Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.
IRVIN D. YALOMLove is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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One doesn’t do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.
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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.
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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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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
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Living safely is dangerous.
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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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If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive?
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My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable.
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There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.
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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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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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It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one’s germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!
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What? ‘Borderline patients play games’? That what you said? Ernest, you’ll never be a real therapist if you think like that. That’s exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis.
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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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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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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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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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Hidden in disguise, leaking out in a variety of symptoms. It is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts.
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To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.
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There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
IRVIN D. YALOM