Quotes from Harriet Lerner

Our society cultivates guilt feelings in women such that many of us still feel guilty if we are anything less than an emotional service station to others.

Questioning ourselves for being oversensitive is a common way that women, in particular, disqualify our legitimate anger and hurt. ...The fact that some of us feel more vulnerable than others in a particular context does not mean we are weak or lesser in any way.

Anger is inevitable when our lives consist of giving in and going along; when we assume responsibility for other people's feelings and reactions; when we relinquish our primary responsibility to proceed with our own growth and ensure the quality of our own lives; when we behave as if having a relationship is more important than having a self.

The best apologies are short, and don't go on to include explanations that run the risk of undoing them. An apology isn't the only chance you ever get to address the underlying issue. The apology is the chance you get to establish the ground for future communication. This is an important and often overlooked distinction.

We can influence the other person through our words and silence, but we can never control the outcome.

Indeed, in many situations wisdom lies in being strategic rather than spontaneous. This is especially true when we're dealing with a difficult person, a hot issue, or a tense situation. The enormous challenge is to make wise decisions about how and when to say what to whom, and even before that, to know what we really want to say and what we hope to accomplish by saying it.

We diminish people when we don't allow them to help us, or when we act like we don't need anything from them and they have nothing to offer us. We also diminish them when we allow them to go on and on, even after we've exceeded our capacity to pay attention.

But here is the real point when it comes to the challenge of apologies in family relationships. If our intention is to have a better relationship, we need to be our best and most mature self, rather than reacting to the other person's reactivity. Also, some of the other person's complaints will be true, since we can't possibly get it right all the time.

Sometimes, the failure of the other person to apologize when they should hits us harder than the deed they should apologize for.

Anger is a tool for change when it challenges us to become more of an expert on the self and less of an expert on others.

But an honorable relationship, she reminds us, is one in which "we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us…of life between us." When we are not able to speak authentically, our relationships spiral downward, as does our sense of integrity and self-regard.

If you treat man as he appears to be, you make him worse than he is. But if you treat man as if he already were what he potentially could be, you make him what he should be.

Don't use "below-the-belt" tactics. These include: blam- ing, interpreting, diagnosing, labeling, analyzing, preaching, moralizing, ordering, warning, interrogating, ridiculing, and lecturing. Don't put the other person down.

the body, seeking truth, sends a signal. But decoding it, interpreting its meaning, and knowing how to proceed from there is another matter entirely.

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

Nothing you say can ensure that the other person will get it, or respond the way you want. You may never exceed his threshold of deafness.

Kids want nothing more than for all the important adults in their life to get along.

Self-help books for women are part of a multibillion-dollar industry, sensitively attuned to our insecurities and our purses.

Believing that all women should want to be mothers makes about as much sense as believing that all men should want to be engineers.

People's sense of self worth is pivotal to their ability to look clearly at the hurt they've caused. The more solid one's sense of self regard, the more likely that that person can feel empathy and compassion for the hurt party, and apologize from an authentic center.

When we do not put our primary emotional energy into solving our own problems, we take on other people's problems as our own.

To listen with an open heart and ask questions to better help us understand the other person is a spiritual exercise, in the truest sense of the word.

When forgiveness experts talk in binary language ("You either forgive the wrongdoer or you are a prisoner of your own anger and hate"), they are collapsing the messy complexity of human emotions into a simplistic dichotomous equation.

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