I had helped him understand that he had lost sight of his personal boundaries. It is natural, I had told him, that one should respond adversely to an attack on one's central core-after all, in that situation one's very survival is at stake. But I had pointed out that Carlos had stretched his personal boundaries to encompass his work and, consequently, he responded to a mild criticism of any aspect of his work as though it were a mortal attack on his central being, a threat to his very survival. I had urged Carlos to differentiate between his core self and other, peripheral attributes or activities. Then he had to "disidentify" with the non-core parts: they might represent what he liked, or did, or valued-but they were not him, not his central being.
( Irvin D. Yalom )
[ Love's Executioner ]
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