A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

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.

Powerful emotions, therapy says, are triggered in the present by traumas and difficulties that began in a distant and usually largely forgotten past.

We operate instead with surface and misleading pictures of our dispositions and goals. We may settle, in haste or fear, on the most obvious answers: our new friend is very kind, we should aim for the most highly paid job, our childhood was “fun.”

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.

At the heart of mental illness is a loss of control over our own better thoughts and feelings.

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

There is no risk of spoiling anyone by doing so: Spoilt people are those who were denied love, not those who had their fill of it.

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

Small household tasks offer us a metaphor for the sort of fixing we’re interested in but can’t yet quite manage inside ourselves. They give us the courage to imagine a day when we might be as tidy inside our minds as the linen cupboard outside currently is—thanks to what we did all afternoon.