The study found—and this was a surprise decades ago—that the quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. But relationships in childhood had a special power. At one point the directors of the study wondered why some of the men in the study were promoted to officers during World War II and others weren’t. They found that the number one factor that correlated with success in wartime was not IQ, physical endurance, or socioeconomic background. The number one factor was the overall warmth of the man’s family home. The men who had been well loved and seen deeply by their
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