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

Harriet Lerner

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Harriet Lerner
Partner
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More quotes by Harriet Lerner

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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.
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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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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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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Kids want nothing more than for all the important adults in their life to get along.
Harriet Lerner
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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.
Harriet Lerner
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Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.
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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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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the body, seeking truth, sends a signal. But decoding it, interpreting its meaning, and knowing how to proceed from there is another matter entirely.
Harriet Lerner
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We all fear change, even as we seek it.
Harriet Lerner
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The happiest people are focused on living their own life (not someone else's) as well as possible.
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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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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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.
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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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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If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.
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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The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don't want to.
Harriet Lerner