Harriet Lerner Quotations

And 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.

Request an apology when you believe you deserve one, but don't get in a tug of war about it. Instead, be a role model and tender a genuine apology yourself when an apology is due. Your willingness to apologize can be contagious and models maturity for your partner. Also, your non-apologizing partner may use a nonverbal way to reconnect after a fight, defuse the tension, or show you he's in a new place and wants to repair a disconnection. Accept the olive branch however it's offered.

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

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

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

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

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

Kids want nothing more than for all the important adults in their life to get along.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

We're vulnerable to repeating history, especially if we don't know what's driving us. For example, it may be a family tradition to marry someone with addiction problems, or who is an injured bird in need of caretaking. Or, you may be drawn to guys who remind you of your distant, unavailable father -- or your ill-tempered mother -- with the unconscious belief that you can take an old story, and through the power of your love, give it a new, happy ending.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Anxiety is extremely contagious, but so is calm.

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.

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.

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.

While women once acquired relationship skills to "hook," "snare," or "catch" a husband who would provide access to economic security and social status, the position of contemporary women has not changed that radically. Much of our success still depends on our attunement to "male culture," our ability to please men, and our readiness to conform to the masculine values of our institutions.

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.

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

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.

Anger is neither legitimate nor illegitimate, meaningful nor pointless. Anger simply is. To ask, "Is my anger legitimate?" is similar to asking, "Do I have the right to be thirsty? After all, I just had a glass of water fifteen minutes ago. Surely my thirst is not legitimate. And besides, what's the point of getting thirsty when I can't get anything to drink now, anyway?" Anger is something we feel. It exists for a reason and always deserves our respect and attention. We all have a right to everything we feel--and certainly our anger is no exception.

Marriage is the lightning rod that absorbs anxiety and stress from all other sources, past and present. When marriage has a firm foundation of solid friendship and mutual respect, it can tolerate a fair amount of raw emotion. A good fight can clear the air, and it's nice to know we can survive conflict and even learn from it. Many couples, however, get trapped in endless rounds of fighting and blaming that they don't know how to get out of. When fights go unchecked and unrepaired, they can eventually erode love and respect, which are the bedrock of any successful relationship.

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

We all fear change, even as we seek it.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Silence can pose a greater threat than the difficult truth.

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

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

Feeling inadequate is an occupational hazard of motherhood.

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

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

the body, seeking truth, sends a signal. But decoding it, interpreting its meaning, and knowing how to proceed from there is another matter entirely.

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").

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.

When anxiety disrupts functioning, it's psychiatric illness.

Men are often (though not always) the pursuers for sex, just like women are often (though not always) the pursuers for conversation.

Love alone is never a good enough reason to marry.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

We begin to change the dynamic of our relationships as we are able to share our reactions to others without holding them responsible for causing our feelings, and without blaming ourselves for the reactions that other people have in response to our choices & actions. We are responsible for our own behavior and we are not responsible for other people's reactions; nor are they responsible for ours.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Many people value criticism in the early stage of a relationship, but become allergic to it over time. Remember this: No one can survive in a marriage (at least not happily) if they feel more judged than admired. Your partner won't make use of your constructive criticism if there's not a surrounding climate of admiration and respect.

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

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

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.

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.