I continue to answer site users and invite you to ask your questions, right here in the comments. DonnaAnna writes: Dear Irina, We are your main clients 35+, but not more than 65, who are we anyway? There are so many “shards” and traces of the personalities and attitudes of our parents – the last “Soviet” generation – in us. Confusion in front of the present, and the understanding that children most likely know much more about the modern world. Maybe the main question is - who are we? How to get back to yourself? To who we were, to who we could be? What do you think? In general, it’s interesting that now people younger than me – those who are 25-30 years old – come to me for consultations more often. But I also really like working with peers. There are many common themes and difficulties that are close to me. Your question seemed very multi-layered to me, it is about different things. First, it’s about what is ours in us and what is superficial, those very traces and fragments, as you figuratively write, it’s really interesting: is this heritage suitable for me or is it something essentially alien that was foisted on me, and I Now I carry it out of habit, it’s a pity to quit. In Gestalt there is a term for this - “introject”; if we explain it through the food metaphor, so beloved by Perls: an introject is something that is swallowed without chewing and not digested, not assimilated... The second thing I heard in the question: what to rely on when the world has become so unstable? Unlike the world in which our parents lived until a certain moment, until the country fell apart. And at first it seemed to me that your question is about that identity, which concerns self-determination through belonging to a group: family, country... We really need our flock, in a significant group or sphere, about which one can say “mine”, “ours”: my language, our country, our company... And the question is characterized by the wording - WE: who are WE, and not “who am I”. But then We had a small dialogue in the comments, and the question was revealed with a new layer: Irina Rebrushkina: How do you answer the question - who were we? If it is important to return to oneself, it means that identity was once defined, and then lost: somewhere there was a turn AWAY from oneself. And it’s interesting, as you see, where, at what point did this turn happen? DonnaAnna: We were children with a keenly transparent and magical perception of life. Every phenomenon is a miracle, something new is a discovery. Is it different for anyone else? Haven't you seen the miracle, the magic, the peculiarity of every moment? Did you believe in Santa Claus, took special pleasure in opening your grandmother’s chest, smelling your mother’s perfume, getting into your father’s high boots? And where exactly was this childhood identity lost)))) At what point could this turn happen? Do you know its markers, signs of sensation? Maybe you can tell me how to look) And perhaps, yes, this is also about identity, but a special one - existential, about a person’s correspondence to himself. The ability to live your own authentic life, not someone else’s, and be impressed by it. There is a book about this by the famous psychotherapist James Bugental, you might be interested in reading: “The Science of Being Alive.” If it’s about me specifically, then yes, I really yearn for this lost childhood perception, really. You spoke very well about this and found precise, good words for it, very vividly described how a child experiences the world. What happened to us and where exactly did we take a wrong turn? We have grown up. And I think that in this slow turn AWAY from oneself, in the loss of freshness and authenticity of experiences, the ability to be SO impressed by the world, by life, two things play a role: the natural erasure of novelty, which inevitably occurs over time, the way we habitually limit ourselves, We create boredom for ourselves, we erase this novelty ourselves, we don’t notice it. Natural addiction occurs due to adaptation, the fact that many things become familiar and then pass into the category of automatisms. We are not aware of automatisms, we do not track them and, accordingly, we do not experience them. Nothing compares to the first neural trace, the first imprint of experience - of course, it is the most vivid. It’s one thing when I see falling leaves or snow for the first, fifth, tenth time in my life,.