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Silence can pose a greater threat than the difficult truth.

Harriet Lerner

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Harriet Lerner
Greater
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Silence

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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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If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.
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We all fear change, even as we seek it.
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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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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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 you pursue a distancer, he or she will distance more. Consider it a fundamental law of physics.
Harriet Lerner
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What initially attracts us and what later becomes 'the problem' are usually one and the same.
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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The happiest people are focused on living their own life (not someone else's) as well as possible.
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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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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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.
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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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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The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don't want to.
Harriet Lerner
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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.
Harriet Lerner