family

In addition to hopelessness, another primary indicator of an image is a pervasive sense of shame, a feeling of not being worthy or deserving. A specific shame lives in the inner child of all of us, stemming from the time we discovered, with a great shock, that our parents and our world were not perfect. The child has a great need to believe that he

My father’s generation was not one accustomed to discussing and analysing in the way ours is and I believe the telling and retelling of this story was as close as my father ever came to reflecting critically on the profession he practised. As such, it gives a vital clue to his thinking.

As the study’s longtime director George Vaillant put it, “Whereas a warm childhood, like a rich father, tends to inoculate a man against future pain, a bleak childhood is like poverty; it cannot cushion the difficulties of life. Yes, difficulties may sometimes lead to post-traumatic growth, and some men’s lives did improve over time. But there is a

If a baby goes unseen by their caretakers for long periods of time it can leave lasting emotional and spiritual damage. “The development of the soul in the child,” the philosopher Martin Buber wrote, “is inextricably bound up with that of the longing for the Thou, with the satisfaction and disappointment of this longing.”

When, in adulthood, you get to know someone really well, you often develop a sense for how they were raised. You see in some people’s current insecurities how as children they must have been diminished and criticized. You see, in their terror over being abandoned, how they must have felt left behind when young. On the other hand, when you meet peop

“They loved me the way they loved each other,” Moore wrote, “the only way they knew how: inconsistently and conditionally. From them, I learned that love was something you had to scramble to keep. It could be revoked at any minute for reasons that you couldn’t understand, that you couldn’t control. The kind of love I grew up with was scary to need,

For many immigrants, if you move here with trauma, you’re going to do what it takes to get by. You cheat. You beat your wife. You gamble. You’re a survivor and, like most survivors, you are a god-awful parent.

“You know, I don’t think she ever lost her shit around her white friends.” “Yeah, well,” Erin said ruefully, “we were family.”

Studies have documented that families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better homework skills, higher grades, greater emotional control, and more confidence. Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget. It’s not that