Winnicott on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Relationship

We can be more compassionate. We will inevitably, in the course of therapy, realize how much we were let down by certain people in the past. A natural response might be blame. But the eventual, mature reaction (building on an understanding of how our own flaws arose) will be to interpret others’ harmful behaviour as a consequence of their own distu

Children need to see positive confirmation of themselves in the world around them and they need to believe in their capacity to love. Adults are no different. But when we get into a spiral of anger and resentment, as the little boy did with his mother, it can feel hard to let grievances go, especially if pride is at stake. What eventually allows th

all good lovers are in a way good psychotherapists: that is, the success of modern romantic relationships critically depends on the degree to which both partners can, at crucial moments, adopt a therapeutic attitude toward the other’s compulsions, blind spots, rages, and eccentricities.

It also risks reducing care to giving, protecting, and fixing, rather than treating it as a negotiation of needs that involves assuming strength in the other, resisting the temptation to provide all the answers, inevitable failure and disappointment, allowing for the fact that our desires for others may chafe against what those others want for them

Second, you can try “This Is Your Life.” This is a game some couples play at the end of each year. They write out a summary of the year from their partner’s point of view. That is, they write, in the first person, about what challenges their partner faced and how he or she overcame them. Reading over these first-person accounts of your life can be