Quotes About Understanding

My role as a therapist is to create a safe space where the diversity of experiences can be explored with compassion.

Do you love the blouseman more than all of us?" "No," her mother replies. "But sometimes it's easier to be different with a different person.

Love and desire do not have to be mutually exclusive. Many couples find a way to integrate their contradictions without resorting to compartmentalization. But it starts with the understanding that we can never eliminate the dilemma. Reconciling the erotic and the domestic is not a problem to solve; it is a paradox to manage.

When you ask people if they are monogamous, I suggest you ask them first what their definition of monogamy is.

From his perspective, things are clear. "I want to rebuild with you, not rehash the same things over and over." I have explained to him that repetition helps restore coherence and is intrinsic to healing;

You need two things in a marriage," she told me. "You need the will to make it work and you need to be able to make compromises. It's not hard to be right, but then you are right and alone.

Only when the betrayed partner feels emotionally met will he or she be able to listen to explanations without hearing them as justifications.

In truth, we never know our partner as well as we think we do.

we can tolerate seeing

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it.

The adherents of talk intimacy (often, though not always, women) have a hard time recognizing these other languages for closeness

Happy isn't even a real idea, he said. It's just like love. A reasonably skeptical person doesn't even know what it means.

Those who cannot easily forgive will not collect many friends. Look for the best in others and yourself.

In singing our song, in telling our story, in inviting you to say 'Hey, listen to me, and i'll listen to you', we're starting a dialogue. And when you do that, this healing happens, and we come out of our corners, and we start to witness each other's common humanity. We start to assert it. And when we do that, really good things happen

Another important statement

I like people who are not sure of themselves, the perplexed, the modest, those who try to understand.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

Wanneer een S.S.-man me dood zou trappen, dan zou ik nog opkijken naar z'n gezicht en me met angstige verbazing en menselijke belangstelling afragen: Mijn God kerel, wat is er met jou allemaal voor verschrikkelijks in je leven gebeurd, dat je tot zùlke dingen komt?

I know that those who hate have good reason to do so. But why should we always have to choose the cheapest and easiest way? It has been brought home forcibly to me here how every atom of hatred added to the world makes it an even more inhospitable place.

And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful.

Don't give anybody up. . . or leave anybody out. . . . There's room for everything, and time for everybody, if you take your day the way it comes along and try not to be much later than you can help.--Spoken by Jack to Gloria

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

For all of them told happenings like narrations, chronological and careful, as if the ear of the world listened and wished to know surely.

The frame through which I viewed the world changed too, over time. Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.