family

“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,

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

These were tiny realizations, perceived as the little oddities of others, but they spoke to a quality of spareness in our house, a shying away from things sensual, a certain difficulty with indulgence. I snooped through that bathroom with a combination of longing and disdain, sensing that my family was different and that I wasn’t supposed to want

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.

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

One can retain precious memories of even the worst families provided one’s soul is capable of seeking out what is precious.

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

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.

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.”