The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
IRVIN D. YALOMThe death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient’s control over every interaction.
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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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 spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming 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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And if you do the latter, you’re not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.
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One reason patients are reluctant to work in a therapy group is they fear that things will go too far, that the powerful therapist or the collective group might coerce them to lose control–to say or think or feel things that will be catastrophic.
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Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
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I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
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Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.
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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
IRVIN D. YALOM






