šo varētu izlasīt visi, kuriem kādā brīdī ir gadījies saskarties ar domu, ka varbūt jāpamēģina terapija, bet bail vai arī nav īsti priekšstata, kas tas ir un cik lielā mērā var palīdzet tikt galā ar grūtībām.

Therapy seeks to facilitate the intimate rediscovery of apparently distant emotions so that we can rethink them with our adult faculties and liberate ourselves from their frequently mysterious and painful hold on us. (..) Psychotherapy understands that we like to keep away from ourselves because so much of what we could discover threatens to be painful. (..) Therapy demands that we not try to be too clever and accept the need to feel lost and confused.

We often torment ourselves because we have in our minds a very demanding – and in fact impossible – vision of what we’re supposed to be like across a range of areas of our lives. This vision doesn’t emerge from a careful study of what actual people are like. Instead it’s a fantasy, a punitive perfectionism, drawn from the cultural ether. With the phrase ‘good enough’, Winnicott wanted to move us away from idealisation. Ideals may sound nice, but they bring a terrible problem in their wake: they can make us despair of the merely quite good things we already do and have. By dialing down our expectations, the idea of ‘good enough’ resensitises us to the lesser – but very real – virtues we already possess, but which our unreal hopes have made us overlook. A ‘good enough’ life is not a bad life. It’s the best existence that actual humans are ever likely to lead.

(..)Therapy cannot make us happy every day. But its benefits are tangible nevertheless. After a course of therapy, we’ll stand to feel substantially freer. We’ll realise that what we had believed to be our inherent personality was really just a position we had crouched into to deal with the prevailing atmosphere. And having taken a measure of the true present situation, we may accept that there could – after all – be other, sufficiently safe ways for us to be.