How to Overcome Your Childhood

A feeling that one doesn’t deserve to exist unless one meets the criteria of worldly success can do wonders for one’s productivity. Offering conditional love has a habit of getting people to meet one’s conditions.

survive, we needed to be acutely responsive to what others expected us to do and say. The very question of what we might really want became secondary to an infinitely more important priority: manically second-guessing the desires of those on whom, at that time, our lives depended.

pleaser is lying for poignant reasons: not in order to gain advantage, but because they are terrified of the displeasure of others.

The collective gasp of relief would be heard in distant galaxies.

The Golden Future will, it starts to be clear, never materialise, but a bigger prize awaits: a feeling of liberation from expectations that were always disconnected from reality.

We are back to an all-too-familiar theme: that most psychological problems arise because people have not been empathetically cherished and reliably loved when it really mattered, and that if one could be granted one wish to improve the internal well-being of humanity, then it would be, with a wave of a magic wand, to do away with shame.

The people-pleaser is lying for poignant reasons: not in order to gain advantage, but because they are terrified of the displeasure of others.