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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.

Harriet Lerner

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Harriet Lerner
Imperfections
Imperfection
Miracle
Children
Love

More quotes by Harriet Lerner

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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.
Harriet Lerner
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Often when someone apologizes - like a parent who says to a child, I'm very sorry I neglected you when you were a kid - they also ask, Do you forgive me?, because they want the other person to be over it. However, healing can take a great deal of time. And if we forgive too quickly, we cut the process short.
Harriet Lerner
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The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don't want to.
Harriet Lerner
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Intensity is not the same as intimacy, although we tend to confuse these two words.
Harriet Lerner
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No book or expert can protect us from the range of painful emotions that make us human.
Harriet Lerner
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Anxiety is extremely contagious, but so is calm.
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.
Harriet Lerner
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Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is to stop trying to be helpful.
Harriet Lerner
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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.
Harriet Lerner
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If you pursue a distancer, he or she will distance more. Consider it a fundamental law of physics.
Harriet Lerner
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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.
Harriet Lerner
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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
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Self-help books for women are part of a multibillion-dollar industry, sensitively attuned to our insecurities and our purses.
Harriet Lerner
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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.
Harriet Lerner
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We all fear change, even as we seek it.
Harriet Lerner
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Women are raised to be the nurturers and steadiers of rocked boats, to hold relationships in place as if our lives depended on it. But it shores up your own dignity and integrity if you're able to say, There are a million things I love about you, and I want our relationship to continue. I forgive you 95 percent, but not this 5 percent.
Harriet Lerner
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As many have observed, it is easy to tell a lie, but it is almost impossible to tell only one.
Harriet Lerner
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Whole-hearted listening is the greatest spiritual gift you can give to the other person.
Harriet Lerner
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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.
Harriet Lerner
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Differences don’t just threaten and divide us. They also inform, enrich, and enliven us.
Harriet Lerner