In a study we did of bereavement, we found that rather impressive numbers of widows and widowers had not simply gone back to their pre-loss functioning, but grown.
IRVIN D. YALOMReality 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.
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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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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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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Death, however, does itch. It itches all the time. It is always with us, scratching at some inner door.
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Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.
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Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms.
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Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life!
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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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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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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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There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can’t treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)
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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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Look out the other’s window. Try to see the world as your patient sees it.
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To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.
IRVIN D. YALOM