Mildred Newman > Quotes

“Most of us haven't begun to tap our own potential; we're operating way below capacity. And we'll continue as long as we are looking for someone to give us the key to the kingdom. We must realize that the kingdom is in us; and we already have the key. It's as if we're waiting for permission to start fully living.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“Embrace the child in you; make friends with yourself. It gives such a reserve of strength to call on.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“Judging yourself by superhuman standards is another way of mistreating yourself, and a good excuse for giving up. Don’t judge yourself at all; accept yourself and move on from there.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“The first thing is to realize that we’ve probably been looking in the wrong place. The source is not outside us; it is within. Most of us haven’t begun to tap our own potential; we’re operating way below capacity. And we’ll continue to as long as we are looking for someone to give us the key to the kingdom. We must realize that the kingdom is in us; we already have the key. It’s as if we’re waiting for permission to start living fully.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“First, you have to make a very basic decision: do you want to lift yourself up or put yourself down? Are you for yourself or against yourself? That may seem like a strange question, but many people are literally their own worst enemy.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“We talk, of course, about what’s wrong with the world, about war and welfare, prices and pollution. But we also talk more frankly than ever before about what’s awry in our inner world, about frustration and boredom and anxiety, about difficulties with marriage and sex, about the lack of fulfillment in our lives. We may not be any unhappier than our ancestors, but one thing is clear: we do not accept misery as our natural state.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“It would be futile for me to “make up my mind” to be a painter if I have no talent in that direction. But the truth is, if the talent is lacking, the desire will be absent, too. Your genuine self does not want to do things that are utterly foreign to it; it wants to realize its own potential. Of course, people can come up with all kinds of crazy notions about what they think they want to do or be, but they are just that—notions, and not genuine impulses. When we use our willpower to achieve goals that do not spring out of us, but which we set for the sake of pleasing others or to fulfill a fantasy about who we are, we create a kind of monster, a mechanical man in which our living self is trapped. We have all seen people who are held together by sheer willpower; the effort is enormous, but the result is hardly worth it. They aren’t people we enjoy being with—or who enjoy being with themselves.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“People who do not love themselves can adore others, because adoration is making someone else big and ourselves small. They can desire others, because desire comes out of a sense of inner incompleteness, which demands to be filled. But they cannot love others, because love is an affirmation of the living, growing being in all of us. If you don’t have it, you can’t give it.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“If we learn how to listen, we will find out a lot and we will hear some wonderful things.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“But if you look to someone else to establish your identity for you in some way, losing that person can make you really feel destroyed.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“There are plenty of people who are having a wonderful time with their lives; they are living to the hilt and love every minute of it. But they don’t talk about it much; they are busy doing it. They don’t usually write articles or go to analysts. Yet it’s true; not enough people have that sense of zest in their daily lives. Too many people have just not mastered the art of being happy.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“You must also learn to talk to yourself. That’s very important. You need to explain things, to reassure yourself. You need to establish an ongoing dialogue. It can help you through all kinds of tough situations. When the child in you is up to mischief, you can stop and discuss it first; you can tell him “no.” There is usually a moment when it could go either way. If you pay attention, you can take that moment and consider what you really want to do. You have the power to stop yourself; this is a good thing to know. At first it’s hard, but it gets easier.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“You mean our most important ideas about life are ones we are not even aware of, and we’ve been carrying them around since childhood? Yes, and their impact can be very powerful. Often when we think we’re responding to actual people and events, we’re merely assigning them parts in the inner novel we’ve been writing all our lives. For example, if someone has felt deserted as a child by an important adult, and this becomes a key experience in his way of seeing the world, there are several ways he can continue to have that experience. One way is to seek out the kind of people who are likely to desert him as an adult—and we are all very clever about that. Another is to drive people away by his own behavior. Or he can imagine he is deserted by people who really haven’t mistreated him at all. Whatever way he chooses, he confirms his theory about what to expect from others, and this is very gratifying. Come on! That certainly doesn’t sound like any way to have fun. You’d be surprised. Being right is one of the most satisfying experiences in the world. Or let’s say, rather, that being wrong is one of the most unsettling experiences that can happen to anyone. It’s an awful blow to the ego to feel you’ve made a mistake. That’s why people don’t want to change. It would mean admitting they were wrong. A patient once burst out at me indignantly, “But that would mean I wasted the first forty years of my life!” Some people would rather go on making the same mistake for another forty years than admit it and cut their losses. People are very stubborn. Sometimes they secretly believe that if they keep on long enough with their misconceived behavior, they’ll make it right. That reality will give in to their views, rather than vice versa. They’re still trying to get their parents to give in. They haven’t given up their anger over what they didn’t get when they were five years old.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“You can stop your parents from getting away with your whole life; you can stop yourself from giving up your whole life.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“Doing what makes you feel good about yourself is really the opposite of self-indulgence. It doesn’t mean gratifying an isolated part of you; it means satisfying your whole self, and this includes the feelings and ties and responsibilities you have to others, too. Self-indulgence means satisfying the smallest part of you, and that only temporarily.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“You won’t always use it well, either. And when the child in you does misbehave, don’t punish yourself; you’ve done that enough. Forgive the child in you. Most of the things you feel terrible about weren’t so bad to begin with. We often go on doing things against ourselves just to prove we are the terrible person we imagined we were as a child. We suffer because of such imagined sins as our deep feelings for our parents or our rage when they let us down or our loss of faith in ourselves when another child was born and our star turn was over.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“One fundamental thing, for example, is to meet your own expectations. If you have housework or homework or some other work to do, and you are tempted to let it slide, ask yourself how you will feel if you put it off. If you sense that you will be a little disgusted with yourself, then go ahead and do the job, and let yourself savor the feeling you get from having done it. Enjoy the experience of being in charge of yourself.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“Every time you catch yourself putting yourself down, just stop and turn around and push yourself up.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“We would much rather blame someone or something for making us feel unhappy than take the steps to make us feel better.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“As long as we feel small and helpless, we feel we’re in the presence of invisible, all-powerful adults. They may not be very nice adults; we’re always expecting them to blame us or yell at us. But as long as they’re there, we’re not alone. That’s the thing we fear most: if that disapproving parent goes away, we will be all by ourselves. But that feeling, too, is a leftover from being four years old. To be abandoned is a terrifying prospect to a child; he literally couldn’t survive it. But for an adult, aloneness is something quite different. He not only can survive, he often needs aloneness to grow, to get to know himself and develop his powers. Someone who cannot tolerate aloneness is someone who doesn’t know he’s grown up. It takes courage to let go of that fantasy of childhood safety. The world may never seem so certain again, but what fresh air we breathe when we take possession of our own separateness, our own integrity! That’s when our adult life really begins.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“You start by paying attention. If things keep turning out the way you don’t want them to, ask yourself what you are doing to make them come out that way.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“When you stop trying to get from people what they can’t give you, you can begin to enjoy what they can offer. People can share whole worlds with each other, but first they must have access to their own.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“Then why don’t we do it? Why do so few of us live that way? Because there’s also a hidden payoff in continuing to suffer. For one thing, it’s familiar; we’re very comfortable with it. It gives us a sense of security to keep on in the same old self-defeating ways, letting one bad action lead to another. We know what to expect. It makes our world comprehensible, predictable, in some sense manageable.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“Some people are so caught up in doing harm to themselves and have so little understanding of why they do it that analysis is the only way they can begin to break out of their self-destructive spiral. It can help them get around the roadblocks that stand in the way of growth—the roadblocks that often were put in place by others but that we work hard to keep there.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“This economy of emotional scarcity, which is the source of so much jealousy and conflict and resentment, is really a myth. It’s a kind of magical thinking, which vastly exaggerates our impact on the rest of the world. It’s not like that at all. What you achieve doesn’t take anything away from anyone else.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“What I am trying to say is that if we want to become all that is in us to become, we have to use everything we’ve got—our feelings, our intuition, our intelligence, and our willpower—our whole self. If we do, the payoff is enormous.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“If someone is on a diet for a week and goes off it for a day, the overeating is nothing compared with the orgy of self-recrimination he then indulges in. What about the week he was on the diet? He should give himself credit for that and go right back on it, if that is what he wants for himself. The pitfall is this: very likely it was not so much the food he couldn’t resist on the eighth day as the temptation to tear down the wonderful self-image he was building all week long. That’s something many of us find hard to take: really feeling good about ourselves. When we “hate ourselves the morning after,” we should ask where we get our biggest kick—from our activities the night before or from wallowing in self-reproach the following day.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“We are accountable only to ourselves for what happens to us in our lives. We must realize that we have a choice: we are responsible for our own good time.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend

“Most people don’t know they have one, because they have never put it into words. They are made up of vague feelings, unspoken apprehensions, the things we didn’t dare talk about or even admit to ourselves as children. They deal with the most powerful and problematic forces in human life, like sex and aggression, which most families find too formidable to discuss. So we develop complex ideas about the nature of reality, which we never communicate and never examine. Someone said that God created the world in a fit of absentmindedness. We do almost as well. We build worldviews half asleep and let them, like tinted lenses, color our lives.”
― Mildred Newman, How to Be Your Own Best Friend