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Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.

Harriet Lerner

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Harriet Lerner
Signals
Anger
Listening
Worth
Signal

More quotes by Harriet Lerner

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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.
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Anxiety is extremely contagious, but so is calm.
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The happiest people are focused on living their own life (not someone else's) as well as possible.
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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.
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Intensity is not the same as intimacy, although we tend to confuse these two words.
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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.
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Believing that all women should want to be mothers makes about as much sense as believing that all men should want to be engineers.
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The miracle is that your children will love you with all your imperfections if you can do the same for them.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is to stop trying to be helpful.
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Men are often (though not always) the pursuers for sex, just like women are often (though not always) the pursuers for conversation.
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Many of our problems with anger occur when we choose between having a relationship and having a self.
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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.
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Every time I open Facebook, I see a post with something like, We must forgive or be prisoners of our own bitterness and hate. People think that forgiveness is all-or-nothing, but this myth hurts people. You can forgive 10, 97, or 14 percent. Forgiveness is complicated.
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As many have observed, it is easy to tell a lie, but it is almost impossible to tell only one.
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Self-help books for women are part of a multibillion-dollar industry, sensitively attuned to our insecurities and our purses.
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There are some things for which there is no apology, and on the question of slavery, there is no adequate apology for ripping people out of their homeland and bringing them here in chains. There is no adequate apology for the ongoing horrific legacy of racism.
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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.
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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.
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