Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
IRVIN D. YALOMIt’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.
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Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation.
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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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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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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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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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Live your life to the fullest; and then, and only then, die. Don’t leave any unlived life behind.
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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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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.
IRVIN D. YALOM -
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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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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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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A free man who lives among the ignorant strives as far as he can to avoid their favors. A free man acts honestly, not deceptively.
IRVIN D. YALOM