Quotes About Perspective

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.

difference between a criticism and a complaint, how the former contains judgment while the latter contains a request.

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.

He wrote, "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Welcome to Holland." Written by Emily Perl Kingsley,

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

You seem like you're enjoying the experience of suffering, so I thought I'd help you out with that." "What?" "There's a difference between pain and suffering," Wendell says. "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."p62

Suffering shouldn't be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering—I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I'm lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins—or loses? But pain is pain.

Do they consider what they're saying to be the only version of the story—the "accurate" version—or do they know that theirs is just one of many ways to tell it?

Every day, our patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves. If they can see themselves more clearly through our reflections, we can see ourselves more clearly through theirs. This happens to therapists when we're providing therapy, and it happens to our own therapists too. We are mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors, showing one another what we can't yet see.

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.

the most important lessons from my training: There's no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn't be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering—I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I'm lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins—or loses?

But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn't mean you'll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel—anxiety, elation, anguish—blows in and out again.

Is this something that's being done to me or am I doing it to myself?

quote from Einstein: "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

There are many ways to tell a story, and if I've learned anything as a therapist, it's that most people are what therapists call "unreliable narrators." That's not to say that they purposely mislead. It's more that every story has multiple threads, and they tend to leave out the strands that don't jibe with their perspectives.

Your misery doesn't change their situation. You can't lessen their misery by carrying it for them inside you. It doesn't work that way. There are ways for you to be a better mother to them at this point in all of your lives. Sentencing yourself to live in prison isn't one of them.

A half shelf-life for a woman is about thirty-five. The real shelf life is forty. Once you're forty and dating online, no guy who wants to have kids is willing to even meet you. Divorced guys who already have kids will meet a forty-year-old, but many of them have had vasectomies.

What people don't like to think about is that you can do everything right—in life or in a treatment protocol—and still get the short end of the stick. And when that happens, the only control you have is how you deal with that stick—your way, not the way others say you should. I'd let Julie do it her way—I was so inexperienced that I didn't have a strong sense of what a "way" should look like—and it seemed to help.

There's no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn't be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering—I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I'm lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins—or loses?

this midlife crisis may be more about opening up than shutting down, an expansion rather than a constriction, a rebirth rather than a death.

There's no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn't be ranked, because pain is not a contest.

Maybe everything they complain about isn't actually a problem! Maybe it's fine the way it is. Maybe it's even great, like their haircut. Maybe they'd be happier if they didn't try to change things. Just be.