Stephen Grosz Quotes

#1. Closure is just as delusive-it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.

Stephen Grosz

#2. I want to change, but not if it means changing.

Stephen Grosz

#3. All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. But if we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us- we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don't understand.

Stephen Grosz

#4. As he spoke, I had the mental image of a small boy switching on the nightlight, not because he wants to be able to find his parents during the night, but because he fears his parents will forget him - lose him - in the dark.

Stephen Grosz

#5. My breakdown was like a furnace and what was burned away was any belief in my own feelings

Stephen Grosz

#6. I knew tht we all have the capacity to act in self-destructive ways, nevertheless i had a kind of faith that the desire to live was more powerful. now, instead, i felt its fragility. peter's suicide made me feel that the battle between the forces of life and death was far more evenly pitched.

Stephen Grosz

#7. It is less painful, it turns out, to feel betrayed than to feel forgotten.

Stephen Grosz

#8. Being loved is the problem, because love is a demand - when you're loved, someone wants more of you.

Stephen Grosz

#9. The bigger the front, the bigger the back.

Stephen Grosz

#10. For a minute, the fantasy frightened her, but ultimately, this fear saved her from feeling alone.

Stephen Grosz

#11. A lot of people, especially psychoanalysts, assume that happiness can only be found in a couple - but not all of us are made for a relationship.

Stephen Grosz

#12. At one time or another, most of us have felt trapped by things we find ourselves thinking or doing, caught by our own impulses or foolish choices; ensnared in some unhappiness or fear; imprisoned by our own history. We feel unable to go forward and yet we believe that there must be a way.

Stephen Grosz

#13. There cannot be change without loss

Stephen Grosz

#14. we all try to silence painful emotions. but when we succeed in feeling nothing we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us and why.

Stephen Grosz

#15. He seemed never to have acquired a skill that we all need: the ability to make another person worry about us.

Stephen Grosz

#16. When I'm in a couple, I feel I'm disappearing, dying - losing my mind.

Stephen Grosz

#17. Being present, whether with children, with friends, or even with oneself, is hard work. But isn't this attentiveness
the feeling that someone is trying to think about us
something we want more than praise?

Stephen Grosz