Harriet Lerner
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.Collection: Attitude
We cannot make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern.Collection: Patterns
If we only listened with the same passion that we feel about being heard.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Lonely
An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way.Collection: Party
We begin to change the dynamic of our relationships as we are able to share our reactions to others without holding them responsible for causing our feelings, and without blaming ourselves for the reactions that other people have in response to our choices & actions. We are responsible for our own behavior and we are not responsible for other people's reactions; nor are they responsible for ours.Collection: People
Keep in mind that the tendency to be judgmental - toward yourself or another person - is a good barometer of how anxious or stressed out you are. Judging others is simply the flip side of judging yourself.Collection: Judging Yourself
You can't evaluate a prospective partner if you insulate your relationship from your family and friends--and his.Collection: Family And Friends
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.Collection: Life
Whole-hearted listening is the greatest spiritual gift you can give to the other person.Collection: Spiritual
If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.Collection: Waiting
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Emotional
Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is to stop trying to be helpful.Collection: Trying
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.Collection: Expression
In long-term relationships ... we are called upon to navigate that delicate balance between separateness and connectedness ... we confront the challenge of sustaining both--without losing either.Collection: Long
Many people value criticism in the early stage of a relationship, but become allergic to it over time. Remember this: No one can survive in a marriage (at least not happily) if they feel more judged than admired. Your partner won't make use of your constructive criticism if there's not a surrounding climate of admiration and respect.Collection: People
We all fear change, even as we seek it.Collection: Change
No book or expert can protect us from the range of painful emotions that make us human.Collection: Book
If you pursue a distancer, he or she will distance more. Consider it a fundamental law of physics.Collection: Distance
Being able to make a sincere apology - one that says, "Yes, I get it; I screwed up. Your feelings make sense, and I'm taking this seriously" - is at the heart of being successful in leadership, parenting, and friendship, as well as our own integrity and self-worth. And the failure to apologize? Even a good relationship will suffer quietly - because we really feel it when someone won't take responsibility for what they said, or didn't say.Collection: Integrity
Underground issues from one relationship or context invariably fuel our fires in another.Collection: Fire
Don't count on the power of your love or your nagging to create something that wasn't there to begin with.Collection: Nagging
I'd say that while it's normal to long for an apology, if you really need it, you're not ready to speak to whoever harmed you. Non-apologizers tend to walk on a tightrope of defensiveness above a huge canyon of low self-esteem - they just can't listen to anything that's going to set them off balance. So focus on what you say for your own sake, because you need to hear your own voice telling the truth.Collection: Apology
Many of our problems with anger occur when we choose between having a relationship and having a self.Collection: Anger
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.Collection: Heart
the body, seeking truth, sends a signal. But decoding it, interpreting its meaning, and knowing how to proceed from there is another matter entirely.Collection: Communication
Fear has never helped anybody make good choices. It leads to clinging when we should be walking.Collection: Choices
Feeling inadequate is an occupational hazard of motherhood.Collection: Motherhood
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.Collection: Girl
Love alone is never a good enough reason to marry.Collection: Reason
While women once acquired relationship skills to "hook," "snare," or "catch" a husband who would provide access to economic security and social status, the position of contemporary women has not changed that radically. Much of our success still depends on our attunement to "male culture," our ability to please men, and our readiness to conform to the masculine values of our institutions.Collection: Husband
It is an act of courage to acknowledge our own uncertainty and sit with it for a while.Collection: Courage
What initially attracts us and what later becomes 'the problem' are usually one and the same.Collection: Problem
Marriage is the lightning rod that absorbs anxiety and stress from all other sources, past and present. When marriage has a firm foundation of solid friendship and mutual respect, it can tolerate a fair amount of raw emotion. A good fight can clear the air, and it's nice to know we can survive conflict and even learn from it. Many couples, however, get trapped in endless rounds of fighting and blaming that they don't know how to get out of. When fights go unchecked and unrepaired, they can eventually erode love and respect, which are the bedrock of any successful relationship.Collection: Couple
The best apology, I think, was from my husband, Steve, who slept with a close friend of mine decades back, when we were committed to being life partners but not yet married. And many of the factors that made Steve's apology so healing are universal. One important thing is that he confessed to the affair, rather than my discovering it. He looked deeply into his own history in terms of why this happened, but he never used that history as an excuse.Collection: Husband
The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don't want to.Collection: Two
We need to hear the sound of our voice for what we think and need.Collection: Thinking
We commonly confuse closeness with sameness and view intimacy as the merging of two separate I's into one worldview.Collection: Views
Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even or finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself.Collection: Stories
Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.Collection: Love
Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.Collection: Political
As many have observed, it is easy to tell a lie, but it is almost impossible to tell only one.Collection: Lying
Intensity is not the same as intimacy, although we tend to confuse these two words.Collection: Two
Kids want nothing more than for all the important adults in their life to get along.Collection: Kids
It's remarkable how many couples can precisely describe their particular pattern of painful fighting, and claim to be helpless to change it.Collection: Couple
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.Collection: Apology
Believing that all women should want to be mothers makes about as much sense as believing that all men should want to be engineers.Collection: Mother
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."Collection: Integrity
Being in touch with our bodies, or more accurately, being our bodies, is how we know what is true. HarrietCollection: Life