Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.
IRVIN D. YALOMWhen we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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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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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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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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All these things I’ve written so much about. That’s why I’ve made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there.
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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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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.
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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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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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To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.
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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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The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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What? ‘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.
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Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
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To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
IRVIN D. YALOM