Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart

This is why there is truth to the adage that we all get the marriage partners we deserve, and why most of our dissatisfactions with others reflect limitations in ourselves.

Finally, we are entitled to receive only that which we are prepared to give.

The motivations and habit patterns that underlie most of our behavior are seldom logical; we are much more often driven by impulses, preconceptions, and emotions of which we are only dimly aware.

Because acceptance of responsibility for what we do and how we feel requires an act of will, it is natural to blame people in our pasts, especially parents, for not doing a better job.

My favorite therapeutic question is “What’s next?”

complaining about how one feels, or about repetitive behaviors that produce familiar and unhappy results, is just the beginning of a process. My favorite therapeutic question is “What’s next?”

don’t give much direct advice in therapy—not out of modesty or as a “trick” to get patients to come up with their own solutions to problems, but because most of the time I don’t have a clear idea of what people need to do to make themselves better.

It is hope that I’m really selling. If, after extended effort, I cannot persuade someone to buy, I am wasting both our time by continuing.

As much as we try, we do not control how we feel or what we think.

Only by embracing our mortality can we be happy in the time we have.

Keeping our expectations low protects us from disappointment.

People in despair are, naturally, intensely self-absorbed. Suicide is the ultimate expression of this preoccupation with self.

It is when our dream of what we could be collides with the truth of what we are that the clang of cognitive dissonance both deafens and blinds us.

The search for ideal love is both infantile and a symptom of middle-aged fears.

Too often, in our efforts to be good teachers, all we transmit is our anxiety, uncertainty, and fear of failure.

They exist in a sort of distracting dream with which the people now in our lives cannot compete.

We have the power to idealize or denigrate those characters that inhabit our life stories.