If you are sick of this kind of automatic thinking ruled by the superego, which I wrote about in my last post, the “cure” is to learn how to distinguish reality from fantasy and increase the capacity to hold a complex reality. We are all sometimes “bad” and sometimes “good” – and we still have intrinsic value as human beings. To learn to hold a more complex reality means work. For some valid reasons, the psyche has learned that this is the “safest” way to handle things. I write “safest” with quotation marks, because it was the safest, but now it perpetuates your suffering. It was the safest because it made it possible to maintain the bond with important caregivers when you were little, but now, when you’re grown up, you succumb to the pain of your psyche’s own invention. In short, the negative feelings you felt for many reasons when you were little had nowhere safe to go but back onto you. This is sometimes called the “gift of love” (Benjamin, L) – I take on the negative feelings that don’t fit in our relationship, so our relationship can be good and positive.