Richard Lannon

Being well regulated in relatedness is the deeply gratifying state that people seek ceaselessly in romance, religions, and cults; in husbands and wives, pets, softball teams, bowling leagues, and a thousand other features of human life driven by the thirst for sustaining affiliations.

The child of emotionally balanced parents will be resilient to life’s minor shocks. Those who miss out on the practice find that in adulthood, their emotional footing pitches beneath them like the deck of a boat in rough waters. They are incomparably reactive to the loss of their anchoring attachments—without assistance, they are thrown back on threadbare resources. The end of a relationship is then not merely poignant but incapacitating.

So it is with emotional knowledge. In the first years of life, as his brain passes from the generous scaffold to the narrow template, a child extracts patterns from his relationships. Before any glimmerings of event memory appear, he stores an impression of what love feels like.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

—Marcel Proust

A child with emotionally hazy parents finds trying to know himself like wandering around a museum in the dark: almost anything could exist within its walls. He cannot ever be sure of what he senses.

People who trust a little can gamble and learn to trust more; people who have no faith from which to leap are out of luck. Mental health is a substance that attracts itself as readily as money or power: the more you have, the more you can get.