Harriet Lerner Quotes

Although it's not useful to drown in despair, it's also not useful to keep a 'positive attitude' when this means concealing or denying real emotions.

We will be in tune with our bodies only if we truly love and honor them. We can't be in good communication with the enemy.

Those of us who are locked into ineffective expressions of anger suffer as deeply as those of us who dare not get angry at all.

We cannot make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern.

Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.

If we only listened with the same passion that we feel about being heard.

Anger is a tool for change when it challenges us to become more of an expert on the self and less of an expert on others.

An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way.

Whole-hearted listening is the greatest spiritual gift you can give to the other person.

In long-term relationships ... we are called upon to navigate that delicate balance between separateness and connectedness ... we confront the challenge of sustaining both--without losing either.

If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.

Differences don’t just threaten and divide us. They also inform, enrich, and enliven us.

The miracle is that your children will love you with all your imperfections if you can do the same for them.

Love alone is never a good enough reason to marry.

Anxiety is extremely contagious, but so is calm.

Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.

We need to hear the sound of our voice for what we think and need.

Silence can pose a greater threat than the difficult truth.

It's a cliché, but also a deep truth (as cliché's tend to be), that you can't love another person very well if you don't love yourself.

We'll always be disappointed if we believe that we can plan for a peak experience and make it happen. True joy can't be anticipated or planned. It just strikes.

Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.

When you can't see yourself objectively, you won't see anyone else objectively, either.

The bolder and more courageous you are, the more you will learn about yourself.

Don't count on the power of your love or your nagging to create something that wasn't there to begin with.

Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.

Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is to stop trying to be helpful.

Pretending can be a bold form of experimentation and inventiveness. In pretending joy or happiness, we may discover or enhance our capacity for it.

Many of our problems with anger occur when we choose between having a relationship and having a self.

The first world we find ourselves in is a family that is not of our choosing.

Wherever you find a wife and mother-in-law slugging it out, you'll find a son who's not speaking up to either his mother or his wife.

Feeling inadequate is an occupational hazard of motherhood.

The more we seek exclusivity in friendship, the more it becomes obligatory and the less likely it is to fulfill the wonderful vision of what true friendship can be.

Fear is a message - sometimes helpful, sometimes not - but often conveying critical information about our beliefs, our needs, and our relationship to the world around us.

We all fear change, even as we seek it.

Intensity is not the same as intimacy, although we tend to confuse these two words.

What initially attracts us and what later becomes 'the problem' are usually one and the same.

People marry with a deep longing that their partner will tend to their wounds, not throw salt in them. Honor your partner's vulnerability.

Feeling essentially superior to other people is as sure a sign of poor self-esteem as feeling essentially inferior.

If what we are doing with our anger is not achieving the desired result, it would seem logical to try something different.

You can't evaluate a prospective partner if you insulate your relationship from your family and friends--and his.

The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don't want to.

Your children are not little mirrors reflecting back the good or bad job you've done.

The happiest people are focused on living their own life (not someone else's) as well as possible.

Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even or finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself.

It is an act of courage to acknowledge our own uncertainty and sit with it for a while.

Self-help books for women are part of a multibillion-dollar industry, sensitively attuned to our insecurities and our purses.

Being in touch with our bodies, or more accurately, being our bodies, is how we know what is true. Harriet

As long as we can feel hope, there is hope.

Believing that all women should want to be mothers makes about as much sense as believing that all men should want to be engineers.

It's remarkable how many couples can precisely describe their particular pattern of painful fighting, and claim to be helpless to change it.