At the root of our failures lies one woefully familiar psychological problem: self-hatred. It is because we haven’t learnt to love and respect ourselves that we say nothing, believing that we have no right to take our own positions seriously.

Inevitably, there is much about ourselves we don’t like and want to change. There are also broad areas of our mental and emotional life we don’t want to examine at all and whose existence we would prefer to deny entirely. These are the areas where we feel most vulnerable, most fragile—perhaps most damaged—or those things we are most ashamed of. But