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. YALOMWere 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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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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The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
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I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
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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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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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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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We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.
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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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Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
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I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.
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Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
IRVIN D. YALOM