A lot about our behaviour doesn't make sense until we can take on board a basic idea about the way that we humans are built: that our biology privileges survival over self-awareness.
In other words, the most important priority for members of our species is to live and to keep going, not to pause, understand and take stock.
Place any new human in a terrible circumstance — let's say, in a home with a violent or alcoholic parent, or an abusive or depressed one — and it won't, as one might imagine it could, be able to focus clearly on what's gone wrong or mourn its condition.
It will simply — as we've ascertained it must — keep going.
In order to do this, it will call upon a range of innate survival techniques.
It may start to think surprisingly well of its parents, declaring them justified in their beatings, selfishness and humiliations.
It might assiduously blame itself rather than sparing any pity for its own deprivations.
Let's remember that a sense of self-compassion can be a very dangerous thing indeed when one is five years old and no one would listen even if one yelled.
Or else it will ward off despair through activity: it will over-achieve at school or break windows.
The benighted child can't look back, it can't glance down.
