Quotes from Harriet Lerner

Wherever you find a wife and mother-in-law slugging it out, you'll find a son who's not speaking up to either his mother or his wife.

deception and 'con games' are a way of life in all species and throughout nature. Organisms that do not improve their ability to deceive - and to detect deception - are less apt to survive.

Although it's not useful to drown in despair, it's also not useful to keep a 'positive attitude' when this means concealing or denying real emotions.

Fear has never helped anybody make good choices. It leads to clinging when we should be walking.

We will be in tune with our bodies only if we truly love and honor them. We can't be in good communication with the enemy.

If what we are doing with our anger is not achieving the desired result, it would seem logical to try something different.

If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.

Many of our problems with anger occur when we choose between having a relationship and having a self.

Whole-hearted listening is the greatest spiritual gift you can give to the other person.

An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way.

The happiest people are focused on living their own life (not someone else's) as well as possible.

Being in touch with our bodies, or more accurately, being our bodies, is how we know what is true. Harriet

It's a cliché, but also a deep truth (as cliché's tend to be), that you can't love another person very well if you don't love yourself.

Don't count on the power of your love or your nagging to create something that wasn't there to begin with.

Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.

The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don't want to.

It is not fear that stops you from doing the brave and true thing in your daily life. Rather, the problem is avoidance. You want to feel comfortable so you avoid doing or saying the thing that will evoke fear and other difficult emotions. Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run but, it will never make you less afraid.

Our society doesn't promote self-acceptance and it never will. First of all, self-acceptance doesn't sell products. Capitalism would fall if we liked ourselves the way we are now. Also, people who feel shamed and inadequate themselves tend to pass it on. I'm sure you've noticed that many individuals and groups try to enhance their self-esteem by diminishing others.

But one of the hallmarks of emotional maturity is to recognize the validity of multiple realities and to understand that people think, feel, and react differently. Often we behave as if "closeness" means "sameness.

We cannot make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern. 4.

Letting go of anger and hate requires us to give up the hope for a different past, along with the hope of a fantasized future. What we gain is a life more in the present, where we are not mired in prolonged anger and resentment that doesn't serve us.

Differences don't just threaten and divide us. They also inform, enrich, and enliven us.

Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.

There's a widespread belief that if you have solid self-esteem you don't need outside affirmation and praise. This is patently untrue, by the way.