Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
IRVIN D. YALOMThe more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Life as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other.
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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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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If we climb high enough, we will reach a height from which tragedy ceases to look tragic.
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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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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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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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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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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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Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life.
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When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves, that is always a bad sign.
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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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To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.
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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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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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The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.
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I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.
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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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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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Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?
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One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.
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Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.
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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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Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.
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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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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.
IRVIN D. YALOM