Grieving our Foolishness - Why People Come to Therapy.

It’s becoming clear to me that, in one way or another, people often come to therapy because there is something about themselves they dislike.

A part of them is hated.

This self-hatred rarely appears out of nowhere. More often, it has roots in early experience—long before we had language, morality, or choice in the way we now understand them.

In the first few years of life, a child is egocentric in a very specific way. The baby is not merely self-focused; the baby is the world, and the world is the baby. There is no clear boundary between inner and outer experience yet. When pain, rupture, or incongruence occurs, it is not perceived as something happening to the child—it is perceived as something that is the child.

If connection breaks, I am the problem. If something feels wrong, I am wrong.

Pain and incongruence are internalized because there is nowhere else for them to go.

As we grow into adulthood, this early pattern often continues in subtler forms. We act, make choices, and later realize—sometimes immediately, sometimes years later—that what we did was wrong or misaligned. Instead of understanding these moments developmentally, we often turn against ourselves.

We take the mistake personally.

We carry it as evidence.

The “bad” part of us gets worse.

The “good” part becomes harsher, more prosecutorial.

Both parts battle each other in the name of an ideal that did not exist at the time the mistake was made.

Many of our mistakes happen the first time. We weren’t taught another way, or we needed to test reality for ourselves. In the error, we learn—but we also blame. We take on the burden as if we should have known better, even when knowing better was only possible after the experience.

There may be a better way to understand this.

Ethical clarity does not arrive fully formed. It develops over time. It is learned through experience and through the body’s feedback—through the felt consequences of our actions, not through self-punishment.

So instead of beating ourselves up for doing something wrong, what if we grieved our foolishness for not knowing better?

Grief says, “I didn’t know yet, and that mattered."

Self-hatred says, “I should have known, and therefore I am bad.”

Grief allows integration, learning, and repair.Self-hatred freezes us in a moral loop, endlessly reenacting the original wound.

Therapy, at its best, is not about correcting bad people. It is about helping people release themselves from punishments they never consciously chose, for mistakes made before clarity was possible.

There is a big difference between accountability and cruelty.

And learning begins where cruelty ends