Quotes About Emotions

Why do parents do this? Often, they envy their children's childhoods--the opportunities they have; the financial or emotional stability that the parents provide; the fact that their children have their whole lives ahead of them, a stretch of time that's now in the parents' pasts. They strive to give their children all the things they themselves didn't have, but they sometimes end up, without even realizing it, resenting the kids for their good fortune.

often different parts of ourselves want different things, and if we silence the parts we find unacceptable, they'll find other ways to be heard.

You're going to have to feel pain—everyone feels pain at times—but you don't have to suffer so much. You're not choosing the pain, but you're choosing the suffering.

I remember reading a divorced woman's experience of getting to know a new lover after her decades-long marriage ended: "I will never lock eyes in the delivery room with David," she wrote. "I've never met his mother.

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." How many times had I said something similar to my own patients? But here I feel as if I'm hearing this for the first time. Don't judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don't be afraid of the truth.

Therapy elicits odd reactions because, in a way, it's like pornography. Both involve a kind of nudity.

Perhaps men apologize preemptively, by holding their tears back.

I remember saying that there was a difference between examining and dwelling, and if we're cut off from our feelings, just skating on the surface, we don't get peace or joy—we get deadness.

There's a difference between pain and suffering,

She can't concentrate because trying not to cry is taking all of her focus. She looked up the symptoms of depression and ticked off all the boxes.

you're going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you're human

Even in the best possible relationship, you're going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you're human.

you can't mute one emotion without muting the others.

such as depression and anxiety, personality

But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn't mean you'll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week.

dance allows our bodies to express our emotions in a way that words sometimes can't. When we dance, we express our buried feelings, talking through our bodies instead of our minds — and that can help us get out of our heads and to a new level of awareness. That's partly what dance therapy is about. It's another technique some therapists use.

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.

You can't get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me.

The more you welcome your vulnerability," Wendell had said, "the less afraid you'll feel." This isn't how we tend to view life when we're younger. Our younger selves think in terms of a beginning, middle, and some kind of resolution. But somewhere along the way—perhaps in that middle—we realize that everyone lives with things that may not get worked out. That the middle has to be the resolution, and how we make meaning of it becomes our task.

People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn't the absence of feelings; it's a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings. John

joy isn't pleasure; it's anticipatory pain.

Sometimes "drama," no matter how unpleasant, can be a form of self-medication, a way to calm ourselves down by avoiding the crises brewing inside.

When we dance, we express our buried feelings, talking through our bodies instead of our minds—and that can help us get out of our heads and to a new level of awareness

But if I live in the present, I'll have to accept the loss of my future. Can I sit through the pain, or do I want to suffer?