A Therapeutic Journey

The vulnerability is both touching and—when you remember how damaged certain adults are—appalling. You can do anything with little people. Tell them you are their friend and then burn their hand, give them a lollipop and then separate them from their parents, whisper to them late at night that no one must ever know about this and ruin them for life

But we will, of course, never arrive. There is no true destination and there is definitely no end point. All there is is the journey—an idea which, though it has its tragic dimension, liberates us to make more of the true valuable increments of life: moments.

We don’t actually ever need the whole of society to love us. We don’t have to have everyone on our side. Let the Robert Greenes of this world—and their many successors in newspapers, living rooms, and social media down the ages—say their very worst and nastiest things and be done with them. All that we need is the love of a few friends or even just

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott made a distinction between what he termed a “true” and a “false” self. In order to be healthy, a baby and developing child needs to be allowed to express and experience its true self: that is, it has to be honest about its actual wishes and desires, without fear of censorship or any pressure to compromise. If it i

The timid always imagine that anger might destroy everything good. They overlook, because their childhoods encouraged them to, that anger can also be a fertilizer from which something a lot less bitter and a lot more alive can emerge.

The spirit of true love should require that whenever there is feedback, we turn gratefully to our partner and ask for more, that we continuously search to access a better version of ourselves, that we see love as a classroom in which our lover can teach us one or two things about who we should become—rather than as a burrow in which our existing er

Everyone, during the close-up, prolonged inspection all relationships entail, is sure to reveal themselves as being substantially disturbed. Which is why we so much want and need to be with someone who grasps, with reference to the complexities of our early emotional lives, the essential normality of our oddities. They might win our hearts by sayin

We are the insane ones and they will always fly the flags of health, rationality, and balance. They feel sorry for us from afar: We are the proverbial drowning man and they the observer on dry land.

Loving companions bear no such hints of superiority. They do not judge us as beneath them when we lie crumpled in our pyjamas at midday because they do

With the example of therapy in mind, we’ll be less upset by squalls, less frightened of viciousness, and better able to hear with wry patience that we are apparently a shit-faced bastard who ruined someone’s life—only, ten minutes later, to hear an addendum that we are also someone our partner will love to eternity. Anger and irritation don’t destr