There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can’t treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)
IRVIN D. YALOMPsychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.
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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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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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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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Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
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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.
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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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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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Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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Indeed, the evidence supporting the efficacy of group therapy, and the prevailing sentiment of the mental health profession, are sufficiently strong that it would be difficult to defend the adequacy of the inpatient unit that attempted to operate without a small group program.
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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
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I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
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Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
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To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
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Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
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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 spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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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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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM