A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

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.

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.

If we stop admiring, it is not because we are ever really bored or because it is “normal” to take someone for granted; it is chiefly only because we are, at some level, furious. Anger creeps into love and destroys admiration. We cease to delight because we unknowingly grow entangled in various forms of unprocessed annoyance. We can’t cheer them on

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.

People who cause a fuss don’t generally do so because they have been listened to a lot; they start screaming—and later taking drugs and robbing stores—because their smaller, younger messages were never heard.

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

We can continue the questioning: Why is this thing so worrying? And then: What could I tell myself to make this less bad? And finally, we can ask ourselves to complete a sentence: I feel compassion for myself because

We tend to be imprisoned by a set of stories and judgments that we repeat to ourselves without even noticing how partial, and usually unfair, they are to us, and how open they might be to being questioned and nuanced.

A well-functioning mind recognizes the futility and cruelty of constantly finding fault with its own nature.