When the Past Is Present Quotes

“In a true you-and-I relationship, we are present mindfully, nonintrusively, the way we are present with things in nature.We do not tell a birch tree it should be more like an elm. We face it with no agenda, only an appreciation that becomes participation: 'I love looking at this birch' becomes 'I am this birch' and then 'I and this birch are opening to a mystery that transcends and holds us both.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships

“Transference is essentially a compulsion to return to our past in order to clear up emotionally backlogged business.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships

“We can actually reconstruct our past by examining what we think, say, feel, expect, believe, and do in an intimate relationship now.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships

“We do not eliminate transference; we decant it. We do not kill it as David killed Goliath. We wrestle with it respectfully as did Jacob with the angel, until it yields its blessing. The blessing is the revelation of what we missed or lost and the grace to grieve it rather than transfer it. We feel a momentum to mourn all those who did not make time for us, to let go of their importance to us, to go on with life no longer determined or unduly influenced by what others choose to do. We then find satisfying sources of need-fulfillment in ourselves and in other humans who can be there for us most of the time and not there sometimes. And in a yes to that, we have all we need.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships

“Patriotism comes from the same Latin word as father. Blind patriotism is collective transference. In it the state becomes a parent and we citizens submit our loyalty to ensure its protection. We may have been encouraged to make that bargain from our public school education, our family home, religion, or culture in general. We associate safety with obedience to authority, for example, going along with government policies. We then make duty, as it is defined by the nation, our unquestioned course. Our motivation is usually not love of country but fear of being without a country that will defend us and our property. Connection is all-important to us; excommunication is the equivalent of death, the finality we can’t dispute. Healthy adult loyalty is a virtue that does not become blind obedience for fear of losing connection, nor total devotion so that we lose our boundaries. Our civil obedience can be so firm that it may take precedence over our concern for those we love, even our children. Here is an example: A young mother is told by the doctor that her toddler is allergic to peanuts and peanut oil. She lets the school know of her son’s allergy when he goes to kindergarten. Throughout his childhood, she is vigilant and makes sure he is safe from peanuts in any form. Eighteen years later, there is a war and he is drafted. The same mother, who was so scrupulously careful about her child’s safety, now waves goodbye to him with a tear but without protest. Mother’s own training in public school and throughout her life has made her believe that her son’s life is expendable whether or not the war in question is just. “Patriotism” is so deeply ingrained in her that she does not even imagine an alternative, even when her son’s life is at stake. It is of course also true that, biologically, parents are ready to let children go just as the state is ready to draft them. What a cunning synchronic-ity. In addition, old men who decide on war take advantage of the timing too. The warrior archetype is lively in eighteen-year-olds, who are willing to fight. Those in their mid-thirties, whose archetype is being a householder and making a mark in their chosen field, will not show an interest in battlefields of blood. The chiefs count on the fact that young braves will take the warrior myth literally rather than as a metaphor for interior battles. They will be willing to put their lives on the line to live out the collective myth of societies that have not found the path of nonviolence. Our collective nature thus seems geared to making war a workable enterprise. In some people, peacemaking is the archetype most in evidence. Nature seems to have made that population smaller, unfortunately. Our culture has trained us to endure and tolerate, not to protest and rebel. Every cell of our bodies learned that lesson. It may not be virtue; it may be fear. We may believe that showing anger is dangerous, because it opposes the authority we are obliged to appease and placate if we are to survive. This explains why we so admire someone who dares to say no and to stand up or even to die for what he believes. That person did not fall prey to the collective seduction. Watching Jeopardy on television, I notice that the audience applauds with special force when a contestant risks everything on a double-jeopardy question. The healthy part of us ardently admires daring. In our positive shadow, our admiration reflects our own disavowed or hidden potential. We, too, have it in us to dare. We can stand up for our truth, putting every comfort on the line, if only we can calm our long-scared ego and open to the part of us that wants to live free. Joseph Campbell says encouragingly, “The part of us that wants to become is fearless.” Religion and Transference Transference is not simply horizontal, from person to person, but vertical from person to a higher power, usually personified as God. When”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships

“Though most of us want to move on from our past, we tend to go through our lives simply casting new people into the roles of key people, such as our parents or any significant person with whom there is still unfinished business.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships

“A lack of love means not receiving the five A’s of adult love: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing us to be ourselves.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships

“For all that has been: Thanks. For all that shall be: Yes.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships

“As we become more courageous, getting on with life becomes more valuable than the narcotic comforts of the status quo.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships

“It is a sign of health when we acknowledge the legitimacy of our longings.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships

“While certain partners may hurt us, they cannot undo the abiding trust that we continue to carry so steadfastly toward the human world. We become able to hold others with a relaxed grasp, not compulsively or coercively as if we needed to hold on for dear life. Buddhist writer Stephen T. Butterfield wrote, “Since no relationship can be made entirely safe and secure . . . this has to mean trust in one’s own ability to use any consequence, including betrayal, as a means for waking up.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships

“The heart of any psychological work is addressing, processing, resolving, and integrating the issue at hand. These words form the acronym APRI, which in Italian means “you open.” As we understand this central and necessary four-part plan to complete our unfinished business, transference may not have to kick in so fiercely anymore.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships

“We say an unconditional yes to the given of life that our needs will not always be met and also to the first noble truth of Buddhism, that life includes unsatisfactoriness.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships

“We recall that there are two ways of going around: The spiral is positive repetition, ever-evolving in an upward trend. The spinning wheel in the snow is the negative repetition, ever wasting energy.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships

“Is there a middle way between hope and despair? It is the
unconditional yes to the given of life that our needs are sometimes met
and sometimes not, that life is not always predictable, that things do not
always come out the way we want. Between the extremes of hope and
despair there flies a wise owl. He is the one that lands not in the marshes
of wishful thinking nor in the desert of despondency but on the tree of
life, the reality of how things are in the human world. We can sit with
him on any branch of mindfulness. There we feel a sense of divine
balance and we realize that our unconditional yes was how we aligned
ourselves to it.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships

“In grief, there is an element of inconsolability. In our needs, there is an
element of unsatisfiability. In the face of life’s most profound questions,
there is an unknowability. This fits with the work of Kurt Gödel, the
Czech mathematician, who confirmed the “incompleteness theorem,”
which states that in any mathematical system there are indeed
propositions that can neither be proved nor disproved. These natural
incompletions reflect the first noble truth of Buddhism about the
enduring and ineradicable unsatisfactoriness of all experience. This is not
only Buddha’s truth, it is the one that some of our children and punk
rockers also proclaim.
Yet there is a positive side. Inconsolability means we cannot forget but
always cherish those we loved. Unsatisfiability means we have a
motivation to transcend our immediate desires. Unknowability means we
grow in our sense of wonder and imagination. Indeed, answers close us,
but questions open us. In accepting the given of the first noble truth
without protest, blame, or recourse to an escape to which we can attach,
we win all the way around.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships

“No moment is ever trivial, since any moment points to the exit into enlightenment.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships