Bestselling author and psychologist Tony Bates has spent his career seeking to understand the lives of others. Here he turns his therapeutic eye on himself and describes the events and people in his own life that have made him the insightful thinker and teacher that he is today. He recalls traumatic events in his childhood that reverberated throughout his life and how, with therapy and time, he was eventually able to heal.

He recounts the stories of the patients that affected him most deeply and informed both the direction of his work and his philosophy as a psychologist. This book invites us to reflect with compassion on the meaning of our own lives, as well as on the way we, as a society, support those with mental health difficulties.