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?
IRVIN D. YALOMOne 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.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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…the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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Only free man are genuinely useful to one another and can form true friendships. And it’s absolutely permissible, by the highest right of Nature, for everyone to employ clear reason to determine how to live in a way that will allow him to flourish.
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Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.
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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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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
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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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Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a ‘falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.
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Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.
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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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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.
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Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer
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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.
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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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Indeed, the evidence supporting the efficacy of group therapy, and the prevailing sentiment of the mental health profession, are sufficiently strong that it would be difficult to defend the adequacy of the inpatient unit that attempted to operate without a small group program.
IRVIN D. YALOM