Refute your damnation of others

Writes Dan Siegel, By the middle of the third year of life, a child has already begun to join caregivers in mutually constructed tales woven from their real-life events and imaginings. As one article explained, Emotion regulation does not rely on willpower. People cannot simply will themselves to be in love, or to feel intense joy, or to stop feeling guilty. Emotional control typically relies on various subtle tricks, such as changing how one thinks about the problem at hand or distracting oneself. Christina was certainly not above deploying some tricks and distracting herself. But changing her way of thinking amounted to more than a trick and was proving extraordinarily hard to put into practice. She turned to mindfulness meditation as a deeper method of emotional control, and though she could barely follow one breath without getting lost in a wayward thought, she felt somewhat calmed by the effort to center herself. With characteristic practicality, she had tried constructive self-talk to avoid exposure and flare-ups. She wrote Post-its to herself and read them each day: Minimize contact. Be aware of responses and check them. Practice discipline. We parry and fend the approach of our fellowman by compliments, by gossip, by amuse-ments, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. So for friendship to grow into something closer, people must first be able to be themselves:We must be our own before we can be another's . There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until in their dialogue each stands for the whole world. ' That this is hard to achieve, as Aristotle and Montaigne pointed out, means that friendship is too often a kind of descent or a compromise:What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! ' If most friends were to write truly honest letters to each other, Emerson speculates, they would have to confess how often they had failed one another. This is not so odd or fatalistic as it may first seem. For example, it is very similar to what is often said about happiness: the thing that kills it is wanting it; but living as if happiness were not the goal of life actually makes for it.

(Not that such a neat summary makes the actual living any easier. I've built the Boeing 777. I think I can do this. He was right. Successful people show up with an arsenal of previous achievements that they can apply to new challenges. Alan was my fastest learning assignment ever because he already knew what to do. Emily didn't have that backstop of achievement. She would not only be developing new eating habits, new behavior. She'd be learning how to succeed on the fly. This was the change profile Emily brought to the party on day one. She was tackling one of the hardest behavioral changes in a nonconducive work environment and doing it alone rather than in a supportive group environment. The self-knowing that results is enriched by the narratives that caregivers co-construct with the child. This is a critical point: The child's sense of a rich internal subjective life, and an awareness of this internal life, is totally mediated through these co-constructed narratives. (We have already seen this in the articles on twinship: the good-enough parent asks: What was your day like? How did you feel when Bobby took that toy away from you on the playground? What did you do? What was effective? How might you handle this another time if it happens again, or something like it happens? In effect, the parent or caregiver is asking, Who do you want to be in the face of this kind of experience? )

So, our relationships not only shape what we remember, but how we remember. I don't judge myself, I earnestly try to help myself and don't criticize myself for my confusion. This is always, ultimately, about me managing my own feelings. That is my highest and only priority. Christina tried to approach her problem systematically, but the methods she turned to had ended up feeling like piles of dry leaves, empty of any meaning or relevance. We agreed we would meet twice a week for a time. As she spoke, I listened, questions coming and going in my mind. Was she revisiting early emotional wounds, trying to repair miscarried love from her childhood? Was she a forty-four-year-old woman being preyed on by a welter of confusing endocrine events? Was she, as she entered middle age, trying to recapture a younger version of herself, for whom new love was still in her future? Christina told me that when she was driving alone in her car, she had taken to listening to music from her early teens. ) For many, like Aristotle, happiness is friendship, at least in part, so, in the same way that most people keep faith with happiness when they do not have it, Emerson advocates never losing faith in the highest aspirations of friendship. I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new,' he writes. And again:I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. ' This paradox is not meant to decry close friendship. The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood . But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us and which we can love. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. The spirituality of friendship is therefore dynamic; it moves from below up.

It does not posit a high ideal of friendship as if it were Figure 17:I hate the prostitutions of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. On the other hand, the Daily Questions and her uncle's nightly follow-up calls would be providing elements of structure and follow-up that are curiously missing from most diet articles and weight loss programs (the ones that tell you what to eat but not how to stick with it). The process she followed is a primer on how to pursue adult behavioral change. Stick to the juice cleanse. Get exercise daily. Advance my wine knowledge (she was studying for her Stage 2 Master Sommelier exam). Stay in touch with friends and family. Learn something new at work. Do something nice for someone outside of work. Her goals, not surprisingly, could have been plucked from the classic self-improvement menu we all feast on: lose weight, get fit, get organized, learn something new, quit a bad habit, save more money, help others, spend more time with family, travel to new places, fall in love, and be less stressed. Nothing wrong with that. Most dramatically, our deep human connections shape the very existence of a self that remembers. True autobiographical memory, or episodic memory, then, both requires and contributes to a sense of personal consciousness, of self-knowing (psychologists call this self-knowing autonoesis. ) Of course, this self-knowing is precisely what is not present in the context of the confused, disorganized, or dysfunctional family. What is not present in these families is precisely this quality of self-knowledge, of perspective, of a subjectively rich autobiographical memory--that is, in sequence, with a fullness of time and trajectory, and cause and effect. Implicit memories--especially memories of difficult or even traumatic experiences--lead to an impairment and a constriction of explicit autobiographical memory. They restrict the flow of information. They impair the creation of life stories. They are not integrated. And worst of all, implicit memories constantly intrude themselves--unconsciously--into daily life, into daily decisions, into life choices, into our coping mechanisms.

As in: Why am I in this relationship with David? She found herself lost in nostalgic reverie, collecting up bits of her past that she hadn't remembered in years--deep talks with her father, her first high school heartbreak. I don't know why I'm so absorbed, she said one day. Sometimes I walk around with a brick of grief inside. It's as if all my available internal room has been filled with this brick. My children talk to me, and I feel like I'm listening from the end of a long tube, echoing, far away, hard to hear. This is their childhood, and I don't feel present. And I feel terrible about Ben. Obviously, he knows something is wrong. What can I say? That I've fallen in love with another man? ' (Ralph Waldo Emerson) 240 The Spirituality of Friendship merely a goal to achieve, and which if achieved would suggest that the quest was somehow over. After all, friendship itself would come to an end if the desire to get to know another some more ceased. Nor does it analyse thelow' vicissitudes of friendship solely to reveal the shape and extent of the ambiguities that is the stuff of most relationships, and leave it at that. But, on the assumption that all friendships start from below, it suggests a dynamic process of sifting, discernment, patience, personal struggle and gratitude - sometimes moving up, sometimes sliding down - that opens up the possibility for some friendships to aspire to and realise the best. And when life is lived less than fully -I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it;