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

We can accept the truth of an extraordinary redemptive idea that the modern age cannot tolerate: that it might be possible to fail in the eyes of the world and yet to remain valuable and deserving of love.

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

Recovery can start the moment we admit we no longer have a clue how to cope.

A healthy mind combines an appropriate suspicion of certain people with a fundamental trust in humanity. It can take an intelligent risk with a stranger. It doesn’t extrapolate from life’s worst moments in order to destroy the possibility of connection.

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

We cause ourselves a lot of pain by pretending to be competent, all-knowing, proficient adults long after we should, ideally, have called for help. We suffer a bitter rejection in love, but tell ourselves and our acquaintances that we never cared. We hear some wounding rumors about us but refuse to stoop to our opponents’ level. We find we can’t

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.

As a result, we often lie, not for advantage or thievery, but in order to keep hold of a love we desperately want to rely on. We pretend to be strong and unafraid. We disown our needs and longings. We put on a show of being someone else.