To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
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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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
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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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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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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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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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Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
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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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The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
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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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As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.
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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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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 had to pick out a therapist in a movie that I’d like to go see as a personal therapist, it would be Robin Williams in Goodwill Hunting.
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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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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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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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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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Absolute power, as we have always known, corrupts absolutely; it corrupts because it does not do the trick for the individual.
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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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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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Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.
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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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The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.
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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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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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A curious thought experiment. . . Nietzsche’s message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally
IRVIN D. YALOM