Labeling and diagnosis is a catastrophic way to communicate. Telling other people what's wrong with them greatly reduces, almost to zero, the probability that we're going to get what we're after.

It's never what people do that makes us angry; it's what we tell ourselves about what they did.

Once you can clearly describe what you are reacting to, free of your interpretation or evaluation of it, other people are less likely to be defensive when they hear it.

Staying with empathy we allow speakers to touch deeper levels of themselves.

What others do may be the stimulus of our feelings, but never the cause.

Fix-it jackals can't wait to fix it, because they don't know how to enjoy pain. And until you learn how to enjoy pain, you can't enjoy intimacy.

We only feel dehumanized when we get trapped in the derogatory images of other people or thoughts of wrongness about ourselves.