used as a practical aid.
The BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s veiled autobiography, A Perfect Spy (available on DVD), provides a well-observed analysis of why we develop secret lives. The book on which the series is based is equally good.
It’s impossible to choose a song that makes everyone feel alive, since it so depends on personal taste. ‘Dynamite’ by Taio Cruz would blast my 7-year-old son into the present – not that he lives anywhere else for most of the time (he is now eight and has moved on to ‘All Along The Watchtower’ by Jimi Hendrix). More contemplative might be ‘I Know That My Redeemer Liveth’ from Handel’s Messiah. For me, it’s the whole second side of the Beatles album Abbey Road, but especially ‘Golden Slumbers’.
3. Fluid, Two-Way Relationships
Being fluid and two-way in relationships does not mean spilling your guts; it can be very subtle, as is evident in the cunning and perceptiveness displayed by Jane Austen when she describes her characters’ complex and often implicit communications. All of her books are superbly written, but many people feel Emma is the most remarkable. The books offer an ethical map for conducting oneself in dealing with our fellow humans. Equally edifying, in a different way, is my favourite Evelyn Waugh book, A Handful of Dust. Its account of a husband’s betrayal by his wife is chilling. Perhaps most powerful of all is T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. It conveys the loneliness of the single person, although happily for Eliot he found love in his later years and largely gave up writing such searingly honest and deep poems.
There are no simple solutions to marital discord, but the best self-help method is called Imago Therapy. In essence, it entails repeating back to your partner what he or she says, and checking that you have understood them correctly. Harville Hendrix is the author of Getting the Love You Want (Pocket Books, 2005), the clearest popular account of the method. Approaching relationships from a different angle, Solitude by Anthony Storr (Simon & Schuster, 2005) persuasively contends that we place too high a value on relationships in modern life, demanding too much of them. He maintains that there is much to be gained from our own company.
Perhaps the greatest television drama ever made, Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven (BBC, available on DVD) explores relationships and the differences between the genders. Using popular classics from the 1930s, the characters occasionally break into song to convey their inner states, mouthing the words as if in a musical. Leaving aside the fact that this was the most innovative and imaginative use of the television medium of all time – making today’s efforts seem pathetic in their unoriginality – the series has much to teach us about love, sex and romance.
Whilst most pop songs are about either falling in love (e.g. 10cc’s ‘I’m Not In Love’) or being rejected by lovers (most of Bryan Ferry’s oeuvre as a single artist, e.g. ‘Dance Away The Tears’), few explore the finer subtleties of communication. Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Leonard Cohen album has some of the most poetic and moving things to say about the travails of romantic love.
4. Authenticity in our careers
New Grub Street by George Gissing remains the definitive account of the tension between writing for profit as a journalist and writing to express yourself or to create art. Although written in the late nineteenth century, the need to earn a living and afford a middle-class lifestyle whilst also doing work that you are proud of and care about remains as difficult to reconcile today as it ever was. The same tension between intrinsic and extrinsic goals and motives is to be found in the excellent This Bleeding City by Alex Preston (Faber & Faber, 2011). A harrowing account of life in a bank during the 2008 Credit Crunch, its main protagonist is torn apart by the conflict between his desire to do something worthwhile and his ambition to become rich.
My own book Office Politics: How to thrive in a world of lying, backstabbing and dirty tricks (Vermilion, 2013) offers ways to sustain authenticity and succeed in your career. In some respects it is a guide to surviving a problem I explored in my book Affluenza: How to succeed and stay sane (Vermilion, 2007), which explained why it is so hard to keep your marbles, in a crazy society.
The John le Carré BBC TV drama series (again available on DVD), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, is not only gripping to watch, it explores how you can be real and true even while working in the deceitful world of espionage.
Always preoccupied with the problem of what is authentic, John Lennon wrote his song ‘Working Class Hero’ to express his frustration at the unreality he felt as a result of his massive success. It contains the lines ‘There’s room at the top they are telling you still / But first you must learn how to smile as you kill.’
5. Playfulness and Vivacity in Parenting
Nancy Mitford’s novel Love in a Cold Climate provides a delightful portrait of the amusing family culture in which she was raised. The playfulness and vivacity transcend the privileged, aristocratic setting, and offer a model to us all.
My book Love Bombing: Reset Your Child’s Emotional Thermostat (Karnack Books, 2012) offers a very simple method for sparking love, playfulness and vivacity between you and your children between the ages of three and puberty. It can be undertaken to varying degrees of intensity and seems to change the way you relate to the child. You simply tell them that you are going to spend some time exclusively with them (it is usually the mother who does it, but not necessarily), during which they will be completely in control, and during which time you will shower them with love. In the full version, ideally you take the child away from the family home for the weekend, perhaps leaving on Friday night and returning on Sunday. You ask the child to choose a name for this period together (‘Mummy Time’ or similar). In the run-up to it, the child finds themselves very excited, and during the weekend, perhaps spent at a bed & breakfast facility or, if you can afford it, a hotel, the child is in charge. Within reason you do whatever he or she wants. You also tell the child that you love them, with real passion. The odd thing is how many parents find that the child suddenly becomes a delight to be with. They in turn rediscover why they were so glad when the baby was first born, or why they love their child.
On returning, you try and arrange to spend half an hour every evening with the same rules (often hard to do, I realize, especially if there are other children – back in the zone, so to speak. Many parents report that a Love Bombing weekend, or some variant of it (perhaps as little as an afternoon), produces dramatic shifts towards greater emotional health in both them and their child.
For fuller instructions on how to do this, read Love Bombing or contact me via my website, www.selfishcapitalist.com.
A more academic analysis of playfulness is Donald Winnicott’s classic, Playing and Reality (Routledge, 2005). The three types of mother I described in this chapter – Hugger, Fleximum and Organizer – are explained in detail in my book How Not To F*** Them Up (Vermilion, 2011).
Mike Leigh’s 1990 film Life Is Sweet, like most of his work, is a model of playfulness, this time in a family setting. Although often very funny, it also portrays the struggle of a defiant teenage girl with bulimia. The tensions in the family are exposed, but the underlying affection and solidarity felt by its members is celebrated, crucially lubricated by playful vivacity.
David Bowie’s song ‘Kooks’, on his Hunky Dory album, sympathizes with his son about having such eccentric parents. In actual fact, much of the care for Zowie, as the poor boy was named (subsequently changed by him to Duncan), was provided by a nanny. But the song does encourage playfulness and humility in parents in a beguiling fashion.
Conclusion: Meeting the Challenges
Of all the novels I have read, Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy offers the most profound account of how to live an emotionally healthy life. A nobleman has an encounter with a prostitute, who is convicted by the courts as a consequence. The nobleman decides to devote his life to helping her, and is appalled to realize the kind of society he lives in. Along the way, he carves out a much more meaningful raison d’être.
Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society (Routledge, 2001) develops his ideas about emotional health for individuals and society, still the nearest thing there is to a map for sane existence, despite having been written nearly sixty years ago.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film Amelie (2001) is as uplifting and amusing as can be. An innocent young woman accidentally does someone a favour and decides to start secretively making other people’s lives happier. Without the film becoming being corny or sentimental, she succeeds. Needless to say, she also finds love . . .
The song ‘Heroes’ by David Bowie, from the album of that name, remains the most powerful musical evocation of the power of intimate relationships to transcend external adversities. Equally moving and inspiring is Bowie’s song ‘Rock’n’roll suicide’, with which he ended his album Ziggy Stardust. Less well-known is his ‘Cygnet Committee’, from the album Space Oddity. It ends with repetition of the request ‘I want to live, I want to live.’