Quotes About Communication

Sometimes people can't identify their feelings because they were talked out of them as children.

The answer to an unasked question is always no,

the upside of being a therapist's child is that nothing gets shoved under the rug; the downside

and I'm not sure if it's all of your annoying questions or the sadistic silences you put me through—but I feel like you get me, you know? And I don't want your head to get too big or anything, but I thought, you have a more complete picture of my total humanity than anyone else in my life.

Projective identification is like tossing a hot potato to the other person. The man no longer has to feel his anger, since it's now living inside his partner.

Say what you will about the wonders of technology, but screen-to-screen is, as a colleague once said, "like doing therapy with a condom on.

Some people hope that therapy will help them find a way to be heard by whoever they feel wronged them, at which point those lovers or relatives will see the light and become the people they'd wished for all along. But it rarely happens like that.

A patient's boyfriend doesn't want to stop smoking pot and watching video games on weekends.

not that she's hiding her feelings; it's that she can't access them. There's a word for this kind of emotional blindness: alexithymia. She doesn't know what she's feeling or doesn't have the words to express it.

The inability to say no is largely about approval-seeking—people imagine that if they say no, they won't be loved by others.

The therapist explained that 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.

alexithymia. She doesn't know what she's feeling or doesn't have the words to express it.

He let me tell my story in whatever way I needed to today.

You know what three words are even more romantic to me than 'I love you'?" "You look beautiful?" he tried. "No," his wife said. "I understand you.")

more real in his life is allowing him to let others be more real too.

Above all, I didn't want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion — an apt phrase, given John's worldview. In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people's feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty.

think about how common it is, even in everyday situations, to be jealous of a spouse and how taboo it is to talk about that. Aren't we supposed to be happy for their good fortune? Isn't that what love is about?

Wendell once pointed out that we talk to ourselves more than we'll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren't always kind or true or helpful—or even respectful. Most of what we say to ourselves we'd never say to people we love or care about, like our friends or children. In therapy, we learn to pay close attention to those voices in our heads so that we can learn a better way to communicate with ourselves.

symbolically or literally)—all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep.

Just because she sends you guilt doen't mean you have to accept delivery.

These were often the same people who later admitted that they also glanced at pinging phones during sex or while sitting on the toilet. Upon learning this, I placed a bottle of Purell in my office.)

anger serves another function—it pushes people away and keeps them from getting close enough to see you.

You didn't fall in love with me before our first date, when I told you I had a six-year-old," I say. "You knew what to do then, didn't you?" More suffocating silence. As you've probably guessed, this conversation goes nowhere.

Is Boyfriend unhappy with something in the relationship that he's afraid to tell me about? I ask him calmly, my voice softer now, because I'm mindful of the fact that Very Angry People aren't Very Approachable.