Receiving Love Quotes

“Experiencing empathy, the freedom to explore, trust, and insight can reset your default reactions to a more curious, tolerant, and confident stance. Because our brains are plastic, consistently positive experiences do stimulate existing neurons to adapt and connect in different pathways. Nurturing relationships help us grow psychologically and neurally in ways that are not possible in nonnurturing relationships. As adults, our most important opportunity for a nurturing relationship comes through committed partnership. It’s a breakthrough to realize that the purpose of committed relationship is not to be happy, but to heal. And then you will be happy!”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“Our personal relationships are tainted by our own self-hatred, and our social attitudes are formed by it. Our private wounds produce ripples of dis-ease all around us.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“As a result, not all of our inborn traits, tendencies, and talents cross into adulthood with us. Parts of ourselves are left behind on the road to maturity. What is left is a joylessness and emptiness we try to fill with things that can’t possibly give us what we’re looking for.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“The infant is born with many million more neurons than she can use. Gradually, she loses the brain connections she doesn’t need and begins to strengthen those that will help her survive and thrive in her particular environment. In a parallel process, the infant soon learns which of her actions are greeted with smiles and which cause frowns or, equally frightening, indifference.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“If the need is met—the parents attend to it, support it, and help the child be successful at integrating it—then it will become a natural and wholesome part of the child’s self. If the need is not met, then the child’s frustration will lead to pain. In human beings, including children, our primitive, or “old,” brains interpret this pain as a sign of danger. The perception of danger causes fear, and fear results in resistance to whatever is seen as dangerous.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“Unfortunately, a child often has the experience of being injured when one or both parents do not support her normal developmental needs and impulses. When we talk about needs, what are we talking about? An important example would be the need to stay connected or attached to the caretaker. Besides all the impulses a child has to make to maintain this attachment, the child also has impulses toward exploring, creating an identity, and becoming competent in the world. When these needs and impulses develop, our caretakers can support them or they can not support them, totally or partially.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“When we say or do things that other people don’t approve of, we learn to hide certain parts of ourselves in order to avoid negative feedback.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“Each of us comes into the world whole and able to receive love and nurturing from our parents as naturally as we breathe. We are connected to our social context, to all parts of ourselves, to the universe, and to the Divine.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“You can see how symbiosis is related to projection. Projection is the means by which symbiosis is achieved: I ascribe to you things that are true about me, and that makes you an extension of me.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“Symbiosis is the unconscious assumption that other people share your subjective states, thoughts, and feelings. When two people are symbiotic, they have an inability to function on their own as individuals and still be in a relationship. They cannot operate with clear boundaries and be connected. Their connected knowing is so overly emphasized that it has become fused knowing. They think, or act as if they think, that when you love someone and that person loves you back, you must think, feel, and act alike.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“One clue that it’s a projection rather than an objective assessment is if it’s veracity is asserted repeatedly with intense emotion.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“The person we are most attracted to will very likely share some significant traits or characteristics with the parent who gave us the most trouble in childhood.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“A good relationship also has four distinct stages: attraction, romance, power struggle, and mature love.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“These old ghosts are remnants from both positive and negative experiences—times you were truly loved and times you were hurt, times you were empathically understood and times you were grossly misjudged. All have left their mark.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“People enter relationships with varying degrees of self-awareness. Everyone is aware to some extent of the important people and events that have made them who they are. But most of us do not know the extent to which we continue to be influenced by our previous experiences. We are formed from every important relationship we’ve ever had. Look into the Between of any marriage, and you will find ghosts from each partner’s past. Mothers, fathers, former lovers, best friends, coaches, and special teachers occupy the Between of every marriage and influence the way individuals become partners.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“During the day, I have conversations in my mind about what a wonderful husband and father he is, and then he comes home. He walks through the door and something happens. I feel a physical shift happen inside of me, and I either get quiet or I sometimes get irritable or angry or distant.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“But we can only be evolved in the same context in which we were lost—that is, in relationship. We are born into relationship. Our personalities are formed by relationship. And, we are healed in relationship. Relationship holds both the evidence of our injuries and the means of our salvation. It’s the way we become who we are.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“is easier to go without love than to accept a form of love that reawakens our fears of loss. In fact, to receive love feels far more dangerous than to be without it.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“Not allowing ourselves to be congratulated, celebrated, appreciated, nourished, or loved by people and events outside ourselves is a defense designed to protect us from psychic pain. Barriers to love are erected in our unconscious as it acts on behalf of our own survival. In fact, a barrier to receiving is often the capstone of all our defenses. Connecting”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“As we know, human memory is notoriously unreliable when it comes to recalling facts. But when it comes to matters of the psyche, the way we feel about what happened can be as significant as the facts of the case.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“Self-rejection is the most universal and least recognized problem in our lives. It is the source of all our difficulties in giving and receiving love.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“In a healthy relationship, two people gradually transition from moving within a single orbit to moving in two separate, but overlapping, orbits. They are able to have their own friends, their own interests, their own schedules, and—most important—their own opinions, feelings, and thoughts, while still enjoying and preferring each other’s company.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“one partner’s defense quickly becomes the source of the other partner’s wound. Wounds don’t cause damage; defenses cause damage. When defensive partners lash out or retreat in an effort to protect themselves from pain or intrusion, they wound the other partner, who responds with a defense, which, in turn, wounds the partner who was defensive in the first place. A cycle of unconscious wounding and defending gets established that is hard to break.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“Whenever their partner’s behavior looks or sounds like the real threats they’ve experienced in the past, they activate the defenses they used back then. Their defensive arsenal is ready to be deployed at the slightest provocation. An unsuspecting or well-intentioned partner can stumble over a tripwire and never know what they did to set off the attack.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“The partners have learned how to balance the requirements of closeness and separateness, how to create a sexual life that satisfies them both, how to solve problems effectively together, and how to talk and listen to each other so their differing points of view are understood and honored.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“In fact, you chose him or her, in part, because he or she recreated the same difficulties you had in childhood.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved

“We are formed from every important relationship we’ve ever had. Look into the Between of any marriage, and you will find ghosts from each partner’s past. Mothers, fathers, former lovers, best friends, coaches, and special teachers occupy the Between of every marriage and influence the way individuals become partners. These old ghosts are remnants from both positive and negative experiences—times you were truly loved and times you were hurt, times you were empathically understood and times you were grossly misjudged. All have left their mark.”
― Harville Hendrix, Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved