A lot of us suffer from forms of emotional and psychological difficulty. From OCD to depression, anorexia to self mutilation, our mental world is rife with difficulty. Walk into a psychiatrist’s, or psychologist’s, office however and you are likely to be told the problem is you. There’s a genetic thing, or an emotional thing, or a broken thing in you that needs to be fixed. And while it is true there might be something to fix, the source of the problem usually lies with others. No child is born depressed, they are made depressed by the abuse and disregard of those around them. Case in point, our schools. Many of our adult difficulties may be directly traced to the violence and abuse we experience in schools, not only at the hands of other students, but at the hands of the teachers as well.

Despite our idolatrous worship of the “individual,” relations are the bedrock and foundation of human experience. We simply cannot survive without relationships. We start out in dependent relationships to our parents, experience our childhood in relation to our teachers, and our peers, enter work life in trade and/or corporate relationships, and build families in a relationship with our partners. Yet for all our experience “in” relationships we have remarkably little success with them. Relationships fail at ridiculous rates and many established relationships are abusive pure and simple. Perhaps it is time to put aside the idolatry of the individual and take a closer look at the significance, importance, and operation of relationships in our progressive and modern world.

Why does family crises seem to boil over each year at this time? Why is the holiday season our busiest time? Contradiction and hypocrisy. You can’t be happy in that body of yours while you’re repressing the truth and living a lie. So pull up a chair and drink to forget, or make the hard choices that will bring you forward in health. Your choices, your choice, your choice.

One of the biggest hurdles to successful therapy is awareness. As children we are taught to suppress our awareness, and play the game of social niceties. We learn through the years that what people want to hear is a superficial illusion. Everything is OK in our life, in our relationship, and in our childhood. Coming into therapy we often want to maintain our illusions, but that won’t work. The first step in any successful regime is an honest assessment of the environment/life you live, not as a judgment but as a way to identify what areas need attention. Here is a story that speaks about illusion, and reality. If you want to start your healing process, the first thing to do is to face the truth.