In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown.
IRVIN D. YALOMWe 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.
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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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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Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a ‘falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.
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Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.
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Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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If I’m among men who don’t agree at all with my nature, I will hardly be able to accommodate myself to them without greatly changing myself.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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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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Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
IRVIN D. YALOM






