People cheat when they feel cheated. They lie when they feel lied to, and they steal when they feel robbed. Some of that springs from a need for cosmic balance, where I pay-forward whatever I suffered that should not have been my fate. But some of it is a communication, where my behavior is meant to inscribe on the walls of the universe: this thing I do to others, is what was done to me.

Compulsive shoplifting, for example, can be a kind of broadcast to the world, silently announcing that I have been deprived of my due. Typically, the stolen good was not a material object but a form of experience, some crucial, human relational need that I now despair of ever meeting. Why the despair? Because of too many failed attempts to get hold of that primal good, and because the critical period has passed, in which the needful thing could have found its mark, by meaning just what I needed it to mean: that I am a good-enough person, in a good-enough world. If I can believe this belief, then a good-enough life-of-my-own can feel both permissible (fate will allow it) and feasible (I can manage it). If I doubt my own goodness and/or the goodness of people in general, it will be much harder for me to build an ongoing good experience of being myself. So, whence comes this necessary faith in the human good?

According to Heinz Kohut, what children need are parents who can supply two crucial developmental resources: first, a mother (figure) who mirrors our childhood grandiosity and affirms it for us, and second, a father (figure) whom we can idealize and look up to, identifying with him in an aspirational way. Kohut saw these two needs as ordered, both chronologically and in their relative importance. He also saw childhood and youth as eras that often afford us second chances to get what we need, or, if things go poorly, a new round of trauma (from deprivation or other emotional injury). A step-parent, say, can step in and make things much better, or much worse.

In the 1970’s, psychologist Urie Brofenbrenner made an observation which has often been quoted, and deserves even more notice today: “In order to develop normally, a child requires progressively more complex joint activity with one or more adults who have an irrational emotional relationship with the child. Somebody’s got to be crazy about that kid.” This Somebody need not be the original parent (biological or adoptive) or a step-parent; it can be, say, a relative, a guidance counselor, or a teacher — often an art teacher, perhaps because art is nearer to the emotions than most other subject areas taught in schools. But the changes in institutional culture of the past two decades have made it more risky and difficult for teachers to show special interest in troubled students who may need it. Among the religious, clergy can be well placed to show this kind of individualized interest, but they, too, have become understandably risk-averse as the stakes of being misunderstood have sharply risen. Librarians sometimes took on this kind of role in children’s lives, with often wonderful results, but smartphones and the internet have so fully replaced books that librarians are fading from view.

If a community is in sufficiently rough shape, an idealistic nonprofit might come along and offer a program that pairs at-risk youth with ethically ambitious adults who help them along in caring ways. But those programs don’t always appear, and not all childhood neglect or abuse happens in poorer cities and towns that are in obvious trouble. Much of American literature is about the family traumas of the middle class, and even the wealthy are often very desperate people — in part because they already have the money that everyone else assumes is the solution to every problem, yet their pain continues. “Spoiled,” remember, does not just mean “pampered.” It means a kid has been given everything except what’s most important: wholesome loving care. It is, after all, a metaphor about rancid milk — because material abundance paired with emotional scarcity can spoil a person’s capacity to believe that real love (which psychoanalytic language symbolizes as the breast milk of a loving Mother) exists anywhere.

Some kids who are deprived of one or more of Kohut’s two essential relational supplies (a mirroring mother figure and an idealizable father figure) become hyper-competent, fiercely independent adolescents. Later in life, they can have trouble coupling-up, because romance involves giving what they never received, and because the offer of love feels strange and dangerous to them. By contrast, some other deprived kids remain dependent for decades, relentlessly hoping the caregivers they need will come along, or indeed, that their own feelings and behaviors will eventually transform the attachment figures they do have into the wise and generous ones they still crave. Then there are those who combine elements of each, presenting as adults with impressive professional success while remaining lonely and emotionally entangled with their withholding parents. These people are ahead of their peers in the outside world, but behind them on the inside.

Much trouble can be avoided if several afflicted kids find each other in time to form a group, where they can do their best to raise one another. But this is hard, because independent kids are reluctant to depend on anyone, including peers; dependent kids may welcome fellowship, but their resentments can get displaced and wreck the very friendships they have loaded with meaning and value. An adolescent friend group, with its intense attachments, passions, and impulses, can work wonders or exacerbate personal trouble, depending which personality elements get validated within it, and how the larger world responds. Plenty of movies are about the various storylines that such a group can be found living through, though it’s rare that a clique of teenagers manages to learn, from a film, how to avoid the pitfalls in its path. Art might seem to promise lessons of useful prudence, but it mainly offers us a deeper understanding of those losses and mistakes we’ve already endured.

The benefits of therapy derive from insight on the one hand, and the therapeutic relationship on the other. Between the two, it’s usually the relationship that does the most good — but it’s a relationship built on a series of conversations whose main ingredients are the patient’s stories of the past and the recent past, expressions of feelings in the present, and interpretations that come from the therapist or from the patient (in other words, insight). Some of what gets illuminated and reframed is the experience of not-getting what we needed. It might seem like a waste of painful effort, to recount what you already know about old yearnings and losses. But it often turns out that the telling is itself a healing process, when someone is listening with consistently reliable respect and empathy. The teller and the listener can then reshape what the story means, shifting control of that meaning from the outside world of the past into the inner world of the present.

I don’t believe in laziness. Instead, I believe in internal conflict. For me, there’s no perverse trait that makes people avoid necessary work. Instead there are, as Freud taught, various parts of the self, some younger and more primitive, others older and more developed, and these want different things that conflict with each other. I’ve discussed the issue in this blog before, but I want to explore another side of it now.

Perhaps there are tasks you’ve been avoiding, even though you believe they would do you a lot of good—maybe you keep not-doing some prescribed physical therapy, or postponing a consultation with a psychiatrist, or putting off a reckoning with some career decision that keeps knocking at the door. Why aren’t you making the moves you wish you would make?

Well, check whether there’s any hidden rage that might be in the way. Are you more pissed off than you tend to suppose? If you take a look underneath your de facto boycott of what ought to come next, do you find some smoldering archaic anger blocking your progress? Maybe, maybe not—but anger can be hard to recognize in yourself if you disapprove of it, because you want to avoid any self-critical shame that might come from realizing you’re mad without having a rock-solid justification. If your anger is big, irrational, daunting, primal, disproportionate, scary—it may have those characteristics because it’s coming from a primitive part of self that has big feelings, big enough to be overwhelming. That’s why it’s repressed: the rageful child part of you is afraid its own anger would vaporize the world if you were to feel it in full; the more adult parts are ashamed because this same anger is so unreasonable, so savage, so… childlike.

Wounded child parts of self tend to feel that they live in a broken world, a cosmos cracked in half by the injustice of not getting the perfect parents that they needed (and sometimes, not even the good-enough parents). They feel cheated. Their rage is a cry for justice—that is the beautiful aspect of it, which should be respected. The downside is that feeling cheated by life tends to stop us from making necessary improvements. If I am stuck in the bitterness of feeling screwed-over, I may be living inside the misconception that any progress I dare to make would be a betrayal of the wounded child inside me. Adults boycott their own lives, they flounder and self-sabotage and procrastinate, because of a beautiful, bittersweet, tragic loyalty to their own grievances from long, long ago. The unwritten law of such a life is: If I go ahead and start building my own life for myself, it will mean that I approve of all the wrongs that were done to me in the past.

But the inner child is not actually gratified by the adult’s refusal to live a full, open-hearted life. The inner child is simply afraid that such a life would erase forever her claim to some eventual cosmic justice. So the way to get free of this prison-house is deliberately to seek out the inner child, and provide the necessary loving nurturance directly from your adult self, with reassuring words of warmth and dignity and tenderness. Don’t be a tough guy. Stop identifying with your Spartan high standards for a few minutes and give that kid some wholesome generous attention, because somebody has to, and you’re the only one who is in there deep enough to do the job. Remember a time when you were hurt or scared, and your parent either stayed away, or made it worse. Now watch yourself in your mind’s eye, the grownup you’ve become, walking onto the stage set and going straight to the suffering child and holding that child, saying soothing words of commitment and connection and safety. For example: “This stuff that happened was not fair. But I am here now, and I got you. I can’t betray you, because I am you; I’m you all grown up. And I’m with you, and I always will be. I love you.”

Now, watch the kid go to sleep at last, all done crying, inside your heart, where there’s a bed with a night-light and a teddy bear and all the good stuff kids need. Now walk quietly out of the room. Now turn back toward the current moment, your adult life, your present opportunities to build and to repair and to explore.

Action and learning and success are no longer stained with the implication that you have somehow capitulated to a corrupt world-order. You may have thought growth would require more cynicism, a devil’s bargain you persistently refused. It turns out, however, that less cynicism is what did the trick—not getting colder and more jaded (which is what scoffers mean when they yell ‘Grow up!’), but the opposite: giving that furious sulking inner infant your heartfelt affection, without scorn, without shame, without despair. Forward movement is your own prerogative, an exploration of what the environment affords and what your own gifts and experiences can equip you to attempt. You are free to live as best you can, knowing that though you will someday die, you do at least get to find out who you are, and to see what feels worthwhile, by earnest trial-and-error. It is time for that serious form of play we call work.

Some people struggle with a compulsive need to save money. Even when their income is more than adequate, they feel as if any expense on present desires would be reckless. They see their peers fail to save for the future, and it redoubles their resolve. Some of them aspire to an early retirement, socking away their earnings in pursuit of a specific number that means “safety,” or “success,” or “freedom”—forgetting that retirement (especially an early one) tends to cause a crisis of meaning, when the intrinsic rewards of working are suddenly subtracted from life.

Of course, there’s much to be said for financial prudence, but what I’m talking about is the extreme version, where the saver begins to suffer from money anxiety, far beyond what the real circumstances impose. This can take the form of missing out on too many things, but it can also involve a partner’s distress—not just because the person won’t buy gifts or take vacations, but because they inflict too much criticism about the other person’s spending habits. In a relationship, constant penny-pinching can build resentment. And if one partner always takes the role of money saver, the other will have a hard time avoiding being cast in the role of money spender. When the saver talks as if spending and wasting were the same thing, the spender will be at risk for shame and guilt. Those are bad for the relationship.

The proverbial phrase “penny-wise and pound-foolish” is useful here (a Britishism, where a pound is worth a hundred pennies). But suppose the miser is prudent on both levels, saving money in matters both large and small. There is still a sense in which the phrase applies, because most expenses are less important than the emotional well-being of yourself and those closest to you—especially if you have a partner, and even more so if you have children. If you’re managing money well enough that your income covers your expenses and permits you to save or invest some of each paycheck, it might be penny-wise, but pound-foolish, to refuse to take your partner out on a date. That’s because the relationship is worth pounds, not mere pennies, and paying for shared pleasant experiences in the present is a form of investment in the relationship’s future.

Not only that, but the present is, strictly speaking, all we have. Aside from the fact that we might somehow die tomorrow, the present is the living flame of experience, where we are, and its claim on our resources inheres in the truism that this, too—not just the future we’re so worried about—is life itself.

Suppose you are struggling with excessive frugality, to the point where your partner feels nagged and demeaned by your bids for total financial control. You find yourself commenting on their every purchase, even though you realize the pain and anger this tends to cause. How can you stop yourself from saying this kind of stuff?

Well, here’s an exercise that may help. Imagine yourself one year in the future. You’ve now made about a hundred more remarks concerning your partner’s spending habits, their specific purchases, and their ideas about money, remarks that sprang from your anxiety and impulsivity. You rationalized your behavior by focusing exclusively on the fact that the money you were trying to save is, ultimately, for the both of you (for your family, whether it’s just the couple, or more). But now, one year on, you can plainly see how much accumulated suffering this has caused, how much distance it has put between you and the other(s) whom you love. You wish you had a time machine—you see where I’m going with this—to undo the piteous waste of closeness and harmony that you squandered in all that worrying. Well, here you are, back in the present, with those twelve months still stretching out ahead, unspoiled by any thoughtless utterance or grim withholding. How will you use this second chance?

Of course major purchases and big-ticket decisions will still require some discussion, some ambivalence, and some math. But in the small matters that crop up so frequently—stuff that costs less than 1 or 2 percent of a paycheck—you have a richesse of opportunities to let go, stay quiet, and smile on the process. For example, suppose your partner has just a brief moment free (between work and school, or childcare and eldercare, or housework and rehearsal, etc.) to grab a few necessities, and buys them at a big box store, instead of the 99 cent shop you’re sure is much cheaper. They could have spent $7 less and gotten the same stuff. Well, that $7 is not going “out the window.” It’s being invested in the relationship. You make the investment by giving up this one little nugget of control, and prizing the other person’s effort over your own vision of perfect prudence. As you watch yourself respond (rather than react), choose gratitude for the labor they did running errands, not anxiety about the price tag. Getting the job done should count for more than doing it perfectly.

When was the last time you took your beloved out to dinner? Can you afford to? If so, remember that this moment, too, is life. The present counts at least as much as the future will. And though you must save some for tomorrow, you should also spend some for today, lest it be remembered as a time of anxious austerity that could have been better, but wasn’t. Live your life, not your fears.

What do couples fight about? Well, in the great dialogue called the Euthyphro, Plato says “people disagree about the just and the unjust,” since if they merely disagreed about, say, the size of a stone, “they would simply resort to measuring.”

When couples argue, it’s usually about one person’s perception of unfair treatment from the other person. Someone feels some kind of injustice, and then takes a chance on bringing it up, hoping for a resolution of some kind (e.g., an apology). But when an argument becomes a fight – when it really goes off the rails, so that both people get caught up in rage –  it’s usually because someone felt as if their personal value as a human being has come under threat. Depending on that person’s life history, they may be more susceptible to feeling that way, even when it’s triggered by something pretty trivial.

Let’s use some inclusive, genderless names to paint an example of this. Call one partner Gamma, and the other, Theta. The conversation begins as a relatively cool-headed chat about some recent bit of behavior (say, Theta left dishes in the sink again) that doesn’t sit right with Gamma. So Gamma talks about it, and Theta acknowledges the reasoning, but feels judged and micromanaged. Theta doesn’t get upset, but doesn’t apologize either. Theta might even make the mistake of calling Gamma “too sensitive.” One way or another, Gamma gets the message that Theta won’t take the complaint seriously. This is because Theta experiences Gamma’s complaint as a bid for power and control, whereas Gamma experiences Theta’s dirty dishes as a direct insult.

At this point, things are deteriorating. What triggers the sharp decline in the quality of the conversation is this: Gamma feels undervalued as a person. It goes like this: “If my hurt feelings aren’t worth any serious attention, then I don’t matter; I’m not seen as a fully human somebody; I have no rights; we are not peers; I’m being taken for granted. If Theta can get away with slighting me this way, I am being erased from the universe. I just don’t count. And if I don’t put a stop to it right now, who knows where it will end?”

A few dishes in the sink. A loose cap from a toothpaste tube. A few minutes of lateness for a date night out. Why do these small disappointments sometimes kindle bonfires of anger and indignation? Such slights, real or perceived, can feel like a matter of life and death because for every one of us, feelings really were a matter of life and death in the beginning, when we were infants. The baby loves the mother (or primary caretaker), and if the mother doesn’t love her baby in return, the baby can actually die. Even with plenty of food and clean clothing, a baby can die of emotional starvation (“marasmus,” or “failure to thrive”).

Next, the person who feels undervalued may escalate the fight even higher by thinking, “Since my very worth as a human being is under attack, and everything is now at stake, it’s appropriate (even necessary) for me to blast my partner to smithereens, without restraint. If I don’t explode in protest, my not-exploding will mean I agree with my partner that I am indeed worth nothing. So my self-respect would be gone, too, and I’d become nothing.” That’s when the fight escalates still further, because Gamma’s emotional threat detection system is on red alert, calling all hands to battle-stations. What started out as a few dirty dishes – perhaps an act of passive-aggressive immaturity, perhaps just a thoughtless oversight – is now a mutual emotional hurricane.

How does couple’s therapy help here? It helps by coaching both members of the couple to reframe experiences of disagreement so that they do not trigger a state of emotional emergency based on perceived threat to personal value. Exploring the individual life histories of each partner may illuminate just why it is that their threat-detection systems are triggered by some things and not others.

In other words, the therapy opens up a gap between the objective issue at hand – what the fight seems to be about – and the emotional interpretation it produces in the person who feels insulted by it.

That gap is a breathing space, a pause, where the angry person has a chance to slip out of the rage and instead remain focused on the relational issue at hand. It’s a chance to respond, instead of reacting.

In terms of the brain, it’s an opportunity to keep one’s mind in the human prefrontal cortex (where we can think clearly, and even speak clearly), instead of dropping into the amygdala, an ancient reptile part of the brain that is only capable of fight-or-flight reactions to perceived threats.

In terms of personality, it’s a chance to solve the problem using your most adult self, who is experienced, well-informed, and ethically ambitious, rather than a more primitive part of self, such as an inner toddler or inner teenager who is full of gigantic, overwhelming, intensely unpleasant feelings like wrath, yearning, fear, and emotional pain.

Once a couple has learned to keep their ordinary conflicts from escalating, they are then free to collaborate in making informed choices about how to improve the relationship, or whether to end it. Whatever they choose, it will be a free choice of responses to what has happened within and between the two people. At that point, couple’s therapy moves beyond the emphasis on improving communication, and into an exploratory process of decision-making about where the two people want the relationship to go.