The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
IRVIN D. YALOMLook out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)
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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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Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.
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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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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)
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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 spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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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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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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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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Reality always creeps in–the reality of our helplessness and our mortality; the reality that, despite our reach for the stars, a creaturely fate awaits us.
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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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Only free man are genuinely useful to one another and can form true friendships. And it’s absolutely permissible, by the highest right of Nature, for everyone to employ clear reason to determine how to live in a way that will allow him to flourish.
IRVIN D. YALOM