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Things improved dramatically later, but only after years of suffering with frequency and intensity that would cause any parent to cry along with Christ at Golgotha: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”



To grasp agony and wring out meaning is not a trite exercise. Most self-help books offer a one-two-three step process. Peterson’s title may lead one to think his book is of the same ilk. Instead, his book draws on Dostoevsky, Freud, the Talmud, the New Testament and Taoism, as well as patients and students whom Peterson helped manoeuvre through life’s unfair odds, their own choices, or both.

Peterson aims to help readers through misfortune’s arrows in part by grounding us in the world’s great faiths and sages. The author then asks us to be honest in the process — with our own hearts and heads, but also friends, children and spouses. Peterson observes that honesty produces genuine conflict that is “neither pleasant nor easy.” It is, however, the only way to grow and not surrender to fakery or despair.



Elsewhere, Peterson poignantly observes that our human frailties, perhaps especially those we struggle to overcome, are where the love of others is called forth in our direction.

“What can be truly loved about a person is inseparable from their limitations,” writes Peterson, in a moving recounting of early childhood difficulties with his own son, Julian.



Such calls to clarity and actual compassion are why Peterson’s words and work touch a nerve: Because Peterson starts with men, women and children as they are and the world as it is; he then adds honesty and demands non-safe spaces to critique ourselves and others, the only way we might improve either.

The truth may not immediately set you free; it will light up the proper path.

Mark Milke is a regular Herald contributor.