A Quote by Harriet Lerner

It's remarkable how many couples can precisely describe their particular pattern of painful fighting, and claim to be helpless to change it. — © Harriet Lerner
It's remarkable how many couples can precisely describe their particular pattern of painful fighting, and claim to be helpless to change it.
People - I mean couples - don't like to talk much about fighting. It's not attractive. No one likes to admit it or describe it or lay claim to it. We want our coupledoms to look... sanitized and pretty and worthy of admiration. And anger blasts are ugly. But, I think that is a crock. There is a kind of fighting that isn't ugly. There is a way for anger to come our as an energy you let loose and away. The trick is to give it a form, and not a human target. The trick is to transform rage.
Change always follows the same pattern. If you come up with something new they try and put you off.If that doesn't work they call you stark raving bonkers.If that doesn't work they lock you up like the suffragettes.Then, after a pause, the change happensand you can't find anyone that doesn't claim to have been fighting for it with you.
See, even if you're stuck in life, if you can describe just exactly the way you're stuck, then you will immediately recognise that you can't go on that way anymore. So, just saying precisely, writing precisely how you're stuck, or how you're alienated, opens up a door of freedom for you.
Everybody hates dependence, and that's why couples are continuously fighting, not knowing why they are fighting. They have to meditate over it, they have to contemplate over it, why they are fighting. Everything is just an excuse to fight. If you change one excuse, another excuse will be found; if no excuse is left then excuses will be invented, but somehow the fight has to be there.
I regard it in fact as the great advantage of the mathematical technique that it allows us to describe, by means of algebraic equations, the general character of a pattern even where we are ignorant of the numerical values which will determine its particular manifestation.
Things can never be as they were. It's astonishing how we comment on change, as if change is something remarkable. On the contrary, not to change is unnatural, against nature.
It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future.
You must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. There are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are. If nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?
How is it that, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, there are still some who would deny the dangers of climate change? Not surprisingly, the loudest voices are not scientific, and it is remarkable how many economists, lawyers, journalists and politicians set themselves up as experts on the science.
Growth is painful. Change is painful. But, nothing is as painful as staying stuck where you do not belong.
I'm fighting for real change, not just partisan change where everybody else gets rich but you. I'm fighting all of us across the country are fighting for peaceful regime change in our own country. The media donor political complex that's bled this country dry has to be replaced with a new government of, by, and for the people.
Growth can be painful, change can be painful but nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don't belong Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow it only empties today of it strengths
Most people would rather complain about some painful life pattern than dare to meet the level of their own consciousness responsible for its repeated appearance... and therein do the work needed to change it once and for all.
It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.
How can you claim infallibility and claim that in these 114 [drone] strikes there was just one mistake -- one person killed that was a civilian -- and at the same time say, 'Well, we don't really know how many people were killed or who they were, but we know they weren't civilians'? I don't know how you can do that.
In every community in Illinois, same-sex couples have chosen to join together and, in many instances, to raise families of their own. These couples are our relatives and friends, our neighbors, co-workers and parents of our children's classmates. They deserve the same rights and responsibilities that civil marriage offers straight couples.
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