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...

One at the expense of the other, rather than the acceptance of both. It’s that time of year—actually, we’re already on the downhill path of the Big Three: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. I doubt many of us are at a loss for stimulation. It surrounds us now in countless ways—haunting, actually. It’s easy to be swept up in the holiday spirit, to let ourselves get caught in the doing of things, when so much of nature (and our bodies are not separate from that) is telling us to slow...

No one is normal! There is a tendency in life to divide mental acuity into crazy and sane. It might be wiser to instead see mental health as a continuum that we slide along—much like our physical health: sniffles, cold, fever, broken bone. We are all a little bit crazy. Mad at times. Hurricanes and tornadoes are relatively rare, yet they still happen. There is no such thing as a fully mature or fully sane being. To think otherwise is to put yourself in a purity trap, which inevitably leads...