Whenever I pick up a self-help book, I notice that the thing they are mostly targeting is your behaviour. What they miss out on is the thing that is generating that behaviour: your core beliefs.

What is a core belief?

A core belief is an unconscious assumption about the self that molds everything on top of it. In this article, I am focusing on Aaron Beck’s clinical model. It states that you can never experience a core belief directly; you can only experience the result it produces: thoughts. And when you repeatedly act on those thoughts, you form a behavioral pattern. When you stop automatically acting on those thoughts and argue with them, you gain the ability to change.

Here’s the six-step process I use in therapy sessions to help my clients understand them: find the belief, trace where it came from, and rewrite it to match who I am NOW instead of who I WAS when I built it.

Find The Stuck Point

This is the most important part: understand where you struggle in life. Don’t think in vague terms. Try to figure out the specific moments in your life where one decision could have changed the trajectory of your life. When you figure it out, the next part is to notice your repetitions.

Start noticing your patterns: Why do you choose emotionally unavailable partners? Why is it difficult for you to handle criticism? Why do you feel guilty when you say no?

These are some examples of recurring patterns, and there can be more patterns like these. Don’t just look for your behaviour but also think about the environment in which you start acting automatically. These are your stuck points.

Find the core belief underneath it

There’s an interesting concept in mathematics called permutations and combinations. According to it, a small set of numbers can rearrange themselves in thousands of combinations. In my experience, none of us chose our combination, but we can learn to read it. To look at it closely, to feel where it still holds us, and from there to begin arranging it differently.

If your stuck point is: You apologise even if you haven’t done anything wrong. The core belief can be: If someone is upset with me, I am unsafe.

If your stuck point is: You’re unable to rely on anyone. The core belief can be fear of abandonment.

Find the origin

This step requires a lot of contemplation and introspection. You have to figure out the first environment in which this belief made sense. This is also the time where your attachment patterns form. Attachment researchers have a term for this: an internal working model, the template a much younger version of you built.

Look for the earliest moment where your core belief made sense. It can be a small experience that happened in your classroom, or how you felt about conflicts when you saw your parents arguing. When you notice it, you will realise the belief was a strategy a much younger version of you made to survive a specific environment. You will realise that it doesn’t define who you are and that it was just a decision that you made with limited information available to you at that time.

Note: If during introspection, something heavier surfaces, it might be worth doing that with someone who’s trained to hold it.

Reprogram to match current reality

This is the part most people skip or do incorrectly. It’s easy to just switch the narrative. For example, “if you think you aren’t enough” you can think, “you are amazing”. But human psychology doesn’t work that way. You can’t simply replace a deeply held belief with a positive statement and expect your mind to accept it as truth. If the new belief contradicts everything your mind has learned from experience, it will feel less like a belief and more like a lie you’re trying to convince yourself of.

The reason behind this is that your mind will not find it credible or believable. The correct thing to do is to write down the current belief as a true statement according to the present conditions.

For example, if your core belief is “people abandon me if I am not enough,” instead of thinking “I will never be abandoned,” think “yes, people can leave me, but that’s not evidence of me being inadequate.”

The old belief was a reasonable model given what a much younger version of you had access to. The new one just has to account for what you actually have access to now, which in most cases is more information than your older version had.

Act from the new belief

This is how you convert what you learnt from the previous 4 steps into a practical tool. You can’t just change your beliefs by thinking about them; you have to consciously ACT on them.

Next time, when your old belief system automatically says, “your needs don’t matter,” consciously think, “My needs are allowed to exist alongside someone else’s.” Then you have to behave accordingly. Express your disagreement, ask for help when you need help, tell someone that you’re hurt, etc.

When you start doing this, your nervous system will panic, as if something terrible is about to happen. But you have to sit with that discomfort. Your goal is to explore what happens when you choose a different path. Your nervous system will collect new information through the experience, and that is how beliefs begin to change.

Repeat

For this to work, you’ll have to consciously ACT (!) differently hundreds of times to make a change. Beliefs are deeply rooted in us. Choosing a different path once simply can’t eliminate a behaviour that you developed through years of repetitions. You can tell yourself, “you are allowed to have boundaries,” and at the same time fold when someone gets upset with you, and suddenly you find yourself apologising to make them feel better.

And it’s okay. Change takes time. Figure out your stuck point, assess the core belief underneath it, understand why you did it, and match the belief with the current time.

Over time, your old belief will start to crack, and you will become comfortable choosing different paths. You will not feel uncomfortable saying no to someone or feel unsafe because someone is disappointed. This is where actual change blooms, almost like discovering a new way of being human in the world. Almost a miracle.

The Deeper Point

We are always going to have core beliefs. We can’t eliminate them, that’s impossible. What we can do is stop living in an autopilot mode and become conscious of our own behaviour.

Once we become conscious, we can start questioning: What am I doing because I believe in it?

And then: Is that belief still describing the world I actually live in?

The work is to understand that you needed these beliefs at some point in your life, but now that need is no longer present, and it’s okay to let go of them. Don’t hate your past self. Instead, thank that version of yourself for surviving with the information it had, and then slowly teach yourself something new.

If the question stayed with you, leave your email below. This is where we continue.

Subscribe now

And were I to sneak into the consciousness of that man, I would surely look into it and ask which is the greater fear: The fear to die, or perhaps the fear to finally live?

And moreover, that person seeks to outsmart themselves. For they have expressed an intimate thought: the fear of dying is not as great as they thought, and is enchanted in his mind because they do not know how to live.

Be careful with those words, for who will teach a person how to live, or more precisely - how to die?

These two extremes are very near each other, and it seems that in a very crude and surprising way, this is where a person can hold both ends of the stick. For knowing how to die, they would surely know how to live, and knowing how to live, their death would certainly be received with complete understanding.

And were they not well versed in these crafts, they would surely spend their life in a feeling of non-being, as if they existed only in absence.

How can you exist in absence?

Do you not listen to the words of old men? So many describe how they blatantly missed so many years of their lives, which can clearly no longer be returned. And you could not doubt their mere existence for all those lost years. They truly were, but only in absence.

Shall we show compassion to our souls, and accept a loss of one year for every ten we have lived? Or is this too lenient? Perhaps a person loses half of their life?

Stop expressing more of the terror in me! Let us return to the sacred learning, the one that will clarify to us how I could die in the best and most beautiful manner, and by that also live as I sought to be.

It seems that you would have asked the philosopher to gather the crowd in the marketplace and to expressly indicate the proper death. And at first did not even understand why they should hear such trivialities, for how can they discuss what does not exist in their minds?!

Let them be. Talk to me, to yourself. Be with me for one moment, as close as possible. Tell me a great secret from within you.

It seemed to be an impossibly winding whirlpool that I have known from within me, for I am willing to die each day anew, as if to know and appreciate my world to its fullest before its absence.

And how can you die each day anew?

Ask yourself the inverse: what predated what - light or dark? Which of the two supports its contradiction? Who better describes life: the dead, or those living in their absence?

It is clear that those who have seen the end expose the mask of life in a clearer, sharper way than those who live in their absence. But so enchanted is their path, now that they can no longer speak.

But see what cunning of the mind your mouth expressed: even in our discussions I do not truly exist. It is only you, expressing yourself in a different form in your imagination. And perhaps here, too, you can animate the mouths of those who are no longer among the living, as if they would tell you hidden, wonderful things?

What would those tell me?

They would require you for a task only a few are capable of.

Enough of your concealment!

Viktor Frankl would express to you the most charming thought ever written. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he demands of the reader to “live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted for the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.”

So crass are those who are already gone, but still seek to educate? Where were they and their wisdom when they were alive? Is this demand not a blatant proof of their absence in their lives?

True. Only the dead can educate with such enchanted advice. And perhaps it is the imagination of a man who converses with his older image, as you do…

Perhaps we shall continue to converse with the dead, and they will enchant us with more biting thoughts?

How beautiful will be the conversation of the great geniuses who are already digesting their wisdom not in their active soul but after the fact! Imagine a series of their lectures after their life’s play, completely free of the familiar borders.

I would have asked for one cutting line from each, and by that I would certainly learn to die in the best way.

And in that it still seems that when a man is painfully conscious of his nearing end, then his world cleanses to the point that he would fall in love with his dreams, and his termination would be a surprise upon coming.

Would those agree on a few modest commandments, for which a person could die, and therefore also live not in his absence? And how beautiful are their deliberations on such matters, as if they extracted spirit by sharing cutting wisdom? They would turn the world of psychology on its head in one hour’s worth of talking!

These geniuses would create the most enchanted book of books, as if making obsolete all other wonderous creations by combining their ideas. Can you imagine the wonderous hall where Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Sartre, Tolstoy, Yeshayahu Leibowitz and others would gather?

Oh dear, I almost fell in love with my existence in this moment. For it will take a whole life for me to experience my world and give in to the depths of their sacred souls. And it seems now that concerning myself with high ideals can make my life worthwhile, and so I will not live only in absence and by submitting to the common fictions, but I will become a masterpiece in myself, with the advice of the most wonderful masterpieces humanity has ever known.

What is the most enchanting thought you have heard?

** get my books here **

Subscribe now

Yet they still end up making the mistakes they fully understand. They can describe everything about it. What triggered it? What defense mechanism was triggered? What’s the repeating pattern? They can also explain to their friend what to do in that certain situation, but they will end up not following their own advice.

The reason behind this is that being self-aware can’t change your patterns. Change requires you to take agency of your own life and consciously choose new patterns. Self-awareness can be a tool, but not the entire thing. Being psychologically sophisticated doesn’t guarantee that someone will also be good at processing and implementing the psychological changes.

Some of the most influential people have also been the victims of this same problem. These people wrote deeply about human nature, changed our understanding of it, yet they themselves repeated the same patterns in their lives that they wrote about.

Dostoevsky’s Gambling Addiction

Fyodor Dostoevsky is known for his deep psychological understanding of human nature. He influenced every great writer after him. Even though he wrote extensively about self-destructive behaviour and understood it deeply, he himself engaged in the destructive behaviour of gambling. He wrote a book called “The Gambler” (1866). Dostoevsky wrote this book when he had accumulated substantial gambling debts, including money owed to the publisher Fyodor Stellovsky. His contract required him to deliver a new novel by November 1, 1866, or risk losing publication rights to his works for years.

He continued to gamble despite the obvious destruction it caused in his life. Yes, he understood suffering, compulsion, guilt, and self-deception with extraordinary psychological depth, yet intellectual understanding did not magically overpower the forces he described.

Nietzsche’s Irrational Impulses

Friedrich Nietzsche was the genius who declared that “God is Dead.” His work is known for talking about self-authorship and overcoming irrational beliefs. He talked about the overman, a new generation of philosophers who will pursue truth relentlessly and without any biases. Nietzsche’s work makes us question our comfortable identities. His work pushes us to question everything and helps us become the master of our fate.

Yet Nietzsche remained lonely and isolated his whole life. His life contained a lot of emotional volatility, unrequited love, physical suffering, and increasingly extreme isolation. Nietzsche never became the Overman he extensively wrote about. Self-overcoming doesn’t mean isolation or a perfect rational being who has no contradictions. His philosophy recognised that human beings are made of competing drives. Having irrational impulses is not a problem. The problem is acting like consciousness can control them. When we do that, we are not being transparent to ourselves.

Kierkegaard And His Failed Relationship

Søren Kierkegaard is probably the best example of this case. He wrote extensively about inner life, love, institutions, and the difficulty of becoming oneself. Only a few people in history can match the depth of his work. But his own life is a contradiction. He deeply loved Regine Olsen, but he never married her. He became engaged to her, then broke off the engagement, apparently believing that his psychological and spiritual disposition made ordinary marriage impossible.

He kept writing about relationships and their meaning years afterwards. He understood the dilemma, but that understanding could never resolve the emotional conflict behind it.

So, what’s the psychological reason behind it? Why doesn’t insight automatically create change?

Nobody chooses to be hypervigilant, a perfectionist, or a people pleaser intentionally. Most of this behaviour was learned emotionally when you were a child. Every emotional pattern has a need behind it. For example, the habit of being a perfectionist can be a defense mechanism to protect yourself against shame. Similarly, the reason behind being hypervigilant could be that you had to struggle for attention and safety in your childhood. The child simply adapted to its environment.

When you grow up, you can understand why you behave in a certain way intellectually, but the older emotional framework underneath still stays present. This is why just telling yourself that “you will not do it again” never really works. The emotional framework is serving a need for you. The behaviour is usually doing something for you. The person who overthinks may be trying to prevent uncertainty. The perfectionist may be trying to prevent shame. The people pleaser may be trying to prevent abandonment. The emotionally distant person may be trying to prevent dependence. If you simply change the behaviour without understanding the emotional framework beneath it, it’ll find another way to show up.

Also, the problem with self-awareness is that it can also become a form of defense mechanism. It helps you in understanding, but that understanding prevents you from feeling your emotions. You can explain why you are angry, but at the same time, you can have a problem expressing your anger and feeling it. This understanding creates a distance from the experience. You are talking about your emotions instead of feeling them.

Understanding yourself without experiencing yourself is living like a robot. The understanding has to eventually become an experience. You have to stay in the conversation that you withdraw from. You have to tolerate someone being disappointed in you without immediately repairing their feelings. You have to ask for what you need without making the request disappear beneath ten explanations. You have to experience uncertainty without automatically trying to eliminate it (!)

People assume that in therapy, people only talk about their emotions and feelings. But that’s not true. The goal of therapy is to provide you with a safe space where you can examine how you are dealing with the new changes in your life. People commit to therapy not only to talk about their emotions, but to observe their own lives, understand their patterns, and process the changes happening around them. They invest their time in therapy because they want a space where they can slow down, understand themselves, and look at their lives from a different perspective. I also love seeing people transform. It’s my favourite part of my work.

Change occurs slowly. You notice your patterns and you consciously choose to break them. You will probably fail in the future, and that’s where you should try again instead of being hopeless. Eventually, instead of making decisions automatically in certain situations, you will have the ability to make a conscious choice.

This is where psychological freedom arrives: the ability to choose. The true nature of self-awareness is to allow us to recognise our contradictions while they’re happening, and that recognition gives us the power of choosing. This is how I think about self-overcoming as well. Becoming a person who can see the pattern early enough to choose what happens next.

An uncomfortable question to ask yourself is: “What does this mistake continue to give me that I am not yet willing to give up?” This question will take you much deeper than self-awareness. Because once you understand what you are trying to protect subconsciously, you finally have something that you can begin to change.

Subscribe now

As a therapist, I draw on attachment theory to help my clients navigate their lives, and I am glad that it has gained popularity, allowing people to name their vague feelings through it. There is one problem, though: social media is portraying it as a permanent label, which is not true. What attachment theory really does is that it only helps you name what you are feeling in a relationship based on your tendencies in that relationship.

It’s totally possible that one person can have a secure attachment style with one person and an anxious attachment style with a different person. The reason behind this is simple: relationships are an interactive model; there are two parties involved in it. Your behaviour impacts your partner’s behaviour and vice versa.

Attachment theory can’t explain why you are exhibiting those patterns. For example, a person can have an anxious attachment style because of inconsistent caregivers in childhood, and another person can have an anxious attachment because their partner is inconsistent and disappears for hours without any communication. Both of these individuals exhibit the same patterns but due to different reasons.

Now, the problem is that people sometimes use this label for themselves or their partner to label them. The label gives us a simple explanation, but sometimes that explanation might not be accurate. Also, people love to diagnose themselves; instead of doing the hard work of understanding their partner, they simply label themselves as anxious or avoidant as if they are some sort of disorder.

So how do you know whether what you’re feeling is an old attachment pattern or an accurate response to what is happening now?

This is where it becomes a bit complicated.

Read more

The question can feel offensive and painful after a breakup, but I don’t want you to blame yourself for entering into a relationship that wasn’t working out. I want you to recognise what was the thing that made sense to you at that particular moment in life. This will help you understand your own emotional pattern and how you evolved after a break-up.

Just after a break-up, this black-and-white narrative is necessary for us. It helps us to detach from the person and lets our nervous system calm down. This distance allows us to see things clearly after a while, and when we start seeing things for what they are, a new level of understanding is attained.

Relationships aren’t a small thing; we actively participate in them, we become vulnerable, and we let all of our guards down. We adjust our needs for the other person. We adapt to the other person. Now, this doesn’t mean we should take responsibility for someone else’s cruelty. “I allowed this person to hurt me” and “I am curious about why this relationship made sense to me at that time” are two different mindsets. The first one is self-blame, and the second one opens up space for introspection and growth.

The reason why we find it so difficult to leave a bad relationship is that it is meaningful to us. We can have opposite feelings at the same time; something can be both meaningful and harmful to us at the same time. in therapy we learn to sit with both feelings and accept them both.

But after a while, when you look back at your relationship, you see a lot of new things, because now you have the information that you lacked before. You’re much more self-aware about your boundaries; you are selective about whom you want to be vulnerable in front of; you are aware of what emotional patterns can lead to exhaustion; you know your attachment style, and your definition of love is redefined; earlier, you might have confused anxiety, attachment, or the feeling of being chosen with love.

Also, when people say, “I would never choose someone like that again,” they aren’t lying. The experience has changed them to make different choices in the future that are more aligned with their boundaries and needs. This is only possible because of the painful experience you went through.

It may feel uncomfortable to accept, but that relationship was necessary for you at that time. The reason behind this is that you needed that person and not necessarily because you wanted to get hurt. Back then, you weren’t ready for the kind of intimacy that you want today; maybe you were confused about boundaries, or maybe you didn’t know what stability feels like because life has always been chaotic. There could have been many needs, and you wish that you could have avoided the relationship, but this experience was necessary for the current version of you to emerge.

According to the psychoanalytical perspective, looking back at your ex is like looking at the older version of yourself; they both are similar. Your relationship was shaped by the older version of you at that time. When you look back, it can reveal your unconscious desires, attachment patterns, and emotional patterns (Anima and Animus). Today you may think How could I have loved the person? But a better question to ask yourself is:

what was I looking for when I loved them?

Your answer to this question can reveal a lot of things.

Read more

A simple explanation can be that romance is entertaining, and I admit that it is entertaining. But this alone cannot explain why love stories occupy such a privileged position in human culture. No other genre is given the same amount of attention. Neither can any other genre make us feel the same emotional intensity that we feel with romantic stories. I find people rooting for fictional characters as if something meaningful is at stake inside their own lives. When fictional characters get reunited, it comforts them. When they get rejected, it hurts them. Somehow, the longing and yearning of fictional characters becomes their own yearning and longing.

I think psychology offers us one answer. Human beings are dependent on relationships. For example, other animals can survive without years of care from other animals. But humans cannot survive without years of care from others, As the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott once said: “There is no such thing as a baby”, there must always be parents or caregivers alongside them. Even before we learn language, morality, or our own identity, we learn about attachment. We learn whether anyone will come to us when we cry. Whether someone delights in our existence or not. Will someone comfort us when we are afraid? For us humans, love is not just romantic; it is biologically intertwined in our existence. The inherent need to be chosen, protected, and emotionally held is built into the architecture of being human.

When we grow up and become adults, this need metamorphoses into a need to be seen. As adults, we no longer cry for a parent in the middle of the night. But many of us want that someone will understand us without endless explanations, and romance is the symbolic expression of that hope. We are not only looking for affection, but we are also looking for recognition. We want another person to say to us that, yes, I see you for who you are, and I will choose you anyway.

This also explains why the most memorable romantic stories never focus on physical affection. My favorite romance movie, Before Sunrise, in it there are just two strangers who spend one night trying to understand each other’s inner world. The whole movie is just about celebrating each other’s existence. And after years of watching that movie, the only thing I remember about that movie is the deeply intimate conversation that the two characters had. The romance was just simply the surface. Beneath it lay the universal wish to be deeply known without being abandoned. Before Sunrise is compelling because it is actually a story about recognition.

Martin Buber explained in his work that human life becomes most meaningful through genuine encounters with another person. He made a distinction between relationships. According to him, there are two kinds of relationships. In one, we treat other people as objects, and in another relationship, we meet them as fully human subjects. When romance is at its healthiest, it is the second encounter generally. But whether such complete recognition is ever fully possible, that’s another question. But the longing itself remains powerful.

This is also the reason why we love unfinished love stories. Stories like White Nights by Dostoyevsky aren’t about successful relationships or genuine emotional understanding. They are about longing and yearning itself. Sometimes the desire becomes more fulfilling than the fulfillment itself. Freud argued that this desire survives only because it remains unsatisfied. Once it is satisfied, the fantasy loses its intensity. The longing allows us to keep our imagination working, and because of that, sometimes the beloved becomes larger than life because it feels so extraordinary.

But there is also a hidden danger inside our obsession with romance.

The rest of this article is for subscribers.

Join before 11 August and you’ll pay $7 instead of $9.

As long as you stay subscribed, your price stays at $7. After that, this offer won’t return.

Read more

What people forget is what came after. He grew up in a house of women, his mother, his grandmother, his sister, two aunts, and still spent much of his adult life at a distance from her. She raised him inside a devout faith he would spend his life dismantling, and it wasn't only that she failed to understand the thinking he had become.

She could not accept it!

A mind that had grown into something fundamentally different from her own was not a mystery to be puzzled over. It was a threat to what she had built her life on. So it wasn't simply that a father was missing. A mother was present, and still an unbridgeable distance had opened between them, not for lack of love, but because acceptance asks something that understanding alone does not.

Out of that, Nietzsche wrote one of his most famous lines.

“Whoever has not got a good father should procure one.”

This sounds like defiance. Underneath it is something more desperate. If nobody hands you an authority to lean on, you can try to become that authority yourself. You become your own parent, your own judge, your own source of permission.

The psychological need here is obvious enough. Every child needs someone whose approval means something, whose presence sets a floor under the world. When that person is missing, the mind doesn’t simply accept the gap. It tries to fill it, often with itself. The solution feels like strength. Self-sufficiency. Needing no one.

Only in retrospect, after writing two books of Existential Dialogues, I realize that these were the conversations I had always wished I could have had with my father.

But this is also the dilemma. A parent you invent can never surprise you. Can never see something in you that you didn’t already know was there. The whole reason a parent’s gaze matters is that it comes from outside, from someone who isn’t you, who might notice what you’d have missed in yourself. Nietzsche solved the problem of the missing father by becoming his own, and in doing so, made sure he would never again be truly seen by anyone but himself.

Subscribe now

Kafka refused that solution entirely.

His father was not absent. He was overwhelming, loud, physically enormous in the room, and Kafka spent his life shrinking in front of him. His mother saw what was happening and chose peace with her husband over protecting her son, not out of cruelty, but the way people choose the path of least resistance when confrontation costs too much.

Here the psychological need is different. It isn’t the need to invent an authority. It’s the need to never again be that exposed. Once you’ve been truly diminished by someone whose approval you needed, a part of you concludes that needing anyone that much is the actual danger. So Kafka never went looking for a substitute. No mentor was ever allowed to matter as much as his father had.

“my respect for your opinion was such that my failure became inevitable."

This looks like caution. It might even look like wisdom, refusing to repeat an old wound. But the dilemma sits underneath it too. If you never again let anyone occupy that position, you also never again get the thing a parent is supposed to give you, the sense of being steadied by someone bigger than you, someone you didn’t have to build yourself. Kafka protected himself from repeating the injury and, in the same motion, sealed off the one kind of relationship that might have repaired it.

Jung took a third path, and it’s the one that reveals something the other two hide.

For him, the formative parent wasn’t his father, a pastor uncertain in his own faith. Jung was a deeply curious child, full of big questions, but his father was unable to help him find the answers. It was his mother, who he described as having two personalities, warm and ordinary by day, strange and unpredictable by night. Decades later, when he built his theory of the unconscious, of the hidden parts of the self we split off and don’t examine, it is hard not to hear his own mother inside it.

“Nothing exerts a stronger psychic effect upon the human environment, and especially upon children, than the life which the parents have not lived.”

And yet he went looking for a father figure anyway. He found one in Freud, older, certain, commanding, everything his own father wasn’t. For years he wrote to him like a son seeking approval. Then it broke, the way these things often do. Freud accused him of wanting to kill the father. Jung never spoke to him again.

The need Jung was answering wasn’t really about fathers at all. It was about authority itself, about wanting someone whose certainty he could borrow because his own mother’s instability had never let him fully trust his own perception of reality. Freud offered exactly that, for a while. But a borrowed authority is still borrowed. It has to be given back, or taken back, eventually. Jung did exactly what Nietzsche recommended, invented a father for himself, and discovered that inventing one doesn’t close a wound. It only gives the wound a new name, and a new person to lose.

Anna Freud chose a fourth path, and it might be the most difficult one to see clearly, because it doesn’t look like a wound at all.

She never married. She built her career inside her father’s, lived beside him for almost her entire life, and in his final illness, she was the one who cared for him herself rather than leave it to anyone else. Where Nietzsche invented an authority, where Kafka refused to trust one again, where Jung found one and lost him, Anna Freud simply never allowed the separation to happen in the first place.

"I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within."

The need underneath this is perhaps the quietest of the four. Not the need for approval, or safety, or borrowed certainty, but the need to never test whether you could survive the loss at all. If you never fully leave, you never have to find out. Staying looked, from the outside, like devotion. It may also have been the most complete avoidance of the four, because it never had to confront the original absence. It simply made sure the absence never arrived.

Invent one. Refuse another. Find one and lose him. Or never leave to begin with. Four different answers to the same unbearable fact, that the parent we needed was never fully available in the way we needed them to be, and something in each of us had to be done about that. None of the four is a resolution. Each is a different shape the avoidance takes.

I think about my own list sometimes.

When I was in elementary school, there was a sports teacher who once asked us to shoot as many baskets as we could in a minute. Everyone stood directly in front of the hoop and shot straight on. I moved to the side and started banking the ball off the backboard, over and over again. From that angle, I realized I could make many more shots than by shooting straight at the hoop.

He stopped the class and said, “Look. Daniel is thinking.”

I don’t know why that sentence stayed with me the way it did. But something in me had been waiting a long time for someone to notice that, specifically.

Not that I was good. That I was thinking.

There were fathers of women I loved who taught me things about steadiness without meaning to. Men who came into my mother’s life for a year or two and left something behind when they went. None of them signed up for the role. Most of them probably don’t know they filled it.

Look at your own parents for a moment. Not the story you tell about them. What was actually there, and what quietly wasn’t. Most people, if they’re honest, cannot say they had two parents who were fully present, fully able to see them. That isn’t a tragedy. It’s closer to the rule than the exception, even if almost no one says it out loud.

And so we spend our lives doing something we rarely name. We keep finding people willing to stand, briefly, in the place that was left empty. A teacher who saw something. A partner’s mother who knew how to be steady. Someone’s father who taught you, without meaning to, what patience actually looks like up close. We let them in for a season, take what they have to give, love or strength or some way of seeing that we hadn’t been shown before, and then we move on, usually without ever telling them what they were to us.

Perhaps the task was never to resolve what wasn’t there. Some grief doesn’t close. It settles into a person the way a lake settles into a landscape, permanent, still, not going anywhere, and not asking to be emptied.

This is what it means to “live with the constant grief”, the way I wrote in Stare Into the Lake. To hold what I didn’t have, and still go on enjoying, with courage, the fruits and the love the world has to offer me. Not in order to erase the pain of the past, but in order to live, to choose, and to grow together with it. To let in more beautiful colors of existence.

How many meaningful parents do you actually have, if you look honestly?

Leave a comment

There is a thought that quietly visits almost everyone at some point in life, although very few people are willing to say it out loud. You look at the night sky, think about the billions of years that existed before you were born and the billions that will continue after you are gone, and a strange question emerges. Does any of this really matter? Not in the sentimental way we usually ask it, but in the deepest possible sense. If the universe is indifferent to my existence, if galaxies will continue expanding long after my name has disappeared, why should I care about any of this? Why keep trying? Why keep loving, creating, or hoping inside a reality that appears entirely unconcerned with whether I exist at all?

This realization often feels terrifying because we have spent most of our lives believing that meaning must come from somewhere outside ourselves. As children, our parents tell us what matters. Schools tell us what success looks like. Religions tell us why we exist. Cultures hand us identities before we have the opportunity to choose them. For much of our lives, meaning arrives already packaged. Then something changes. Perhaps a loss, a disappointment, or simply growing older forces us to notice that many of these inherited certainties no longer carry the emotional weight they once did. We discover that the world is not obligated to reassure us. It does not explain itself. It simply continues existing. That realization can feel like standing alone in an immense silence.

Albert Camus believed this silence is where philosophy truly begins. He argued that the central human problem is not suffering itself but the confrontation between two irreconcilable realities. On one side stands the human mind, endlessly searching for meaning, justice, and explanation. On the other stands a universe that offers none of these things voluntarily. Camus called this collision the absurd. Importantly, the absurd does not mean life has no value. It means the universe refuses to answer the questions we desperately keep asking it. We ask why innocent people suffer. Why love ends. Why death exists. The universe remains silent. The pain comes not only from suffering but from our expectation that reality should justify itself.

We suffer more from our inability to tolerate uncertainty than from the possibility that the answers might be upsetting.

People respond to this uncertainty in many different ways. Some find meaning through faith, others through philosophy, family, creativity, community, or personal values. These paths can offer genuine comfort and direction. Camus was not trying to take those away. He was asking a different question. Even if we have beliefs that guide us, there are still moments when life refuses to provide the answers we long for. A loved one dies unexpectedly. A diagnosis changes everything. A relationship ends without explanation. What do we do when reality remains silent despite our deepest questions? How do we continue living then?

The question, then, is what we are supposed to do with this silence. If the universe does not provide absolute meaning, should we invent comforting certainties? Should we surrender to despair and conclude that nothing matters? Camus believed both responses miss something essential. One escapes uncertainty by demanding final answers. The other mistakes uncertainty for hopelessness. His philosophy of the absurd offers a middle way. It asks whether we can stop demanding that life justify itself and instead learn to participate in it fully. Not because we have solved the mystery of existence, but because we have accepted that some mysteries may never be solved. This is where Camus believed freedom quietly begins.

Read more

There is a sentence I hear in therapy far more often than people expect. It rarely sounds dramatic. It is usually hidden inside ordinary complaints about relationships, anxiety, perfectionism, or the inability to feel good enough. After enough conversation, it quietly emerges: “I just wanted my parents to see me.” The details change from person to person. Some wanted approval. Others wanted protection. Others simply wanted to feel emotionally safe. Yet beneath these different stories lies the same psychological longing. Long before we wanted success, romance, or purpose, we wanted to be known by the people whose eyes first taught us who we were.

Few writers captured this longing more painfully than Franz Kafka. His Letter to His Father is not merely a personal document about a difficult parent. It is a psychological portrait of what happens when a child grows up feeling chronically small in the presence of someone whose approval feels impossible to earn. Kafka describes a father who appeared overwhelmingly powerful, emotionally intimidating, and impossible to satisfy. Whether every detail reflects objective reality is almost beside the point. What matters psychologically is the world Kafka carried inside himself. He developed a profound sense of inadequacy, a relentless self-consciousness, and the painful belief that something about him was fundamentally insufficient. Those themes did not remain inside his childhood. They became the emotional atmosphere of his adult life and eventually the foundation of much of his writing.

When people read Kafka, they often focus on the absurdity of his stories. They notice the bureaucracy of The Trial or the horror of The Metamorphosis. What they sometimes miss is that beneath these narratives lies the emotional experience of a child trying to exist in a world that constantly feels larger, more powerful, and more condemning than he is. Gregor Samsa does not simply wake up as an insect. He wakes up believing that his worth depends entirely on what he can provide. Josef K. does not simply face an unexplained trial. He carries the haunting feeling of being guilty without fully understanding why. These stories continue affecting readers because they describe emotional realities that many people quietly recognize within themselves.

One of the greatest misunderstandings about childhood is the belief that it ends when childhood ends. Intellectually, most adults know they are no longer six years old. Psychologically, however, many continue organizing their lives around emotional conclusions they reached decades earlier. A child who repeatedly experiences criticism may become an adult who constantly anticipates rejection. A child who learns that love depends upon achievement may become an adult who cannot rest without guilt. A child who never feels emotionally safe may later struggle to trust partners who genuinely care for them. The body grows older, but the nervous system often continues expecting the world it learned during its earliest relationships.

This is why people are sometimes surprised that insight alone changes so little. Someone may understand exactly why they fear abandonment or why they keep choosing emotionally unavailable partners. They may know their attachment style, recognize the influence of childhood, and accurately describe every important event that shaped them. Yet their emotional reactions remain remarkably similar. They still panic when someone pulls away. They still feel guilty when setting boundaries. They still believe they have to earn love rather than receive it. Understanding your history is important, but understanding alone rarely transforms the emotional habits your nervous system has spent years rehearsing.

Read more

If you find value in writing that challenges as much as it illuminates, disturbs as much as it enriches and you have the means, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

One of the most heartbreaking moments in The Shawshank Redemption does not happen inside the prison. It happens after prison. Brooks Hatlen, the elderly librarian played by James Whitmore, finally receives the freedom he had spent decades waiting for. The prison doors open, and the world welcomes him back. Yet instead of feeling liberated, he feels lost. The streets move too fast. The grocery store overwhelms him. Every ordinary task feels unfamiliar. Eventually, unable to adapt to the very freedom he once longed for, Brooks takes his own life. It is one of cinema’s most devastating psychological moments because it reveals something deeply uncomfortable. Sometimes the thing that saves us is not what feels safest.

The film uses the word “institutionalized” to explain Brooks’ tragedy. He had lived inside prison walls for so long that they no longer felt like a punishment. They felt like home. Outside those walls there was uncertainty, responsibility, and endless possibility. Inside them there was predictability. Human beings adapt remarkably well, even to environments that hurt them. This is one of the great paradoxes of psychology. We often assume that people naturally move toward what is healthy. In reality, we are usually drawn first toward what is familiar. Familiarity calms the nervous system, even when it comes wrapped in suffering.

This same pattern appears far beyond prisons. I often meet people who sincerely want peace, healthy relationships, and emotional stability. They tell me they are exhausted by conflict. They say they no longer want chaos in their lives. Yet when they finally encounter a relationship that is calm, respectful, and emotionally available, something unexpected happens. They become restless. They begin wondering whether something is missing. The relationship starts feeling flat, predictable, or strangely empty. They tell themselves there is no chemistry. Sometimes they leave, only to find themselves once again in relationships defined by unpredictability, emotional distance, or conflict. They believe they are choosing passion. More often, they are choosing familiarity.

This is one of the most misunderstood consequences of growing up in chaotic environments. If your earliest experiences of love were mixed with instability, criticism, emotional unpredictability, or constant conflict, your nervous system may gradually learn that this is what intimacy feels like. Chaos becomes associated with connection. Hypervigilance becomes associated with care. Emotional inconsistency becomes associated with desire and passion. Years later, when a healthy relationship offers consistency instead of unpredictability, it does not always feel comforting. Sometimes it feels unfamiliar. And what is unfamiliar can feel psychologically threatening, even when it is objectively safer.

Many people interpret this experience as evidence that they have simply met the wrong person. They say there is no spark, no excitement, no passion. But beneath these explanations there is often another possibility. The nervous system is not asking, “Is this relationship healthy?” It is asking, “Does this relationship feel like the world I learned to survive in?” or perhaps the deeper, unconscious question: "How can someone love me this way when my parents loved me in a completely different way?" Those are very different questions. We do not automatically fall in love with what is good for us. We are often drawn toward emotional environments that resemble the ones that first taught us what love was supposed to feel like.

Read more

There is a sentence I hear surprisingly often in therapy. Someone sits down, describes years of anxiety, indecision, or dissatisfaction, and eventually says, “I just want to be my authentic self.” It sounds like a simple goal. It feels psychologically healthy. Modern culture has taught us that authenticity is the highest form of self-development. We are encouraged to be ourselves, speak our truth, and stop living for other people. Yet after asking a few more questions, something interesting usually happens. The person becomes quiet. They realize they have no clear answer to the most important question of all. What exactly is this authentic self they are trying to become? They know what they dislike about their current life, but they struggle to describe the person underneath the roles, expectations, and identities they have accumulated over the years.

This is because authenticity has quietly become one of the most misunderstood ideas in modern psychology. We speak about it as though there is a fully formed, original self waiting somewhere inside us, hidden beneath layers of social conditioning. The task, we imagine, is simply to uncover it. But human beings do not emerge in isolation. We are shaped from the beginning by language, family, culture, education, religion, friendships, algorithms, films, books, and people we admire. Before we choose our values, many of our values have already chosen us. Before we decide who we want to become, countless invisible influences have already begun writing the first chapters of our identity. The self we experience as deeply personal is often far more collective than we realize.

This is why I often think about one of the most memorable episodes of BoJack Horseman, “Xerox of a xerox.” The episode revolves around a painful realization: our stories, identities, and even our attempts to express ourselves are often built from things we inherited rather than invented. The title sounds cynical at first, but psychologically it contains an uncomfortable truth. Much of what we believe to be uniquely ours has been borrowed from somewhere else. Our humor resembles someone we admired. Our ambitions resemble the people who raised us. Even the language we use to describe ourselves was learned from other human beings. We like to imagine ourselves as original authors, yet we are also editors, constantly revising material that existed long before we arrived.

This realization often creates resistance. People worry that if everything is influenced by something else, authenticity becomes impossible. If my personality is shaped by my parents, my friends, the books I read, and the culture around me, then what part of me is actually mine? This question reveals a hidden assumption. We imagine authenticity means originality. We assume that to be authentic is to become someone untouched by influence. But this standard is impossible. No human being creates themselves from nothing. Even the philosophers who urged people to think independently were themselves shaped by traditions they spent their lives questioning. The desire to become completely original may itself be another fantasy inherited from a culture obsessed with individuality.

The deeper psychological problem is not that we are influenced by others. The problem is that we often remain unconscious of those influences. In therapy, people sometimes discover that they are pursuing careers they never genuinely chose, relationships that repeat familiar family dynamics, or definitions of success that belong more to their parents than to themselves. They wake up in their thirties or forties with an unsettling feeling that they have been living someone else’s life. What they call an identity crisis is often the painful recognition that many of their choices were made automatically. They did not consciously decide what mattered to them. They inherited values, repeated patterns, and followed scripts that felt normal simply because they had never been questioned.

This is why I think authenticity is less about discovering yourself and more about examining yourself. The question is not, “Who am I beneath all influence?” That person does not exist. The more useful question is, “Which influences still deserve a place in my life?” Psychological growth rarely involves stripping away every external influence until some perfectly pure self emerges. It involves becoming increasingly conscious of the ideas, loyalties, fears, and aspirations that quietly organize your life. Some of them continue to serve you. Others belonged to a younger version of yourself who needed them for reasons that no longer exist.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche understood this process remarkably well. He believed that becoming who you are was not an act of self-discovery but an act of self-creation. Yet self-creation did not mean inventing yourself from nothing. It meant developing the courage to examine inherited values rather than obeying them automatically. Nietzsche repeatedly warned that many people spend their lives living according to moral systems, ambitions, and ideals they never consciously chose. They inherit them, mistake them for their own, and then defend them as though they emerged naturally from within. Authenticity, in this sense, requires less confidence and far more honesty. It demands the uncomfortable willingness to ask whether the life you are living is actually yours.

One of the reasons this process feels so frightening is that borrowed identities provide stability. They tell us what success looks like, what relationships should be, what kind of person deserves admiration, and what future we ought to pursue. Letting go of these inherited structures creates uncertainty, and uncertainty is psychologically expensive. Many people prefer an inherited certainty to an examined freedom. It is easier to continue living a copy-and-paste life than to confront the possibility that some of our deepest convictions were never freely chosen. The tragedy is that we often confuse familiarity with authenticity simply because we have carried certain beliefs for so long.

Nietzsche’s message was, “Become who you are.” We often read this as permission to express ourselves. I wonder if he meant something far more demanding. Before you can become who you are, you must first decide who you are willing to stop being. Every inherited belief, every borrowed ambition, every identity built to earn love or approval eventually asks the same question: Can you say no to your ambitions if they were never truly yours? Can you reject the beliefs that once gave you belonging? Can you disappoint the version of yourself that has spent years trying to please everyone else? Perhaps becoming yourself is less about self-expression than about having the courage to edit your own life.

This is not a place for answers.

It is a place for questions that linger, for contradictions that refuse resolution, for the strange feeling that something important is hiding just beyond language.

We dwell among contradictions, chase impossible questions, and examine the tensions that shape human existence.

If you find value in writing that challenges as much as it illuminates, disturbs as much as it enriches and you have the means, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Share

There is a particular kind of person I often meet in therapy who describes themselves as fiercely independent. They rarely ask for help. They solve their own problems, regulate their own emotions, and carry difficult experiences alone. They are usually highly competent and remarkably responsible. Friends admire their resilience. Colleagues depend on them. They often take pride in not needing much from anyone. Yet if the conversation continues long enough, another emotional reality slowly emerges. They feel lonely more often than they admit. Relationships feel emotionally distant. They secretly wish people would understand them better, yet struggle to let others get close. The contradiction is painful. They deeply want connection while simultaneously organizing their entire lives around never having to depend on anyone.

Eventually, a question appears. Why do some people seem so independent while also feeling profoundly alone? Why do they crave intimacy and yet become uncomfortable when someone genuinely attempts to care for them? Why does receiving help sometimes create guilt, irritation, or a strange desire to withdraw? Most people assume the answer is personality. They conclude that they are simply introverted, self-sufficient, or built differently from others. But in my work, I have rarely found that to be the full story. More often, what looks like independence is something much older. It is an adaptation that once protected the person from disappointment and gradually became mistaken for an identity.

Many people who struggle with closeness learned something very early in life: needing others did not feel safe. Sometimes they grew up with emotionally unavailable parents. Sometimes they lived in homes where vulnerability was dismissed, criticized, or ignored. Sometimes caregivers were inconsistent, loving one moment and emotionally absent the next. Children are remarkably adaptive. If the environment repeatedly teaches them that asking for comfort leads to disappointment, they eventually stop asking. They become less expressive about their needs. They become easier, quieter, and more self-reliant. From the outside, this looks like maturity. Internally, it is often a child making a painful but intelligent decision: if I need less, I can hurt less.

The tragedy is that these adaptations work remarkably well(!) The child who learns not to need anyone often becomes an adult who can tolerate enormous amounts of stress and responsibility. They become the friend who listens to everyone else’s problems. The person who never complains. The partner who says they are fine even when they are overwhelmed. They survive because they have learned how to carry everything alone. Over time, the strategy becomes so successful that it transforms into an identity. They no longer say, “I learned not to depend on people.” They say, “I am just independent.” They no longer say, “I am afraid of being disappointed.” They say, “I enjoy being alone.” Survival slowly becomes personality.

Read more

Others experience the opposite. They feel overwhelming chemistry with someone they would never commit to. They fantasize about them constantly, become obsessed with them, yet the thought of building a stable life with this person feels strangely impossible.

Different partners, different circumstances, but the emotional experience remains remarkably similar. Eventually a painful question appears.

Why are some people capable of loving someone, or desiring someone, but struggle to experience both at the same time?

Over a century ago, Freud attempted to answer this. He called it the Madonna-Whore complex. The name is outdated and reflects the cultural assumptions of his time, but the psychological insight has remained surprisingly persistent.

Freud observed that some people unconsciously divide partners into separate emotional categories. One category contains people who are admired, respected, cherished, perceived as suitable for love and commitment. The other contains people associated with sexuality, fantasy, danger, excitement. The tragedy emerges because these categories become psychologically separated. The person can love deeply without desire, or desire intensely without love, but rarely both at once.

“Where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire they cannot love.”

This split usually remains invisible to the person living it. They don’t wake up one morning and say, “I’ve separated love from desire.” They describe patterns. They lose attraction once relationships become serious. They keep getting infatuated with unavailable people. They complain that kind partners feel boring, while chaotic relationships feel alive. They oscillate between safety without passion and passion without security. Because the pattern is unconscious, they conclude they simply haven’t found the right person.

In reality, they may be meeting the same psychological division again and again in different forms.

Freud believed these patterns often originate in early experiences of love, attachment, and sexuality. In some developmental environments, affection becomes associated with innocence and emotional safety, while sexuality becomes linked with secrecy, guilt, or shame. Over time, these emotional currents organize themselves into separate internal systems. The person learns, without realizing it, that tenderness and desire do not belong together. Respect and eroticism become psychologically incompatible.

The result is a quiet tragedy. They may deeply admire and love one person while struggling to desire them. Or they may experience overwhelming passion toward someone they cannot fully trust or commit to. The problem isn’t an absence of love or attraction. The problem is that love and desire have been organized into different emotional worlds.

Modern attachment theory adds a layer. For some people, emotional intimacy itself activates anxiety. Desire often thrives in uncertainty, because uncertainty leaves room for fantasy. The other person stays partly unknowable, partly unfinished, and the mind fills in the gaps with longing. Real intimacy demands the opposite. It requires allowing another person to become ordinary. To see their fears, their limitations, their morning faces. And for individuals whose emotional development separated love from desire, ordinariness can feel like the death of attraction.

This is why emotionally unavailable relationships can feel so intoxicating. Distance preserves fantasy. The unavailable partner remains psychologically unfinished, and the mind continues filling the gaps with idealization and longing. The very absence of intimacy sustains the erotic tension. Many people mistake this intensity for compatibility. In truth, they may be feeling the emotional consequences of uncertainty itself.

If you’ve read this far, you may recognize yourself in some of it. Most thoughtful people do.

But here is where the conversation usually ends, and where I think it should begin.

Because Freud described a real phenomenon, but I am not certain he diagnosed it correctly. I am increasingly convinced that what he called the Madonna-Whore complex is not only an individual neurosis. It is partly a cultural inheritance, partly a misunderstanding of how desire actually works, and partly, this is the uncomfortable part, a problem that Freud’s own framing has helped to preserve.

There are at least four things wrong with the way we keep telling this story.

And once you see them, you cannot un-see them.

Read more

When people first watch Fight Club, they often focus on the violence, the rebellion, or the critique of consumer culture. Yet none of those themes explain why the film continues to resonate with millions of people decades after its release. The deeper reason is that many viewers recognize themselves in the narrator before Tyler Durden ever appears. They recognize the exhaustion of living according to expectations they never consciously chose. They recognize the feeling of achieving things that were supposed to matter and discovering that they do not. Most importantly, they recognize the strange loneliness of becoming successful at a life that does not feel like their own.

Nietzsche had a word for this condition. He called it nihilism. Today, the word is often associated with hopelessness, but Nietzsche meant something more subtle. Nihilism emerges when the structures that once provided meaning begin to collapse. A person continues functioning, but no longer knows why they are functioning. The old values lose their emotional power, yet no new values have taken their place. This creates a psychological vacuum. People still move through life, but they no longer feel connected to what they are doing. The narrator of Fight Club embodies this state perfectly. He has acquired everything society promised would create fulfillment, yet he remains emotionally numb.

What makes this experience so painful is that it often arrives after success rather than failure. Most people assume existential crises occur when life falls apart. In reality, many crises begin when life works exactly as intended. You follow the script. You achieve the milestones. You become responsible. And then one day you find yourself staring at the ceiling, wondering why none of it feels alive. This is the moment when the narrator begins attending support groups. It is not because he is searching for help. It is because he is searching for a feeling. Even grief borrowed from strangers feels more real than the carefully constructed life he returns to afterward.

Then Tyler Durden appears. Most viewers see Tyler as confident. Others see him as a rebel. I think both interpretations miss something important. Tyler Durden is not confident. Tyler Durden is compensation. He is the psychological response to a life that has become disconnected from authentic desire. He emerges at the exact moment the narrator can no longer tolerate his own passivity. Tyler represents everything that has been rejected, suppressed, or sacrificed in the process of becoming socially acceptable. He is aggressive, whereas the narrator is passive. Decisive where the narrator is hesitant. Alive where the narrator feels dead.

The reason Tyler feels so liberated is that he offers something modern people desperately crave: certainty. He knows what he believes. He knows what he wants. He knows who the enemy is. He provides a coherent explanation for suffering and a clear path forward. Psychologically, this is incredibly seductive. Human beings can tolerate pain far better than they can tolerate confusion. Meaninglessness creates anxiety because it leaves us without orientation. Tyler eliminates that uncertainty instantly. Suddenly, there is a mission. A purpose. A brotherhood. A sense of belonging. The narrator is no longer drifting through life. He finally feels part of something larger than himself.

Read more

From the outside, they appear self-aware. They read psychology. Philosophy. Literature. They understand attachment styles. Trauma. Defense mechanisms. They can explain exactly why their last relationship ended.

And yet somehow, the emotional experience keeps repeating. Different person. Different face. Different story. Yet the same distance. The same anxiety. The same feeling that something important remains just out of reach.

Eventually a question appears: “If I understand myself this well, why do I keep struggling with love?”

This is where the lives of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Camus, and Sartre become surprisingly useful. Not because they figured love out. Because they didn’t.

Some of the most brilliant minds in history spent their lives studying freedom, meaning, morality, suffering, and the human condition. Yet when it came to intimacy, many found themselves trapped in the very patterns they could describe so clearly in others.

And perhaps that is exactly why their stories matter. They reveal something uncomfortable: Insight does not automatically create intimacy.

Nietzsche and the Fear of Being Ordinary

When Friedrich Nietzsche met Lou Andreas-Salomé, he believed he had found someone extraordinary. She was intelligent, independent, intellectually fearless.

He fell in love quickly. She rejected him. Then rejected him again. The emotional collapse that followed would shape some of his most important writing. Most people look at this story and see heartbreak. I think something deeper was happening.

Nietzsche spent much of his life cultivating the identity of an outsider. Someone exceptional. Someone who stood apart from ordinary people.

And many intellectually gifted people quietly build similar identities. They become known for being insightful. Deep. Different. Hard to understand. But love asks for something entirely different. Love is not interested in your uniqueness.

Love eventually wants your ordinary self. The insecure self. The needy self. The frightened self. The version of you that exists when nobody is impressed.

And for some people, that exposure feels more threatening than rejection itself. Because if someone sees the ordinary parts and walks away, there is nowhere left to hide. Many people do not fear being unloved. They fear being loved without the protection of being exceptional.

Dostoevsky and the Addiction to Emotional Intensity

Fyodor Dostoevsky understood suffering better than almost anyone. He could describe guilt, shame, faith, self-destruction, and psychological conflict with astonishing accuracy. Yet his own romantic life often pulled him toward pain. He repeatedly found himself attached to relationships that generated anxiety, instability, longing, and emotional chaos.

Why? Perhaps because understanding a pattern and escaping a pattern are not the same thing. This is one of the most difficult lessons psychology teaches.

Awareness is valuable. But awareness alone does not change emotional conditioning. Many people know they are attracted to unavailable partners. Many know they struggle with abandonment. Many know they confuse intensity with intimacy.

And yet the same attraction appears again. Not because they are irrational. Because the nervous system does not automatically seek health. It seeks familiarity.

For some people, calm feels unfamiliar. Stability feels boring. Peace feels suspicious. And emotional turbulence feels like chemistry. The question is not whether you understand your pattern. The question is whether you are willing to choose differently when the pattern appears.

Camus and the Need for New Mirrors

Albert Camus spent much of his life moving between relationships. He loved deeply. But he was also repeatedly unfaithful. This contradiction fascinates people because it seems difficult to understand.

How can someone genuinely love and still continually seek new romantic experiences? One possibility is that the issue was never love itself. It was selfhood. Many people do not seek new relationships because they need new people. They seek new relationships because they need new reflections of themselves.

Being desired temporarily restores something. Being admired temporarily restores something. Being chosen temporarily restores something.

For a moment, uncertainty disappears. But because the deeper problem remains unresolved, the feeling fades. And the search begins again. This pattern is often mistaken for passion. But underneath it is usually something quieter. A difficulty being alone with oneself. A difficulty experiencing one’s own existence without external confirmation.

How many people call it freedom when what they are really experiencing is restlessness?

Sartre, Beauvoir, and the Limits of Self-Awareness

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir believed they could redesign relationships through reason. They wanted freedom without possessiveness. Commitment without limitation. Intimacy without dependency.

It was one of the most ambitious relationship experiments in modern intellectual history. And in many ways, it failed. Not because they lacked intelligence. Because intelligence does not eliminate emotional reality.

This remains one of the most seductive mistakes thoughtful people make. They believe understanding a feeling is equivalent to resolving it. They believe awareness neutralizes vulnerability. They believe analysis creates immunity. It does not.

You can understand jealousy perfectly and still feel jealous. You can understand attachment theory and still fear abandonment. You can explain your wounds beautifully and still be governed by them.

The unconscious is not persuaded by good arguments.

It changes only through experience.

The Hidden Problem: What connects all of these stories?

Not arrogance. Not failure. Not weakness. It’s something much more human. Each of these thinkers spent their lives developing extraordinary insight into the human condition.

But insight can become a hiding place. Knowledge can become a defense mechanism. Analysis can become a substitute for vulnerability. Some people retreat into work. Some retreat into achievement. Some retreat into self-improvement. Some retreat into philosophy. All of them remain emotionally protected.

The tragedy is that protection often looks identical to growth from the outside. Until one day a relationship exposes the difference.

What This Means For You

I see this pattern often in my work. People who understand themselves remarkably well. People who have read everything. Thought about everything. Analyzed everything. And yet remain stuck in the same emotional experiences. The same relationship dynamics. The same fears. The same forms of loneliness.

Eventually they discover something frustrating. The next step is not another insight. It is a risk. A conversation. A boundary. A confession. A decision. A willingness to tolerate uncertainty without immediately retreating into explanation.

Because love is not primarily a problem to solve. It is an experience to participate in. And perhaps the deepest challenge is not becoming more self-aware.

Perhaps the deepest challenge is allowing another person to meet the parts of you that awareness has spent years protecting. That is where intimacy begins. And that is the place even philosophers struggled to enter.

Something happens after an essay like this, and it is worth naming.

The recognition feels like movement. It feels like progress. But then it fades. usually within a few days and the same pattern starts running again.

Insight alone doesn’t change us. Continuing the work does.

That is what this newsletter is for. Every week, I write to thousands of thoughtful people who are tired of using analysis as a hiding place, exploring what it actually takes to move from self-awareness to real intimacy, risk, and change.

Written from inside the problem, not above it.

If the question stayed with you, leave your email below. This is where we continue.

Subscribe now

Nietzsche asks us to imagine a demon coming to us in our loneliest hour and telling us that everything in our life will return. Not only the beautiful parts. Not only the kisses, the friendships, the moments of pride, the rare mornings when being alive felt strangely light. Everything. The shame, the fear, the losses, the illnesses, the humiliations, the mistakes, the years of confusion, the people we hurt, the people who hurt us, the nights we did not know how to continue. Nothing would be edited. Nothing would be improved. Nothing would be explained from above. This life, exactly as it was, would have to be lived again and again (!)

Most people present this idea as if the highest human being would immediately say yes. As if the goal is to become so strong, so free, so overflowing with life, that one could look at the whole of existence and say: yes, again, exactly like this. But I want to be honest. I do not think most people would say yes. Maybe even Nietzsche himself would not have said yes so easily. And maybe this is exactly why the question is so powerful. If we answer it too quickly, we turn it into another motivational slogan. But if we stay with it, the question becomes almost unbearable.

As an existential psychotherapist, I have sat with young people who are already tired from life. People who are supposed to be at the beginning, but already carry shame, anxiety, loneliness, family wounds, failed love, trauma and the strange feeling that they are late to their own existence. I have also sat with Holocaust survivors. People who knew something about human darkness that philosophy can approach, but never fully contain. When you sit with people who have seen what life can do to a person, you become much more careful with beautiful ideas. Because the truth is this: most people would not choose to live their life again. Maybe they would choose the pleasures again. The laughter, the food, the loves, the books, the children, the friendships, the small moments when the world suddenly felt kind. Maybe they would choose a certain face, a certain afternoon, a certain sentence someone once said that stayed with them for years. But the entire life? With the terror included? With the childhood included? With the helplessness included? With the losses included? With the body included? With all the years that did not feel like growth but simply like survival? Most people, if they were honest, would probably say DAMN NO.

And maybe that is not weakness. Maybe that is honesty. There are things in life no person would freely choose twice. There are experiences we survive, but would never bless. There are rooms in the soul we do not want to enter again. There are years that were not “lessons” while they were happening. They were simply pain.

Read more

-Albert Camus

A Boy from Algiers Who Refused to Look Away

There is something almost theatrical about Albert Camus’s life, the kind of arc that, if invented in fiction, would be dismissed as too neat, too symbolic. Born in 1913 in a working-class apartment in Mondovi, French Algeria, to a mother who was partially deaf and could barely read, and a father who died in the trenches of World War I before Albert turned one, Camus grew up in raw, unsentimental poverty. He slept in a two-room apartment with his mother, grandmother, and uncle. The Mediterranean sun blazed overhead with indifferent ferocity. He played football in the dust. He read obsessively.

And yet this child of deprivation would go on to write some of the twentieth century’s most searching moral literature, novels, plays, essays, and journalism that refused the easy consolations of ideology, religion, or nihilism. In 1957, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature at just forty-four years of age, becoming the second-youngest laureate in the award’s history. Three years later, on a January road outside Paris, he died in a car crash. A manuscript, unfinished, was found in the wreckage.

Camus belongs to no school of thought entirely, which is precisely why he remains so alive. He is often shelved next to Sartre as an existentialist, a label he rejected with characteristic bluntness. He was a philosopher who disliked being called a philosopher. A French intellectual who spent his formative years under the Algerian sun. A moralist who despised moralizing. To understand him properly, you have to begin not with his arguments but with his sensibility, a man deeply in love with life, deeply aware of its absurdity, and absolutely unwilling to betray either truth.

The Absurd: Camus’s Central Obsession

Before diving into individual works, it is worth pausing on the idea that powers all of them: the absurd. Camus did not invent the word, but he gave it a specific, charged meaning that he returned to throughout his career.

For Camus, the absurd arises from a collision, the collision between the human longing for clarity, meaning, and order, and the universe’s complete, utter silence on the matter. We are creatures who demand reasons. The world offers none. That gap, between our hunger for significance and the world’s radical indifference, is the absurd. It is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be faced.

“The absurd is not in man nor in the world, but in their presence together.”

The crucial move in Camus’s thought, the thing that separates him from darker thinkers who reached similar conclusions, is what he says we should do about it. Most responses to the absurd, he argued, are forms of evasion. Suicide says: if life has no meaning, I will exit. Religion says: there must be meaning beyond what we can see. These are what he called philosophical suicide, leaping out of the tension instead of living inside it. Camus demanded a third option: revolt. Stay. Acknowledge the absurdity. Keep living anyway. Find joy in the confrontation itself (!)

This is the skeleton beneath everything he wrote. The novels dramatize it. The essays argue it. The plays perform it. Now let us trace it through the works.

The Novels: Three Masterpieces, One Thread

The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers only: a deeper journey through Camus’s novels, essays, plays, and the psychological reason his work still feels necessary for anyone trying to live without illusions. The Founding Member option also includes one year of full access plus a private 1:1 online session with me, for readers who want to bring these ideas into a real conversation.

Read more

Not similarity in talent or personality. Something deeper than that.

A child standing in front of a father whose approval feels psychologically enormous. A child learning very early that love, safety, recognition, and worth are somehow tied to performance.

Kafka described his father as emotionally overwhelming. In his famous “Letter to His Father”, he wrote about feeling diminished in his presence, constantly inadequate, unable to meet an invisible standard that always seemed slightly out of reach. His father represented authority in its most psychologically consuming form. Not simply strictness, but a presence so large it shaped Kafka’s entire internal world.

Reading Kafka, you get the sense of a child who slowly learned to monitor himself constantly. A child who became hyper-aware of judgment. Someone who internalized criticism so deeply that it eventually became part of his own inner voice.

And when I later read interviews and stories about Michael Jackson’s childhood, I felt something painfully similar.

Michael Jackson’s relationship with his father, Joe Jackson, has often been discussed publicly, especially the intense rehearsals, punishments, criticism, and emotional fear surrounding his upbringing. What struck me wasn’t only the harshness itself. It was the psychological structure around it.

The child learns very quickly that mistakes are dangerous. That approval must be earned repeatedly. That being exceptional is not a gift anymore, but a requirement for emotional survival.

And this creates a very specific kind of adult psychology.

From the outside, these children often become extraordinary. Highly disciplined. Sensitive. Hyper-attuned. Creative beyond ordinary standards. But internally, many remain organized around an old emotional equation:

“If I perform well enough, MAYBE I will finally become lovable.”

This is why external success so often fails to resolve internal insecurity.

Because the original wound was never about achievement itself. It was relational.

A child does not naturally experience love as conditional. That connection is learned psychologically through repeated emotional experiences. When affection, attention, or safety become tied to performance, the nervous system begins associating worth with achievement.

Over time, rest itself can become psychologically difficult.

You see this in many high-achieving adults. They struggle to stop. Not because they consciously want more success, but because slowing down unconsciously activates feelings of worthlessness, anxiety, or emotional emptiness.

Performance becomes regulation.

Work becomes self-soothing.

Achievement becomes emotional survival.

And the tragic part is that the world often rewards this adaptation. Society applauds the productivity, the discipline, the brilliance. Few people notice the fear underneath it.

What makes Michael Jackson especially heartbreaking to me is that even after becoming one of the most famous human beings alive, there remained something profoundly childlike and emotionally unfinished around him. Not in an insulting sense. In a psychological sense.

As if some part of him never fully exited the emotional atmosphere of childhood performance.

Kafka carried this differently. More inwardly. More privately. His suffering became intellectualized, transformed into literature filled with anxiety, judgment, alienation, and impossible authority structures. Reading Kafka often feels like entering the mind of someone who expects invisible judgment at all times.

Both men, in very different ways, seemed unable to fully escape the internal world shaped by their fathers.

And I think many people quietly relate to this more than they realize.

Not everyone had an openly cruel parent. Sometimes the pressure was subtle. Emotional withdrawal. Perfectionism. Conditional praise. A feeling that being loved required becoming someone impressive, useful, exceptional, easy, successful, emotionally controlled.

Children adapt to these environments brilliantly.

That’s what makes it complicated.

The adaptation often works.

The child becomes competent. Responsible. Achieving. Attentive to others. Highly functional.

But later in life, the nervous system may still carry the same underlying fear: “If I stop performing, will I still be loved?”

And this question enters relationships too.

Many people raised under conditional emotional environments become adults who struggle with intimacy because they unconsciously experience love as something to earn rather than receive. They monitor themselves constantly. They overextend. They become emotionally hypervigilant.

Sometimes they become attracted to emotionally unavailable people because the emotional structure feels familiar. Love mixed with uncertainty. Affection mixed with anxiety. Validation mixed with unpredictability.

The nervous system mistakes familiarity for intimacy.

This is why healing is not simply about insight.

Subscribe now

Someone may intellectually understand their childhood dynamics completely and still emotionally react from the same place. The body remembers relational environments long after the mind understands them.

And this is why compassion matters.

Not superficial self-help compassion. Real compassion.

Because many people who seem excessively ambitious, perfectionistic, emotionally anxious, or unable to rest are not simply chasing success.

They may still be psychologically standing in front of someone they could never fully satisfy.

Still trying to become enough.

Still hoping achievement will finally produce the safety and love that should never have depended on performance in the first place.