Once upon a time, our wholeness was lost to us when our all-star team of inner friends—Guilt, Self-Hatred, Suppression, Denial, and the rest—came aboard to keep us safe. We were barely involved in the hiring process, and mostly we didn’t notice them as they went about their business. Like a cadre of reality-TV design experts, they set about remodeling our personalities so that we’d make it out of childhood in one piece: beautifying certain rooms and boarding up others, installing alarms, locking the cellar door. But their success at keeping us intact required that we emerge into adulthood withcore parts of ourselves walled off. They were good at their  jobs. 

After many years of living in this stuffy, segmented home, we came to long for a more spacious, better-ventilated existence. So we thanked the experts for their service, and sent them out for a well-deserved sandwich. And we devoted ourselves gently but diligently to a new task, the literal antidote to the psychic dismemberment required of us long,long ago: the task of remembering ourselves.

—The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté