Betsy > Betsy's Quotes

“One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“People who feel empty never heal by merging with another incomplete person. On the contrary, two broken-winged birds coupled into one make for clumsy flight. No amount of patience will help it fly; and, ultimately, each must be pried from the other, and wounds separately splinted. The”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“The human being either asserts autonomy by heroic self-assertion or seeks safety through fusing with a superior force: that is, one either emerges or merges, separates or embeds. One becomes one’s own parent or remains the eternal child.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“come to believe that the fear of death is always greatest in those who feel that they have not lived their life fully. A good working formula is: the more unlived life, or unrealized potential, the greater one’s death anxiety.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“Some people are wish-blocked, knowing neither what they feel nor what they want. Without opinions, without impulses, without inclinations, they become parasites on the desires of others.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

“As a general rule, the less one’s sense of life fulfillment, the greater one’s death anxiety.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

“Indeed, the capacity to tolerate uncertainty is a prerequisite for the profession. Though the public may believe that therapists guide patients systematically and sure-handedly through predictable stages of therapy to a foreknown goal, such is rarely the case: instead, as these stories bear witness, therapists frequently wobble, improvise, and grope for direction. The powerful temptation to achieve certainty through embracing an ideological school and a tight therapeutic system is treacherous: such belief may block the uncertain and spontaneous encounter necessary for effective therapy. This encounter, the very heart of psychotherapy, is a caring, deeply human meeting between two people, one (generally, but not always, the patient) more troubled than the other. Therapists have a dual role: they must both observe and participate in the lives of their patients. As observer, one must be sufficiently objective to provide necessary rudimentary guidance to the patient. As participant, one enters into the life of the patient and is affected and sometimes changed by the encounter.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“It’s the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals—my professional rosary.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“Many a friendship or marriage has failed because, instead of relating to, and caring for, one another, one person uses another as a shield against isolation. A”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes over flow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“The more the therapist is able to tolerate the anxiety of not knowing, the less need there is for the therapist to embrace orthodoxy.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety. Fusion eradicates anxiety in a radical fashion—by eliminating self-awareness. The person who has fallen in love, and entered a blissful state of merger, is not self-reflective because the questioning lonely I (and the attendant anxiety of isolation) dissolve into the we. Thus one sheds anxiety but loses oneself. This is precisely why therapists do not like to treat a patient who has fallen in love. Therapy and a state of love-merger are incompatible because therapeutic work requires a questioning self-awareness and an anxiety that will ultimately serve as guide to internal conflicts. Furthermore,”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

“Decision invariably involves renunciation: for every yes there must be a no, each decision eliminating or killing other options (the root of the word decide means “slay,” as in homicide or suicide).”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love. Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a “falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“Freedom as a given seems the very antithesis of death. While we dread death, we generally consider freedom to be unequivocally positive. Has not the history of Western civilization been punctuated with yearnings for freedom, even driven by it? Yet freedom from an existential perspective is bonded to anxiety in asserting that, contrary to everyday experience, we do not enter into, and ultimately leave, a well-structured universe with an eternal grand design. Freedom means that one is responsible for one’s own choices, actions, one’s own life situation. Though the word responsible may be used in a variety of ways, I prefer Sartre’s definition: to be responsible is to “be the author of,” each of us being thus the author of his or her own life design. We are free to be anything but unfree: we are, Sartre would say, condemned to freedom.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“I have noted two particularly powerful and common methods of allaying fears about death, two beliefs, or delusions, that afford a sense of safety. One is the belief in personal specialness; the other, the belief in an ultimate rescuer.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“though the fact, the physicality, of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“How disquieting to realise that reality is an illusion, at best a democratisation of perception based on participant consensus.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

“The second, “alternatives exclude,” is an important key to understanding why decision is difficult. Decision invariably involves renunciation: for every yes there must be a no, each decision eliminating or killing other options (the root of the word decide means “slay,” as in homicide or suicide).”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“Beware the powerful exclusive attachment to another; it is not, as people sometimes think, evidence of the purity of the love. Such encapsulated, exclusive love—feeding on itself, neither giving to nor caring about others—is destined to cave in on itself. Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love. Rather, love is a way of being, a “giving to,” not a “falling for”; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person. Though”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely. Meaning ensues from meaningful activity: the more we deliberately pursue it, the less likely are we to find it; the rational questions one can pose about meaning will always outlast the answers. In therapy, as in life, meaningfulness is a by-product of engagement and commitment, and that is where therapists must direct their efforts—not that engagement provides the rational answer to questions of meaning, but it causes these questions not to matter.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“This encounter, the very heart of psychotherapy, is a caring, deeply human meeting between two people, one (generally, but not always, the patient) more troubled than the other. Therapists have a dual role: they must both observe and participate in the lives of their patients. As observer, one must be sufficiently objective to provide necessary rudimentary guidance to the patient. As participant, one enters into the life of the patient and is affected and sometimes changed by the encounter.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

“That just seems to be the way we’re built.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

“The last gift a parent can give to children is to teach them, through example, how to face death with equanimity.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

“I have found that four givens are particularly relevant to psychotherapy: the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and, finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“Sometimes death anxiety is dismissed as trivial in its universality. Who, after all, does not know and fear death? Yet it is one thing to know about death in general, to grit one's own teeth and stoke up a shudder or two; it is quite another to apprehend one's own death and to experience it in the bones and sockets of one's being. Such death awareness is a terror that comes rarely, sometimes only once or twice in a lifetime-a terror that Marvin now experienced night after night.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

“In choosing to enter fully into each patient’s life, I, the therapist, not only am exposed to the same existential issues as are my patients but must be prepared to examine them with the same rules of inquiry. I must assume that knowing is better than not knowing, venturing than not venturing; and that magic and illusion, however rich, however alluring, ultimately weaken the human spirit.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit. But there is timing and judgment. Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer. Beware of stripping a patient who can’t bear the chill of reality. And don’t exhaust yourself by jousting with religious magic: you’re no match for it. The thirst for religion is too strong, its roots too deep, its cultural reinforcement too powerful.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy