If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire.
IRVIN D. YALOMI must stop him from being one of those who call themselves good because they have no claws.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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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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Death cures psychoneurosis. In a sense all these neurotic concerns–fear of rejection, interpersonal concerns–seem to melt away, and people get another perspective on their lives. The important things are really important, and the trivia of life is trivialized.
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A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming 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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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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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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The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death.
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You know, I think everybody I’ve seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it’s very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They’re not really interested in the person, he doesn’t relate to the person.
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Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I’m still learning.
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When we have forgotten ourselves and become absorbed in someone (or something) outside ourselves
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To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
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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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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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The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.
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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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… sooner or later she had to give up the hope for a better past.
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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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Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
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Living safely is dangerous.
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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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I never want to take away something when I don’t have anything better to offer him in a way.
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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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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.
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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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I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.
IRVIN D. YALOM