Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
IRVIN D. YALOM
Life as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
IRVIN D. YALOM -
Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
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Heidegger makes the distinction between being absorbed in the way things are in the world and being aware that things are in the world.
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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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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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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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To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
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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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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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Death cures psychoneurosis. In a sense all these neurotic concerns–fear of rejection, interpersonal concerns–seem to melt away, and people get another perspective on their lives. The important things are really important, and the trivia of life is trivialized.
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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM