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.
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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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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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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Many people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true.
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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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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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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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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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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.
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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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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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Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
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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.
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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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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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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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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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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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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
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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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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
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Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you “Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?” – Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent.
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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 creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.
IRVIN D. YALOM