With inflation rising faster than wages, fears of AI-driven unemployment, social divisions, climate change, and the collapse of the postwar order, there is much to be anxious about. Hearing about these threats so much, it’s easy to become desensitized and apathetic.

There is in this a crisis of meaning, as young people can no longer see themselves thriving inside a system that appears to be reaching its breaking point. The old values no longer ring as true. The old promises, increasingly incredulous.

Without meaning, the centre cannot hold. We revert to the extremities, to the law of the jungle.

What is there left to inspire, to give us hope? We need a new story, a grand narrative. A vision and mission young and old can be a part of.

Perhaps we need to ask ourselves what it means to be essentially human. What are our defining characteristics, now that even intelligence, the one characteristic that most obviously distinguished us from animals, is no longer exclusively ours? In fact, in terms of intelligence, broadly speaking, machina sapiens now surpass homo sapiens. Unlike cold calculating machines, we humans are passionate, but animals show greater passion. What then can set us apart?

Maybe such a question is impractical because the answer would remain an abstraction, and an incomplete one at that, since any essential definition would be devoid of the cultural and historical context that makes an answer meaningful. The question must be posed within the particular cultural historical context, because what it means to be a woman, what is means to be a man, mean very different things from one generation to the next. A more useful question would be ask, as the Ancients did, what does it mean to live a good (human) life, which brings us to the question of purpose, along with that of character and virtue. Now that intelligence is abundant, standing out is not a question of what you know but who you are. The French language eloquently expresses this emphasis by giving to knowledge (le savoir) a nuanced contrast with le savoir-faire and le savoir-être, which we can translate as a know-how and know-how-to-be.

— You are a human being, not a human doing.

— How shall I be?

Psychotherapy is not generally prescriptive in such matters, not because of some detached moral relativism, but because the greater moral imperative in therapy is honesty in service of truth. In this process, the client/patient is assisted in asking these questions as they relate to their particular lives and challenges. The work begins in earnest by taking greater responsibility for one’s own circumstances. Though there is much in life we cannot change, there is always some room for agency. Learning how to differentiate between the two creates possibilities to act more intentionally. In other words, to live more meaningfully.

Psychotherapy does not have a solution to big problems like inflation, unemployment, civil unrest, or war. The fruits of the therapeutic work cannot be mass-produced because it engages with the client/patient as an individual, not as a ‘mass man’. There is no psychotherapism that could be administered to re-engineer society, but perhaps honest conversations like the ones held in counselling rooms can help us respectively and collectively move from laying blame to taking responsibility. Then, we may pursue the question of what it means to live a good human life.

Then, we’ll be more likely to see concerted efforts to build rather than destroy.

Does it ever seem curious that some clients, no matter how many therapists they’ve seen, and despite the countless hours they’ve spent in therapy, don’t ever seem to get better? At some point you start to wonder, do they even want to get better?

Of course, they say they do. They’ve come to you. And yet the problem continues to plague them. Or perhaps it’s doing something else for them. Perhaps, from this problem, they derive some secondary gain.

Freud wrote about this phenomenon, among other places, in Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis, in which he says that “what is apparently the consequence of illness is in reality its cause, the motive for becoming ill.” Freud was here discussing the case of a young man for whom the presenting problem of OCD had the consequence of delaying his studies, and thus postponing an important decision regarding marriage he was expected to make upon their completion. Regarding this decision, the poor man was conflicted on many levels, and coincidentally, he was utterly preoccupied by his symptoms. He thus derived from his ailment some secondary gain.

Consider the example of a young woman plagued by indecision. She complained of not knowing what she wanted and routinely relied on others to choose for her. Upon inquiry, we learned that she’d once had the strong desire to pursue a particular goal, but was thwarted by family. To cope with the anger and resentment that arose, and the guilt and self-reproach that ensued, she learned to doubt herself until the very threat of experiencing all those emotions was replaced by anxiety about making mundane decisions. The latter problem was hers, and thus posed no threat to important attachment relationships. On the contrary, those relationships could be served by roping loved ones into recurring scenarios in which they could help her make decisions.

To be clear, clients like this are in no way faking the problem. They are sincerely struggling. It just so happens that the problem is also affording them some degree of protection. To better understand what’s at play, it is helpful to think in terms of parts or layers. There is one part that comes to therapy seeking help for a particular presenting problem. On the surface, this commonly sounds like an ask for ‘strategies’, implying a whole range of assumptions about the nature of the problem, such as the assumption that with the right ‘strategy (trick)’, the problem will go away. Unsurprisingly, when all the tips and tricks prove futile, one must wonder whether the problem itself is not some sort of strategy, a trick of the psyche to keep greater distress at bay.

Psychotherapy is not the purveyance of tricks and stratagems that a client can then deploy against distress. Psychotherapy is fundamentally a relationship, through which the fragmented parts can be known, processed, and integrated. Yet, clients may try, consciously, and most often unconsciously, to recruit the therapist in a tacit pact to talk about tricks and stratagems, thereby avoiding deeper, more distressing concerns. And when that happens, we see therapists burn out or feel increasingly incompetent, and clients who subject themselves to hours of psychotherapy, without ever getting to a place where real change can happen. The client may be getting some emotional need met by colluding with their therapist, but at the cost of learning to relate more maturely. The therapist may be getting some emotional need met by seemingly maintaining good rapport with the client, but at the cost of helping them actually grow.

There are layers to every story, just as there are many parts to every person. Though certain parts are louder than others, what we encounter is often the psychological equivalent of the magician’s sleight of hand.

If we accept the Cartesian claim as our premise, I think therefore I am, and consider the extent to which our thinking is now being delegated to machines, to what extent can we continue to consider that we truly exist? In what way is our existence dimmed by the fact that the machines are increasingly thinking for us? If Descartes’s Cogito is the foundational proposition of the modern self, is artificial intelligence its undoing?

aI think therefore am I?

Descartes’s method established the subjective self as the indubitable ground for truth, upon which the edifice of the modern self was to be constructed with the instruments of rationality. However, Reason is a very light rider, and the passions proved too unruly. Downstream from I think were the swift currents of I feel, a subjectivity that still evades the scrutiny of reason. Psychoanalysis and its various offshoots were Reason’s attempt to shed light on the murky undercurrents of the self, but they too were in turn carried by the torrent, for I feel ebbs and flows. Instead of answering the question what is the self, we now speak of many selves, or parts, as popularized by psychotherapy models like Internal Family Systems. Something about the subjective turn now feels like turning and turning in the widening gyre.

And now our machines are better at thinking than we are. It is almost as though we set out to build a mirror of what we thought ourselves to be: I think therefore I am. Descartes tied thinking to certainty and the Enlightenment project that proceeded from his postulate also pursued certainty, contributing with each successive generation to the growth of a body of scientific knowledge. Today, that body of knowledge is being fed to the machines like the forests of old to the ‘fires of industry’. The ecological impact is no allegory, and a sort of madness seems to have taken hold of society.

AI has all the answers. It can tell you what to wear with that shirt. It can tell you what to pair with that dish, what stock to buy, and which car to drive. It increasingly shapes your preferences, your likes and dislikes. And because it’s paying attention, it reinforces these preferences every time you refresh your ‘feed’ of content.

I’m reminded here of Marshall McLuhan’s contention: the medium is the message. What he meant is that the psychic and social effects of a particular medium are more significant than any content it conveys. Much as electric lights turned night into day, how might electric thoughts change the way we related to ourselves and to one another? And what are the second-order effects of this new medium?

Artificial light, he explains, extends ‘the scale and form of human association and action’, making it possible for the city to never sleep. But at what cost? What was lost when the ancient boundary of night was conquered? What might we lose when the boundary between thought and prompt is blurred? The sky is obscured, as it were, by light. It is an illumination that dims the majesty of the celestial tapestry. With artificial intelligence, the lights are on, but nobody’s home.

When you ask people about intelligence, they tend associate smarts with the ability to recall facts. All through school, we’re taught that intelligence is getting the right answers on the test. Well, if that’s smarts, then our machines have outsmarted us. But, maybe there’s more to intelligence than getting the right answer. Picasso once said that “computers are useless. They can only give you answers”. What was he getting at?

Human beings do not have all the answers. Yet in his wisdom, Socrates famously declared “I know that I know nothing”. Instead of giving answers, Socrates asked questions. He asked questions of those who had certainty in their opinions, only to help them understand the baseless assumptions and contradictions that underpinned them. His method, he likened to midwifery in that his role was to assist his interlocutors give birth to understanding. He did not give answers, but by asking questions, helped others find insight.

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If the patterns we in world are reflect in the human microcosm, perhaps the work of Ian McGilchrist can provide a helpful frame. His study of brain anatomy led to him explore the differences between both hemispheres of the brain in terms of perception and sense-making. The left hemisphere, he explains, is characterized by a narrow concern for detail and certainty. The right, with a concern for the bigger picture. The left hemisphere perceives and understands things in isolation. The right hemisphere perceives and understands how they fit into a whole. In the Master and his Emissary, McGilchrist likens the advent of modernity to the dominance of left hemispheric perception, giving rise to a mechanistic world-view, and the subsequent ordering of the word into isolated abstractions more readily quantifiable. It is a mode of perception that became the mode of perception and thus shaped the world accordingly. AI could thus be likened to a gigantic growth of the left hemisphere, further exacerbating the existing imbalance.

In disequilibrium, we seek stability, certainty. The more imbalance people experience, the more they tend to gravitate towards absolutes. This is why in times of crisis, we see more polarization, more demagoguery, more ideology. When the ground shakes, you want something firm to hold on to. The problem is that looking for stability in a demagogue, an ideology, or increasingly in an all-knowing AI, shakes your own sense-making abilities. By conditioning to ourselves to ask for the answer, we’re learning to doubt our selves. The more we seek reassurance from the machine, we less we trust ourselves.

Anxiety thrives in uncertainty. Certainty feels safe, predictable, and under control, but life can be unpredictable and there is much we cannot control. Abstraction and intellectualization is appealing because it appears to give us a sense of control, but it is also a clever way to disconnect and ‘explain away’ the discomfort. Uncertainty can also arouse curiosity. Where might that lead?

Holding yourself in uncertainty is uniquely human. Machines need an answer. They’ll even ‘hallucinate’ one if need be. Human beings can sit in the unknown. Human beings can sit in the mystery. And though conditioned as we are to seek answers, what we may really need are questions.

If the modern self is predicated upon the certainty of I think therefore I am, perhaps these thinking machines will prompt us to inquire more deeply about the mystery of being. Who are you without category or label?

I don’t have the answers, only questions, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. Drop me a line. Thank you.

For a tasty cup of coffee, the beans must first be picked,
Severed from their roots, their flesh is crushed, and cracked, and stripped.

Isolated now, from all they’ve ever known,
The beans are tossed into a bag and sometimes shipped quite far from home.

From truck to truck to warehouse, they are measured, they are sold,
Perhaps inside they cherish still the dream of fertile soil.

Alas, they shall not grow again, instead they shall be cooked.
Roasted til their colours change and start resembling soot.

But it’s the heat that gives them flavour, it’s the heat that gives them smell,
Rising from the fire coffee beans begin to swell.

They’ve been transformed, and still the journey’s just begun.
They’ll face the grinder and the water, slowly brewing til their done.

I’ll bet you can smell it now, the coffee’s musk is strong,
Alluring and inviting everyone to come along.

Drink a cup, and think about the journey of each bean,
Who’s essence now has been extracted, causing us to dream.

Are we prepared to travel, just like these little beans,
To be plucked, and crushed, and roasted, so that others too can dream?

The steps of life are difficult so take one at a time.
When you feel sleepy, maybe it’s just coffee time!

This little poem I wrote back in 2013, sitting in the library, sipping a fresh cup of joe. I share it with you today in gratitude of the little moments of boredom that give way to inspiration. May we never cease to contemplate the lessons in little things, the stuff we take for granted, for they may yield a greater meaning.

Yours truly,
Henrik

I took a trip down memory lane and stumbled across old photographs, like the one above, taken up in a tree somewhere in Southern Italy — free as a bird. Time flies, and carries our lives with it. And every so often, bits of the past float by for a visit.

As I looked at this photograph, the eyes of my younger self gazed back at me. Something within me stirred. I became at once the observer and the observed, the witness and the wayfarer. Which one is the man, which one is the mirror? And can man truly see and know himself without some kind of mirror, some kind of reflection?

Though entertaining these curiosities appeals to the part of me that desires to indulge a philosophical inclination, they don’t capture the whole picture. On a deeper level, a younger self, much younger still than the youthful man in the photo, is within me. For our early years are formative, as we learn how to relate to self and others in what becomes enduring patterns of personality; the blueprint we carry into adulthood. Attachment styles and personality traits are widely thought to take shape in early life and remain generally unchanged across the lifespan. In this sense, as you go through life and form relationships, your younger self is watching and even leading the way.

This metaphorical inner child allows us to explore both themes of continuity and themes of rupture. I am, in a sense, still that younger self, and I largely relate to self and others in a similar manner. In another sense, those earlier chapters are closed and can never be recovered. A popular maxim declares that the old you must die for you to reach your full potential. Perhaps there is something appealing about the prospect cutting down the past, making way for a fresh start. However, I think the appeal of such language is that it makes it sound easy — too easy — cutting down the old undesirable parts like pruning a tree. Does this not simply perpetuate, and even reinforce, the disconnection from self?

The past is gone but its echo reverberates in the present. Talking about the past in therapy is fruitful in so far as it arouses thoughts and emotions in the present to which we can attend. The point is not merely to explain why things are the way they are, for though such insight can provide some relief from self-condemnation, staying at the level of explanation can become a barrier to deeper integration. That is where the healing happens, and here, the metaphorical inner child can act as a powerful emotional conduit. The image of an inner child, a younger self, is an invitation relate to and be present with the vulnerable parts of yourself — parts that you may have learned to avoid masterfully — parts that evoke shame, and fear, and anxiety. Because the image of a child naturally evokes compassion and protectiveness, the metaphorical inner child beckons you to relate to it, and thus to yourself, with compassion and protectiveness. You’re not actually going back in time and rescuing yourself from a situation, you’re learning in the here and now that you can be both soft and strong, compassionate and protective, with your own heart.

And this new relationship to self radiates throughout your relationships with others. Clients often remark that leaning to be more compassionate and protective of their own hearts has allowed them to be less dependant on the appraisal of others/less fearful of their disapproval. Of course, we still need relationships — but hopefully ones in which we can be both more connected to self, and thus more connected to others. For what kind of connection to others could we have if it were at the expense of our connection to self?

When people talk about killing the old self, they usually refer to their vices and their desire for drastic change. The image of the inner child suggests that within even the most vicious, there is a hope for redemption, for surely they didn’t start out that way. Reject the vices, reject the behaviour, but don’t conflate your inner most self with that behaviour.

It’s not that old you needs to die, an image of rejection, but that a younger you needs your protection, compassion, and permission to live, an image of embrace.

Your younger self is watching. It’s your turn, make your move.

And so, over the course of the next month, billions of souls around the world will give something up in the Name of something greater — an ancient bargain that is known to enrich the spirit. For the unbridled appetite is insatiable like a fire that grows ever greater the more it consumes. But you were not merely meant to consume. You are not merely a consumer. Fasting is a reminder.

Coincidentally, we’re also beginning to see the most powerful and influential, at least by worldly measure, tremble as the evidence of their ungodly indulgences on a certain island come to light. Men who would walk as lords upon the Earth, brought low by their own passions and lack of self-restraint.

Between self-restraint and self-expression, psychotherapy is ambivalent. In it’s commitment to truth, psychotherapy as praxis is agnostic; the psychotherapist’s role is not to dictate truth, but to facilitate its discovery. However, given that there exist competing assumptions about human flourishing, different currents of psychotherapy inevitably incline towards one moral framework or another.

Critics of psychotherapy consider it the ideological progenitor of the sexual revolution and claim the field advocates for unrestrained libido. However, while Freud discussed relaxing taboos, he also argued that self-restraint was a necessary condition for civilization and thus could not be dispensed with entirely. A product of the positivism of his time, Freud’s greater omission was not recognizing the transcendent dimension of Man. Others after him turned his theories about whats ails us into a prescription, an endeavour of liberation, imposed on society writ large. Social mores have changed, and we’re as anxious as ever.

No, psychotherapy is not do what thou wilt. It is know thyself, and thus, it entails accountability.

And fasting teaches self-awareness and accountability. It hinders impulsivity and bolsters agency. That you can learn to say no to even food and drink for a portion of time reveals the strength of the will — a will that is made subservient to a higher ideal, a higher Will, and thus freed from the tyranny of want.

You were not merely meant to consume. You are not merely a consumer.

“O ye who believe! Fasting is prescribed to you as it was prescribed to those before you, that ye may (learn) self-restraint” (Quran 2:183)

Each year, we observe the passage of time, as countless generations before us have, each year growing older, until in turn, our time comes. Time and tide wait for no one.

One year ends, another begins. What have we done? What remains unfinished?

Take account of your wins, however small or seemingly irrelevant. Good is rarely wasted, however distant desired outcomes may appear.

Take account, too, of your missteps, especially the ones that your heart knew weren’t good for you. What lessons can you glean?

And in this time, we tend to make resolutions. We set goals for the year ahead, and most often this means doing more (or doing less). There’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s certainly plenty of work to be done.

Still, if we’re paying attention, we may come to recognize in ourselves when our doing serves to deflect from our being. As though doing more will keep me from having to contend with myself. And doing more will surly garner some approval of others or of internalized others - those parts of me for whom I can never be enough.

After all, it’s worked thus far. At least, on the surface.

But tell me, which is the mountain you truly wish to ascend?

When you hit these metrics, how then will you measure up?

You’re a human being, not merely a human doing. You know quite well what to do. How shall you learn to be?

Surely, you’ve tasted something of it before. What do you remember1? It’s not a conceptual knowledge, but an experiential one.

“But what can I do?”

Try sitting with yourself for five minutes, with no phone or input of any kind. Observe only one thing: how do you relate to yourself? How do you observe yourself speak to yourself, or treat yourself, and how does that relationship influence what you deny yourself and what you indulge in?

The ancients said that a man could never set foot in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, nor he the same man.

May we change for the better, and should we find ourselves here a year from now, may we be a litter wiser and kinder to ourselves.

Life is nothing short of miraculous. It is a wonder that we exist at all.

An infinite sea of possibilities collapsing into the present moment, and here we meet.

I pray this finds you well.

I’ve glimpsed beauty in my life, I’ve lived moments of awe and wonder. They are etched into my memory, scattered like stars across the night sky - distant, sometimes barely discernible amid the light pollution, but on cold nights, they shimmer more brightly. A reminder that the kind of beauty that evokes awe and wonder is not too far away.

Because that beauty is not a place. It’s every place, or rather, it can be in every place when one is in a state of awe and wonder.

I look to the stars to be filled anew with wonder. Sometimes I get a hint of it, but often I’m weighed down by worldly concerns, such that my gaze does not reach the heavens. Those nights are darker.

As though the cosmos mirrors the state of my heart and mind. My horizon, defined by my inner disposition. Yet, reaching for the horizon can also bring about inner expansion.

This is no mere subjective statement about my “sublime feelings”, as C.S. Lewis cautions in The Abolition of Man. The stars are indeed beautiful and worthy of awe and wonder. The cosmos is not a canvas upon which I impress subjective meaning. It is a magnificent work of art with which I engage and interact.

Yet, there is ugliness and pain in this world, so much so that our innate artistic sensibilities grow numb in response. Disenchantment and cynicism, a protective carapace for a wounded psyche. Vapid consumption, filling, not fulfilling.

Healing is seeing beauty again, and being filled anew with awe and wonder. It’s not a retreat from the world to a childlike innocence, but an advance, a going-through, and a transcendence, a going-beyond. That is, an expansion of the self to contain complex and seemingly contradictory emotions. To find beauty and hope in spite of the ugliness and the pain. You’re not too broken for beauty. You’re not too empty to be filled with awe and wonder.

Consider the possibility that you, even you, with all your flaws and imperfections, could experience such a state as awe and wonder. Then attempt to create the opportunity.

Rituals can be helpful for some, and breaking from routine can be helpful for others. There’s no one right way to do it, though people tend to forget that and impose their way as the only way. But as legendary music producer Rick Rubin counsels in his contemplative work on creativity and artistic expression: “The purpose of such exercises is not necessarily in the doing, just as the goal of meditation isn’t in the meditating”.1

There are many paths that can take us there, but don’t mistake the path for the destination. For some, a walk in the woods. For others, listening to a piece of music. For others, studying molecular biology. For others, a shared moment of intimacy.
The activity is important, but it’s not the point. It points to something more. Something within yourself and paradoxically beyond you.

Play is no trivial matter. Childish, perhaps, but in best of ways. Imaginative, spontaneous, and engaging.

Great artists play. Good artists perform. The rest simply imitate or conform. Picasso once said “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up”. And I think what he meant here is that all children play, which is embodied creativity, but many grow out of it and retreat to their heads, overthinking, or thinking that play is of little value in the real world. No time for childish games.

The grown-ups, concerned with figures and ‘matters of consequence’ were once children, but few of them remember it, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry reminds us in Le Petit Prince. And amidst ‘matters of consequence’, play carries connotations of trivial frivolity. Here, play is the opposite of serious.

But just watch the way a great musician plays a piece of music or the way an athlete plays their sport. Would you suggest that they’re anything but serious? Nay, they are completely serious. They eat, sleep, and breathe it, but when they play, they play. Isn’t it interesting that we reserve this word ‘play’ for activities that are exemplary of human excellence?

Seriously, that’s the difference between children, and those of us that have forgotten how to play. Children take play seriously. We take ourselves seriously - so seriously that we try not to make mistakes or risk losing face. Children don’t take themselves seriously, they stumble and make mistakes, and carry on. They aren’t preoccupied with managing perceptions.

Play is embodied creativity. It’s not confined to a particular mode of artistic expression or a select few sports. Play is a way of being present, engaged, spontaneous, and creative. One can embody a playful spirit in work as in leisure.

I started my career as a high school teacher. Some of my fondest memories, some of the best classes I taught, were largely improvised. That’s not to say that I just made stuff up, but rather like a jazz musician, I worked within the appropriate scale and key to produce something living, something unique - and I taught grammar. I took the work of teaching seriously, and before I could freestyle a lesson, I had to lay the foundation - the rules of the game, if you will. Inversely, when I spent my nights preparing carefully curated powerpoints to deliver a lesson, it fell flat. The life wasn’t in it. I realize looking back that in those instances, I’d taken myself too seriously.

Years before that, when my preferred way of going through life was with a backpack and a guitar, I tried my hand at busking. It was not very profitable, but more importantly, it did not feel very rewarding. On the other hand, when I just played and sang with the people I’d meet, good things tended to happen. I came to understand that in busking, I embodied a transactional disposition, trying to woo passersby for coin, whereas in simply playing, I was more present, engaged, and creative. And when I went about it this way, I was met with abundance every time. Things just clicked in ways I couldn’t plan or control.

I suspect that among grown-ups, play is sorely lacking from leisure. There is plenty of entertainment for consumption, so much so that public life has largely been reduced to entertainment, just as Neil Postman so presciently observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death, before we had screens and algorithms. Today’s society is one of spectacle, and it captivates (in every sense of the word) by evoking strong emotional responses, but this results in societal polarization; a regression to the immature psychological mechanism of splitting, whereby people and situations are perceived in black-and-white.

Play, on the other hand, as embodied creativity brings colours back in the world and has a unifying potential. This is the Olympic ideal, and music is often said to be the universal language. So my claim is that the more one embodies a spirit of playfulness, the more compassionate and resilient they’ll become. Creativity is an expression of life force, and accessing it regularly increases hope and resilience. Whereas suffering or malaise is indicative of a disconnection from life force, from authenticity, and from creativity. Perhaps this one of the ways in which we can understand the Biblical injunction to ‘become like little children’1.

So, take what you do seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it feels like play, but don’t take yourself so seriously that it inhibit your ability to engage fully with the present moment.

In other words, go out and play.

— “What do you feel?”

— “I don’t feel anything…”

Early in therapy, an exchange like this one is not uncommon. Typically, it’s not that clients don’t have emotion, it’s that emotion feels foreign, like a language that they’ve yet to learn… or perhaps learned to ignore. Part of the work of therapy is putting words to this emotional experience, making it intelligible.

We understand the flight from feeling in the context of early life experiences, and it’s here that some critics of psychotherapy claim we blame the parents. No, blame is antithetical to personal accountability, an essential part of growth. Regardless of whatever parents you got or early life circumstance, the wounds are not your fault, but healing is your responsibility. It’s okay to feel angry. It’s okay to feel sad. We’ll work through it.

Our primary caregivers are also our primary cue-givers, in that their every reaction or lack of reaction is a cue. We organize our world with these cues, delineating what is safe and what is dangerous. It could be, for example, that in the family of origin, expressing ‘negative’ emotion was met with blame and shame - not necessarily overtly, but implied by the caregiver’s reaction. Quite understandably, a child in such an environment would adapt as necessary, even when that means learning to mistrust or repress their own feelings.

The attachment relationship is so important that, to preserve it, a child would even deny themselves, deny their feelings, and disconnect from parts of themselves deemed problematic. It’s not a conscious choice. It’s a response to a pressing need.

—“I’m just not an emotional person…”

I was recently speaking with a longstanding clinical supervisor and mentor who so eloquently expressed that people, in their idiosyncrasies or in their vices, are often yearning for a feeling. That is, doing the one thing that allows them, even for a fleeting moment, to feel. No amount of moralizing will persuade them give it up. They know it’s ‘wrong’ — it may even be the reason they came to therapy — and yet it meets a need, albeit imperfectly.

Curiosity on the part of the therapist helps disarm the client’s inner critic that is busy beating themselves up about this habit and trying to rope the therapist in by expecting her or him to agree with claim that the behaviour is wrong and that therapy should be about stomping it out. If we aren’t careful, we may just side with the client’s inner critic. Curiosity is not to condone, nor to condemn, but to make space for insight, for possibility, where none existed before.

Longing is a central part of the human condition. Whether we yearn for a return to better days or long for unrequited love, or perhaps for something enduring in the face of ephemeral pleasures, something authentic, something transcendent, we yearn.

And perhaps we’re yearning for a feeling that we don’t quite yet know.
What does it feel like to come home?

I’ll leave you to ponder over the words of the Sufi sage Rumi:

Longing is the core of mystery.
Longing itself brings the cure.
The only rule is, suffer the pain.

The purpose of psychotherapy is not to feel better. The purpose is to change, that is, changing something at the psychological level about oneself that is creating distress in one’s life. Feeling better generally comes about as a result of that change.

Though getting there often requires a little discomfort, because there are things about ourselves that we tend to hide from ourselves, and change requires brining those aspects of ourselves into conscious awareness. As we do so, layers of rationalizations, projections, and other defences, are laid bare. Those unpleasant aspects of ourselves, those things for which we may so quickly condemn others, we come to recognize in ourselves.

We are but human, with all the highs and lows that such a statement entails.

There is, in the field of psychotherapy, as in society writ large, a proclivity to comfort, rather than confront, even when comforting requires a minor compromise be made with accuracy or accountability. We say things to make the other feel better, even when those things are not true. We seek out those who say things that make us feel better, even when those things are not true. And the familiar, though false it may be, feels comforting through sheer familiarity. Social media algorithms only amplify this solipsistic bias.

In reflecting upon our relationship to truth and falsehood, I invite you to consider the similarities between the words soothe and sooth. One denotes the act of comforting, the other denotes truth.

It is also worth noting that the word soothe appears to have arisen from the older word sooth, which now largely only lingers in the lexicon as an appendage in the word soothsayer, which itself is seldom used save with derision. Soothsayers belong to a bygone age, an age of mythology, not science.

What of truth? The verb soothe once meant bearing witness to truth. Now, it means comforting. I wonder to what extent this semantic shift coincides with what philosopher Charles Taylor described as the subjective turn, that is, a gradual shift from objective (i.e. transcendent) moral referents to an increasing preoccupation with subjective experience as the referent par excellence. It is the shift from cardinal virtues to personal values.

Psychotherapy is downstream of this subjective turn and represents a response to it. It has been described as amoral, in so much as your psychotherapist will not tell you what you ought or ought not do. Psychotherapy, however, is not immoral, and characterizations to that effect are a misrepresentation. It is not a license to do what thou wilt. The chief moral injunction in psychotherapy is honesty in the pursuit of truth, and truth is not merely an abstraction. It needs to be acted upon, which precipitates ethical considerations.

Still, some seeking soothing while others seek sooth. Let us then look within ourselves and assess our readiness for truth. The pursuit of truth doesn’t always feel good. At least, not at first. But people don’t come to psychotherapy for comforting lies, they come because they’re ready to change.

Just a push and you’re off to the races.

At least, that’s how it is when you are at the top of the hill.

What’s missing from this picture? The climb.

For every hill you ride, you first need to climb.

Alas, we don’t always think that way. More often than not, we look to hills on the horizon as inevitable milestones, taking for granted the effort required to reach them. Then expect ourselves to take action as effortlessly as rolling down a hill. Like, next month, I’ll get sober, or next year, I’ll work harder, or once I hit forty, then I’ll take my health seriously. You get the idea.

I know I’ve done it, and I hear it from others all the time too. I call this the milestone fallacy. It’s a clever sort of procrastination that gives one the illusion of acting by ‘planning’ to act at a forthcoming date of some supposed significance. Making plans to act can give us a dopamine buzz that feels like we’re doing something. Only we’re not. We’re kicking the can down the road and rationalizing that doing so is better than dealing with it now by attributing some special quality to the road ahead.

But the truth is, with every hill, we first need to climb. And I’ve noticed that those who’ve chosen or had to climb hills early in life tend to be better at climbing others. Those early climbs endow one with the psychological capital that facilitates future ascent. This psychological capital is the byproduct of the pursuit of excellence. I recently attended a talk by an accomplished local entrepreneur who credited much of his work ethic and achievement to the discipline he first honed in sport, a living example of the aphorism how you do anything is how you do everything. Among the highly successful, this seems to be quite a common pattern. I see it in my own family.

Then you have those like me who didn’t climb any serious hills as a young man, and who perhaps hoped instead to simply enjoy the ride on the way down. Just take it easy, man. That was attitude. I claimed I didn’t care to climb, like I was somehow above it. It’s just that I didn’t care to try, because trying is difficult. False humility only serves pride. In the end, this false humility only took me for a ride.

What could have been were I not biding my time? Where are the mountains I have yet to climb?

I won’t sit here and lament what I’ve missed, nor indulge in despondency. I can only get moving if I hope to find my mountain.

So that thing you’ve been waiting to do? That goal simmering on the back burner? For how much longer? Let’s do this together!

Thank you for being with me. Your support means a lot.

Kindly,

Henrik

Fortunately, I was encouraged by parents to pack my bag, pick up a paddle, and take part in a month-long canoe-camping expedition in the Outauouais. Having done a little camping growing up, I was open to the idea. Looking back I can appreciate how much growing up happened for me on that trip.

In a culture that commodifies milestones but is largely bereft of rites of passage, the marked departure from the familiar gave this trip a certain initiatic quality. The days on the water and the nights under the stars were like medicine for the soul.

Prior to going on this expedition, my life had in many ways come to an impasse. I felt scattered, with parts yearning to grow while others clung to old habits. The trip expanded my horizon, both outwardly and inwardly. I found confidence and optimism like I’d never felt before, and thankfully, have carried with me to this day.

The portage, from the French verb porter (to carry), is the act of carrying canoe and equipment around or across an impasse. On a river, this might be a waterfall or a series of rapids. On a lake, it means traversing the distance to the next one. You must hoist the craft that carried you above your head and climb over rocks and stumps, or trudge through thick mud, until at least you reach a clearing and can put everything down again.

Sometimes the path we’ve taken up to now cannot take us any further. Recognizing this, and making the necessary adjustment, is crucial. It’s not always easy. With so much time and effort poured into a particular course of action, it can be quite tempting to deny or delay coming to terms with the obvious when it simply becomes untenable. We pride ourselves in perseverance, but there’s no glory in going headfirst over a waterfall. Sometimes the smartest move is to pick everything up and move on.

This might mean stepping back from a project, away from a relationship, or even turning down a promotion. I hear every so often from people who, upon getting that desired position, realized it was not a good fit. Others may yet resist that realization and come to counselling for ‘strategies’, as though they could force reality to match their expectations, rather than adjust their expectations to reality. It’s ok to pivot, it may even be necessary. Sometimes the things we think we want are standing in the way of what we may truly be seeking.

But walking away is not always easy. There can be a long stretch of uncertainty and self-doubt, such thoughts can come to mind like the buzzing mosquitos on a portage that torment you while your hands are full of gear. There may be a steep uphill climb, made slick from recent rain, or a warning from other campers that a bear is in the vicinity. It can be tough. It can be scary. It won’t last forever.

Soon enough you’ll catch a glimpse of the water, and you might hear the call of the loon. The air feels lighter. You’re almost there.

If you’ve reached a place that’s become unnavigable, perhaps you need to get out of the water and hike a little further downstream before launching again. Perhaps there’s a bigger lake just beyond the brush.

Perhaps you need to pick everything up and portage until you find that next opportunity.

One way to think about this question is to ask yourself what you envision a successful life would look and feel like. This question takes us past the stuff we might hope to acquire to the life we aspire to live. In what way does that vision differ from the life you’re presently living?

The more I consider this question, the more I realize that much of what I desire is already within reach. Family, health, and a clean conscience are treasures I wouldn’t trade the world for.

I also value the freedom to move at a slower pace. Isn’t that ultimately the goal of the rat race - to reach a point at which you can stop running and appreciate how far you’ve come? Otherwise what’s the point?

Sometimes, that slower pace is simply a few minutes in a coffee shop before getting on with the day. And a little while back, just as I’d sat to take my first sip of the day, I overheard two older gentlemen talking about life and adversity. One of them said to the other:

“Do you ever wonder whether things are happing for you, not happening to you?”

What an interesting perspective, I thought. What might success look like from this angle?

When things go awry, it’s so easy to ask why? As though there were an explanation. Perhaps we can explain how a thing occurred, but have we any insight into the why? That’s bordering on prophecy, as though we could peak behind the curtain and catch a glimpse of the inner workings of destiny. Sure, we may say that everything happens for a reason, but I think, most of the time, we only articulate a reason in retrospect. When an unforeseen and unwanted event occurs, asking why suggests an unspoken assumption that bad things shouldn't happen, that this shouldn’t be.

Sometimes, I hear even people more explicitly say things like what did I do to deserve this? Implying that the events were some kind of cruel fate that was unfairly doled out. There are echoes here of the age-old problem of theodicy - if God is good, why do bad things happen? That may be an abstraction, but on a personal level, it can feel like a betrayal. “I did all the right things, but this still happened to me”. And in the face of that betrayal, such an utterance also reveals an inclination to blame oneself for whatever hurt or disappointment was encountered. This tendency likely goes back a long way and may effectually be boiled down to: “If I were better, I wouldn’t get hurt”.

Its early development may be in what Ronald Fairbairn1 describes as the defense mechanism of splitting, whereby a child desperate to preserve the possibility of a relationship with a parent will ‘split’ and attribute all of the ‘badness’ to themselves to ensure that the parent be only ‘good’. In other words, in the child’s mind, the parent is made blameless, which requires the child to take on all of the blame. This allows a child to preserve the ideal of the parent they desire, even at their own expense. As these early patterns tend to follow us through life, many adults may do the same, taking on all of the ‘bad’ to preserve the idealized ‘goodness’ of their significant other, leader, or guru.

And yet, try as we may to be good people, bad things happen and there’s no sugarcoating the sufferings of life. But if, as the gentleman in the café suggested, they are happening for us, not to us, then instead of asking why, let us ask what:

• What am I left with?

• What can I do about this?

• What is the best way to respond?

• What can I learn from this?

• What have I overlooked?

And maybe herein lies opportunity in the face of adversity. Maybe success is not merely the outcome, but the attitude with which we face that outcome, especially when the outcome is not what we’d hope for. The victim asks why did this happen to me, blaming self or others, while the victor asks what can I learn and what can I do about it.

Or as popular memetic rhetoric puts it: If you were thirty failures away from your goal, how fast would you want to fail?

Bless,

Henrik

Avoidance works in the short term, but it’s not a solution. Life has a way of repeating the lesson until we learn it. Those unpleasant feelings, and the scenarios that evoke them, that we avoid, have a way of cropping up despite our best efforts to keep our space safe and sterile. Life finds a way.

And here’s the thing about avoidance, it’s predicated on the implicit assumption that we can’t handle unpleasant emotions, as though we were made of paper, and the emotions were like the rain.

So we go through life trying to stay dry, as though raindrops could make us disintegrate. And in doing so, create unnecessary hardship for ourselves and our loved ones.

And what if you aren’t made of paper? What if you were more like plant? Maybe a little water could help you grow, not tear you apart.

What if we could integrate the unpleasant feelings instead of fearing the disintegration they’ve come to represent?

An old song comes to mind:

Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten

We don’t want to get hurt, so we hold back… but at what cost?

We build walls around our hearts to keep us safe, but slowly suffocate as we watch life go by from the window. If only we could open it a crack and let in some fresh air…

The phrase window of tolerance means the space between hyperarousal (fight or flight) and hypoarousal (freeze) in which we can manage stress and adversity in a healthy and mature manner. Within that window of tolerance, we can experience discomfort without becoming dysregulated, or to put it more eloquently, without losing our shit when shit happens.

Growth is about learning to widen that window, to increase our capacity to tolerate unpleasant emotions without retreating into self-defeating defences. A great example of this is learning to experience guilt about something we did instead of reverting to shame about who we are, i.e., “I did something wrong” rather than “I am bad”. Whereas shame makes us want to hide or disconnect from ourselves, guilt can lead to remorse, which in turn can lead to resolve to make amends and never do that again.

We must come to understand that we are not flawed or broken, but repeating patterns of behaviour in an attempt to shield ourselves from pain and suffering that is both ultimately futile and constricting.

And we must develop the awareness and fortitude to experience discomfort without the old knee-jerk reactions. Stepping outside of your comfort zone will feel stressful. There will be things that feel triggering. Increasing your capacity to tolerate this discomfort becomes your window of opportunity. Here is where you can choose to respond differently.

And I know it won't be easy. Trying to do things differently will set off all the alarm bells inside your body. The temptation to retreat to old ways will be strong. Here’s where having alternatives can be so helpful. Instead of a drink, go for a walk. Instead of mindlessly scrolling, read a book. Choosing the alternative is still a feat of willpower, a proof of agency, and the scaffolding for further growth.

A great example of increasing our window of tolerance is seasonal acclimatization to lower temperature. In the fall, 5°C has us layering up and trying to keep warm, whereas in the spring, that balmy 5°C has us out with no coat. Objectively, the temperature is the same, but our experience of it is entirely different. We’ve increased our capacity to tolerate cold.

As we increase our capacity to tolerate discomfort, what once felt like a trigger may feel more like a notification. Swipe left and move on.

The world is waiting outside your window.

To forgive the oppressor is never to condone the oppression. It is to reclaim one’s agency in the face of it; to choose to no longer be defined by oppression. It is, with no exaggeration, the triumph of good over evil.

Trauma is not so much the event that happened to us, as the impact that the event had. There are overtly traumatic events and there are subtleties, which can also leave scars. What Eva says next is particularly insightful:

“The day I forgave the Nazis, privately I forgave my parents whom I hated all my life for not having saved me from Auschwitz. Children expect their parents to protect them; mine couldn’t. And then I forgave myself for hating my parents.”1

Though well aware that her parents did not abandon her, as she and her sister were ripped from her mother’s arms, a part of her still felt something like betrayal. On a deeper level, she felt ashamed of herself for feeling resentment about that sense of betrayal.

Forgiving ourselves can be the most daunting gesture of all because we still have to live with ourselves afterward.

Eva found freedom in forgiveness precisely because doing so was entirely up to her. It is not for anyone else to suggest when or whom you should forgive.

I’ll go further and say that if forgiveness is offered from a position of weakness or dependency, it is not forgiveness, but compromise. Sometimes I work with clients, the children of neglectful or narcissistic parents, who seek to forgive their parents to alleviate their own fear of extinguishing the possibility for closeness, because remaining angry threatens their prospects for attachment. Such people are quick to rationalize the behaviour of their parents while dismissing the gravity of their own pain. Turning instead to blaming themselves for being angry with their parents. It is thus essential to healing that clients like this learn to forgive themselves for sequestering their emotions, by coming to understand that doing so served to mitigate the fear of separation and protect whatever parental bond they had.

The image of the Nazi rightfully evokes evil, but we also know that evil is not confined to a particular uniform or ideology. Every human being has the potential of becoming an oppressor, as the Stanford Prison Experiment2 so manifestly demonstrates.

In order for Eva to forgive her oppressors, she had see some humanity in them. In forgiveness, she found a freedom that no other human being could ever give nor take from her.

Such is the contemplative state that allows us to respond more intentionally to psycho-emotional distress. Instead of reenacting patterns of behaviour that perpetuate our suffering, from the position of an observer, we can wait out the storm.

Talk therapy, journaling, contemplative practices, and certain rituals can each potentially serve to assist us in developing sufficient self-awareness to experience life, in all its delight and misery, without shirking from the responsibility of living.

Life can be chaotic and unpredictable. Here’s where the analogy of watching the storm can inversely mean watching from a distance instead of approaching what scares us. We build all sorts of mental contraptions to avoid the anxiety of living, preferring to look at the world through the window of an ideology, or perhaps a screen.

But both meanings can help us approach an understanding of awareness as appropriate distance, like the distance at which to write and read this text. Too far and we lose sight of things, too close and our vision gets blurry.

You’ve likely met people that are in their heads about things and others that lack reflexivity. Neither extreme is desirable, and most fall somewhere in between.

Contemplative practices train to us take the right distance; to be in the world, but not of it. The phrase riding the tiger evokes a masterful response to chaos and unpredictability. The tiger is the threatening force that cannot be outrun nor vanquished. Like life itself, it will devour you if you insist to resist it. We’ve neither strength nor speed to defeat it; only wisdom will afford a path forward. Though wisdom is born of contemplative practice, of appropriate distance, it also consists of appropriate action. Now that you can see things more clearly, you must respond more intentionally1. The Chinese proverb also carries a warning: Once you ride the tiger, it’s hard to get off. This implies that though life is uncertain, one must commit to engaging with it. You don’t get to be wise for a weekend. It is the responsibility of a lifetime.

In Waking The Tiger, Peter Levine employs the metaphor of the tiger to evoke vitality, the life force, to draw attention to the way this energy becomes trapped in the body when the natural survival response is inhibited. The premise of Somatic therapy is that by gradually releasing this energy, the body can return to a healthy equilibrium.

There are tigers out there as there are tigers in here. Neither is inherently bad. May we approach tigers with wisdom, put things in their appropriate place, and find balance and meaning.

Regards,
Henrik Vierula

P.S. I’ve included a little exercise below for those interested in approaching a tiger this afternoon.

You may approach a tiger of your own with this IFS Fire Drill exercise, which I’ve taken the liberty of gathering from Mentally Fit Pro2.

How to do a Fire Drill:

1. Choose a Trigger Person: Select someone from your life who triggers strong emotional reactions in you. This could be someone from your past or present.

2. Visualize the Trigger Person: Imagine this person in a room by themselves. Visualize them contained and unable to harm you.

3. Observe their Actions or Words: Look through a window into the room and observe the actions or words of the trigger person that typically upset you.

4. Notice Your Reactions: Pay attention to what happens in your body and mind as you observe the trigger person. Notice any changes in your muscles, heart rate, breathing, and thoughts.

5. Acknowledge Your Protector: When your protective instincts kick in, acknowledge them and reassure yourself that you are safe. Remind yourself that you don't need to engage with the trigger person.

6. Separate Your Energy: Encourage your protective instincts to separate their energy from you. Visualize a boundary between yourself and the trigger person.

7. Observe Any Changes: Take another look at the trigger person in the room and observe if they appear any differently to you now that you've separated your energy from them.

8. Reflect on Your Protector: Spend some time reflecting on why your protective instincts react strongly to this person. Consider past experiences or beliefs that may be contributing to your reactions.

And verily! In the cattle, there is a lesson for you. We give you to drink of that which is in their bellies, from between excretions and blood, pure milk; palatable to the drinkers.
(Quran 16:66)

For two things to mutually coexist, a certain barrier must stand between them. It may be thinner than skin or even abstract like the lines on the map, just as it may be hard as concrete and sharp as razor wire. Nations have borders like people have boundaries, and though the former take great pains to defend and secure theirs, the latter is more commonly a work in progress. Should one nation breach another’s border, a host of escalatory measures is deployed to meet the threat. When a personal boundary is violated, it is not uncommon for people to ignore the sirens ringing throughout their bodies, as doing so seems safer than confronting the threat.

Ignore the sirens long enough and pretty soon they’ll fade into the background. One may even come to interpret the siren as the threat. This pattern develops early on and is rehearsed to the point of mastery (meaning it becomes like second nature), unless the opportunity and the wherewithal to break that pattern are found.

Asserting personal boundaries can feel so ambiguous and confusing because our instinct to seek attachment is so strong. Take the child who, not wanting to disappoint her parents, acquiesces to their insistence that she allow strangers to touch and hug her; “just be nice”. Take the young teen who gives more than he’d like to peers, to be liked, though he knows they're just taking advantage of him. Take the countless encounters of an intimate nature, not born of desire, but because one or the other thought it was expected of them.

Personal boundaries are not merely physical, just as we are not merely physical. Our sense of self stretches beyond our skin to the interpersonal relationships within which we are embedded. We have moral boundaries, and repeated violations of these can result in what is sometimes referred to as a moral injury, characterized by a lack of trust, most pointedly in ourselves.

Anger arises to defend our moral boundaries, but anger is often maligned and misunderstood. For a child, preserving the bond with caregivers is paramount, and if expressing anger could jeopardize it in any way, that anger is redirected or repressed, and a person can even grow to be afraid of feeling angry in close relationships. It will come out instead as sarcasm, cynicism, or passive aggression, slowly eroding the bond of trust in that relationship.

Maligned anger can turn malignant in the way that regret can devolve into resentment. In the bestselling book When The Body Says No, Dr. Gabor Maté makes the case that repressed anger can even contribute to a cascade of physiological symptoms and chronic conditions. He argues, and I think rightly so, that between body and mind, there is no boundary.

Part of setting boundaries is learning to say no. Part of doing that is learning to allow yourself to feel your anger, your sadness, your fear, your pain. Anger can feel scary, it can so quickly get ugly, but as Aristotle teaches, most of our problems with anger arise due to an excess or a deficiency of it, and that when rightly balanced, anger can lead to courage.

May we all have the courage to be honest with ourselves and set boundaries when and where it is appropriate.

Some prompts for introspection:
Pay attention to the thoughts and feelings that arise in response to each question.

• What is your relationship with anger?

• When was a time you compromised with yourself to avoid upsetting others?

• Where do you need to stand up for yourself a little more?

To take it further, document your experience in a journal and repeat the exercise in a few weeks or months’ time.

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What does it make you feel? Sit with it for a moment, whatever it may be.

Clients often remark that speaking affirmations in the mirror feels phoney. Some have described it as just lying to yourself. Others have said something to the effect of “rationally, I know I’m good enough, but emotionally, I don't feel like it”.

What would it feel like to really experience yourself as good enough, as loveable, and worthy?

Maybe you can feel it now. Many people don't know how, except in the conditional - better grades, less weight, taking up less space, having less needs, making oneself needed, etc.

That conditional sense of self-worth is like a small boat tossed about in a sea of shame. You do what it takes to stay afloat, but the little boat remains precariously waiting for the next wave. What lies in the depths below remains unknown.

Brené Brown, researcher, author, and podcaster, defines shame as an “ intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging”. I’d add that this belief is more often implicit. I’ll hear clients list all their qualities, explicitly aware that they are more than good enough, yet still believe otherwise on a deeper level. No amount of status nor sexual attention can make them feel otherwise. Though we yearn for connection, shame arises from that part of us that deems us unfit for connection. And many actually go through life settling for some semblance of connection, taking that to be better than nothing at all. Shame is both deeply personal and inherently relational.

So can you simply talk yourself out of this shame? I think not. In fact the assumption that you can pull yourself out of it is what likely leads to disappointment and feeling like just lying to oneself. Compound that with an expectation that you should be able to perpetuates the disappointment.

Because shame arises in responses to our perceived inadequacy to connect with others, to belong, it stands to reason that connection is the remedy. Connection with others and connection with self. Not connection with others at the expense of connection with self.

In those moments of pain, speaking affirmations will not make the pain disappear. Can you be present with yourself instead? Can you stay, when your first reaction is to get away? Stay. Be there in the shame with that part of you. Draw strength from the relationships in your life that feel the realest. Friends, family, even the therapeutic relationship with your therapist. Bring that strength to bear in the present. Stay.

Because our psycho-emotional wounds often stem from early life experiences, the metaphor of being with your inner child can be helpful here; hold that part of you as you would a child in need of comfort and nurture.

Affirmations have their place. It’s much better to speak kindly to yourself than to be your own tormentor. Healing, though, has to go deeper than the content of the words. It’s not a matter of persuading yourself, which implies a dichotomy. It’s a matter of presence, of connection.