All of these have roots in a sense of not having mattered enough to anyone over long childhood years.

The loving companion doesn’t get bored of instilling the same fundamental message: I am here for you and it will be OK.

Our sadness starts to seem like a personal curse rather than what it more fairly always is: an inevitable feature of being alive.

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

And yet that is exactly where love should and must be deployed if relationships are to survive. True love cannot be directed solely toward those who are admirable and virtuous. It has to soften our judgments in relation to people who are at points undeniably maddening and plainly wrong.

In the ruins, we may be able to ask ourselves new questions: What do I actually want to do? Whose opinion do I really care about? We’ll have slain the dragon of prestige and may now be ready to live on our own terms for the first time.

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

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.

We must make time, as often as once a day, to lie very still on our own somewhere, probably in bed or maybe in the bath, to close our eyes and direct our attention toward one of many tangled or murky topics that deserve reflection: a partner, a work challenge, an invitation, a forthcoming trip, a relationship with a child or a parent. We might need