The Road Less Traveled

The Road Less Traveled, written by M. Scott Peck, an American psychiatrist and best-selling author, is a popular book of psychology and spirituality from 1978. The whole book contains four parts: Discipline, Love, Growth and Religion, Grace.

    Usually, I don’t like chicken soup books, especially the best-selling chicken soup for the words and examples are often clichéd and unpractical, but The Road Less Traveled is my exception. Peck uses lots of real examples of the patients he meets during the psychotherapy, and guides us a trade to be mature, standing on the psychological points. Followings are the analysis based on the first part—Discipline. 

    The popular miniseries, Patrick Melrose, holds everyone’s eyes and makes children’s safety issue argumentative again. The main character, Patrick Melrose, is born in a wealthy, upper class family, but lives a miserable life with the never-rid-of ghost of childhood bleakness. Why the original family is so important for a child’ growth? I find the answer in this book.

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    Firstly, children have a natural instinct to learn from their parents. According to the book, a child who witnesses his/her father’s domestic abuse has more possibility to beat his/her sister because he/she learns from the father not to control temper. That is why when Patrick grows up, he behaves like his father, getting mad easily, abusing alcohol and drugs. Even Patrick’s son shouts at the man like Patrick did.

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    Secondly, the feeling of being abandon will follow the child for the rest of his/her life. “For children, the fear of abandonment begins around the age of six months. To the child, abandonment by its parents is equivalent to death.” Patrick is exact that child. Abused by his father, Patrick is deadly hurt, but his mother does not take good care of him. He feels being abandoned and the reaction he chooses to avoid his father is to die. Although he does not succeed, his heart has already died before he grows up.

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    And for those lucky children growing up in a loving family, playing with their parents, they know that they are valued, they are precious, and so as their time and lives. They will not easily squander their time on meaningless things, but set a goal with self-steam.

  People who succeed in a certain field are often those who valued themselves, and they value their time, their life, their work and so on. The quality of self-value is established in childhood, so every step or period in our growth is not isolated, but connects with each other and will have invisible affection towards our lives.

writer: 李玥

editor:  童瑜

pictures from Internet