We all fear change, even as we seek it.

As long as we can feel hope, there is hope.

Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.

Anxiety is extremely contagious, but so is calm.

Love alone is never a good enough reason to marry.

Silence can pose a greater threat than the difficult truth.

Feeling inadequate is an occupational hazard of motherhood.

When anxiety disrupts functioning, it's psychiatric illness.

We need to hear the sound of our voice for what we think and need.

Whatever your sex fantasy is with your partner, consider it normal.

If we only listened with the same passion that we feel about being heard.

Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is to stop trying to be helpful.

The first world we find ourselves in is a family that is not of our choosing.

The bolder and more courageous you are, the more you will learn about yourself.

Intensity is not the same as intimacy, although we tend to confuse these two words.

Kids want nothing more than for all the important adults in their life to get along.

Your children are not little mirrors reflecting back the good or bad job you've done.

When you can't see yourself objectively, you won't see anyone else objectively, either.

It is an act of courage to acknowledge our own uncertainty and sit with it for a while.

No book or expert can protect us from the range of painful emotions that make us human.

Whole-hearted listening is the greatest spiritual gift you can give to the other person.

Differences don’t just threaten and divide us. They also inform, enrich, and enliven us.

Underground issues from one relationship or context invariably fuel our fires in another.

What initially attracts us and what later becomes 'the problem' are usually one and the same.

If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.

As many have observed, it is easy to tell a lie, but it is almost impossible to tell only one.

Fear has never helped anybody make good choices. It leads to clinging when we should be walking.

The happiest people are focused on living their own life (not someone else's) as well as possible.

If you pursue a distancer, he or she will distance more. Consider it a fundamental law of physics.

Many of our problems with anger occur when we choose between having a relationship and having a self.

The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don't want to.

Don't count on the power of your love or your nagging to create something that wasn't there to begin with.

Being in touch with our bodies, or more accurately, being our bodies, is how we know what is true. Harriet

The miracle is that your children will love you with all your imperfections if you can do the same for them.

Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.

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

Feeling essentially superior to other people is as sure a sign of poor self-esteem as feeling essentially inferior.

We commonly confuse closeness with sameness and view intimacy as the merging of two separate I's into one worldview.

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.

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.

If what we are doing with our anger is not achieving the desired result, it would seem logical to try something different.

Self-help books for women are part of a multibillion-dollar industry, sensitively attuned to our insecurities and our purses.

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.

Believing that all women should want to be mothers makes about as much sense as believing that all men should want to be engineers.

Men are often (though not always) the pursuers for sex, just like women are often (though not always) the pursuers for conversation.

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.

Judging people for whom they love (a same sex partner) rather than by whom they harm, should in itself merit a psychiatric diagnosis.

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.

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.

People marry with a deep longing that their partner will tend to their wounds, not throw salt in them. Honor your partner's vulnerability.

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