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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“There’s something likable in everyone,”
It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them.
We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.
No matter how open we as a society are about formerly private matters, the stigma around our emotional struggles remains formidable.
if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.
I said I wasn’t depressed; I was just bored. I hadn’t considered that if the only thing that keeps you going all day is knowing you’ll get to turn on the TV after dinner, you probably are depressed.
When working with couples on empathy, often I’ll say, “Before you speak, ask yourself, What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to? ”
People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.
Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.
“Do you think I’m a bad person?” she’d ask, and I’d assure her that everyone who comes to therapy worries that what they think or feel might not be “normal” or “good,” and yet it’s our honesty with ourselves that helps us make sense of our lives with all of their nuances and complexity. Repress those thoughts, and you’ll likely behave “badly.” Acknowledge them, and you’ll grow.
Before having a baby, I’d relished the freedom of a non-office job. But now I longed to get dressed every day and be in the company of verbal grownups.
“Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.”
Fromm was right; people didn’t use extra time earned to relax or connect with friends or family. Instead, they tried to cram more in.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
I thought of something Wendell had said to me after I’d listed my own regrettable missteps that I took great pleasure in punishing myself for: “How long do you think the sentence for this crime should be? A year? Five? Ten?” Many of us torture ourselves over our mistakes for decades, even after we’ve genuinely attempted to make amends. How reasonable is that sentence?
Julie thinks about this. “They can say, ‘I’m so sorry.’ They can say, ‘How can I be helpful?’ Or ‘I feel so helpless but I care about you.’”
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering—
“The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.”
Maybe our pasts don’t define us but inform us. Maybe all she’s been through is exactly what makes her so interesting—and so caring now.
That’s why it’s especially important to be the people we want to be now, to become more open and expansive while we’re able.
