“The fear of abandonment has led to not evolving, to stopping the engine, to not graduating, to not obtaining the best result.”
This is a warning: if you have unfinished business with the past, or even a difficulty in relating to family affections, this book is for you. It is perhaps even more so for those who do not deny having them. The text was created in our opinion to make people reflect, to have a greater awareness of the role of parent and child. An attempt to defuse war devices that could explode many years after they were launched, and cause more damage than expected. The fact that the author is a psychologist and psychotherapist by profession should not make anyone who wants to tackle the reading feel uncomfortable; the clear and accessible style allows accessibility to the key contents even to those who are not used to addressing certain topics in a scientific manner.
The title of the book for us is perhaps the most important question we must ask ourselves: what is the distance that heals? And if it heals, is there an underlying principle of illness/discomfort that we do not see?
A very challenging passage in all families is certainly the birth of a child and the weight of expectations that parents make fall on them, because perhaps they see in him a new possibility of fulfillment, or of prolonging their existence (with the real risk of crushing the possibility of self-affirmation in his own way of the offspring).
A situation that arises unconsciously, from the choice of the name of the child, the custom of giving the name of a grandfather or a great-grandfather, hides the viaticum that one hopes the child can take, as if one wanted to put him inside a cage of values that will necessarily influence his life or, even worse, the future sense of guilt for having betrayed the expectations of the parent.
Perhaps this is precisely the message and the main objective of the author, helping people to recognize what is their own distance that takes care of when you go out into the world and then return home; what is the distance from the judgment of home, without denying the values with which we grew up.
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Valeria Locati, La distanza che cura, Mondadori, Milano, 2025