Top 100 Harriet Lerner Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “If we only listened with the same passion that we feel about being heard.”

— Harriet Lerner

2. “Anxiety is extremely contagious, but so is calm.”

— Harriet Lerner

3. “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

4. “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

5. “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

6. “Whole-hearted listening is the greatest spiritual gift you can give to the other person.”

— Harriet Lerner

7. “The strongest relationships are between two people who can live without each other but don’t want to.”

— Harriet Lerner

8. “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

9. “People marry with a deep longing that their partner will tend to their wounds, not throw salt in them. Honor your partner’s vulnerability.”

— Harriet Lerner

10. “If you pursue a distancer, he or she will distance more. Consider it a fundamental law of physics.”

— Harriet Lerner

11. “Keep in mind that the tendency to be judgmental – toward yourself or another person – is a good barometer of how anxious or stressed out you are. Judging others is simply the flip side of judging yourself.”

— Harriet Lerner

12. “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

13. “The rush of sexual attraction can act like a drug and blur our capacity for clear thinking. This can lead us to distance ourselves from our friends or even abandon our life plan for someone who couldn’t otherwise be relied on to water our plants and feed our cat.”

— Harriet Lerner

14. “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

15. “Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is to stop trying to be helpful.”

— Harriet Lerner

16. “It is an act of courage to acknowledge our own uncertainty and sit with it for a while.”

— Harriet Lerner

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to.”

— Harriet Lerner

21. “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

22. “If you pay attention, you may find that it is not fear that stops you from doing the brave and true thing in your daily life. Rather, the problem is avoidance. You want to feel comfortable, so you avoid doing the thing that will evoke fear and other disquieting emotions. Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run, but it will never make you less afraid.”

— Harriet Lerner

23. “Silence can pose a greater threat than the difficult truth.”

— Harriet Lerner

24. “Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.”

— Harriet Lerner

25. “Fear has never helped anybody make good choices. It leads to clinging when we should be walking.”

— Harriet Lerner

26. “Your children are not little mirrors reflecting back the good or bad job you’ve done.”

— Harriet Lerner

27. “When we do not put our primary emotional energy into solving our own problems, we take on other people’s problems as our own.”

— Harriet Lerner

28. “Letting go of anger and hate requires us to give up the hope for a different past, along with the hope of a fantasized future. What we gain is a life more in the present, where we are not mired in prolonged anger and resentment that doesn’t serve us.”

— Harriet Lerner

29. “The best apologies are short, and don’t go on to include explanations that run the risk of undoing them. An apology isn’t the only chance you ever get to address the underlying issue. The apology is the chance you get to establish the ground for future communication. This is an important and often overlooked distinction.”

— Harriet Lerner

30. “When you can’t see yourself objectively, you won’t see anyone else objectively, either.”

— Harriet Lerner

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

— Harriet Lerner

32. “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

33. “As long as we can feel hope, there is hope.”

— Harriet Lerner

34. “The challenge in all intimate relationships is to preserve both the “I” and the “we” without losing either when the going gets tough. If we’re faced with a choice, we need to choose speech over silence, keep our behavior in line with our stated values and beliefs – and save ourselves first.”

— Harriet Lerner

35. “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

36. “Feeling essentially superior to other people is as sure a sign of poor self-esteem as feeling essentially inferior.”

— Harriet Lerner

37. “Anger is inevitable when our lives consist of giving in and going along; when we assume responsibility for other people’s feelings and reactions; when we relinquish our primary responsibility to proceed with our own growth and ensure the quality of our own lives; when we behave as if having a relationship is more important than having a self.”

— Harriet Lerner

38. “The miracle is that your children will love you with all your imperfections if you can do the same for them.”

— Harriet Lerner

39. “I’m a good example of wanting to apologize only for my precise share of a problem – as I calculate it, of course – and I expect my husband Steve to apologize for his share, also as I calculate it. Since we’re not always of one mind on the math, it can lead to the theater of the absurd.”

— Harriet Lerner

40. “Intensity is not the same as intimacy, although we tend to confuse these two words.”

— Harriet Lerner

41. “Through words we come to know the other person – and to be known. This knowing is at the heart of our deepest longings for intimacy and connection with others. How relationships unfold with the most important people in our lives depends on courage and clarity in finding voice.”

— Harriet Lerner

42. “If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.”

— Harriet Lerner

43. “Love alone is never a good enough reason to marry.”

— Harriet Lerner

44. “The bolder and more courageous you are, the more you will learn about yourself.”

— Harriet Lerner

45. “In my professional work I am struck by how often sibling relationships fall apart around the life-cycle stage of caring for elderly parents, and dealing with a parents death and it’s aftermath. Failed apologies have the most serious consequences at stressful points in the life-cycle, and loss is the most challenging adaptational task that family members have to come to terms with.”

— Harriet Lerner

46. “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

47. “Nothing is more fragile than a single snowflake,” it said. “But look what they can do when they stick together.”

— Harriet Lerner

48. “Feeling inadequate is an occupational hazard of motherhood.”

— Harriet Lerner

49. “Differences don’t just threaten and divide us. They also inform, enrich, and enliven us.”

— Harriet Lerner

50. “All the assertiveness training and communication skills in the world can’t prevent a relationship from becoming fertile ground for silence and stonewalling, or for anger and frustration, or for just plain hard times. No book or expert can protect us from the range of painful emotions that make us human. We can influence the other person through our words and silence, but we can never control the outcome. That said, what we can.”

— Harriet Lerner