Harriet Lerner Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.

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

Harriet Lerner
Don't count on the power of your love or your nagging to create something that wasn't there to begin with.

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

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

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

Harriet Lerner
Silence can pose a greater threat than the difficult truth.

Harriet Lerner
Most of us experience fear as a kind of stop sign or flashing red light that warns: 'Danger! Do not enter!' But we may need to decode that signal and consider what it's trying to convey. 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.

Harriet Lerner
Intensity is not the same as intimacy, although we tend to confuse these two words.

Harriet Lerner
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.

Harriet Lerner
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.

Harriet Lerner
Nothing you say can ensure that the other person will get it, or respond the way you want. You may never exceed his threshold of deafness.

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

Harriet Lerner
Wherever you find a wife and mother-in-law slugging it out, you'll find a son who's not speaking up to either his mother or his wife.

Harriet Lerner
No book or expert can protect us from the range of painful emotions that make us human.

Harriet Lerner
Men are often (though not always) the pursuers for sex, just like women are often (though not always) the pursuers for conversation.

Harriet Lerner
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").

Harriet Lerner
Relationships are most likely to fail when we don't address problems or hold our partner accountable for unfair or irresponsible behavior... the ability to clarify our values, beliefs, and life goals--and then to keep our behavior congruent with them--is at the heart of a solid marriage.

Harriet Lerner
If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.

Harriet Lerner
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.

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
Whatever your sex fantasy is with your partner, consider it normal.

Harriet Lerner
Kids want nothing more than for all the important adults in their life to get along.

Harriet Lerner
Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.

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

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

Harriet Lerner
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.

Harriet Lerner
If what we are doing with our anger is not achieving the desired result, it would seem logical to try something else.

Harriet Lerner
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.

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

Harriet Lerner