A Therapeutic Journey Quotes

“The essence of psychotherapy lies in a willingness to get systematically interested in why we constantly respond in the bizarre and uncalled-for ways we exhibit. It asks by what sequence of formative experiences an otherwise perfectly decent and intelligent person could be led to sob on the floor or threaten to jump out of the window after an argument. It’s less disturbed by a tantrum, a sulk, or a cold withdrawal than curious about where such over-or under-reactions might be coming from.”
― Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

“Our requests to our lovers might sound as follows: I need you to accept—often and readily—the possibility that you might be at fault, without this feeling to you like the end of the world. You have to allow that I can have a legitimate criticism and still love you. I need you to be undefensive. I need you to own up to what you are embarrassed or awkward about in yourself. I need you to know how to access the younger parts of you without terror. I need you to be able to be vulnerable around me. I need you to respond warmly, gently, and compassionately to the fragile parts of who I am; to listen to, and understand, my sorrows. We need a union of mutual tenderness. I need you to have a complex, nuanced picture of me and to understand the emotional burdens I’m carrying, even though I wish I weren’t, from the past. You have to see me with something like the generosity associated with therapy. I need you to regularly air your disappointments and irritations with me—and for me to do the same with you—so that the currents of affection between us can remain warm and our capacity for admiration intense. If these five critical demands have been met, we will feel loved and essentially satisfied whatever differences then crop up in a hundred other areas. Perhaps our partner’s friends or routines won’t be a delight, but we will be content. Just as if we lack these emotional goods, and yet agree on every detail of European literature, interior design, and social existence, we are still likely to feel lonely and bereft. By limiting what we expect a relationship to be about, we can overcome the tyranny and bad temper that bedevil so many lovers. A good, simpler—yet very fulfilling—relationship could end up in a minimal state. We might not socialize much together. We might hardly ever encounter each other’s families. Our finances might overlap only at a few points. We could be living in different places and only meet up twice a week. Conceivably we might not even ask too many questions about each other’s sex life. But when we do come together it would be profoundly gratifying, because we would be in the presence of someone who knew how to be kind, vulnerable, and understanding. A bond between two people can be deep and important precisely because it is not played out across all practical details of existence. By simplifying and clarifying what a relationship is for, we release ourselves from overly complicated conflicts and can focus on making sure our urgent underlying needs are sympathized with, seen, and understood.”
― Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

“Honesty is a love-preserving mechanism that keeps alive all that is impressive and delightful about our partner in our eyes. By regularly voicing our small sorrows and minor irritations, we are scraping the barnacles off the keel of our relationship and thereby ensuring that we will sail on with continued joy and admiration into an authentic and unresentful future. 2 Love and Psychotherapy Lovers and psychotherapists might, at first glance, seem to”
― Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

“We’ve been brought up to act fast, to assume that we know everything immediately and to ignore the fact that consciousness is made up of layers, and it’s the lower strata that might contain the richest, most faithful material.”
― Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

“But there is another, more dynamic and less hidebound way to interpret love: as a particular kind of education. In this view, a relationship essentially comprises a mutual attempt to learn from and teach something to another person. We are drawn to our partners because we want to be educated by them and vice versa. We love them because we see in them things that we long for that are missing in us; we aspire to grow under the tutelage of love.”
― Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

“Anger and irritation don’t destroy love; they are inevitable parts of being genuinely close to and extremely dependent on another human being.”
― Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

“Feelings get less strong, not stronger, once they’ve been acknowledged.”
― Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

“To complain in love is a noble and honorable skill very far removed from the category of whininess with which it is sometimes confused”
― Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

“Thinking isn’t what we do best when it’s all we’re meant to do.”
― Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

“Grown-up life is intolerably hard and we should be allowed to know and lament this.”
― Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

“It’s one of the more unexpected features of mental life that what manifests itself as “anxiety” is really, at heart, a form of intense self-suspicion.”
― Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

“The way we treat ourselves is an internalization of the way others once treated us, either directly in the sense of how they spoke to us or indirectly in the sense of how they behaved around us, which could have included ignoring us or openly displaying a preference for someone else.”
― Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

“The norm has ceased to be enough. We cannot be average without at the same time having to think of ourselves as being what our age resents above all else: losers.”
― Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

“We should be disloyal to those who brought us up in an atmosphere of fear in order to save what remains of life from always appearing doom-laden.”
― Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life

“We generalize outward from dubious premises.”
― Alain de Botton, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from The School of Life