ADVICE
According to psychotherapist and agony aunt Philippa Perry, nearly all of the problems we encounter in our lives are rooted in our personal relationships. But if we want to resolve them, we must first do the work on ourselves. She tells Megan Conner how
Philippa Perry knows a thing or two about advice. Her last book, 2019’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (And Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did) spent 41 weeks on The Sunday Times Bestsellers List and sold 2m copies globally. Four years on, she’s decided to laser-focus on every relationship in our lives in her latest guide, The Book You Want Everyone You Love* To Read *(And Maybe A Few You Don’t), a comprehensive look at unpacking our own belief systems around relationships and working out how we can change them to better serve our happiness.
‘As an agony aunt, pretty much every dilemma I’m given leads back to relationships,’ says Perry, ‘so this is really not new territory. But over the years, I suppose the key thing I’ve observed that people always want to know is, why? “Why do I feel like this? Why do I act like that?” When really what we should be asking ourselves is, how? “How do I organise myself in a way that this always happens to me? How do I argue?” It’s only when we’ve gone back and figured this out that we can start to have true agency over our relationships.’
Perry has chosen to structure her insights into three main sections: how we love, how we argue and how we navigate change – the idea being that if we examine each of these things in isolation, we will be able to unlock the tools we need for the final part: how we find contentment. ‘Because I do believe that if we tick off the three Cs – connection, conflict and change – we’ll be able to get to the fourth C, which is contentment. But first we need to ask ourselves, what are we responsible for?’ It’s a good question. Here, Perry identifies common flaws in our approach to relationships and tells us how we can reset so that eventually we’re all hurtling towards happiness.
1 Connection (How we love)
Forming relationships is part of being human and fundamental to our sense of self. The people around us function like mirrors,reflecting who we are and confirming our current view of ourselves, and we all need positive mirrors in order to feel valued. Sometimes we might not like what people see in us, and this can also be useful (although beware of gaslighting mirrors – people who are deliberately trying to make you feel less confident). Whether we find it easy or challenging to connect, we all come across stumbling blocks. Here are some common ones:
A big thing that stops us getting close to others is having a relationship with someone in our head instead of with them. A classic example is the mo
