Quotes About Change

The ultimate function of prophecy is not to tell the future, but to make it. Your successful past will block your visions of the future.

O que este livro pergunta é: "Como mudamos?", e o que ele responde é: "Ao nos relacionarmos com os outros".

This stage is hard because the behaviors people want to modify are embedded in the fabric of their lives; people with addiction issues (whether that addiction is to a substance, drama, negativity, or self-defeating ways of being) tend to hang out with other addicts.

1) As a therapist, I know a lot about pain, about the ways in which pain is tied to loss. But I also know something less commonly understood: that change and loss travel together. We can't have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.

But I also know something less commonly understood: that change and loss travel together. We can't have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.

I was holding on to a future that had been canceled. I was watching Boyfriend's future unfold while I stayed locked in the past. I'd need to accept that his future and mine, his present and mine, were now separate and that all we had left in common was our history.

Mas por que agora?", pergunto, tentando colocar minha nova pergunta com graça: "Parece-me que você estava com aqueles móveis havia... hã... um bom tempo?". Wendell ri. Não escondi muito bem o subtexto. "Às vezes", ele diz, "as mudanças são assim".

Then there's the fact that losses tend to be multilayered. There's the actual loss (in my case, of Boyfriend), and the underlying loss (what it represents). That's why for many people the pain of a divorce is only partially about the loss of the other person; often it's just as much about what the change represents: failure, rejection, betrayal, the unknown, and a different life story than the one they'd expected.

That's why it's especially important to be the people we want to be now, to become more open and expansive while we're able.

What was helpful in getting to where the person is today? What wasn't? What has she learned about herself—her strengths, her challenges, her internal scripts and narratives—and what coping strategies and healthier ways of being can she take with her when she leaves?

If something isn't working, do something different,

But . . . if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things . . . about Holland.

change and loss travel together.

This stage [relapse] is hard because the behaviors people want to modify are embedded in the fabric of their lives; people with addiction issues (whether that addiction is to a substance, drama, negativity, or self-defeating ways of being) tend to hang out with other addicts.

That's why it's especially important to be the people we want to be now, to become more open and expansive while we're able to. A lot will be left dangling if we wait too long.

Whereas in their younger years, people often come to therapy to understand why their parents won't act in ways they wish, later on, people come to figure out how to manage what is. And so my question about my mother has cone from "Why can't she change?" to "Why can't I?

Insight is the booby prize of therapy" is my favorite maxim of the trade, meaning that you can have all the insight in the world, but if you don't change when you're out in the world, the insight—and the therapy—is worthless

The nature of life is change

We can't have change without loss.

want to capture the process in which humans, struggling to evolve, push against their shells until they quietly (but sometimes loudly) and slowly (but sometimes suddenly) crack open.

Often, though, people carry around the belief that the majority of their problems are circumstantial or situational—which is to say, external. And if the problems are caused by everyone and everything else, by stuff out there, why should they bother to change themselves? Even if they decide to do things differently, won't the rest of the world still be the same?

In therapy we say, Let's edit your story.

Before having a baby, I'd relished the freedom of a non-office job. But now I longed to get dressed every day and be in the company of verbal grownups. It was during this perfect storm of isolation and plummeting estrogen that I started to wonder if I'd made a mistake by leaving medical school.

What makes therapy challenging is that it requires people to see themselves in ways they normally choose not to.