Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful. And if possible, get into therapy at different stages of their life with different kinds of therapists just to sample a bit.
IRVIN D. YALOMIf we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future.
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The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
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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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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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Living safely is dangerous.
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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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And if you do the latter, you’re not so worried about the everyday trivialities of life, for example, petty concerns about secrecy or privacy.
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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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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.
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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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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)
IRVIN D. YALOM