If an act is not one of work or courage, then it is not an act of love. There are no exceptions.
The fact of the matter is that our unconscious is wiser than we are about everything.
Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. It is judicious praising and judicious criticizing. It is judicious arguing, struggling, confronting, urging, pushing and pulling in addition to comforting. It is leadership. The word “judicious” means requiring judgment, and judgment requires more than instinct; it requires thoughtful and often painful decisionmaking.
But the reality of life is such that at times one person does know better than the other what is good for the other, and in actuality is in a position of superior knowledge or wisdom in regard to the matter at hand. Under these circumstances the wiser of the two does in fact have an obligation to confront the other with the problem.
Mental Health is dedication to reality at all costs.
Love is not effortless. To the contrary, love is effortful.
Indeed, if one can say that one has built genuinely loving relationships with a spouse and children, then one has already succeeded in accomplishing more than most people accomplish in a lifetime.
Balancing is a discipline precisely because the act of giving something up is painful.
Throughout the whole of life one must continue to learn to live,” said Seneca two millennia ago, “and what will amaze you even more, throughout life one must learn to die.
The group made the salesman aware in no uncertain terms that his tendency to avoid problem-solving by ignoring a problem in the hope that it would go away was in itself his major problem.
And it is essential that therapists arrive at this knowledge, for the world view of patients is always an essential part of their problems, and a correction in their world view is necessary for their cure. So I say to those I supervise: “Find out your patients’ religions even if they say they don’t have any.
Yet it is in this whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its meaning. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.
It is said that “neurotics make themselves miserable; those with character disorders make everyone else miserable.” Chief among the people character-disordered parents make miserable are their children. As in other areas of their lives, they fail to assume adequate responsibility for their parenting. They tend to brush off their children in thousands of little ways rather than provide them with needed attention.
Children cannot grow to psychological maturity in an atmosphere of unpredictability, haunted by the specter of abandonment. Couples cannot resolve in any healthy way the universal issues of marriage – dependency and independency, dominance and submission, freedom and fidelity, for example – without the security of knowing that the act of struggling over these issues will not itself destroy the relationship.
Self-discipline is a self-enlarging process.
As I have defined it, love is the antithesis of laziness. Ordinary laziness is a passive failure to love. Some ordinarily lazy people may not lift a finger to extend themselves unless they are compelled to do so. Their being is a manifestation of nonlove; still, they are not evil.
You are a beautiful and beloved individual. It is good to be you. We will love you no matter what you do, as long as you are you.
The message they give to their children is: “If you don’t do exactly what I want you to do I won’t love you any more, and you can figure out for yourself what that might mean.” It means, of course, abandonment and death.
If there were but one thing I could hope for from the reader of the remainder of this book, it would be that he or she possesses the capacity to perceive the miraculous.
True listening involves bracketing, a setting aside of the self.