Harriet Lerner Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

Pretending can be a bold form of experimentation and inventiveness. In pretending joy or happiness, we may discover or enhance our capacity for it.

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

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

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

Harriet Lerner
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.

Harriet Lerner
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.

Harriet Lerner
Underground issues from one relationship or context invariably fuel our fires in another.

Harriet Lerner
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.

Harriet Lerner
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.

Harriet Lerner
What initially attracts us and what later becomes 'the problem' are usually one and the same.

Harriet Lerner
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.

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

Harriet Lerner
What new meaning might Freud's concept of 'penis envy' take on, if we consider the fact that in his lifetime the words 'clitoris,' 'vulva,' and 'labia' were not included in the dictionary and, in this country, the only word in Webster's dictionary for female genitalia was 'vagina'? Who decides what words are included in the dictionary and who decides what is real?

Harriet Lerner
Feeling inadequate is an occupational hazard of motherhood.

Harriet Lerner