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.

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.

We think of motivation as something driven by discipline. Often it is just that, a pressurized pushing and shoving from behind, away from the possible bad consequences of our inaction. As someone like Jordan Peterson is happy to remind us, discipline guards against the perils of what some people call laziness. But discipline is not the only form of motivation.

Rather than being pushed from behind, away from the failure we dread, we can be drawn forward from in front, led onward by curiosity, fascination, and a desire to explore the world. I do not believe in laziness. I think what we call laziness is actually internal conflict, a pattern in someone’s functioning, not a trait of his or her nature. If together we can bring the conflict into focus, you can position yourself to make more free, informed choices about what it is you actually want to do with your opportunities. “All you have to do,” as Gandalf said to Bilbo Baggins in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, “is decide what to do with the time that is given to you.”

I had a teacher years ago—a brilliant, soulful teacher of Ancient Greek, the late Jack Collins—whose maxim was “To row is human; to sail, divine.” Of course it was a play on the old proverb “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” What he meant was that there’s a place for discipline, and it’s often necessary, especially near the beginning of a project. But after discipline has done its work, after it’s gotten us launched, rowing our boat away from land, pushing on the oars, there comes a time when discipline is no longer needed, and the serious joy of the work takes its place. When you row a boat, there’s a 1:1 correspondence between the effort you invest, and the result you get. Shove on the oars this much, and the boat lurches forward so much as a result. But when we sail, we hoist the canvass, and thereafter the job is just to maintain the right relationship to the wind—a mighty force, for whose creative power we are not responsible. The wind is a free-flowing, abundant aspect of the environment, and the sailor(s) work is to keep the sail so oriented that the ship can move in the desired direction under the wind’s wild, natural power. Rowing is no longer necessary. One unit of effort can now yield much more than one unit of progress.

Reading books, or writing them, works the same way. At first, you’re counting how many pages you’ve read since you sat down; how many minutes you’ve been reading; what chapter you’re up to; and so on. But then you get successfully caught by the unfolding story, and you forget about all that counting and measuring. You read on because you want to know what happens next; because you care about the main character; because the story is carrying you along. Of course it isn’t only our intellectual tasks that work this way. So do a great many more of our human endeavors…

Therapy is sometimes a form of rowing out, away from the familiar shores of our trouble, and toward the open world, where there are currents and breezes that we can harness for our purposes if we can find the right balance of humility, self-knowledge, and ambition. To row is human; to sail, divine.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

We were all born innocent and beautiful. Then we had a childhood, in which the people who raised us gave us some combination of three things: love (getting the good stuff), neglect (not getting the good stuff), and abuse (getting the bad stuff). When a kid gets neglect and/or abuse from a parent, the psychological process involved is something like this. The person who is supposed to take care of him with nurturance and protection is giving him pain instead. Why? Because the parent is a bad parent. He or she may be a good person, but too damaged by their own untreated trauma to provide good parenting.  If the child realizes this, he will be forced to see that his parent will never meet his needs for consistent nurturance and protection, since they aren’t capable of it. That’s despair, and no kid can tolerate that, because the younger you are, the more your very survival is at risk if your parent is bad. Babies can actually die from lack of love, even if they get all their physical needs met (food, cleanliness, protection from heat and cold, etc.). The name for that is marasmus, or “failure to thrive.” To avoid such life-threatening despair, the child uses the only available defense, despite the terrible price it will cost him. He keeps the parent good, by taking their badness into himself: he must be the bad one, so that the parent can still—in his mind—remain good.

This defense solves the terrifying problem of being stuck with a bad parent. But it does so at the expense of the child’s self-respect, and he grows up believing that he is bad to the core. After all, only a bad child would get bad treatment from a parent who was fair and just. If the parent is good, and yet she treats him badly, it must be because he himself is bad: he must deserve the bad treatment. Believing this, he grows up with a heart full of toxic shame. Guilt is pain about something you have done, but shame is pain about what you are. Some kids misbehave—lying, stealing, hurting themselves or others, abusing drugs, failing at school, having sex too early and unsafely—in order to verify that they are indeed the bad one. If they are going to get neglect and/or abuse no matter what they do, then doing bad things will at least mean that they really do deserve the pain they get, and that feels less unjust. This story accounts for the fact that, when troubled adolescents do get asked why they behave so badly, they often have no idea.

Such a kid typically hates her parents and appears to be in a battle with them. Her destructive behavior is seen as a means of revenge against the parents, and in a way, that’s just what it is. It can also be a protest against a deeply felt though poorly understood sense of having been wronged. It can also be an effort to attract the parent’s attention so that neglect will be replaced by punishment (since, unlike neglect, punishment at least requires the parent to acknowledge the kid’s existence). And in an environment of authoritarian bullying, parental commands backed by force, and unexplained rules, a kid may become destructive in order to preserve her integrity. I may be a bad person, he thinks, but at least I’m my own person.

Now that you’re an adult, the old defense has worn out its usefulness. It costs far more than it’s worth. When you hear the question—what’s wrong with me?—the answer is nothing, because it’s the wrong question. The right question is, What happened to me?

There are several reasons why being kind to yourself might feel terrifying (at first). It requires admitting that the good parents you yearned for are never coming, because here you are, doing for yourself what they should have done. It reminds you of what you should’ve gotten from the people who were supposed to nurture and protect you. The better you treat yourself, the greater the contrast between what you got and what you now realize you deserved. And if you grew up believing that kindness was weakness, that kind men were feminine, that kind people were naïve and lucky and full of shit, then you have to admit you were wrong.

Feelings of worthlessness/self-hate are messages from a wounded child part of you. Don’t buy into what he says. You know things he does not know. Turn toward him, and in your mind’s eye (your imagination), pick him up and dry those tears and speak to that kid with soothing words of love. Tell your inner lonely little child: I love you… I got you… we’re ok… come with me. Talking to parts of yourself that way is not crazy, it is a survival skill.

When you hear intrusive negative thoughts, use your mind/your intellect/your inner observer. Say, oh, look, part of my mind is attacking me right now… isn’t that interesting. Say to that inner attacker: Oh, you again. Yes, I know what you think. But I know something you don’t know. Say to that inner attacker, Yes, I know you think you’re making some kind of contribution, but aggression is not the kind of help I need right now. When you hear intrusive negative thoughts, connect them with what you know about your history. Oh! This is an echo of other people’s shit that got thrown at me in the past. I do not have to hang onto it.

Your inner attacker is an internalized parent, a copy of the one(s) who gave you some amount of neglect and/or abuse. Your parent(s) may have grown old and harmless by now, but those aged parents aren’t inside you. What is inside you is a figure made of the young, strong, crazy people they were when you were a kid. You can’t get rid of that inner bully or kill him/her off. S/he has a place at the table. But not the head of the table. The inner bully needs a seat in the car, but not the driver’s seat. Get that person into a passenger seat so you can steer your life.

When you start to love yourself, it will soon become clear that the love that you have inside—which is yours to give, when and where you want to—is very high-quality, and it’s going to get even more valuable as you grow. It’s the good stuff. It is worth a lot. You can be a source of the good stuff, giving as well as receiving. When you’re accustomed to feeling like a vacant cave of darkness, a black hole from which not even light can escape, it’s strange to think you might turn into a star that radiates light instead. But it happens.

For Further Reading:

The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller

The Forgiving Self, Robert Karen

Healing the Shame That Binds You, John Bradshaw

Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach

Slings and Arrows: Narcissistic Injury and Its Treatment, Jerome David Levin

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.