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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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Harriet Lerner
Helpful
Stop
Sometimes
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More quotes by 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.
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Differences don’t just threaten and divide us. They also inform, enrich, and enliven us.
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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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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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If you pursue a distancer, he or she will distance more. Consider it a fundamental law of physics.
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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 first world we find ourselves in is a family that is not of our choosing.
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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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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.
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If what we are doing with our anger is not achieving the desired result, it would seem logical to try something different.
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Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.
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Silence can pose a greater threat than the difficult truth.
Harriet Lerner
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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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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.
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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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If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.
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What initially attracts us and what later becomes 'the problem' are usually one and the same.
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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.
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Kids want nothing more than for all the important adults in their life to get along.
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Intensity is not the same as intimacy, although we tend to confuse these two words.
Harriet Lerner