Avoid contributing material to the drama that is always stretched taut between parents and children; it uses up much of the children’s energy and consumes the love of their elders, which is effective and warming even if it does not comprehend. Ask no advice from them and count upon no understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance and trust that in this love there is a strength and a blessing, out beyond which you do not have to step in order to go very far!

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.

Winnicott, my psychoanalytic hero, had something to say about this kind of situation. He was writing about parents’ concerns about children’s lies, but his insights go well beyond lying.

If development proceeds well the individual becomes able to

deceive, to lie, to compromise, to accept conflict as a fact and to

abandon the extreme ideas of perfection and an opposite to

perfection that make existence intolerable. Capacity for compromise

is not a characteristic of the insane. The mature human being is

neither so nice nor so nasty as the immature. The water in the glass

is muddy, but is not mud.

Rather than clearly seeing what was wrong, and laying the responsibility on her parents, she had remained vague, telegraphing her pain to those around her while simultaneously taking the burden upon herself. “You had to shut yourself off,” I tell her. “To protect yourself, but also to protect your parents. You loved your father,” I reminded her. “His behavior didn’t make sense. You took it on yourself instead.

His mother was a compelling figure, the center of the household, who indulged Steve as long as he did not question her, but ignored him when he did. We might say she was there as an “object-mother” but erratic as an “environment-mother.” This created a big problem for him. There was no room for integrating his anger in this relationship, no possibility of Steve’s mom ever admitting a flaw, and no acknowledgment of Steve’s independent point of view. The natural give-and-take of a mother-child relationship, in which both parent and child get disappointed with one another but learn to tolerate, and forgive, on the road to becoming

interpenetrating centers never happened.

Steve, we began to see, was never given the chance to work productively with his own aggression. It was as if he had no guidance through the inevitable disappointments of early life.