Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.
IRVIN D. YALOMWhat? ‘Borderline patients play games’? That what you said? Ernest, you’ll never be a real therapist if you think like that. That’s exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.
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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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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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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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The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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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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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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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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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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A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally
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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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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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If you want to choose the pleasure of growth, prepare yourself for some pain.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM