Overcoming the three barriers I have reviewed in this part requires engaging with how we tend to deal with others. We need courage to combat insecurity, imagination and empathy to reverse solipsism, and assertiveness along with a tolerance of conflict to counterbalance wishful thinking. While none of these is easy to do, each can at times feel within our grasp. We should be careful here, however. Too atomistic a view encourages the thought that we are decontextualized individuals with the cognitive means at hand to control our own destiny. That picture, if taken out of cultural context, as so often implied or encouraged by the self-help industry, is hugely distorting, and falsely encouraging. It is a mistake to think that because you identify something in yourself you can thereby change it: attributing an attachment style to a series of painful experiences in your early childhood does not mean you can thereby shrug those off. More generally, the fact that something is contingent on a historical set of circumstances (such as the reason I speak English rather than Swahili) does not mean that it is thereby optional. As the philosopher Charles Taylor puts it, we don't get in and out of world views like a cab.

We are some way from the self-help picture that depicts us as free individuals making choices. Rather, we operate in a culture that powerfully shapes the options available to us. How, for instance, does the attachment style of “dismissive–avoidant” look when you think about the cultural norms of masculinity and femininity with which we all grow up? Western culture tends to discourage men from talking about their feelings, and also encourages us to control, and thereby overcome our helplessness. This set of forces, while hard to see on a day-to-day basis, makes us look like fish that cannot conceptualize the sea in which they swim.