The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

Closure is just as delusive-it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.

Being present, whether with children, with friends, or even with oneself, is hard work. But isn't this attentiveness -- the feeling that someone is trying to think about us -- something we want more than praise?

It is less painful, it turns out, to feel betrayed than to feel forgotten.

Being loved is the problem, because love is a demand - when you're loved, someone wants more of you.

In trying so hard to be different from our parents, we're actually doing much the same thing -- doling out empty praise the way an earlier generation doled out thoughtless criticism. If we do it to avoid thinking about our child and her world, then praise, just like criticism, is ultimately expressing our indifference.

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. But if we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us- we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don't understand.

The future is a fantasy that shapes our present.

we all try to silence painful emotions. but when we succeed in feeling nothing we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us and why.

A lot of people, especially psychoanalysts, assume that happiness can only be found in a couple - but not all of us are made for a relationship.

For a minute, the fantasy frightened her, but ultimately, this fear saved her from feeling alone.

my breakdown was like a furnace and what was burned away was any belief in my own feelings

As he spoke, I had the mental image of a small boy switching on the nightlight, not because he wants to be able to find his parents during the night, but because he fears his parents will forget him - lose him - in the dark.

Being present builds a child’s confidence because it lets the child know that she is worth thinking about.

I think it takes time – it took me time – to realise just how very different people are from each other.

i knew tht we all have the capacity to act in self-destructive ways, nevertheless i had a kind of faith that the desire to live was more powerful. now, instead, i felt its fragility. peter's suicide made me feel that the battle between the forces of life and death was far more evenly pitched.

Experience has taught me that our childhoods leave in us stories like this – stories we never found a way to voice, because no one helped us to find the words. When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us – we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.

At one time or another, we all try to silence painful emotions. But when we succeed in feeling nothing we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us, and why.

...the past is alive in the present. But the future is alive in the present too. The future is not some place we’re going to, but an idea is our mind now. It is something we’re creating, that in turn creates us. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present.

Ultimately, the thrill created by being told ‘You’re so clever’ gave way to an increase in anxiety and a drop in self-esteem, motivation and performance.

We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses.

La negatividad -el estado mental de preferiría no hacerlo- es nuestro deseo de darle la espalda al mundo, rechazando todo tipo de necesidades y apetitos.

En otras palabras, la fantasías paranoides son perturbadoras, pero también son un mecanismo de defensa. Nos protegen de un desastre emocional mayor; a saber, el sentimiento de que nadie se preocupa por nosotros, de que no le importamos a nadie.