One doesn’t do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.
IRVIN D. YALOMSince then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you “Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?” – Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent.
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You know, I think everybody I’ve seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it’s very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They’re not really interested in the person, he doesn’t relate to the person.
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.
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If I’m among men who don’t agree at all with my nature, I will hardly be able to accommodate myself to them without greatly changing myself.
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I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.
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Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
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Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.
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Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.
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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
IRVIN D. YALOM