WHEN WE remain unduly attached to our childhood, our nostalgia centers around a wish to make things work out right once and for all. Self-absorbed and petulant, we insist on the right to an unpromised rose garden or restitution for our accident of birth.
Feeling ourselves to be the heroes or heroines of yet uncompleted fairy tales, we refuse to believe that the villains who have disappointed us will go unpunished or that we’ll never get the compensation we deserve.
Those of us who are caught up in these romantic fantasies go on insisting that there must be someone who will mend our broken childhood dreams. In our search for a magic helper, some of us become psychotherapy patients. A few of us even presume that we ourselves can bestow the magic helpers and so become professional helpers. There are hazards to either course.
Each image of ourselves is misleading because it is incomplete.