Quotes About Growth

We can't have change without loss.

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.

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.

What we fear isn't just dying in the literal sense but in the sense of being extinguished, the loss of our very identities, of our younger and more vibrant selves. How do we defend against this fear? Sometimes we refuse to grow up. Sometimes we self-sabotage. And sometimes we flat-out deny our impending deaths.

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?

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.

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

if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place,

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

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.

We can't convince people not to be self-destructive, because for now, the self-destruction serves them. What we can do is try to help them understand themselves better and show them how to ask themselves the right questions until something happens—either internally or externally—that leads them to do their own persuading.

Julie started to see that we're all in Holland, because most people don't have lives that go exactly as planned.

I 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.

The hiccup at this stage is that change involves the loss of the old and the anxiety of the new. Although often maddening for friends and partners to witness, this hamster wheel is part of the process; people need to do the same thing over and over a seemingly ridiculous number of times before they're ready to change.

The more you welcome your vulnerability," Wendell had said, "the less afraid you'll feel.

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.

Robert Frost poem: "The only way out is through.

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. At some point, being a fulfilled adult means taking responsibility for the course of your own life and accepting the fact that now you're in charge of your choices. You have to move to the front seat and be the mommy dog driving the car.

But sometimes — more often than we tend to realize — those difficult people are us. That's right — sometimes hell is us. Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

that change and loss travel together.

And so it begins, at last. Charlotte doesn't leave this time. Instead, she stays in therapy until she learns to drive her own car, navigating her way through the world more safely, looking both ways, making many wrong turns but finding her way back, always, to where she truly wants to go.

it can either shackle you to the past or serve as an engine for change.

Irvin Yalom, the psychiatrist, wrote that it was "far better that [a patient make progress but] forget what we talked about than the opposite possibility (a more popular choice for patients)—to remember precisely what was talked about but to remain unchanged.

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.