More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 12 - April 20, 2020
We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.’
Your life is not something that someone gives you, but something you choose yourself, and you are the one who decides how you live.
Simply put, people have various complaints about things, but it’s easier and more secure to be just the way one is.
it’s basically impossible to not get hurt in your relations with other people. When you enter into interpersonal relationships, it is inevitable that to a greater or lesser extent you will get hurt, and you will hurt someone, too.
being alone isn’t what makes you feel lonely. Loneliness is having other people and society and community around you, and having a deep sense of being excluded from them. To feel lonely, we need other people. That is to say, it is only in social contexts that a person becomes an ‘individual’.
‘All problems are interpersonal relationship problems.’
At base, ‘complex’ refers to an abnormal mental state made up of a complicated group of emotions and ideas, and has nothing to do with the feeling of inferiority. For instance, there’s Freud’s Oedipus complex, which is used in the context of discussing the abnormal attraction of the child to the opposite-sex parent.
If one really has confidence in oneself, one doesn’t feel the need to boast. It’s because one’s feeling of inferiority is strong that one boasts.
The person who assumes a boasting manner when talking about his upbringing and the like; the various misfortunes that have rained down upon him.
They use their misfortune to their advantage, and try to control the other party with it.
By declaring how unfortunate they are and how much they have suffered, they are trying to worry the people around them (their family and friends, for example), and to restrict their speech and behaviour, and control them.
‘In our culture weakness can be quite strong and powerful.’
instead of treating the child like an adult, or like a child, one must treat them like a human being. One interacts with the child with sincerity, as another human being just like oneself.
Irascible people do not have short tempers—it is only that they do not know that there are effective communication tools other than anger.
When one can think, Whenever I am with this person, I can behave very freely, one can really feel love. One can be in a calm and quite natural state, without having feelings of inferiority or being beset with the need to flaunt one’s superiority. That is what real love is like.
When one is sad, one should be sad to one’s heart’s content. It is precisely when one tries to escape the pain and sadness that one gets stuck and ceases to be able to build deep relationships with anyone. Think about it this way. We can believe. And we can doubt. But we are aspiring to see others as our comrades. To believe or to doubt—the choice should be clear.
People who suffer from stammering are looking at only a part of things, but judging the whole.
They are simply trying to avoid their other responsibilities by using work as an excuse.
It is a series of moments called ‘now’. We can live only in the here and now. Our lives exist only in moments.
It is because Adler’s thought resonates with you now that you are thinking this.
This discussion was something that you needed to hear now.
