Harriet Lerner Quotes

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

We may view it as our responsibility to control something that is not in fact within our control and yet fail to exercise the power and authority that we do have over our own behavior. Mothers cannot make children think, feel, or be a certain way, but we can be firm, consistent, and clear about what behavior we will and will not tolerate, and what the consequences are for misbehavior. We can also change our part in patterns that keep family members stuck. At the same time we are doomed to failure with any self-help venture if we view the problem as existing within ourselves - or within the child or the child's father, for that matter. There is never one villain in family life, although it may appear that way on the surface.

The best apologies are short, and don't go on to include explanations that run the risk of undoing them. An apology isn't the only chance you ever get to address the underlying issue. The apology is the chance you get to establish the ground for future communication. This is an important and often overlooked distinction.

Letting go of anger and hate requires us to give up the hope for a different past, along with the hope of a fantasized future. What we gain is a life more in the present, where we are not mired in prolonged anger and resentment that doesn't serve us.

Silence can pose a greater threat than the difficult truth.

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.

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.

Control is an illusion - a fact you will learn very fast if you become ill, or have things fall apart in some other way. When we understand vulnerability and suffering as an essential part of being human, our individual fate can be easier to manage.

My debt to feminism is simply incalculable. Feminism allowed me to see past a 'reality' that I had once taken as a given. It helped me to pay attention to countless voices, my own included, that I had been taught 'don't count.' Feminism allows me to maintain 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.

Questioning ourselves for being "oversensitive" is a common way that women, in particular, disqualify our legitimate anger and hurt.
...The fact that some of us feel more vulnerable than others in a particular context does not mean we are weak or lesser in any way.

Being who we are requires that we can talk openly about things that are important to us, that we take a clear position on where we stand on important emotional issues, and that we clarify the limits of what is acceptable and tolerable to us in a relationship.

If you pursue a distancer, he or she will distance more. Consider it a fundamental law of physics.

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

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.

Our society cultivates guilt feelings in women such that many of us still feel guilty if we are anything less than an emotional service station to others.

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

Through words we come to know the other person
and to be known. This knowing is at the heart of our deepest longings for intimacy and connection with others. How relationships unfold with the most important people in our lives depends on courage and clarity in finding voice.

When we think of fear, we think of a 'fear of' something. Far more daunting is the challenge of how to conduct ourselves in the dailiness of love and work when anxiety is high and shame kicks in. This is the human condition. We need not let anxiety and shame silence our authentic voices, close our hearts to the different voices of others or stop us from acting with clarify compassion and courage. In today's world, no challenge is more important than that.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

If you exchanged wedding vows, tape them to your bathroom mirror and read them aloud to yourself every morning along with the ritual brushing of teeth. It's not realistic to believe that you will live your promises as a daily practice
unless you're a saint or a highly evolved Zen Buddhist. Not where marriage is concerned. But you can make a practice of returning to your vows when the going gets rough.

Throughout evolutionary history, anxiety and fear have helped every species to be wary and to survive. Fear can signal us to act, or, alternatively, to resist the impulse to act. It can help us to make wise, self-protective choices in and out of relationships where we might otherwise sail mindlessly along, ignoring signs of trouble.

Everyone freaks out. Sometimes the best we can do with fear is befriend it. Expect it and understand that fear will always reappear. Eventually it subsides. It will return. The real culprits are our knee jerk responses to fear and the way we try to avoid feeling fear, anxiety and shame. Don't get me wrong, wanting to feel better fast is a perfectly natural human impulse. It is healthy to seek relief when you feel hopelessly mired in the emotional soup. Calming down is an essential first step to accurately perceiving a problem and deciding what to do about it but the last thing you need to do is shut yourself off from fear and pain - either your own or the worlds. If there is one over riding reason why our world and relationships are in such a mess, is that we try to get rid of our anxiety, fear and shame as fast as possible, regardless of the long term consequences. In doing so, we blame and shame others and in countless ways, we unwittingly act against ourselves. We confuse our fear driven thoughts with what is right, best, necessary or true.

The term girl not only serves to avoid certain anxiety-arousing connotations inherent in the word woman regarding aggression, sexuality, and reproduction, it also serves to impart a tone of frivolousness and lack of seriousness to ambitious, intellectual, and competitive striving that women may pursue.

experience of our self and the other person becomes fixed and small. My goal is to challenge us to engage in novel conversations that will create a larger, more empowering view of who we are and what is truly possible.

Feeling inadequate is an occupational hazard of motherhood.

Love alone is never a good enough reason to marry.

Yet all of us are vulnerable to intense, nonproductive angry reactions in our current relationships if we do not deal openly and directly with emotional issues from our first family - in particular, losses and cutoffs.

Countless self-help books, blogs and seminars promise relief from suffering, when pain and suffering are as much part of life as happiness and joy.The only way to avoid being mistreated in this world is to fold up in a dark corner and stay mute. If you go outside, or let others in, you'll get hurt many times. Ditto if you've grown up in a family rather than begin raised by wolves. Some people will behave badly and will not apologize, repair the harm, or care about your feelings.

But therein lies the paradox: Speaking out and being "real" are not necessarily virtues. Sometimes voicing our thoughts and feelings shuts down the lines of communication, diminishes or shames another person, or makes it less likely that two people can hear each other or even stay in the same room. Nor is talking always a solution. We know from personal experience that our best intentions to process a difficult issue can move a situation from bad to worse. We can also talk a particular subject to death, or focus on the negative in a way that draws us deeper into it, when we'd be better off distracting ourselves and going bowling.

But here is the real point when it comes to the challenge of apologies in family relationships. If our intention is to have a better relationship, we need to be our best and most mature self, rather than reacting to the other person's reactivity. Also, some of the other person's complaints will be true, since we can't possibly get it right all the time.

If you're married to an entrenched non-apologizer, it won't help to doggedly demand one. Some folks lack the self-esteem required to take responsibility for their less than honorable behaviors, feel remorse, and offer a heartfelt apology. And many people are so hard on themselves for the mistakes they make, they don't have the emotional room to admit vulnerability and apologize to a partner.

what fuels human unhappiness in both the personal and political realm can be boiled down to these three key emotions - anxiety, fear, and shame.

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.

I've seen any number of devastated men in therapy who tell me their wives left them out of the blue. The women, however, claim to have voiced their anger and discontent for a long time. Both are right; he hasn't listened well enough; she hasn't shared her thoughts about leaving clearly enough or early enough in the process. Often one person doesn't make a serious issue of divorce until she's finally made up her mind to leave. Any changes her partner then agrees to make are too little, too late. In the end, neither spouse has had the opportunity to test the potential for change in their marriage.

..All of us are vulnerable to intense, non-productive angry reactions in our current relationships if we do not deal openly and directly with emotional issues from our first family - in particular, losses and cutoffs. If we do not observe and understand how our triangles operate, our anger can keep us stuck in the past, rather than serving as an incentive and guide to form more productive relationship patterns for the future.

Keep in mind that the tendency to be judgmental - toward yourself or another person - is a good barometer of how anxious or stressed out you are. Judging others is simply the flip side of judging yourself.

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

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

Don't use "below-the-belt" tactics. These include: blam- ing, interpreting, diagnosing, labeling, analyzing, preaching, moralizing, ordering, warning, interrogating, ridiculing, and lecturing. Don't put the other person down.

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

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.

Fear has never helped anybody make good choices. It leads to clinging when we should be walking.

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

We all fear change, even as we seek it.

We need to listen carefully to the wisdom of our symptoms and to try to decode their meaning, because some of us have learned to settle, to fall silent; to deny that unfair circumstances exist or matter, and then to call our compromises "life." But our bodies, our deeper unconscious selves, remain harder to fool.

There's a widespread belief that if you have solid self-esteem you don't need outside affirmation and praise. This is patently untrue, by the way.

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.

Shame is paralyzing and debilitating. It invites us not to be heard, at least not in an authentic way. Acting courageously when shame enters the picture requires extraordinary courage because people will do anything to escape from shame or from the possibility that shame will be evoked. It is just too difficult to go there. Even for people who will walk in to the fires of transformation to face fear.

Men and women tend to manage shame differently. Generally, men have less tolerance for shame, perhaps because they are shamed almost from birth for half their humanity. The so called feminine part of themselves including anything vulnerable or seen as weak. Men often sit with shame for only a nanosecond before flipping it into something more masculine or therefore tolerable like anger or rage or a need to dominate devalue or control.

We commonly confuse closeness with sameness and view intimacy as the merging of two separate I's into one worldview.

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

To listen with an open heart and ask questions to better help us understand the other person is a spiritual exercise, in the truest sense of the word.

Our family of origin - the source of our first blueprint for navigating relationships.

Relationships are most likely to fail when we don't address problems or hold our partner accountable for unfair or irresponsible behavior ... the ability to clarify our values, beliefs, and life goals
and then to keep our behavior congruent with them
is at the heart of a solid marriage.

Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.

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

Underground issues from one relationship or context invariably fuel our fires in another.

No book or expert can protect us from the range of painful emotions that make us human.

Whatever your sex fantasy is with your partner, consider it normal.

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.

Judging people for whom they love (a same sex partner) rather than by whom they harm, should in itself merit a psychiatric diagnosis.

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 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.

In my professional work I am struck by how often sibling relationships fall apart around the life-cycle stage of caring for elderly parents, and dealing with a parents death and it's aftermath. Failed apologies have the most serious consequences at stressful points in the life-cycle, and loss is the most challenging adaptational task that family members have to come to terms with.

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.

It is not fear that stops you from doing the brave and true thing in your daily life. Rather, the problem is avoidance. You want to feel comfortable so you avoid doing or saying the thing that will evoke fear and other difficult emotions. Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run but, it will never make you less afraid.

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

As many have observed, it is easy to tell a lie, but it is almost impossible to tell only one.

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

Our society doesn't promote self-acceptance and it never will. First of all, self-acceptance doesn't sell products. Capitalism would fall if we liked ourselves the way we are now. Also, people who feel shamed and inadequate themselves tend to pass it on. I'm sure you've noticed that many individuals and groups try to enhance their self-esteem by diminishing others.

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

Our first family: where we learned (not) to speak.

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

A marital therapist recently teased me, "Are you writing another book to help women speak up? I'm trying to help my clients be quiet." Then she said more seriously, "Why do people think they have to tell each other everything they feel?