In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown.
IRVIN D. YALOMLive your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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.
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My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable.
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Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a ‘falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.
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A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
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A free man who lives among the ignorant strives as far as he can to avoid their favors. A free man acts honestly, not deceptively.
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When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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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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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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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.
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Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
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This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
IRVIN D. YALOM