Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be

by Becky Kennedy

Our ability to experience many seemingly oppositional thoughts and feelings at once—to know that you can experience several truths simultaneously—is key to our mental health. Psychologist Philip Bromberg may have said it best: “Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them—the capacity to feel like one self while being many.”* We are at our best when we notice the multiple feelings, thoughts, urges, and sensations inside of us without any of them “becoming” us, when we can locate our self amid a sea of experiences (“I notice a part of me is feeling nervous and a part of me is feeling excited,” or “I notice a part of me wants to scream at my kids and a part of me knows to take a deep breath”). In other words, we are our healthiest selves when we can see that two (or more!) things are true.