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they seemed to be losing the ability to be with others and losing their ability to be with themselves.
avoidance is almost always about fear.
“Avoidance is a simple way of coping by not having to cope.”
Therapy is a completely different experience with a different therapist; no two are exactly the same.
self-sabotage as a form of control.
The four ultimate concerns are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness.
the loss of our very identities, of our younger and more vibrant selves.
our awareness of death helps us live more fully — and with less, not more, anxiety.
children, bound by parental rules, are really free only in one respect — emotionally.
Uncertainty, I’m starting to realize, doesn’t mean the loss of hope — it means there’s possibility. I don’t know what will happen next — how potentially exciting!
she’s been crying for both of you.”
If pre-contemplation is denial, contemplation might be likened to resistance.
People often start therapy during the contemplation stage.
The hiccup at this stage is that change involves the loss of the old and the anxiety of the new.
Stress or certain triggers for the old behavior (a particular restaurant, a call from an old drinking buddy) can result in relapse.
Sometimes the changes you want in another person aren’t on that person’s agenda — even if he tells you they are.
Reacting vs. responding = reflexive vs. chosen. We can choose our response, Frankl was saying, even under the specter of death.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
“Are you waiting for the other shoe to drop?” I ask. There’s a term for this irrational fear of joy: cherophobia
It’s common for people with traumatic histories to expect disaster just around the corner.
For Rita, joy isn’t pleasure; it’s anticipatory pain.
Why do parents do this? Often, they envy their children’s childhoods
They strive to give their children all the things they themselves didn’t have, but they sometimes end up, without even realizing it, resenting the kids for their good fortune.
Forgiveness is a tricky thing, in the way that apologies can be.
You can have compassion without forgiving.
Many of us torture ourselves over our mistakes for decades, even after we’ve genuinely attempted to make amends. How reasonable is that sentence?
Your misery doesn’t change their situation.
a positive therapist-client relationship was an essential part of the cure,
they’re also a way of protecting the speakers from the uncomfortable feelings that somebody else’s bad situation stirs up.
When people delude themselves into believing they have all the time in the world, she’s noticed, they get lazy.
Love wins.
“It means nothing,” I say. “It’s meaningless.”
When we give our minds space to wander, they take us to the most unexpected and interesting places.
A flight to health is especially common when the therapist or patient has been away and in that break, the person’s unconscious defenses take hold.
Sometimes when a new patient comes in, I ask not just “What brings you here?” but “What brings you here now?” The now is the key.
I’d been mistaking feeling less for feeling better. The feelings are still there, though.
if we’re cut off from our feelings, just skating on the surface, we don’t get peace or joy — we get deadness.
therapy is one of the safest of all places to bring your shame.
therapists work to lose patients, not retain them.
Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest.
But pain is pain.
by diminishing my problems, I was judging myself and everyone else whose problems I had placed lower down on the hierarchy of pain.
“closure” was an illusion of sorts.
The price of loving so deeply is feeling so deeply — but it’s also a gift, the gift of being alive. If we no longer feel, we should be grieving our own deaths.
you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others.
in responding to challenging life events from the devastating (becoming handicapped, losing a loved one) to the difficult (a divorce, an illness), people do better than they anticipate.
feelings are actually more like weather systems — they blow in and they blow out.
therapist instructs patients not to do what they’re already not doing, is called a paradoxical intervention.
therapists talk about the difference between privacy (spaces in people’s psyches that everyone needs in healthy relationships) and secrecy (which stems from shame and tends to be corrosive).
when rules are bent with thoughtful intention, it broadens the definition of what effective treatment can be.
