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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
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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Differences don’t just threaten and divide us. They also inform, enrich, and enliven us.
Harriet Lerner
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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.
Harriet Lerner
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If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.
Harriet Lerner
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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
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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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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
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Kids want nothing more than for all the important adults in their life to get along.
Harriet Lerner
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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.
Harriet Lerner
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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.
Harriet Lerner
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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.
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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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 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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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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Self-help books for women are part of a multibillion-dollar industry, sensitively attuned to our insecurities and our purses.
Harriet Lerner