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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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Harriet Lerner
Believing
Sense
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Women
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Believe
Engineers
Men
Mothers

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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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Anxiety is extremely contagious, but so is calm.
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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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The happiest people are focused on living their own life (not someone else's) as well as possible.
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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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No book or expert can protect us from the range of painful emotions that make us human.
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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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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.
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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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Whole-hearted listening is the greatest spiritual gift you can give to the other person.
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Women ... have long been discouraged from the awareness and forthright expression of anger. Sugar and spice are the ingredients from which we are made. We are the nurturers, the soothers, the peacemakers, and the steadiers of rocked boats.
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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.
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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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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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The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don't want to.
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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 pursue a distancer, he or she will distance more. Consider it a fundamental law of physics.
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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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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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What initially attracts us and what later becomes 'the problem' are usually one and the same.
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