Top 100 Harriet Lerner Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “If only our passion to understand others were as great as our passion to be understood. Were this so, all our apologies would be truly meaningful and healing.”

— Harriet Lerner

52. “Indeed, in many situations wisdom lies in being strategic rather than spontaneous. This is especially true when we’re dealing with a difficult person, a hot issue, or a tense situation. The enormous challenge is to make wise decisions about how and when to say what to whom, and even before that, to know what we really want to say and what we hope to accomplish by saying it.”

— Harriet Lerner

53. “If what we are doing with our anger is not achieving the desired result, it would seem logical to try something different.”

— Harriet Lerner

54. “We can influence the other person through our words and silence, but we can never control the outcome.”

— Harriet Lerner

55. “Yet all of us are vulnerable to intense, nonproductive angry reactions in our current relationships if we do not deal openly and directly with emotional issues from our first family – in particular, losses and cutoffs.”

— Harriet Lerner

56. “Nothing, but nothing, will block the awareness of anger so effectively as guilt and self-doubt. Our society cultivates guilt feelings in women such that many of us still feel guilty if we are anything less than an emotional service station to others.”

— Harriet Lerner

57. “When anxiety disrupts functioning, it’s psychiatric illness.”

— Harriet Lerner

58. “No book or expert can protect us from the range of painful emotions that make us human.”

— Harriet Lerner

59. “Underground issues from one relationship or context invariably fuel our fires in another.”

— Harriet Lerner

60. “But one of the hallmarks of emotional maturity is to recognize the validity of multiple realities and to understand that people think, feel, and react differently. Often we behave as if “closeness” means “sameness.”

— Harriet Lerner

61. “We all fear change, even as we seek it.”

— Harriet Lerner

62. “Our society cultivates guilt feelings in women such that many of us still feel guilty if we are anything less than an emotional service station to others.”

— Harriet Lerner

63. “You can’t evaluate a prospective partner if you insulate your relationship from your family and friends – and his.”

— Harriet Lerner

64. “To listen with an open heart and ask questions to better help us understand the other person is a spiritual exercise, in the truest sense of the word.”

— Harriet Lerner

65. “Our society doesn’t promote self-acceptance and it never will. First of all, self-acceptance doesn’t sell products. Capitalism would fall if we liked ourselves the way we are now. Also, people who feel shamed and inadequate themselves tend to pass it on. I’m sure you’ve noticed that many individuals and groups try to enhance their self-esteem by diminishing others.”

— Harriet Lerner

66. “We need to hear the sound of our voice for what we think and need.”

— Harriet Lerner

67. “Don’t use “below-the-belt” tactics. These include: blam- ing, interpreting, diagnosing, labeling, analyzing, preaching, moralizing, ordering, warning, interrogating, ridiculing, and lecturing. Don’t put the other person down.”

— Harriet Lerner

68. “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

69. “Don’t count on the power of your love or your nagging to create something that wasn’t there to begin with.”

— Harriet Lerner

70. “Venting anger may serve to maintain, and even rigidify, the old rules and patterns in a relationship, thus ensuring that change does not occur.”

— Harriet Lerner

71. “Kids want nothing more than for all the important adults in their life to get along.”

— Harriet Lerner

72. “We’ll always be disappointed if we believe that we can plan for a peak experience and make it happen. True joy can’t be anticipated or planned. It just strikes.”

— Harriet Lerner

73. “We commonly confuse closeness with sameness and view intimacy as the merging of two separate I’s into one worldview.”

— Harriet Lerner

74. “A marital therapist recently teased me, “Are you writing another book to help women speak up? I’m trying to help my clients be quiet.” Then she said more seriously, “Why do people think they have to tell each other everything they feel?”

— Harriet Lerner

75. “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

76. “Many of our problems with anger occur when we choose between having a relationship and having a self.”

— Harriet Lerner

77. “The first world we find ourselves in is a family that is not of our choosing.”

— Harriet Lerner

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

— Harriet Lerner

79. “We need to listen carefully to the wisdom of our symptoms and to try to decode their meaning, because some of us have learned to settle, to fall silent; to deny that unfair circumstances exist or matter, and then to call our compromises “life.” But our bodies, our deeper unconscious selves, remain harder to fool.”

— Harriet Lerner

80. “My debt to feminism is simply incalculable. Feminism allowed me to see past a ‘reality’ that I had once taken as a given. It helped me to pay attention to countless voices, my own included, that I had been taught ‘don’t count.’ Feminism allows me to maintain hope.”

— Harriet Lerner

81. “We diminish people when we don’t allow them to help us, or when we act like we don’t need anything from them and they have nothing to offer us. We also diminish them when we allow them to go on and on, even after we’ve exceeded our capacity to pay attention.”

— Harriet Lerner

82. “Respect the fact that all you do and are now, has evolved for a good reason and serves an important purpose.”

— Harriet Lerner

83. “People’s sense of self worth is pivotal to their ability to look clearly at the hurt they’ve caused. The more solid one’s sense of self regard, the more likely that that person can feel empathy and compassion for the hurt party, and apologize from an authentic center.”

— Harriet Lerner

84. “Truth is, 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. She may never love you, not now or ever. And if you are courageous in initiating, extending, or deepening a difficult conversation, you may feel even more anxious and uncomfortable, at least in the short run.”

— Harriet Lerner

85. “Moving in this direction requires us to clarify – to ourselves and others – what’s important to us. Having an authentic voice means that: We can openly share competence as well as problems and vulnerability. We can warm things up and calm them down. We can listen and ask questions that allow us to truly know the other person and to gather information about anything that may affect us. We can say what we think and feel, state differences, and allow the.”

— Harriet Lerner

86. “We cannot survive when our identity is defined by or limited to our worst behavior. Every human must be able to view the self as complex and multidimensional. When this fact is obscured, people will wrap themselves in layers of denial in order to survive. How can we apologize for something we are, rather than something we did?”

— Harriet Lerner

87. “One might debate whether it is preferable to be a cat or a person, but why get into it? If you are reading this now, you are not a cat and never will be. So along with the good days, you’re going to experience the entire range of painful emotions that make us human.”

— Harriet Lerner

88. “Remember that women have a long legacy of assuming responsibility for other people’s feelings and for caring for others at the expense of the self. Some of us may care for others by picking up their dirty socks or doing their “feeling work”; some by being less strong, self-directed, and competent than we can be so as to avoid threatening those important to us. Changing our legacy is possible but not easy. Think small to begin with, but think.”

— Harriet Lerner

89. “What initially attracts us and what later becomes ‘the problem’ are usually one and the same.”

— Harriet Lerner

90. “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

91. “Sometimes, the failure of the other person to apologize when they should hits us harder than the deed they should apologize for.”

— Harriet Lerner

92. “Whatever brings you joy and zest will enhance your ability to act bravely.”

— Harriet Lerner

93. “As many have observed, it is easy to tell a lie, but it is almost impossible to tell only one.”

— Harriet Lerner

94. “Separateness” does not mean emotional distance, which is simply one means of managing anxiety or emotional intensity. Rather, separateness refers to the preservation of the “I” within the “we” – the ability to acknowledge and respect differences and to achieve authenticity within the context of connectedness.”

— Harriet Lerner

95. “The right to be different, whether by choice or necessity, is our greatest right as human beings. And dealing with differences is the greatest of all human challenges. People react anxiously and fearfully to differences. We learn to hate, glorify, deny, exaggerate, or eradicate a difference. Or we try to get comfortable by shaming the different person or group.”

— Harriet Lerner

96. “Differences don’t just threaten and divide us. They also inform, enrich, and enliven us. Indeed, differences are the only way we learn. If our intimate relationships were composed only of people identical to ourselves, our personal growth would come to an abrupt halt.”

— Harriet Lerner

97. “Likewise, the other person has a right to know us accurately, to consider the relationship and make plans for the future based on facts, not fantasies or projections.”

— Harriet Lerner

98. “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

99. “I feel calmed and relieved when my husband knocks at my study door in the middle of a fight, puts his arms around me, and says, “I love you. This is stupid. Let’s just drop it.” Like two kids in the sandbox, we’re suddenly light and playful again.”

— Harriet Lerner

100. “Our goal will be to have relationships with both men and women that do not operate at the expense of the self, and to have a self that does not operate at the expense of the other.”

— Harriet Lerner