How to Be an Adult Quotes

“In the hero stories, the call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, an error, a wound, an unexplainable longing, or a sense of a mission. When any of these happens to us, we are being summoned to make a transition. It will always mean leaving something behind,...The paradox here is that loss is a path to gain.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult: A Handbook for Psychological and Spiritual Integration

“We are born with inalienable emotional needs for love, safety, acceptance, freedom, attention, validation of our feelings, and physical holding. Healthy identity is based on the fulfillment of these needs.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological And Spritual Integration

“There are ghosts asleep inside every one of us: arcane issues never addressed, ancient griefs never laid to rest, suspicions, self-doubts, banished longings, secret meanings.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological And Spritual Integration

“Most people in relationships seldom know what they really want, ask for what they really want, or show what they really feel. Most people avoid or fear intimacy, consistent”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological And Spritual Integration

“The Adult Whose Needs Were Mostly Met in Childhood… • Is satisfied with reasonable dividends of need-fulfillment in relationships. • Knows how to love unconditionally and yet tolerates no abuse or stuckness in relationships. • Changes the locus of trust from others to himself so that he receives loyalty when others show it and handles disappointment when others betray. The Adult Whose Needs Were Mostly Not Met in Childhood… • Exaggerates the needs so that they become insatiable or addictive. • Creates situations that reenact the original hurts and rejections, seek relationships that stimulate and maintain self-defeating beliefs rather than relationships that confront and dispel them, • Refuses to notice how abused or unhappy she is and uses the pretext of hoping for change or of coping with what is unchanging. • Lets her feelings go underground. “If the only safe thing for me was to let my feelings disappear, how can I now permit the self-exposure and vulnerability it takes to be loved?” • Repeats the childhood error of equating negative attention with love or neurotic anxiousness with solicitude. • Is afraid to receive the true love, self-disclosure, or generosity of others. In effect: cannot receive now what was not received originally.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological And Spritual Integration

“We do not let go of control on our own. Usually, something has to happen that shows us incontrovertibly that we are not in control. From this condition of bankrupt ego, we finally let go. Great losses are thus necessary losses like the discarded sandbags that lighten a balloon so it can ascend higher.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual Integration

“In the hero stories, the call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, a depression, an error, a wound, an unexplainable longing, or a sense of a mission. When any of these happens to us, we are being summoned to make a transition.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological And Spritual Integration