Quotes About Acceptance

Yalom wrote in Existential Psychotherapy, our awareness of death helps us live more fully—and with less, not more, anxiety.

Erikson maintained that, in later years, we experience a sense of integrity if we believe we have lived meaningful lives. This sense of integrity gives us a feeling of completeness so that we can better accept our approaching deaths. But if we have unresolved regrets about the past—if we think that we made poor choices or failed to accomplish important goals—we feel depressed and hopeless, which leads us to despair.

During an initial burst of pain, people tend to lash out either at others or at themselves, to turn the anger outward or inward.

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.

The nature of life is change, but the nature of people is to resist change.

I think of something else Wendell once said: "The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change." It was a paraphrase of something he'd read that had resonated with him both personally and as a therapist, he told me, because it was a theme that informed nearly every person's struggles.

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 will inevitably hurt your partner, your parents, your children, your closest friend—and they will hurt you—because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal.

You can't get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can't change what you're denying or minimizing. And, of course, often what seen like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.

But what are we so afraid of? It's not as if we're going to peer in those darker corners, flip on the light, and find a bunch of cockroaches. Fireflies love the dark too. There's beauty in those places. But we have to look in there to see it.

the goal is to integrate the loss into your life and create an ongoing connection with the person who died while also finding a way to continue living.

So what I say is this: You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn't one of them.

If the queen had balls, she'd be the king." If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don't recognize that "the perfect is the enemy of the good," you may deprive yourself of joy. At first patients are taken aback by my bluntness,

When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists. But if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place, in perpetual regret. By Google-stalking Boyfriend, I've been watching his future unfold while I stay frozen in the past. But if I live in the present, I'll have to accept the loss of my future.

Sometimes the changes you want in another person aren't on that person's agenda

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.

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.

He wasn't doing anything fancy; he just seemed wholly at home in his skin.

If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don't recognize that "the perfect is the enemy of the good," you may deprive yourself of joy.

think of something else Wendell once said: "The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change." It was a paraphrase of something he'd read that had resonated with him both personally and as a therapist, he told me, because it was a theme that informed nearly every person's struggles

You know what I love about Rosie?" he says. "She's the only one who doesn't ask things of me. The only one who isn't, in one way or another, disappointed with me—or at least, she wasn't before she bit me! Who wouldn't love that?" He laughs loudly, like we're at a bar and he's just tossed out a breezy one-liner.

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

I think of a Flannery O'Connor quote: "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." What

I think about how it's not knowing that torments all of us. At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we'll never know why.