How to stop interrupting yourself

Inner listening is the key to avoiding a breakdown

Here’s a story about how a song on the radio stopped a person in their tracks, and maybe saved them from a mental health spiral. It’s about a friend – not a visitor of mine in therapy – and I tell it with kind permission.

A healthcare professional in his forties, this person was driving to a convention centre, with his mind on the presentation he was scheduled to give. A song came on from when he was sixteen, and he started to cry. He told me he never usually did that. But our body is the best therapist we’ll ever have, and maybe his body had spotted a teachable moment. Anyway, the tears got so much that he had to pull over and stop the car.

In the usual run of things, I suppose this man would just have continued his journey when the tears were finished. But as it happened, blue lights appeared in the mirror and a police car pulled up. The officer was professional and compassionate. When she realised the breakdown wasn’t mechanical, she was reluctant to let the driver continue. She asked if he wanted an ambulance. And in that moment the question shocked him so much, he heard himself accepting.

So: his car went home on a tow truck, and he spent a few hours in Accident & Emergency, with no signal on his phone. No distractions, just those unfiltered faces you see in hospital waiting rooms: numb, or anxious, or twisted around their pain. In the end he chose to leave without seeing a doctor – but in a way, the waiting room was the treatment. He finally got four uninterrupted hours to think about the pain in his own life. A week later he was in therapy, working through some buried stuff. I think he did well for listening to what his emotions were saying. This sounds like one of those mini-breakdowns that save you from the big one, if you take it seriously.

This was a healthcare professional – a human being who shows love every day by easing other people’s suffering. Someone who spends their weeks caring for others, for low pay, and then spends their weekends at conferences to share best practice. His whole life was about showing love. So how does a person like that get to this point, where their own emotions just erupt?

His case is interesting, because he’s all of us. To some extent we all block out the emotional pain we’re carrying. We’ve learned to do to ourselves exactly what we do as a society: to be too busy for our feelings.

Our movies, for the most part, aren’t dialogue-driven anymore. Our face-to-face conversations are fewer, and increasingly hurried. And online we have thirty-second formats in which we can show up as vulnerable, or outraged, or hurt – but god help us if we release a thirty-minute reel of us pulled over on the motorway verge, ugly with tears and snot, just mindlessly sobbing for all of humanity’s pain. No one wants to like or subscribe to that much reality. So, we send an emoting mask out into the world, and we keep our deep emotions locked down.

Which makes these times subtly deceptive. In some very welcome ways the world is becoming a more empathetic place. Younger people in particular are often a humanising force, and our emotional vocabulary is expanding with each generation. But at the same time, the productivity culture is accelerating faster than empathy can save us. We’re all stretched thin, with no time to listen for our deeper feelings. Which means that all our insightful emotional terms can sometimes just be better labels for surface emotion. If you needed to diagnose the madness of our age, you could say it suffered from an unfounded conviction that it was being real.

If we were really being real, schools would be closed for the day because teaching staff were in tears about their hungry students. Delicate manufacturing operations would grind to a halt because workers were clumsy with rage against the billionaires. Planes would be stuck at the gate because the pilots were too distraught about the wars. If we were honest in public that the world is just making us too emotional to continue right now, then the world could begin to change. Instead we pull over onto the emergency lane of our lives, one at a time, and weep into the dashboard. We accept to experience our society’s collective madness as our own individual mental health conditions – depression, addiction and anxiety; obsession, mania, and despair.

Look at us: tender human beings with our hazard lights on, weeping behind the wheel. When those unexplained tears come, you find yourself auditing your day, your week, your life – trying to trace the cause of your grief. But often there’s no clear audit trail. This is what it is to be human now: we watch accelerating horrors on the news, stony-faced. We suffer increasing abuses from our employers, our societies and the companies we have to deal with – and it’s not always safe to react.

Meanwhile, addictive algorithms have us scrolling through our human condition at incredible speed. We experience every carefully-framed emotion for a second or two, but without slowing down enough for our faces to catch up with those emotions, or for our bodies to participate in them. This life has forced us up to the surface. And so sometimes, of course, a great unconsoled emotion rises from the deep and inhabits us for a little while. Sometimes it can be so powerful that we seem to be breaking down. If a sympathetic police officer suggests an ambulance in a moment like that, we might accept too.

So, how can you and I escape this boom-bust cycle of superficiality and breakdown?

For the visitors I work with, and for me too, the answer always includes self-love. Let’s not get self-love mixed up with egotism, or self-indulgence, or some abstract cosy feeling. Self-love is the straightforward and practical work of respecting your humanity enough to listen when it’s speaking.

This world is just not set up to listen to your honest pain. So if you don’t do the listening yourself – in order to understand your pain, and process it at some speed of your own choosing – then your pain will eventually just erupt and take over your mind. You’ll become one of those disconnected people orbiting their own agony, prey to every nostrum and conspiracy theory, regulated by their own compulsions and fixed ideas. Self-love is how you avoid that happening to you, and it’s also how you recover if it does happen. If a person risks drowning, we wouldn’t think it selfish of them to do some self-swimming. In fact, we might think it unselfish of them to not be relying on rescuers.

So, self-love is the foundation of good mental health – but how do you do self-love, if it doesn’t come naturally?

Like any other kind of love, self-love begins with listening. Think about how unloved you feel in a conversation when someone interrupts you. People who interrupt often don’t realise they’re doing it – they’re just listening inwards, into their own trauma. They’re not necessarily being selfish, but their stuff is talking louder than you are, and they’ve probably been locked in conversation with it for years. But people who wait for you to finish what you’re saying are listening outwards, into a world in which you actually exist. In fact the most profound and practical way of showing someone love is to never interrupt them. To love someone is to agree that they fully exist.

Self-love is no different. It takes a lot of self-love to listen and learn from your own deeper emotions, instead of suppressing them. And self-love – again, like any other kind of love – is not some magical thunderbolt we must wait to be struck by. Love is always a choice: a choice to listen and to accommodate. Love is only ever your choice to let someone fully exist. And when that someone is you, for goodness’ sake stop interrupting them!

We live in an interrupting society. We have so many ways to interrupt our own deep emotions. We interrupt ourselves with alcohol and drugs, self-criticism, materialism, fantasising, bingeing, and busy-work. And the culture colludes, by keeping us scrolling faster than our souls can keep up. We scroll right past ourselves.

A culture of constant acceleration is a self-hating culture. Unfortunately we live in that culture for now, and so true self-love is a deeply counter-cultural act. Self-love is a choice to stop interrupting yourself. Deep emotions will slowly start to surface, and they will become your real life. You’ll start growing immediately, in all kinds of unexpected and beautiful ways, into your full humanity.

Please excuse this interruption – I’ll stop talking now. If you like, maybe you can take the next minute to listen inward and hear what’s there.

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Thank you for reading Human Again, a small dose of therapy in your in-box every week. Comments & feedback are how I learn. I also warmly welcome you sharing your own experiences. So please don’t hold back from leaving a comment!

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