Love's Executioner And Other Tales Of Psychotherapy Quotes
"What do you want? This simple question can evoke unexpectedly powerful emotions, revealing deep-seated longings and pains just beneath the surface of our everyday lives."
"Many things—a simple group exercise, a work of art, a personal crisis—remind us that our deepest wants can never be fulfilled, reflecting the persistent ache of existence pain."
"Freedom means that one is responsible for one's own choices, actions, and life situation, embodying the daunting yet empowering essence of human existence."
"Every therapist knows that the crucial first step in therapy is the patient’s assumption of responsibility for his or her life predicament."
"Self-awareness breeds anxiety, yet it is also the gateway to wisdom and genuine personal growth."
"We are meaning-seeking creatures, driven to find coherence and purpose in the chaos of existence, yet confronted with a universe that offers no easy answers."
"Love is not just a passion spark between two people; it is a way of being, a 'giving to,' not a 'falling for'; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person."
"Though the fact of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us, prompting a profound reevaluation of life's priorities and meanings."
"The capacity to tolerate uncertainty is a prerequisite for effective therapy and, indeed, for a deeply lived life."
"We are, all of us, in this together, facing the givens of existence—death, love, freedom, and the search for meaning—in a shared human journey."
"Well, this obsession has been a central part of your mind for eight years. It’ll be difficult to dislodge it."
"When I make a resolution, I never go back on it."
"I need your commitment to hang in there with me."
"Do my best—I didn’t feel that this was enough."
"I can’t work well with a suicide threat hanging overhead."
"Often I put this down on paper and ask for a signature, but I respect your claim to always honor your resolutions."
"I want us to make a decision now and to start therapy right away."
"I learned not to expect any personal rewards from my work."
"For a love obsession drains life of its reality, obliterating new experience."
"Only when one feels an insight in one’s bones does one own it."
"It’s never worked for me when I’ve been in therapy."
"It is only when therapy enlists deep emotions that it becomes a powerful force for change."
"The more the therapist is able to tolerate the anxiety of not knowing, the less need there is for the therapist to embrace orthodoxy."
"He’s just a person. You haven’t seen him for eight years. What difference does it make what he thinks of you?"
"You are you, you have your own existence, you continue to be the person you are from moment to moment, from day to day."
"All this power that Matthew has—you’ve given it to him—every bit of it!"
"Your existence is impervious to the fleeting thoughts, to the electromagnetic ripples occurring in some unknown mind."
"How can you release yourself from this? How could you be released? Could Matthew release you?"
"Don’t take away the high point of my life. Don’t take away the only real thing that has ever happened to me."
"I’ve thought about you every day for the last eight years!"
"Sometimes caring can be best expressed by silence."
"You can’t go on living a lie or an illusion!"
"I feel like an amputation has taken place. Something has gone from me."
"My predictions of what might happen have come true. I don’t have any more hope, I’ll never have any more satisfaction."
"It’s like I’ve been in a magic show and now I’ve come outside—and it’s very gray outside."
"I feel old, really old. For the first time I know I’m seventy years old, seven zero—that’s older than ninety-nine percent of the people walking around."
"What’s the perfect scenario to drive an ex-lover to suicide? Sudden dismissal with no reasons given—that’s exactly what he’s done to me!"
"But what have I been doing instead? Nothing. Absolutely nothing."
"You’ve been living and feeling one way for eight years, and now suddenly in twenty-four hours all that is pulled away from you."
"Even you would agree that there’s a time when you have to protect yourself."
"If what you really want now is closeness, then it’s time to take all this heat off yourself about finding a wife."
"Concentrate on having a good conversation. Try deepening a friendship with the people you already know."
"I don’t remember exactly what we talked about, but it helped me change a lot."
"I had always before imagined women sitting on Mount Olympus with a line of men before them and sorting them out—this one to my bedroom, this one not!"
"Everybody has got a heart. I’ve been seeing the heart in everyone."
"I am not my work. Not my talk. Not my clothes. None of these things."
"The last gift a parent can give to children is to teach them, through example, how to face death with equanimity."
"If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living."
"In many ways her sons were the real victims of this tragedy—as is often true of the siblings of children who die."
"Growing up bearing the parents’ hopes that one will fulfill the unrealized goals of their life is hard enough, but the additional burden of housing a dead sibling’s spirit may overwhelm the delicate process of identity formation."
"Remember, you can’t do all the work. Be content to help a patient realize what must be done and then trust his or her own desire for growth and change."
"Every profession has within it a realm of possibility wherein the practitioner may seek perfection."
"It’s the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals—my professional rosary."
"The first step in all therapeutic change is responsibility assumption."
"Refusing the loan of life in order to avoid the debt of death."
"The truth was that this was indeed a boring woman, and I needed to confront her with that in some acceptable way."
"The closer we looked, the more apparent it was that everything led back to him, to his death, and to the one hundred fifty pounds Betty weighed at that time."
"The fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully."
"Though the fact of death destroys us, the idea of death can save us."
"Life had to be lived now; it could not be indefinitely postponed."
"Being loved is not sheer chance or fate. You can influence it—more than you think."
"To be truly loved, to be remembered, to be fused with another forever, is to be imperishable and to be sheltered from the aloneness at the heart of existence."
"A lover of words (he spoke several languages), he marveled at the transposition of soul and sole."
"More than anything, I felt sorrow. Sorrow for Dave, for his isolation, for his clinging to illusion, for his want of courage, for his unwillingness to face the naked, harsh facts of life."
"Yet, can therapists or historians or biographers reconstruct a life with any degree of accuracy if the reality of even a single hour cannot be captured?"
"The rich, fleecy texture of image, its extraordinary plasticity and flexibility, its private nostalgic emotional hues—all are lost when image is crammed into language."
"People who feel empty never heal by merging with another incomplete person. On the contrary, two broken-winged birds coupled into one make for clumsy flight."
"The enabling relationship always assumes that the other is never fully knowable."
"I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?"
"Failure had always inflicted terrible wounds, which healed slowly and deeply intensified his feeling of insignificance and loneliness; success offered stupendous but evanescent exhilaration."
"But the moment Saul arrived at the Stockholm Research Institute, the moment he was greeted by Dr. K., he felt strangely convinced that his goal was within his grasp, that there was hope for some final peace."
"Never in his life had Saul failed to complete a project, and his first reaction was to suggest he continue on it alone."
"Saul so basked in the glow of the collaborative relationship that he failed to notice that the library research was not productive."
"Saul, by now growing alarmed, immediately dispatched the article to another journal."
"So Saul, as he was wont to do in such situations, did nothing."
"His eyes pleaded with me: 'I can’t go on. Take this all away. Take away this pain.'"
"He’s scrambling for diversions, I thought. He keeps tossing me enticing tidbits. Stay focused!"
"It was winter in my office. Marge’s face was frozen."
"It is almost miraculous how you, in such a short time, pulled me out of that funk. I’m really glad you’re my psychiatrist."
"My task as a therapist (not unlike that of a parent) is to make myself obsolete—to help a patient become his or her own mother and father."
"Going 'beyond words,' that was what counted. It was what I did, not what I said."
"The project of psychiatric 'treatment' is fraught with internal inconsistencies."
"A patient can tolerate the therapist’s being unfaithful outside of the hour that is the patient’s own."
"I always imagined that you might write something about me. I wanted to leave an imprint on your life."
"If I would have given in to feelings every time I was hurt, I’d never have gotten anywhere."
"You’d think, after six months, I’d know the answer. I’m pretty observant, always have been."
"Phyllis and I were undressing to make love. Wentworth, a partner of mine, who weighs two hundred fifty pounds, was in the room."
"I was trying to get into the window of a room where her body might be."
"It’s that I don’t have faith in them. My wife, Phyllis, doesn’t either."
"Sometimes I think restraints are good. Without them I might run wild."
"I've wondered what it would have been like to have married a woman with a sex drive like mine, a woman who wanted and enjoyed sex as much as me."
"Phyllis enjoys sex. It's just that she never seems to want it."
"Sometimes death anxiety is dismissed as trivial in its universality. Who, after all, does not know and fear death?"
"I've learned more about myself in the past five months than in my previous sixty-four years!"
"I've gotten a two-for-the-price-of-one therapy bargain."
"The past, the true story, the chronicle of real events, is unrecoverable."
"The surface appearance of things no longer compelled him: he was less captivated by his collections of stamps and the Reader’s Digest."
"I try to look back but my vision fails. There are no rear windows. There is no rear-vision mirror."