The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
IRVIN D. YALOMDespair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
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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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Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
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To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
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The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
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Living safely is dangerous.
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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
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You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.
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Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.
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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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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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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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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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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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I must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
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Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
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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.
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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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Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.
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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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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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One reason patients are reluctant to work in a therapy group is they fear that things will go too far, that the powerful therapist or the collective group might coerce them to lose control–to say or think or feel things that will be catastrophic.
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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
IRVIN D. YALOM