A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

Saying “I know” or “oh yes” won’t—as psychotherapy knows—be quite enough. What we need to do instead is to paraphrase what our ailing companion has said, to build sentences that repeat back to them the essence of the difficulty they have expressed but in different words. This form of precis deftly signals two things: first, that we have precisely g

humor. Feelings get less strong, not stronger, once they’ve been acknowledged.

First and foremost, those in authority know what they are doing and our task is to obey and jump through the hoops they set for us. We desire to please teachers and gain prizes, cups, and ribbons. There is an implicit curriculum out there—an externally mandated map of what we need to do to succeed—and a wise person must dutifully subscribe to its d

need you to accept—often and readily—the possibility that you might be at fault, without this feeling to you like the end of the world. You have to allow that I can have a legitimate criticism and still love you. I need you to be undefensive. I need you to own up to what you are embarrassed or awkward about in yourself. I need you to know how to ac

We’re doing it for someone else—an audience: our teachers and our parents, and their substitutes in adult life. Make us proud. You have to shine. We’ve given you so much. What matters is the performance, not any inner sense of satisfaction. Authority figures are benign, wanting what is good for us and speaking on behalf of our long-term interests.

What psychotherapy realizes is that, in our agony, what we desire more than anything, more than we usually even understand, is companionship: for someone else to know that we are suffering and to feel a measure of our pain more or less as we experience it. We yearn to feel that another person appreciates the scale of our despair and the magnitude o

Or someone might tell us: I don’t see why you jump to such unfair conclusions about me. Why can’t you believe that something just slipped my mind? You’re always accusing me . . . To which a reflective listener might answer: I’m sensing that you don’t feel trusted. You think I don’t have enough faith in your good nature and intentions.

Perhaps they caused us immense difficulties around a work crisis—and never apologized. Maybe they flirted with a friend of ours—and left us feeling tricked and unsure. They may have booked a vacation without asking us—and then insisted that they’d done nothing wrong.

We may have to go back as far as childhood to ask: What did I really enjoy doing? When did I feel most alive? There may be clues to what our future should be in the way we used to play as small children, when impressing and earning money were far from our minds.