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By Root 1245 0

you with their angry, intense warning. Perhaps the story that leaps to your mind was about something truly dangerous, but more likely it was based on a socially variable issue, or something peculiar your parent worried about. If your mother once got smacked on the head by falling debris, or your father’s youthful attempts at success were met by crushing failure, you are likely to be raised with a logic of hard hats and defeatism that may be all out of proportion to these dangers. For whereas the animal cub has a hundred lessons to learn and is thus taught a hundred lessons, human culture proposes millions of pitfalls, and the hundred lessons that were seared into your personality may not help you at all. Human beings come of age with so many maladaptive worries that, given a whole world to run around in, they usually pick something very narrow and do it over and over again. How do we pick? Well, Jung put it this way: “Nothing has a stronger influence…on…children, than the unlived life of the parents.”3 It is not only what your parents chose to do that influences you; it is also what they are aware of having missed. Children understand hidden messages. A mother who chose a rootless, independent life may feel betrayed when her daughter marries a doctor and settles in for a life of relative leisure, but mom may have given this choice such power that it had an unavoidable attraction.

As I persist in trying to explain the know thyself of psychotherapy, my text may feel busy with metaphors, but I think they are worth their trouble. Consider that we all have an internal empty field at birth, and as we grow, we experience shocks in certain areas of the field, which we respond to by building up a great pile of stones in that spot, to protect ourselves from being hurt again. As time goes on, the inner field grows crowded with stone mounds. Moving around in such a field requires inventive choreography; and that dance is what a personality is. A person with a lot of mounds is going to look pretty crazy when she tries to walk a straight line. When life circumstances change, the situation turns worse, since none of your long-developed shortcuts and coping methods work now. You crash into walls. The crashing makes you go to therapy, but you go to therapy looking for new shortcuts that will allow you to navigate your city of rock piles under these different circumstances, and what the therapist wants to do is bring you to the pillars and help you unpile the stones. There is nothing in the mounds to be scared of anymore, so if you can just budge the rocks, you will come to have free reign of your mind, and of the world, again.

Like philosophy, the work is strenuous and time-consuming. But what else were you going to do with your time? Maybe it will turn out that you fear death not because it is objectively scary that the inexorable thumb of the universe is headed down to squelch your living soul against the earth, but rather because you have not yet challenged yourself to dare to live, and you know it, and you have translated this wish for life into a surpassingly distracting fear of death. Maybe you miss your dead father so much because the old grump made it clear there were things you were going to have to prove to him about yourself, and now you will never have a chance to do so. Maybe what you needed and could get from him you already got, and all this awful mourning is about a mistake, his mistake, in not seeing you for the perfect and fulfilled little person that you were. Maybe if you come to see this, and forgive him, you can stop your heartbroken longing.

There is no easy way to find out what your problems are, because people do not come to therapy (or philosophy) to change their fundamental beliefs. That’s what fundamental beliefs are; you don’t even know what they are. People come to therapy because some adaptation they worked out with the world isn’t working anymore. Some “symptom,” or neurotic habit, that they used to be allowed is now getting in the way. They want to fix this immediate problem and are glad to replace this