To his surprise, he told me, he found himself crying and shouting in the therapist’s room about his own father leaving him. Therapy helped me put the feelings where they needed to be—with the desertion of my dad, rather than thinking I just wasn’t cut out to be in this relationship or to be a parent.

activities that slowly redefined what certain situations meant to her,

By feeling our childhood hurts, we strengthen our adult capacity for embracing the opposites within—the good and bad aspects of our parents, the good and bad aspects of our own inner child, the pain and the pleasures experienced by our open, undefended child-self. And we discover that we have a much greater capacity now to tolerate feelings and