The Lies We Tell Ourselves Quotes

“Embracing life on its own terms can be difficult. As we embrace life as it is, our illusions collapse. We need emotional courage to bear the pain without running, explaining, or justifying.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“We never break, although we imagine we are breaking. Our illusions break, and all our denial and all our demands cannot put our fantasies together again. And when our denial breaks, the grief and rage start to flow. In this outpouring, the fire of feelings doesn’t burn us; it burns up our illusions.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“The therapist reveals to us the depths we feared and supports us while we bear them.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“In therapy we discover that we heal through relating, for the wounds that occurred in relationships must be healed in a relationship, a relationship where the therapist doesn’t talk at us but with us.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“What you run from is where you need to rest. What you fear you need to face. What you ignore you need to hear.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“Anxiety is a sign of the unspoken.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“To heal, together we must embrace the formerly unbearable: reality and our feelings about it.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“We become well by relating to what is here; we become ill by relating to our fantasies. The therapist stops us from running away from ourselves so we can rest in r”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“The kindest gift we can offer our loved ones is to own our projections and follow the advice we keep giving them. It is hard to sit in our feelings, so we export them onto others. We try to coerce people into being who we want them to be through explanations, instructions, or demands. The latent message remains the same: “My perception should be your reality!”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“By definition, life always includes us: our grief, our rage, our guilt, and our illusions. Our suffering points toward the truths we fear to embrace inside ourselves.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“After we surrender our denial, our illusions fall off and the feelings rush in, allowing the person we are, whom we have yet to meet, to emerge. Feelings are forms of love, invitations to embrace what is, so the false can drop, revealing the real in you.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“As the author Jeff Foster says, “Breakdown can always point to the break-through of a deeper truth, since only that which is false in you can break down. Truth does not break. Some call this recognition ‘waking up,’ some call it ‘self-realization.’”2”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“The moment we are stunned, we can either let the truth in or keep it out with our lies.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“Anxiety never makes sense until we face the facts and put them together.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“To be on good terms with ourselves, we must learn to listen to who we are under the words, the excuses, and the explanations we u”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“Everyone who needs healing has a story of heartbreak, loss, and feelings so painful that we can’t finish our journey. To finish this journey, we seek a person to help us go the rest of the way.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“All those who seek healing had to bear a pain that they couldn’t bear by themselves”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“To stop running, we need a partner to help us sit, bear, and feel. For what was unbearable when alone becomes bearable when shared.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“Remaining in this moment, we feel our feelings, which always reach out to us through anxiety. Anxiety, strangely enough, invites us to dive inside to the places from which we always run, the places we are afraid to descend into a”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life