Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
IRVIN D. YALOMLife 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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Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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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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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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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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He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)
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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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It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.
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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish.
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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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The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.
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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.
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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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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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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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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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Not to take possession of your life plan is to let your existence be an accident.
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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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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.
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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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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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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM