Harriet Lerner Quotes

The more we seek exclusivity in friendship, the more it becomes obligatory and the less likely it is to fulfill the wonderful vision of what true friendship can be.

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

Fear is a message - sometimes helpful, sometimes not - but often conveying critical information about our beliefs, our needs, and our relationship to the world around us.

Throughout evolutionary history, anxiety and fear have helped every species to be wary and to survive. Fear can signal us to act, or, alternatively, to resist the impulse to act. It can help us to make wise, self-protective choices in and out of relationships where we might otherwise sail mindlessly along, ignoring signs of trouble.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

the body, seeking truth, sends a signal. But decoding it, interpreting its meaning, and knowing how to proceed from there is another matter entirely.

We all fear change, even as we seek it.

Every time I open Facebook, I see a post with something like, "We must forgive or be prisoners of our own bitterness and hate." People think that forgiveness is all-or-nothing, but this myth hurts people. You can forgive 10, 97, or 14 percent. Forgiveness is complicated.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Anxiety is extremely contagious, but so is calm.

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.

Before modern feminism, stories of female ambition were silenced or erased; even now, they are told with apology ("Yes, it's a great honor to be a Nobel Prize laureate, but really, what I love best is staying home and being a mother to Kevin and Annie").

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

Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.

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.

We'll always be disappointed if we believe that we can plan for a peak experience and make it happen. True joy can't be anticipated or planned. It just strikes.

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.

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.

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. . . .If, however, we do not use our anger to define ourselves clearly in every important relationship we are in--and manage our feelings as they arise--no one else will assume this responsibility for us.

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

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.

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."

Feeling inadequate is an occupational hazard of motherhood.

My debt to feminism is simply incalculable. Feminism allowed me to see past a 'reality' that I had once taken as a given. It helped me to pay attention to countless voices, my own included, that I had been taught 'don't count.' Feminism allows me to maintain hope.

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