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If you’re a tulip, don’t try to be a rose. Go find a tulip garden.
All of my clients are tulips, and they’re trying to be roses. It doesn’t work. They drive themselves crazy trying. I recognize that some people don’t have the skills to plant the garden they need. But everybody can learn how to garden.
Whatever the truth is, as soon as I got out of the hospital, I knew that I would never have a child of my own. The thought that anyone else in the universe might go through what I went through is beyond my ability to tolerate. It’s not that a child of mine, with my genes, would inevitably have my problems. It’s that I simply could not take that chance.
If I thought I was miserable now, that would be nothing compared with the misery of becoming an alcoholic and then having to get off alcohol, which I figured I would have to do at some point. When I was in seclusion at the institute, getting off cigarettes had been painful, and I thought getting off alcohol would probably be even worse. So I decided to come up with a rule that I kept all the way until I was forty: No drinking alcohol when alone.
“Flowers before bread.” People need the special pleasures in life, in addition to the necessities. “Love, dignity and beauty in life are as essential to life as physical needs,” they assert. If I learned anything from my mother, I learned the value of beauty, and that the effort to bring beauty into any setting is worth the work it entails.
Mother Teresa had a beautiful phrase that captures some of this: “Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.”
You can’t think yourself into new ways of acting; you can only act yourself into new ways of thinking.
you are really lucky, because you know that you are capable of loving someone else. You know you are capable of great love. And many people don’t know that about themselves.”
There are no data that show that hospitalization saves lives or is useful in any way
was as if they didn’t have emotional skin.
As if they had suffered from third-degree burns all over their body. Even the lightest touch was excruciatingly painful, and they lived in environments where everyone kept poking at them. They perceived suggestions aimed at change as personal attacks or as further invalidation. It would whip them off the emotional charts.
unconditional positive regard, a set of strategies developed by the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers.
back pain and tiredness were likely due to my resistance to accepting or dealing with something in myself, some kind of blockage. I doubt that. I likely needed a better way of sitting.
She is still looking outside herself for what she needs
