He may not realize that in order to adjust himself to life he must change himself.
It is rarely that in greater or less degree a man's personality is not involved when he comes to face the predicament that is troubling him. To tell the unemployed man (see Chapter VII) that his sense of failure and of shame was a symptom of his unemployment was in a measure interpreting him to himself. After all, the real cause of his worry was lest there be something wrong with him. To learn that his difficulty was typical of what many other persons had suffered was to be assured that he was not peculiar in this respect and that, therefore, he was as good a man as he had ever been. His concern was himself, but to talk to him in terms of his adjustment was to make his problem objective rather than personal and thus to render it easier for him to grasp.
For, although since our earliest school days we have been reared to believe the maxim, 'Know Thyself,' we find the acquiring of this knowledge through the vehicle of other people the most painful of all ordeals. Few of us can receive the slightest compliment without blushing or undergoing a change in facial expression, and when the truth carries an adverse criticism our suffering
