Knowing ourselves emotionally...

Knowing our own minds is difficult at the best of times. It is extremely challenging to secure even the basic insights into our characters and motivations – and that's the reason we hope, sometimes to be able to free us from some of the neuroses and compulsions that spoil so much of our lives. It is therefore especially humbling and at moments truly dispiriting to realize that dispelling ignorance of our psyches with knowledge isn’t going to be enough by itself. Or rather, we stand to realize that there is a need to be a further and yet more arduous distinction to observe between knowing something about ourselves intellectually and knowing about it emotionally.

The mechanism builds on the idea of a return to live feelings. It’s only when we’re properly in touch with our feelings that we can correct them with the help of our more mature faculties – and thereby address the real troubles of our adult lives. We need, to get fully better, to go back in time whenever possible, and deeply relive what it was like to be us at three, five, nine and fifteen years old – and allow ourselves to laugh, weep and be terrified and furious in accordance with the reality of the situation. It is a quirk of our minds that not every emotion we carry is fully acknowledged, understood, or even truly felt. There are feelings that exist in an ‘unprocessed’ form within us. And it is on the basis of this kind of hard-won emotional knowledge, that we may one day, with a fair wind, discover a measure of relief from some of the troubles within.