The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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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Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.
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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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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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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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We take pleasure not only in the growth of our patient but also in the ripple effect—the salutary influence our patients have upon those whom they touch in life.
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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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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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
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Death cures psychoneurosis. In a sense all these neurotic concerns–fear of rejection, interpersonal concerns–seem to melt away, and people get another perspective on their lives. The important things are really important, and the trivia of life is trivialized.
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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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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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Were not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams.
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