I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.
IRVIN D. YALOMLive your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.
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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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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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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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I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.
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If I had to pick out a therapist in a movie that I’d like to go see as a personal therapist, it would be Robin Williams in Goodwill Hunting.
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Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you “Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?” – Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent.
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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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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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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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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Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
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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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Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.
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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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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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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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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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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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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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One thing I feel clear about is that it’s important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven’t really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won’t look back upon my forties with regret.
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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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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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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM