The following Life Report was submitted in response to my column of Oct. 28, in which I asked readers over 70 to write autobiographical essays evaluating their own lives.

I was born March 24, 1940 in Paterson New Jersey —the second of what would become four sons of an Irish American mother and a Spanish immigrant father.

My mother was the second oldest of eight children in an Irish family whose ancestors arrived in the United States in the mid 1900s. My mother’s father was a successful middle class merchant — a butcher — who proudly worked six days a week in his butcher shop, retiring at age 84 when his right-hand man of 50 years decided to call it quits at age 78. My maternal grandmother, a force to be reckoned with, was a full-time homemaker.

My father had immigrated to this country with his parents and older sister shortly after his birth in Spain, where my grandparents had been born and raised. My father’s dad taught Italian at Central High School in Paterson — and he had obtained a master’s degree in education at Columbia University in New York City. My paternal grandmother was a gentle, competent, and devoted presence also took care of the family and home full-time.

My brothers and I grew up in the midst of two large families — 4 grandparents, 25 aunts and uncles and 29 first cousins, most of whom lived within 5 miles of us in the Paterson area. Thus, despite the eventual dispersion of our family to Florida, Arizona,

Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Maryland and Pennsylvania, I have always had a sense of belonging — even though I was decidedly on my own to make a life. In addition, having grown up knowing all 4 of my grandparents, and experiencing them as people with a sense of dignity and purpose, and also noting the respect they were given by their children and grandchildren — given all of that, I have never been the least bit uncomfortable with aging.

Although aging has never posed a problem for me, growing up and becoming myself has definitely not been easy. Not that such a quest was ever meant to be easy, but I don’t think that my parents or anyone in my family or anyone among my teachers or coaches thought about or spoke about the huge, mysterious challenge that it is to become oneself. Oddly, to the point, this past February, just one month shy of my 71st birthday, I attended a production of Billy Elliot. There was a very moving moment when 12 year old Billy’s new found ballet teacher reads aloud the letter Billy’s mother had written to him shortly before she died. And when the teacher spoke the final words of that deeply touching note: “Billy, I want you to promise me one thing: that you will always be yourself”, I then felt an upwelling of sadness in my chest and tears rolling down my cheeks all the while thinking: “I wish my mother had said that to me.” This at 71 years of age.

As I look back over the years, it is clear to me that I had something of an epiphany — a vision of what I was meant to be —when I was 12 or 13 years old. I have no idea what may have inspired me or stimulated my thought, but I do recall thinking that if everyone really knew that God loved them they would be happy. And I simultaneously decided that I would become a Catholic priest. Given the fact that everyone in my large family was a practicing Catholic and that my brothers and I attended a Catholic parochial school, such an ambition may seem expectable. However, I never found any of the priests or nuns who taught us to be inspiring to me in any way. I do not remember ever thinking that I wanted to be one of them. I seem to have recognized the pain and sadness of people and believed that their suffering was at its core of sense of unworthiness or a profound doubt about the acceptability of whom and what they are — the antidote for which would be God’s love. I experienced this thought as my own.

Interestingly, at the instant I committed myself to this holy cause I decided to begin to swear — to speak vulgarly like all the guys my age. I did not ask myself why this would be necessary. I simply felt I had to look like a regular, normal boy. In retrospect, I can see that I was ashamed of my passion to be a priest and help people to know they truly mattered, not because of their accomplishments or fame, but because they were loved by God. I suspect I saw this as a feminine ambition — not what manly men would ever aspire to. So I would tell no one, go underground with it, do nothing to advance my dream, and establish my male bona fides by, of all things, swearing. I was already a good athlete, which really counted in my blue-collar world, so I guess that, in my youthful mind, swearing sealed the deal.

With my passion quiet and hidden away, I lived my four years at St. Mary’s High School and subsequently at Seton Hall University uninspired, unchallenged and devoid of curiosity. I was simply a good boy, who got good marks in school. The only exception to that lay in the realm of sports.

When I was about 11 years old my father and my Uncle Pie built a basketball court in our backyard. With a backboard that extended three feet in front of the vertical posts that supported the hoop and its backboard, our court was the finest court in three towns: Totowa (our town), Singac and Little Falls. The “big kids” discovered it immediately and flocked to it as bees to honey. It would be a couple of years before my brother, Tony, and I would be grown enough to play with the “big kids”. For a period of 6 or 7 years there were between eight and twenty boys in our yard everyday after school and on Saturdays. The boys gathered even in winter, when we would clear the court of snow. One of our friends, Spanky, went to Paterson Tech, where he learned to be an electrician. So Spanky installed two spot lights on the garage roof so we could even play at night —much to the distress of our neighbors.

Despite the fact that I really enjoyed playing basketball in our yard and on the high school varsity, I look upon those high school years as a very sad time. I was, down deep in my soul, a lost boy. My mother and father had a very unhappy marriage. My mother, whom I deeply loved, was very depressed, always tired, always unhappy with her life (once declaring “life is the never-ending elimination of dirt”). I prayed on my knees every night that my parents would not get divorced. In the final analysis, I believe that it was my mother’s sadness that weighed on me the most. My parents clearly loved and accepted me, but they did not know of my need for them to take an interest in my intellectual development , and talk to me about my thoughts and dreams, and insist on my working harder at learning. I did not know I needed that either, thus my feeling lost without a compass. My mother once told me that the only thing she wanted for her sons was that they be compassionate. She treated us with respect, kindness and compassion (even when in her inability to get us to do the dishes, she called us “lazy spics”) and indeed she got her wish. All four of us are either educators or psychotherapists, and all four of us are devoted to our wives and children. But as lofty as my mother’s goal for us was, I believe we needed her to also desire that we develop our talents and abilities to their fullest, we needed her to help us define what we believed and cared about the most and then we needed her to urge us to live courageously –not only compassionately. I see that very clearly at 71, but I did not see that so vividly in my 30’s and 40’s, when I was raising my two daughters. I hope I did some of that for them.

There is an adage: “We live life forward and we understand it backward”. That is certainly true for me. From where I stand now I can see where I was headed — however tentatively or inadequately — back in my 20’s and 30’s. But at that time my interior stride was neither vigorous nor thoughtfully directed. I entered the seminary at age 21.

I was a competent seminarian. I followed the rules and performed well enough academically. But in the seminary for parish priests (unlike seminaries for Jesuit priests, for example) the only thing they really wanted was obedience and conformity. Being knowledgeable and having a mind of one’s own were not valued. Once again, I did not find myself in an intellectually challenging culture —and the most painful part of that experience, as I think about it now, was that I did not mind it. I was far more a good boy than a young man on a mission. I was selected to go to the University of Innsbruck in Austria for Theological Studies. I went — not because I saw it as a great opportunity — but because I was cooperative.

Then came another major turning point. I read Teshard de Charden’s “The Phenomenon of Man”. Chardin was a Jesuit paleontologist —a man of both science and spirituality. In a lyrically mystical manner —as I remember it —Chardin described the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang until the present. He told a contemporary, science based tale of creation, beginning with the mysterious emergence of energy, then energy condensing into matter, then heavier elements being forged in stars, then some 4-5 billion years ago elements bonding on our little planet to form the self-replicating molecules of life, then living organisms evolving into ever-more-complex forms until we humans (homo sapiens) emerged with a central nervous system capable of language, self-reflection, and a capacity for highly ethical love and spiritual achievement.

The sweep of Chardin’s thought really excited my 23 year old mind. His universe was vastly more mysterious and vastly more supported by verifiable evidence than the universe described within Catholic theology. It would only be a matter of time before this radically new take on “the big story of life” would lead me out of the Roman Catholic Church. But it took a very mundane, earthy experience to get me there.

I was a year and a half into my two year stint as a theology student in Europe, when I spent an evening with a German woman in her mid-twenties talking about life. She was pretty and smart but also cynical about her own worth and the meaning of life. We talked into the wee hours of the night with me challenging her cynicism, and with me, armed with profound philosophical and theological insight, passionately trying to convince her that she and her life were of immeasurable significance —but, to no avail. I had given it my all. What I envisioned as a 12-13 year old –my mission to help people know they were intrinsically worthwhile and thus enabling them to be happy —was put to the test and I failed.

I became deeply depressed — unable to get out of bed for two days. I concluded that there was something wrong with me. If my sense of worth as a person was so dependent upon my ability to convince another person of her intrinsic worth, the how solid was my own sense of worth? Indeed if my sense of intrinsic worth was this shakey, I had no business trying to sell others on that lofty notion. I resigned from the seminary, but I did not give up on my mission. I decided to get psychological help for myself, and then to study clinical psychology so that I might learn how to help others effectively.

Prior to this I would never have described myself as anxious or insecure. Maybe others saw it, but I did not. But in leaving the seminary I immediately felt scared — scared of the responsibility to make a life, to earn a living, to forge an identity around my own endeavors. Without realizing it beforehand, I was giving up a secure, protected life as a priest — a life in which I would always have a job, room and board, and a position of some standing in my community. Now I was on my own. Unbeknownst to me, underneath the surface I had been a young man with a significant amount of insecurity and fear. Now the cat was out of the bag. I definitely needed help.

I returned to the United States and moved home with my mother and father. Mark

Twain said: “home is the place where, if you have to go there, they’ve got to let you in.”

I went home with Twain’s dictum implicitly in mind. But my mother and father cared deeply about me — though perhaps not expressively so. They welcomed me home. In no way did they feel that they “had” to let me in. But in my youth, at 25, I pretty much took their love and generosity for granted — kind of like the law of gravity. I wish I could have felt and expressed then the deep gratitude I feel now.

I managed to get a $5000/year job at Seton Hall University teaching a course in theology and assisting the Dean of Students in running the dormitory. They gave me room and board in the dorm so I was able to live, more or less, on my own. I bought a used VW Beetle for $1200, secured auto insurance, and began to see a psychoanalyst in New York two times a week.

Dr. Esther Menaker became a pivotal person in my life. She and her husband had obtained their Ph.Ds at the University of Vienna in the early 1930’s. They also trained at Freud’s Psychoanalytic Institute. Esther was analyzed by Anna Freud, but despite this very orthodox pedigree, Esther was by no means a conventional Freudian. Indeed, she was a very independent thinker. She had no tolerance for orthodoxies of any stripe –whether religious, political or psychological. Thus, despite her being a secular Jew and the daughter of a non-religious Russian anarchist, Esther had a deep appreciation of my emergence through Catholicism and theological studies. In the mid l960’s psychoanalysts by and large were not like that at all — in fact, in those days psychoanalysis was fundamentally hostile toward religion, which is all Freud knew of spirituality. Had I come upon a conventional psychotherapist, I shudder to think what would have happened to me. I felt ashamed of my aspirations to become a priest. To remedy that unrealistic burden I sorely needed a rare bird like Esther who could help me see the wholesome, creative essence of that dream. If you need a healer, you had better find the one who is right for you.

It is amazing how much luck plays a role in life. I had gotten Esther’s name along with the name of Silvano Arieti M.D. through a friend who had written to Thomas Szasz, M.D. seeking recommendations for me in the New York area. Szasz was an iconoclastic professor of psychiatry at Syracuse University Medical School and author of, among other books, “The Myth of Mental Illness” — a book which had impressed my friend. I went to meet with both Dr. Menaker and Dr. Arieti. Shocked and panicked over the cost of treatment, I chose Esther because, having compassionately reduced her fee by $5.00/hour, her effective hourly charge to me — a hefty $20.00 per session — was $10.00 less than Dr. Arieti’s. I had shopped by price alone but nevertheless got the exact person I needed —even though I had no idea at all of what I needed. Looking back, I obviously had developed a fair measure of confidence in myself in the world or I would not have been able to find a job, be willing to teach students not much younger than me, find a psychotherapist, etc. But I also grappled with strong currents of insecurity and depression about myself. I often felt dispirited, alone and unmotivated. At times passing a stranger on the street I would have the irrational fear that he would strike out and hit me. I was often overwhelmed by the task of making a day, facing my responsibilities. I felt a deep urgency to have a close relationship with a woman. Sexual desire was certainly a part of it, but the intensity of that urgency was not informed by desire –it was informed by need. I needed to be attached to a woman, be spared my aloneness — an aloneness that was childlike and accompanied by profound anxiety and doubt about myself.

Very soon I had a girlfriend. She was smart, pretty, assertive and seemingly at ease in social situations. The apparent self-confidence was very important to me, I believe, because I was very unhappy with the fact that my mother did not have it. What my mother did have was a solid core of goodness. She was honest and real about herself and others and she would never do anything to hurt someone. Even when she was frustrated and angry with my brothers and me, she might chase us with the dish cloth or the broom, but we laughed while we out-ran her, because we could feel that her heart was not in her anger. She would never do to us what her often harsh mother did to her. Sadly my girlfriend did not possess that solid core of goodness. Even sadder than that, my need was so great that I ignored the impact on me of my girlfriend’s fatal flaw.

For a while I complained in therapy of the problems in my love relationship. Finally, one day Esther commented: “Maybe we should re-consider this relationship.” Without thought or feeling, I immediately stopped complaining. Obviously, I was too desperate — unknowingly desperate — to reconsider my relationship. Esther let me be — wisely respecting the limits of my ability to be a realistic, maturely loving person. If I, as I am now, had been my therapist I would have tried to help me mature, grow by encouraging me to embrace my flawed, but nevertheless chosen relationship fully. I would try to teach me to be very more aware of my girlfriend’s legitimate feelings and needs — whether or not she reciprocated in kind. I would have coached me in speaking up about my own experience within my relationship and developing expectations that my experience should be understood and cared about. I would help me to be realistic about my relationship, not by pointing to its flaws, but by working to make it better. Whether things got better or not, I may have become stronger and more realistic sooner. In any event, this approach is in keeping with my conviction that if you are married every day you must be giving that relationship your all — as best you can. Your spouse’s shortcomings are no excuse for straddling the fence.

But Esther’s times had not acquired a detailed understanding of how a person’s inner self grows within a relationship context. That said, I really do not know if I would have been open to that kind of caring interest and advice. Maybe I just had to play out my hand until I smacked into a brick wall of failure.

So I got married. By this time I was in the PhD. program in clinical psychology at Fordham University. Thanks to the U.S. Government (Public Health Traineeship) I went to school tuition free and with a $2000 per year stipend to boot. No one gets that today! My wife got a job as a social worker in a clinic in New Jersey. Her supervisor thought very highly of her, but soon she was finding fault with him. As I remember it, she left after a year. That was a pattern that replicated itself. As a student in the Columbia University School of Social Work she did really well. But soon she became very disgruntled with and highly critical of her field. She eventually obtained her MSW, but she was never happy with her work and never stayed in a job for more than 2 years.

It was the l960s and early 1970s. The woman’s movement was a major force in our culture at the time, and I was naturally sympathetic to it. My mother —in her quiet private way —had been a freedom fighter for herself as a female since her youth in the 1920s. Her mother demanded that she clean her brothers’ (Matt, Jack and Jerry) rooms. My mother felt that was unfair. In her mind there was no reason why boys should be exempt from housekeeping. But there was no arguing with my grandmother!

So my mother complied — sort of. She defined cleaning narrowly — it meant dirt only.

Clothes lying around she would toss out of the window out into the yard. But my mother was not a man hater. She really liked my brothers and me. And while I was very upset at her for feeling so helpless in the face of life’s demands and for feeling so afraid of my father (e.g., My mother: “I can’t write a check because your father will take away the checkbook.” Me at 13: “So what good is the checkbook if you can’t write a check?”), I nevertheless loved her and felt a deep sympathy for her plight. My father was not a tender, supportive companion to her. He was a truly good man, but at home he was part bully and I hated that in him.

So I responded to my wife’s anger and unhappiness with sympathy and excuses.

It’s so remarkable. I was basically a thoughtful young adult. My marriage relationship mattered to me a lot. I was receiving what I think was state-of-the-art psychological help at the time. Without a doubt, I never came across a psychologist in my training at Fordham nor anyone among the psychoanalysts at New York Psychiatric Institute (the training site for psychiatrists at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons), who made me wish I was in treatment with him. (they were all men) But nevertheless, there I was air-brushing the reality of my life —living in the world of my wishes and not in the world as it really is. So human, so sad.

So far that life of illusion was only hurting me. I may be wrong but I do not think that

I was hurting my wife. I did think of her as my equal in every respect. I was never nasty or unkind. I took her complaints seriously. I remember being puzzled and unhappy about a repeated complaint of hers that, when I did the dishes, I would routinely forget a pot on the stove or leave the sink greasy and marked up. She saw this as a sign of my insensitivity to her. It took a few years, but one day when I was working in the yard, my wife, who had been cooking said: “If you go inside don’t clean up. I have more to cook when I get back.” I was taken aback by her caution. I thought to myself “If she thinks I could go in the kitchen and see her mess as ours and clean it up, then I have arrived.”

The point is I was trying. In any event the damage being done by my illusory living was of no great moment — we were both consenting adults. But that was soon to change when we had children.

The year I turned 33 my wife and I adopted a 5 day old baby girl, we bought a house in an affluent suburban New Jersey town, I graduated with my PhD, and I began a job on the faculty of the New Jersey Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry.I felt that my life had come together. I was content. So I decided to conclude my therapeutic work with Esther Menaker. Esther was warmly supportive of my decision; however her parting words to me were “ Don’t tread water.” Obviously, her words stayed with me, even though I did not know why she said them. From this vantage point almost 40 years later, I am sure she saw that I was leading my life in a somewhat bland, uninspired, conventional way. Where was that 13 year old who was going to help people to be happy by showing them that they mattered to God. Why was I taking an essentially administrative job (Assistant Director of the Inpatient Psychiatric Unit) at a medical school? How was that going to advance that 13 year old’s ambition? And a marriage sustained in part by illusion? That may not be exactly treading water but it was definitely not going for the gold! So Esther undoubtedly knew that all was not right in my “complete” life.

Our precious baby daughter Chelsea got us off to an idyllic start as parents. She was alert, at home in your arms, cheerful, a healthy eater, a great sleeper and not much of a cryer. I loved being a father. Feeding, changing diapers, playing, soothing — all were a pleasure for me. To this day I do not know what impact her mother’s unhappiness and emotional edge may have had on Chelsea from those earliest years. Nor do I know what impact my investment in illusion and wishful perception had on her. I do know that anything that dims one’s emotional authenticity ( and devotion to a world of wish and image definitely siphons off emotional energy) makes one seem less vivid, less emotionally real. And that in turn diminishes the feeling of connection that the open, receptive child experiences.

So, filled with love and affection for Chelsea and happily embracing the work of being her father, I was already lacking in a subtle way that let her down. When Aimee was born two years later the consequences of my disconnection from my own feelings became quite serious. As Chelsea tells it, she felt that she lost her mother when Aimee was born. Chelsea was a bubbly, outgoing, engaging little girl. She once said that, in her mother’s effort to make sure Aimee got her fair share of time in the spotlight, her mother stuffed Chelsea into a jar. I recall no such thing. I do know that when they were 2 and 4 that it was important to make room for Aimee to speak at the dinner table or our bubbly, attention-seeking Chelsea would have crowded her out. And I do remember my wife being attentive to that necessity. However I have no memory at all of what accompanied her efforts to restrain Chelsea. Children feel and absorb the emotional meanings conveyed in voice tone and these ocular portals to our souls. Knowing how unhappy, how critical, how combative my wife could be and knowing how blind and deaf I was to the emotional dialogue among us, I trust Chelsea’s narrative. Once when Chelsea was 18 she told me of a dream she had in which she was little and her mother was beating her and I turned my back and did nothing. That depicts my greatest and most painful failure — my failure to protect my child.

To be sure Aimee did not come out unscathed. She was also a very smart, sensitive little girl. Her older sister was out-going, charismatic and talented. Chelsea had a wonderful voice and from the time she was 6 she was wowing our family singing songs from the broadway musical Annie. Given all of that, I think that early on Aimee felt overshadowed by her sister. I was completely oblivious to her serious quandry. I too had been a second child, by my brother Tony. He was always gentle, kind and protective of me. He did not compete for attention with his baby brother the way Chelsea did. I took it for granted that Aimee would be fine as a second child, as I had been. More illusion and wish. Aimee was not me, and Chelsea was not Tony. Aimee has said that when very young she felt Chelsea “owned” me. She needed me to make sure we had time alone together — outside of the force of her sister’s presence. Aimee barely remembers me in her young years. I understand why. She is rightfully grateful to her mother by whom she felt understood.

Her mother protected her, made her feel she mattered. I didn’t.

I am very grateful to both of my daughters for responding to my failures and their mother’s with courage and, ultimately, with wisdom. They both have married kind, loving, hard working men. As I approach the final 20 years or so of my life (if I am lucky) I think of Chelsea and Aimee’s relationships to their men, Foster and Lee, as my greatest blessing.”

My quest for understanding how we humans become happy manifested itself in my doldrum years at the N.J. Medical School in my desire to create a course on how a child develops within the context of a family. I wanted to understand and teach how to raise “happy” children. A friend informed me of a 5 day workshop on Family Therapy at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic. This was 1976 and family therapy was an exciting new approach to helping troubled children. Thinking that this might be helpful to me in gathering an understanding of how families cultivate healthy kids, I signed up. The workshop was conducted by Salvador Minuchin and Jay Haley, two luminaries in the burgeoning field of family therapy. Minuchin clearly saw the relationship between the way parents and children interacted and the way children developed internally, acquiring a sense of safety, competence, closeness, autonomy –all the facets of a healthy self-sense. Minuchin’s approach to therapy was decidedly action-oriented or behavioral, but it was simultaneously, implicitly internal and emotional. This was so new and illuminating for me that I applied for their externship program. For the next academic year I went to Philadelphia every Monday from 9am to 9pm. It was the most exciting learning experience of my life. I was definitely not treading water. I was coming to understand how thoughtful, caring, responsible action is essential to forming close, loving bonds –and how thoughtful, loving bonds are essential for acquiring a sense of inner peace and fulfillment.

This new knowledge for helping families was a boon to the private clinical practice I had begun. In my office I was able to form trusting relationships with the people who came to me. And I think I was competent and effective as well. While I genuinely cared about my patients, in retrospect I can see that I was still too focused on proving myself to go beyond caring for them responsibly to loving them responsibly.

As I approached 40 years of age my wife seemed to blame me more and more for her unhappiness. I defended myself in reasonable argument, but I continued to make excuses for her — until I met a lovely woman at a conference.

The woman was my age, married with two sons close to the ages of my daughters, and a husband who was basically good but emotionally distant. She like me and respected me for the husband and father I was. This touched me deeply because I was not seen that way at home. With this loving woman’s gentle coaxing I soon stopped making excuses for my wife. Then with the girls asleep on Christmas Eve of 1980 my wife berated me for “leaving her alone again” — saddling her with the job of putting our gifts to the girls under the tree. What had occupied me separately was my wrapping gifts for her from the girls and myself. For me this was the last straw. I calmly but gravely told her: “We are have to get marriage counseling, because I cannot live like this.”

We spent the next eight months in counseling but to no avail. In a sense, however, the counseling was very helpful. I could listen without anxiety as my wife spoke of her feelings about me to a third party. Over time I could see that she really did not like

anything about me. I knew that was too extreme to be anyway realistic. So I wrote my wife a long letter describing what had attracted me to her, the qualities I had admired, the values we shared in common, my belief in the potential of our marriage and offered to wait for her if she felt she needed time to decide if she liked me, loved me, wanted me in her life. Her response was: “The same old shit.” So, in mutual agreement, we decided to divorce.

To be sure our divorce was very hard on our daughters. Losing the security of an intact family is always sad, painful, sometimes destabilizing. But, if divorced parents create separate, loving, stable homes for their children, and if those parents respect and cooperate with one another, a healing can take place that restores for the children a sense of secure connection and belonging to a cohesive, thought somewhat weird family.

That did not happen with us. It would be 10 painful years before both girls were essentially emancipated (i.e., when the girls were grown enough to make most of their own decisions) and the conflict between my ex-wife and me all but died because there was so little mutual responsibility for that conflict to feed on. Those were truly terrible years for Chelsea and Aimee. What that parent-created turmoil cost them I will never fully grasp nor will I ever be able to make it up to them.

As for me, though, I continued a relatively long-distance love affair with a woman who had no intention of leaving her husband. He was a decent man. He was in no way abusive or damaging to her or their children. In her judgment, you do not put children through the pain of divorce unless you absolutely have to. I respected and admired her for that, even though it left me hurting.

All the denied, child like neediness that had been put into eclipse by the cocoon of seminary life and that had me marry unwisely in my late 20s and that had inspired my life of illusions in my marriage, came gushing up when I fell in love. It seems to me that when we adults fall in love, we allow ourselves to open up and fall into all levels of consciousness within us. We are like Russian nesting dolls, with our littlest selves, the remains of our child selves, there to be experienced if we permit it.

I came to see that I not only really loved this woman — the solid, thoughtful and loving person she was — but, in addition, I also needed her. And that need of her was itself a blend of mature, adult need (i.e. a simple need for her respect, interest, affection and support for leading my own life) and an immature, child need to be safely securely attached to her. She was my love and she was my “blankie”. But given our separate life circumstances, while she could love me wisely and securely she could not be an adequate “blankie” . We had separate lives. I was too seldom with her to rely on her physical presence to make me secure, To love her and cherish her finely with all the love and longing in my heart, I would have to love her as I found her, a woman whose other loves were just as much a part of her as her own self. Just like in “Beauty and the Beast” in which the needy, narcissistic prince-turned-beast has to let Belle go if he really loves her, so too I had to let this wonderful woman go — day in and day out. I had to take care of that needy, desperate child in me by reminding myself of our enduring love while allowing myself to feel the insecurity, emptiness, sadness, and aloneness that were vestiges of my youth. That was not easy and it took a long time.

All the denied, child-like neediness that had been put into eclipse by the cocoon of seminary life, and that same neediness that had me marry unwisely in my late 20’s, and that same neediness that had inspired my life of illusions in my marriage came gushing up when I fell in love. It seems to me that when we adults fall in love, we allow ourselves to open up and fall into all levels of consciousness within us. We are like Russian nesting dolls — with our littlest selves, the remains of our childhood selves there to be experienced if we permit it. I permitted it.

This woman, whose love and whose cherishing of my love had touched me so deeply, was sweetly understanding and accepting when I suggested that we end our relationship. I knew I wanted a life partner and she wanted that for me too. It was very painful for both of us, especially since we lived at such a distance from one another and we knew that there was not natural way for our lives to intersect. We kept our word and we never met again.

So I focused on living my life in a responsible, loving way — looking after my daughters, keeping a home, becoming a good cook, attending to my patients at work, becoming an avid gardner, taking up photography (on vacation at least) and paying pretty steady attention to how I felt about myself along the way.

Regarding the latter, one day I came downstairs from my bedroom and saw a sock lying on the floor in the hall. Surmising that I had dropped it while carrying the laundry upstairs, I placed the sock on the steps to be carried up when I went to bed in the evening. Well, that evening as I climbed the stairs I spotted the sock out of the corner of my eye. I felt burdened, as if the sock weighed fifty pounds. I absolutely did not want to pick up this almost weightless sock and plunk it in the drawer on the way past my dresser. It was a nothing task, yet it felt incredibly onerous to me.

I had other analogous experiences such as reaching for a jar of spices in the cabinet and finding two others tumbling out onto the counter. I immediately felt a mild but definite sense of threat, as if put upon unfairly by life . Again the task of picking the spice jars up and putting them back were all but effortless. In addition, I became aware that little things like a patient canceling an appointment also evoked anxious feelings as if I were not safe or ok when the expected appointment had to be scratched from my schedule. It was clear that deep in my soul I was not at peace. In fact, I was uptight, anxious, scared.

I came to see that, for me at least, there could be no happiness without inner peace.

And if there was going to be peace in my soul I had to accept that life is what it is, relentlessly other than I might wish it were. The inner protests when life frustrated my wishes, had to be accepted for what they are — namely, the kicking and screaming of my emotional child self, who much prefers the wish world to the real world.

This acceptance of life’s otherness was required even in the domain of relationships.

I was told that an esteemed colleague of mine had spoken of me as an odd guy, who was too close to his daughter, and who incapable of a mature, intimate relationship with a woman. Upon hearing this I felt hurt, embarrassed and diminished. Then I asked myself “Did you really think everyone liked you, admired you and saw you without flaw?”

The answer was “Yes”. At least there was some place within my soul in which I believed that to be so. O, that sneakily pervasive preference for the child world of wishes! Thus, I began to remind myself over and over to face the obvious reality that I have no idea what others think of me, and, whatever it is that others think of me, much of the time it is not likely to be flattering. Facing this reality required me to give up my illusory self-affirmation. This was a loss and is left me with some measure of anxiety but ultimately with a greater sense of quiet, sober peace.

Not that it became blissful for me to encounter someone’s criticism or dislike of me.

Whenever that occurs I instantly feel child-like sense of embarrassment and insecurity, but I am a bit more familiar with and accepting of that vulnerable emotional state. Thus I can basically feel ok within myself; uncomfortable feelings and all. Happiness comes in good times, sadness comes in bad times; peace reigns in all times — if we work at it over a long time. At least, that’s what I think now at 71.

Seven years after my divorce I re-married. My wife was sweet, kind and professionally accomplished. She stepped into a mess with my divorce conflict in high gear and my daughters in adolescence. One of the most difficult roles to play in this world is that of stepparent. The single most important requirement is that you expect nothing beyond basic civility and respect — and sometimes you have to surrender even that. My wife lived that role flawlessly, biding her time cultivating relationships of mutual kindness and respect with both Chelsea and Aimee. When our adult daughters look back, they have reported feeling awed by what my wife did. And I am deeply grateful to her for it.

It appears that the work of living and loving realistically never ends. Without doubt, the work I did between marriages enabled me to become more realistic about myself and life and to become more grown up in the manner of my loving. Still, very early on in my new marriage I found myself feeling like a petulant child. Typically when the alarm went off each morning I was ready to go. I might ask my wife what she wanted for dinner; I might share some thoughts on the meaning of life. Or whatever. My wife, on the other hand, woke up slowly. She did not want to talk beyond “good morning” or “how did you sleep?” So she would deflect my inquiries, which was fine with me. But when I kept forgetting about her rhythm upon awakening, she became impatient and annoyed with me. While I did not express annoyance in return I found myself thinking “I don’t want a wife who gets annoyed with me when, upon her reminding me, I am so genuinely gracious about accepting her wishes.” I wanted my wife to be as I wished her to be, not as she in fact was. So I told myself to grow up and take responsibility for remembering whom you are married to, and give her the love you promised to her. That sort of mindful acceptance is vital to a tender, loving intimacy. And intimate relationships are essential to peace and happiness. To achieve this goal I had to convert all of my urgent needs into simple, heartfelt desires, thus making room in my mind and heart for a simultaneous and equal concern for my wife’s wishes as well as mine. When two people reliably do that with one another — especially over contentious issues — they experience a deep, secure connection. That may well be the sweetest experience that two adults can share on this earth.

There is a memorable phrase in a song in the musical “Les Miserable” that says: “to love another person is to see the face of God”. That line has stayed with me since the moment I heard it some 25 years ago. But in a quixotic attempt to be more specific about this ineffable experience, I would say: to truly cherish another person, wants and all, is to be the face of God; and to exchange that manner of loving deeply and involuntarily with another person is to be as close to the divine as we can get – short of becoming an accomplished mystic. In any event, when we feel ourselves in love we feel peace and not unhappiness within – even if the moment is a sad one.

But old, child feelings can be surprising and powerful forces. And they can be a formidable challenge to a loving heart. One fall day when I was in my early 50’s, I was in my parents’ backyard blowing their leaves. My father was already 10-12 years into his journey through the cruelties of Alzheimer’s Disease. By this time he did not even remember who I — or anyone — was. When we were kids, my father had within him a well of anger that could be mean and bullying. As we and he got older, he became totally mellow. As a father of adult sons he was enormously generous and relentlessly supportive. But the destruction of his brain by that ugly disease seemed to clear the way for the return of his old anger. And on this particular fall day, as I worked in his yard, my father kept coming out of his house to chase me away. “Get the hell out of here”, he yelled. “This is my yard. Who the hell do you think you are?!” “Get out!!” I would respond calmly and reassuringly: “Dad, it’s ok. I am doing your leaves. It’s going to look nice. You like it that way”. We would go back and forth until he would eventually go back in the house. Well, after the fourth or fifth time, I thought to myself: “maybe he’s like a kid and if I yell at him and set limits with him he may just pull himself together and stay in the house”.

So the next time he came out yelling I yelled back. “Get the hell back in the house! Shut up and leave me alone! I’m doing the leaves! Get back in the goddam house!” Well, I yelled at him and he yelled at me. We kept going back and forth until I saw neighbors coming out from behind their houses across the street. They did not know who I was. They probably thought I was some landscaping guy who was about to harm a sick old man. So I quieted down, returned to my soothing approach, and my father returned to the house.

Suddenly I realized that my feigned anger at my father was not feigned at all. My chest was filled with tearful upset and anger. I had no doubt about the meaning of my emotions. I had hated my father’s mean, wish-to-hurt anger when I was a boy. It was never aimed at me directly. But, as is true for all bystanders who witness cruelty inflicted on another, he terrified and humiliated me too. My father’s cruel words to my mother, to my brother, Tony, and to my brother, Buzz, seared my soul as well.

So as I continued blowing the leaves I just thought and felt what I felt. I was very upset. Within minutes my mother came out of the house and was attending to some potted herbs at the back corner of the house. Then my father appeared and walked over to my mother. When he reached her he yelled at her and yanked her quite forcefully by the arm. Without thinking I ran across the yard, grabbed him by the front of his shirt and shoved him against the house. He was startled and flustered, but I had not injured him and I immediately let him go. I was on the edge of tears and ashamed of myself, but I was feeling an upwelling of hurt and anger that I did not know was there inside of me. Indeed, that eruption of anger was 35 years too late. He did not know what he was doing now — at all. There was no rational basis for holding my father responsible for the angry lashing out now. When I was 17 or 18 I was too fearful and weak to have held him responsible for the harm he was doing to us. In my 50’s I thought I knew myself pretty well.

This experience was really humbling. I was in my 50’s, and I thought I knew myself pretty well. At this point, however, any illusions about being the master of myself were shattered. I had to wonder: “what else don’t I know about me?” I loved my father. Within a year of the incident he would be confined to a bed in the living room — incontinent and unable to walk. On a few occasions when the aid did not show up I changed his diaper. For years when my mother finally put him in a nursing home, I visited, sat with him, and fed him. I was perfectly content to do that for him. He was truly a good man – and in so many ways an outstanding model for me and my brothers. Without question he was an enormously generous and loyal father. But that anger from my youth was still and is still there – quietly there within me. I wish my father were alive and lucid today. I could talk to him about it — lovingly.

As everyone knows, life is full of surprises. But the ones that surprise me the most are the ones that emerge within me. About 10 years ago – in my early 60’s – I began to work psychotherapeutically with a woman in her mid 40’s who had endured severe abuse as a child. She was a solid, fine person – a devoted, loving wife and mother with two fine sons, the emotional center of her extended family, a highly talented artist with a successful marketing career and a newly established career as a professional counselor. But years of battling inexplicable depression, anxiety and sleeplessness led her to seek professional help.

In my 25 years of practice I had never encountered so horrifying a story. The abuse this gentle, sweet woman had been subjected to was heinous and vile – burdening her soul with emotional sates that were so dark and devastating that no caring person could bear to hear about them. The desecrating violence her young self had endured unjustly infected her heart with withering humiliation and shame. Her mind/brain had mercifully blocked those horrid memories and menacing emotional states from awareness. But to heal she would have to let herself be aware of these experiences – that is, bear the unbearable enough to strip it of it’s power to define her.

Her human innocence and decency, tortured as it was by a protracted encounter with unmitigated evil, moved me profoundly. I wanted to help her with all my heart – as if she were my daughter, my sister, my wife, or my mother.

But I really did not know what I was in for. Although I had worked with many people suffering with anxiety and depression, and I had helped people tame the terrors of traumatic childhood experiences, there were two things in this experience that were new. One was the person seeking help and the second was the person offering the help. My patient had endured vastly more horror than I had previously encountered and she was astonishingly motivated to face the dangerously dark pain within. In addition, I had changed over time — I had become so much more familiar with the sadness, insecurity within me and as a result I was more ready than ever to feel the emotional pain of other people.

My patient began to have flashbacks — vivid visual memories, physical sensory memories, dangerous emotional states — all of which would come unbidden at inconvenient times. She would need me. I would be called upon to adjust my schedule. I never thought of myself as a rigid person, but I found myself resisting the accommodations that my commitment to my patient called for. She needed longer sessions — requiring time to settle in and feel safe, and time to check and see what was stirring within, and time to allow herself to witness the replay of devastating experiences that were haunting her, and finally time to recover from the often excruciating experiences she encountered. Sometimes I had to reschedule the patient who followed her in order to give her the recovery time she needed. But in the early years that rescheduling made me anxious. Being exquisitely sensitive to my emotions, she often felt compelled to accommodate my apparent needs, and then left in a dangerously dissociated state to drive home. And, I am sad and embarrassed to admit, I let her go. This was really dangerous and wrong. But I did it. Where, at those moments, was my loving heart?

There were urgent calls on weekends, evenings and in the night. For quite a while I had trouble yielding to her plees for help. I felt imposed upon, anxious, pushed outside of the protective confines of conventional practice. On one occasion she brought her husband with her so he could urge me to trust her expression of need. He saw how genuine her agony was and he told me how vital it was that I respect it. My vision was blurred by my anxiety, and that was not good. I was hurting the person I had vowed to help.

For 25 years I had been accustomed to helping people within the conventional boundaries of the 50 minute session during regular office hours — with the occasional telephone call on weekday evenings and weekends. I had been sheltered by the rules of the therapy game from having to make a personal judgment — one situation at a time — about whose needs were more salient at any given moment — mine or my patient’s. The unimaginable depth of her suffering, as well as my profound commitment to see her through this dark valley, forced me to step outside the traditional therapy box and be simply a person with a fellow human being who was calling to me for help. That scared me and stirred an old feeling of shame within me.

The shame that my 13 year old self had hidden from me by swearing was right there still within me. It was hobbling my deep desire to help my patient with all of my heart. I have often wondered about the wellspring of my feeling of shame. There was no obvious sense to it. No one in my family or among my friends had ever mocked me or demeaned me for anything. My brother, Buzz, recently told me that he had always believed I had decided to study for the priesthood to please my mother. He has lent credence to my intuition about the driving force behind my teenage aspiration to help people to be happy by showing them that they are loved. I suspect it came from my passionate wish to make my beloved, depressed mother happy by loving her with all my might.My family did not express loving feelings or real yearnings for love with anything approaching fullness. I suspect that the depth of my love for my mother and the strength of my need for her to be happy seemed too big to me – too big to be acceptable. So I hid them wrapped in shame.

Our healing journey lasted about seven years. Seven years is not a long time for a person to accomplish what this woman accomplished. However, seven years in the hell while quenching its fires is an eternity. I am not proud of the fact that I regularly wanted to be spared of the awareness, the compassionate experience of her pain. My dedication to her and her healing required me to remain open, emotionally exposed to the ache I felt inside my own soul. That ache was there as I listened and absorbed her unrelenting encounters with the raw emptiness and devastating humiliation one feels when stripped of human dignity by cruel, desecrating violence. This was not easy to do. But it has benefited me greatly. I am much more at home and at peace within myself now because I am no longer so afraid of the sadness that lies side-by-side with the joy inside of me. It is very nice to be able to sit quietly and not need to run away from myself.

Those menacing dark days have been gone for almost three years now. Over time my patient had become a deeply cherished friend. In my effort to be a good enough guide for her, I — in great, though incomplete measure — shed the veil of shame that has shrouded my heart. As it turned out, on this quest there were two human beings suffering and growing beyond that suffering – each of us in our own way. I now have a freer, fuller heart for my wife, my daughters, my brothers, my family and friends — and for every person who crosses the threshold of my office.

While in her early 70’s, my Aunt Carmen, the older sister to my father, once said: “life gets better every year”. Now in my early 70’s, I find myself feeling the same way — except for my gradually and inevitably deteriorating body. Interestingly enough, I find that a small price to pay.

As for my teenage dream of helping people to be happy – well, it was a far more complex matter than I could ever have guessed back then. I believe I have made a lot of progress, but I must say: “I have miles to go before I sleep”. I do work at it every day with a quiet, sober, sadness-inflected joy. I love my work so much I would do it for free. I often do.

There is no doubt in my mind that I benefit from what I give to the people who come to talk to me. They share with me their deepest yearnings and their terribly human vulnerability. I then get the opportunity to be with them in mine. I think I am a better person with my family and friends because of what I receive at work.

One thing is very clear to me. I never feel less self-conscious nor more fulfilled than when I am thoroughly and deeply loving another person — even if it hurts.