Philippa Perry

Think of self-awareness as knowing where you are on a map: If you don’t know your starting point you won’t be able to figure out how to get to where you want to go. It’s important that we learn how we react to the world, how we get angry, how we make assumptions about other people and how we talk about ourselves, because until we know what we are doing and how we are doing it, we won’t know what we need to change.

What I tell them is that we can’t do anything about other people, but we do have the power to control ourselves.

We can change our priorities, our belief systems, our habitual responses.

What I’m interested in is how you are making yourself feel the way you’re feeling: how you love, argue, change, and find contentment.

If I had to give you one piece of starting advice, it would be from that doyenne of self-help, Dr. Susan Jeffers, who said: “You are good enough exactly as you are, and who you are is a powerful and loving human being who is learning and growing every step of the way.”

But I believe we are never truly independent: We rely on other people for just about every aspect of our life, from harvesting our food and getting it into the stores to supplying us with running water and building the houses we inhabit. It’s a false construct to believe there is such a thing as complete independence.

The psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott said: “There’s no such thing as a baby, there’s only a baby and a mother.”

This is partly why we are addicted to our phones: they give us a sense of connection that releases low levels of dopamine (the “feel-good” hormone).

Connection matters because the people in our life are like mirrors in which we see ourselves. How others respond to us works as a sort of system of checks and balances for our mental health.

It is a good idea to have people around us who make us feel positive about ourselves. People who, if they do challenge us, do so in a way that makes us feel enlightened rather than worse, and who are on our side.