This is a key for therapists and for friends guiding friends: Try to get to a more sophisticated story about your client’s or friend’s life. Aim for less obvious blame and for more compassion toward parents and other major figures. Learn that life is always more complicated and subtle than you have usually imagined it. Revise your stories, make them more mature and precise, and clear them of strong childish emotions.

The care of a child’s soul requires restraint and close observation. You have to see how the child finds ways to allow her essence to manifest. A parent’s job as soul educator is to “lead out” the child’s soul into actual life, and this will give rise to a unique individual. Educere, one Latin root of education, means “to lead out.” The other, educare, means “to raise and teach.” If you’re really doing education, you don’t put things into the child, you lead out what is already there and is uniquely the child’s. You can’t expect the child to be like other children or indeed like you.

If you wish to grasp a particular child’s soul for care, notice what he or she fears or finds joy in. Individual sensitivity is a key sign of soul. Look at the people she befriends, since friendship is a key element in a soulful life. What does he do when he plays? Play is like dreaming, a world within a world that the soul likes to inhabit or visit. Surely, you will see signs of a future career or lifestyle in a young child. You can nurture that seedling without pressure or demand. The soul does not respond well to force. It wants room to expand and blossom, and it needs understanding and support.

The worst thing would be that he feels your tension around it or your sadness at the loss and thinks that it’s because of something he did. Kids feel what’s going on around them but they can’t understand, and they make it be about them if you don’t help to explain it. Death is very hard for any of us to understand; it certainly will be difficult for him, but he will grow into it and you can help him over the years.

Buddhist thought has been helpful for me with this because the Buddha’s first noble truth—that life is tinged with a sense of pervasive unsatisfactoriness (or suffering)—takes it as a given that there is always some way that we feel unseen, unknown, or unrecognized.

Psychoanalysis has explored many of the most obvious parental failings that contribute to such feelings but, in trying to find the source, or the cause, of personal uncertainty, it has encouraged people to overly blame their families of origin rather than taking on the responsibility of reaching out to establish whatever kinds of connections are actually possible in life.