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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Freedom is a lifetime practice—a choice we get to make again and again each day. Ultimately, freedom requires hope, which I define in two ways: the awareness that suffering, however terrible, is temporary; and the curiosity to discover what happens next. Hope allows us to live in the present instead of the past, and to unlock the doors of our mental prisons.
It’s not what happens to us that matters most, it’s what we do with our experiences.
WE DO NOT CHANGE UNTIL WE’RE READY.
CHANGE IS ABOUT INTERRUPTING THE HABITS AND PATTERNS THAT NO LONGER SERVE US.
WHEN YOU CHANGE YOUR LIFE, IT’S TO BECOME THE REAL YOU.
Suffering is universal. But victimhood is optional. There is no way to escape being hurt or oppressed by other people or circumstances. The only guarantee is that no matter how kind we are or how hard we work, we’re going to have pain. We’re going to be affected by environmental and genetic factors over which we have little or no control. But we each get to choose whether or not we stay a victim. We don’t get to choose what happens to us, but we do get to choose how we respond to our experience.
Victimhood is rigor mortis of the mind. It’s stuck in the past, stuck in the pain, and stuck on the losses and deficits: what I can’t do and what I don’t have.
Sometimes it just takes one sentence to point the way out of victimhood: Is it good for me?
Another tool for moving out of victimhood is to learn to cope with loneliness. It’s what most of us fear more than anything else. But when you’re in love with yourself, alone doesn’t mean lonely.
Releasing ourselves from victimhood also means releasing others from the roles we’ve assigned them.
I like to remind my patients: the opposite of depression is expression. What comes out of you doesn’t make you sick; what stays in there does.
But as long as you’re avoiding your feelings, you’re denying reality. And if you try to shut something out and say, “I don’t want to think about it,” I guarantee that you’re going to think about it. So invite the feeling in, sit down with it, keep it company. And then decide how long you’re going to hold on to it. Because you’re not a fragile little somebody. It’s good to face every reality. To stop fighting and hiding. To remember that a feeling is just a feeling—it’s not your identity.
This is how we release ourselves from the prison of avoidance—we let the feelings come. We let them move through us. And then we let them go.
Feel so you can heal.
Everything is temporary.
Honey, find you and keep filling it up with more you. You don’t have to work to be loved. You just have to be you. May you be more and more you every day.
Honesty starts with learning to tell the truth to yourself.
Honesty starts with learning to tell the truth to yourself. Try the Vital Signs exercise that Robin used to heal her marriage. Several times a day, make a conscious effort to check in with your body and take your own emotional temperature. Ask yourself, “Do I feel soft and warm, or cold and stiff?”
Freedom lies in accepting our whole, imperfect selves and giving up the need for perfection.
it is a universal experience for life not to turn out as we want or expect. Most of us suffer because we have something we don’t want, or we want something we don’t have. All therapy is grief work. A process of confronting a life where you expect one thing and get another, a life that brings you the unexpected and unanticipated.
when you’re a whole person, an adult, you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. So don’t put your life in someone else’s hands. Just make a statement:
Give the other person the information and freedom they need to be assertive about their wants and hopes and fears.
No one grows with criticism. So eliminate it. No criticism. None, ever.
I’m very selective about who’s going to get my anger, because when I’m angry, I’m the one who suffers.
You don’t have to prove your worth.
You can just embrace it, celebrate that you’re imperfect and whole, that there will never be another you.
If you have something to prove, you’re st...
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Tempura mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis. Times are changing, and we are changing with the times.
post-traumatic stress disorder is not a disorder—it’s a very normal reaction to loss, violence, and tragedy.
