Quotes from Harriet Lerner

what fuels human unhappiness in both the personal and political realm can be boiled down to these three key emotions—anxiety, fear, and shame.

A marital therapist recently teased me, "Are you writing another book to help women speak up? I'm trying to help my clients be quiet." Then she said more seriously, "Why do people think they have to tell each other everything they feel?

Fear is a message—sometimes helpful, sometimes not—but often conveying critical information about our beliefs, our needs, and our relationship to the world around us.

Feelings are a package deal, and you can't avoid or deny the painful ones without also forfeiting part of your humanity. If you are never fearful, you may also have trouble feeling compassion, deep curiosity, or joy. Fear may not be fun, but it signals that we are fully alive.

We can only absorb so much anxiety without becoming sick or symptomatic ourselves.

manage ourselves when we are in their grip.

At bedrock is the fear of being seen as essentially flawed, inadequate, and unworthy of being loved.

Change is an anxiety-arousing business, both for the one doing the changing and for those affected by the change. Often we fear that another person's move toward new ideas and experiences will create a gulf so wide that we will not be able to reach them.

we reduce anxiety in one relationship by focusing on a third party, who we unconsciously pull into the situation to lower the emotional intensity in the original pair. For

She discovered that being 'ordinary' wasn't a terrible failure but rather a centering human experience. Perhaps our courage to embrace our ordinariness (along with our uniqueness) is one of the true keys to happiness in our relationships - including the relationship with our own self.

Let us question these questions. Anger is neither legitimate nor illegitimate, meaningful nor pointless. Anger simply is. To ask, "Is my anger legitimate?" is similar to asking, "Do I have a right to be thirsty? After all, I just had a glass of water fifteen minutes ago. Surely my thirst is not legitimate. And besides, what's the point of getting thirsty when I can't get anything to drink now, anyway?

working on key emotional issues at their source, lays the groundwork for more solid intimate relationships in the present or future.

what we believe is most shameful and unique about ourselves is often what is most human and universal

Parent Effectiveness Training.

When we speak from the heart, we long for an ear to hear us, and we all have experienced that down feeling when we perceive ourselves as written off or misunderstood.

It is the intensity of our reactions toward another person's problem that ensures not only the escalation but also the continuation of the problem itself.

If we do not know about our own family history, we are more likely to repeat past patterns or mindlessly rebel against them, without much clarity about who we really are, how we are similar to and different from other family members, and how we might best proceed in our own life.

Duygusal olgunluÄŸun en önemli dönüm noktalar?ndan birisi çoÄŸul gerçeÄŸin geçerliliÄŸini fark etmek ve insanlar?n farkl? düÅŸünüp, farkl? hissedip, farkl? tepki verdiklerini anlamakt?r.

The more we carve out a clear and separate "I," the more we can experience and enjoy both intimacy and aloneness.

Intimacy can happen only after we work toward a more solid self, based on a clear understanding of our part in the relationship patterns that keep us stuck.

old anger-in/anger-out theory, which states that letting it all hang out offers protection from the psychological hazards of keeping it all pent up, is simply not true. Feelings of depression, low

My father chose to have relationships at the expense of having a self, a pattern that began long before he met and married Rose.

But what is courage? In a world saturated with images of action-figure bravado, we may mistakenly believe that courage is the absence of fear. Instead, it is the capacity to think, speak, and act despite our fear and shame.

To obey this rule, we must become sleepwalkers. We must not see clearly, think precisely, or remember freely. The amount of creative, intellectual, and sexual energy that is trapped by this need to repress anger and remain unaware of its sources is simply incalculable.