One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
IRVIN D. YALOMThe 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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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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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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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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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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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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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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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM