As a psychologist, I’ve observed how the source of most distress can be traced back to the ways people bend reality to avoid painful truths. Experiences, people, and situations are frequently edited to create a more acceptable story.

Through this lens, suffering is not the result of situations themselves but rather our attempts to escape them and purposefully distort circumstances and people into what we want them to be.

To heal, we must not only accept people for who they truly are but also recognize our inner life and unmet needs that we unconsciously recruit other people to gratify. This means letting go of our fantasies and false narratives to accept the real people in front of us.

Difficulty accepting others often originates in parent-child relationships, when parents inevitably let down their children, fail to be present, or fail to adequately meet their needs. This can feel so crushing because children are confronted with the jarring discrepancy between the fantasy parent they’ve created and the imperfect version of them that exists in reality.

Children learn to avoid the pain of unmet needs by creating fantasy versions of their parents.

This flawed mechanism was once adaptive, as it allowed the possibility of getting needs met in fantasy that either our parents could not meet in reality or that we were unequipped........

© Psychology Today