Quotes About Connection

none of us can love and be loved without the possibility of loss but that there's a difference between knowledge and terror.

And you know what I'm going to miss most of all? His face. I'm going to miss looking at his beautiful face. It's my favorite face in the entire world.

Sitting-with-you-in-your-pain is one of the rare experiences that people get in the protected space of a therapy room, but it's very hard to give or get outside of it—

We all have a deep yearning to understand ourselves and be understood. When I see couples in therapy, often one or the other will complain, not "you don't love me" but "you don't understand me

The price of loving so deeply is feeling so deeply—but it's also a gift, the gift of being alive.

If you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal.

In this room, I'm going to see you, and you'll try to hide, but I'll still see you, and it's going to be okay when I do.

Every person you've been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (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.

Neuroscientists discovered that humans have brain cells called mirror neurons that cause them to mimic others, and when people are in a heightened state of emotion, a soothing voice can calm their nervous systems and help them stay present.

it's okay to hold one person in your heart and fall in love with another, that our capacity for love is big enough for both.

Years later, when I've done thousands of first sessions, and information-gathering has become second nature, I'll use a different barometer to judge how it went: Did the patient feel understood?

So much of what I'm doing to help him relies on our in-the-room interaction. 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.

Love should increase over time, not start at a high," she said. "Real love is developed over time. It's about learning to trust, bond, and build a family together, with or without children. So I'm in favor of not overthinking yourself to death in the beginning. Women, especially, tend to rule people out too quickly.

It takes a while to hear a person's story and for that person to tell it, and like most stories—including mine—it bounces all over the place before you know what the plot really is.

There's also the issue of glitches. I was once on a Skype session with a patient who was in Asia temporarily, and just as she began crying hysterically, the volume went out. All I saw was her mouth moving, but she didn't know that I couldn't hear what she was saying. Before I could get that across, the connection dropped entirely. It took ten minutes to restore the Skype, and by then not only was the moment lost but our time had run out.)

We're going out again," I announced at my final session with Evan. "But it's weird, because I don't feel the way I'm used to feeling. There was no chemistry, but I'm really looking forward to seeing him again." Evan smiled. "Isn't that chemistry?" he asked. "If you're excited to see someone again?

Like me, the women I met with at the bar were embarrassed by the way they'd dismissed men in the past, evaluating every guy as either too-something or not-something-enough. These guys didn't fit our image of the person we thought we'd end up with, leaving us to end up with nobody

We grow in connection with others. Everyone needs to hear that other person's voice saying, I believe in you. I can see possibilities that you might not see quite yet. I imagine that something different can happen, in some form or another.

It's impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them. We should take the world's enemies, get them in a room to share their histories and formative experiences, their fears and their struggles, and global adversaries would suddenly get along.

Our marriage is successful because it's built not on an unattainable fantasy of perfection, but out of the realization that love is created, not presented.

Sitting-with-you-in-your-pain is one of the rare experiences that people get in the protected space of a therapy room, but it's very hard to give or get outside of it—even for Jen,

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.

It's no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical.

What most people mean by type is a sense of attraction - a type of physical appearance or a type of personality turns them on. But what underlies a person's type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity.