Top 86 Harriet Lerner Quotes

#1. venting anger does not solve the problem that anger signals.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #5383
#2. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #43085
#3. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #80773
#4. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #127725
#5. Nothing you say can ensure that the other person will get it, or respond the way you want. You may never exceed his threshold of deafness.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #145002
#6. The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don't want to.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #162305
#7. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #169967
#8. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #204709
#9. Whole-hearted listening is the greatest spiritual gift you can give to the other person.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #301898
#10. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #331309
#11. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #333699
#12. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #396504
#13. If what we are doing with our anger is not achieving the desired result, it would seem logical to try something different.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #438700
#14. Being in touch with our bodies, or more accurately, being our bodies, is how we know what is true. Harriet

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #450107
#15. Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #480590
#16. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #496581
#17. Kids want nothing more than for all the important adults in their life to get along.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #498026
#18. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #504850
#19. Deception and 'con games' are a way of life in all species and throughout nature. Organisms that do not improve their ability to deceive - and to detect deception - are less apt to survive.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #526085
#20. If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #530668
#21. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #532040
#22. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #545515
#23. As many have observed, it is easy to tell a lie, but it is almost impossible to tell only one.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #551017
#24. Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #554143
#25. Don't count on the power of your love or your nagging to create something that wasn't there to begin with.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #566584
#26. We all fear change, even as we seek it.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #577650
#27. We commonly confuse closeness with sameness and view intimacy as the merging of two separate I's into one worldview.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #578802
#28. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #579550
#29. Silence can pose a greater threat than the difficult truth.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #583885
#30. If you pursue a distancer, he or she will distance more. Consider it a fundamental law of physics.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #617424
#31. If you treat man as he appears to be, you make him worse than he is. But if you treat man as if he already were what he potentially could be, you make him what he should be.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #641109
#32. It is an act of courage to acknowledge our own uncertainty and sit with it for a while.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #666353
#33. The bolder and more courageous you are, the more you will learn about yourself.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #681994
#34. Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #690134
#35. Underground issues from one relationship or context invariably fuel our fires in another.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #704845
#36. But one of the hallmarks of emotional maturity is to recognize the validity of multiple realities and to understand that people think, feel, and react differently. Often we behave as if "closeness" means "sameness.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #724308
#37. The miracle is that your children will love you with all your imperfections if you can do the same for them.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #749732
#38. The first world we find ourselves in is a family that is not of our choosing.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #753325
#39. Your children are not little mirrors reflecting back the good or bad job you've done.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #760116
#40. When anxiety disrupts functioning, it's psychiatric illness.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #836579
#41. People marry with a deep longing that their partner will tend to their wounds, not throw salt in them. Honor your partner's vulnerability.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #838684
#42. I'm a good example of wanting to apologize only for my precise share of a problem
as I calculate it, of course
and I expect my husband Steve to apologize for his share, also as I calculate it. Since we're not always of one mind on the math, it can lead to the theater of the absurd.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #848490
#43. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #857337
#44. Pretending can be a bold form of experimentation and inventiveness. In pretending joy or happiness, we may discover or enhance our capacity for it.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #894258
#45. Believing that all women should want to be mothers makes about as much sense as believing that all men should want to be engineers.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #897612
#46. Judging people for whom they love (a same sex partner) rather than by whom they harm, should in itself merit a psychiatric diagnosis.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #927184
#47. Differences don't just threaten and divide us. They also inform, enrich, and enliven us.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #963106
#48. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #982939
#49. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1023767
#50. We diminish people when we don't allow them to help us, or when we act like we don't need anything from them and they have nothing to offer us. We also diminish them when we allow them to go on and on, even after we've exceeded our capacity to pay attention.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1033682
#51. Many of our problems with anger occur when we choose between having a relationship and having a self.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1082857
#52. It's remarkable how many couples can precisely describe their particular pattern of painful fighting, and claim to be helpless to change it.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1120240
#53. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1133329
#54. what fuels human unhappiness in both the personal and political realm can be boiled down to these three key emotions - anxiety, fear, and shame.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1157195
#55. Feeling inadequate is an occupational hazard of motherhood.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1165820
#56. Whatever your sex fantasy is with your partner, consider it normal.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1178100
#57. No book or expert can protect us from the range of painful emotions that make us human.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1181696
#58. Love alone is never a good enough reason to marry.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1222788
#59. The rush of sexual attraction can act like a drug and blur our capacity for clear thinking. This can lead us to distance ourselves from our friends or even abandon our life plan for someone who couldn't otherwise be relied on to water our plants and feed our cat.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1234337
#60. You can't evaluate a prospective partner if you insulate your relationship from your family and friends
and his.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1247758
#61. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1273548
#62. The challenge in all intimate relationships is to preserve both the "I" and the "we" without losing either when the going gets tough. If we're faced with a choice, we need to choose speech over silence, keep our behavior in line with our stated values and beliefs - and save ourselves first.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1322410
#63. Women ... have long been discouraged from the awareness and forthright expression of anger. Sugar and spice are the ingredients from which we are made. We are the nurturers, the soothers, the peacemakers, and the steadiers of rocked boats.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1383237
#64. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1385852
#65. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1404499
#66. Fear has never helped anybody make good choices. It leads to clinging when we should be walking.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1434625
#67. Intensity is not the same as intimacy, although we tend to confuse these two words.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1457015
#68. Self-help books for women are part of a multibillion-dollar industry, sensitively attuned to our insecurities and our purses.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1462081
#69. Feeling essentially superior to other people is as sure a sign of poor self-esteem as feeling essentially inferior.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1475776
#70. The happiest people are focused on living their own life (not someone else's) as well as possible.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1510404
#71. Anxiety is extremely contagious, but so is calm.

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Harriet Lerner Quotes #1511765
#72. We need to hear the sound of our voice for what we think and need.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1536209
#73. 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?

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1573947
#74. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1609636
#75. Men are often (though not always) the pursuers for sex, just like women are often (though not always) the pursuers for conversation.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1686517
#76. Likewise, the other person has a right to know us accurately, to consider the relationship and make plans for the future based on facts, not fantasies or projections.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1712024
#77. What initially attracts us and what later becomes 'the problem' are usually one and the same.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1740242
#78. Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is to stop trying to be helpful.

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Harriet Lerner Quotes #1777758
#79. When you can't see yourself objectively, you won't see anyone else objectively, either.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1787547
#80. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1793665
#81. As long as we can feel hope, there is hope.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1799074
#82. The body, seeking truth, sends a signal. But decoding it, interpreting its meaning, and knowing how to proceed from there is another matter entirely.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1801681
#83. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1820700
#84. Before modern feminism, stories of female ambition were silenced or erased; even now, they are told with apology ("Yes, it's a great honor to be a Nobel Prize laureate, but really, what I love best is staying home and being a mother to Kevin and Annie").

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1821950
#85. 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.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1827565
#86. If we only listened with the same passion that we feel about being heard.

Harriet Lerner

Harriet Lerner Quotes #1842089

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