Why Everything Relates to Your Childhood
In certain moods, the founding principle of modern psychotherapy — that it is all to do with one’s childhood — can sound especially irritating. Why should we be forever tied to…
Self-Knowledge: Trauma & Childhood
- 01. Why Everything Relates to Your Childhood
- 02. Why Those Who Should Love Us Can Hurt Us
- 03. The Upsides of Having a Mental Breakdown
- 04. How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill
- 05. How We Should Have Been Loved
- 06. Self-Hatred and High-Achievement
- 07. A Self-Hatred Audit
- 08. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
- 09. Two Reasons Why People End up Parenting Badly
- 10. What is Emotional Neglect?
- 11. How Unloving Parents can Generate Self-Hating Children
- 12. How Mental Illness Closes Down Our Minds
- 13. Trauma and EMDR Therapy
- 14. How to Fight off Your Inner Critic
- 15. The One Subject You Really Need to Study: Your Own Childhood
- 16. Sharing Our Early Wounds
- 17. Trauma and How to Overcome It
- 18. Why We're All Messed Up By Our Childhoods
- 19. The Golden Child Syndrome
- 20. The Importance of Being an Unhappy Teenager
- 21. How We Get Damaged by Emotional Neglect
- 22. The Secrets of a Privileged Childhood
- 23. What We Owe to the People Who Loved Us in Childhood
- 24. Criticism When You've Had a Bad Childhood
- 25. On Suffering in Silence
- 26. How a Messed up Childhood Affects You in Adulthood
- 27. Daddy Issues
- 28. The Non-Rewritable Disc: the Fateful Impact of Childhood
- 29. On the Longing for Maternal Tenderness
Why Those Who Should Love Us Can Hurt Us
Part of why it is so hard to understand ourselves is that people are constantly doing things to us that defy the common-sense of view of how human beings might plausibly…
The Upsides of Having a Mental Breakdown
One of the saddest and most puzzling phenomena of psychological life are the incidents commonly known as ‘breakdowns’, in which people find themselves suddenly unable to carry out their normal duties…
How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill
There is a kind of person who seems at first glance to have an admirable degree of self-motivation, thoroughness and drive. They are up at dawn, they rarely take holidays, they…
How We Should Have Been Loved
We hear so much about how difficult childhoods can damage people that we sometimes fail to consider the fascinating and telling obverse: what happens in emotionally-nurturing families, what does it mean…
Self-Hatred and High-Achievement
It might seem – at first glance – as though the people we term high-achievers could not possibly have any relationship to self-hatred: they are the ones who did exceptionally well…