- "One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current predicaments, because once they realize that they can (and must) construct their own lives, they're free to generate change."
- "Above all, I didn't want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call 'idiot compassion' - an apt phrase, given John's worldview. In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people's feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than you honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is 'wise compassion', which means caring about the person bu also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed."
- "Why would we choose a profession that requires us to meet unhappy, distressed, abrasive, or unaware people and sit with them, one after the other, alone in a room? The answer is this: because therapists know that at first, each patient is simply a snapshot, a person captures in a particular moment. It's like a photo of you taken from an unfortunate angle and with a sour expression on your face. There might also be a photo in which you're glowing, caught opening a present or mid-laugh with a lover. Both are you in that fraction of time, and neither is you in your entirety."
- "Your feelings don't have to mesh with what you think they should be, he explained. They'll be there regardless, so you might as well welcome them because they hold important clues."
- "Often people talk about suicide not because they want to be dead, but because they want to end their pain. If they can just find a way to do that, they very much want to be alive."
- "Granted, for some, forgiveness can serve as a powerful release - you forgive the person who wronged you, without condoning his actions, and it allows you to move on. But too often people feel pressured to forgive and then end up believing that something's wrong with them if they can't quite get there - that they aren't enlightened enough or strong enough or compassionate enough. So what I say is this: you can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn't one of them."
- "I wish I could stop crying! I'd told Wendell early on when I felt like a human fire hydrant. But Wendell saw it differently. He'd given me permission to feel and also a reminder that, like so many people, I'd been mistaking feeling less for feeling better."
- "There's no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn't be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering - I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I'm lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins - or loses?"
- "You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can't change what you're denying or minimizing."
- "Besides, how can there be an endpoint to love and loss? Do we even want there to be? The price of loving so deeply is feeling so deeply - but it's also a gift, the gift of being alive. If we no longer feel, we should be grieving our own deaths."
- "Relationships in life don't really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you've been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally) - all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep."
may 15 2023 ∞
may 15 2023 +
