All quotes from
Harriet's book
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.
Truth telling, like peacemaking, doesn't just bloom in our
midst. Sometimes it has to be plotted
and planned.
We can usually be more supportive to distressed persons we love
simply by caring about them -- by being emotionally present with out pulling
back from their pain and without trying to take it away.
Rushing in to offer advice -- or to cheer someone up -- may reflect
our own inability to remain emotionally present in the face of another person's
problems and pain, or to experience our own.
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.
Our
family is the deck of cards fate handed us, giving us virtually no say
whatsoever about where we landed.
With age
comes more discernment, more knowledge of the self, and less willingness to
compromise or betray the self to keep relationships calm -- or to keep them at
all.
The
recognition at midlife that the future doesn't stretch our forever challenges
us to figure out what really matters and to speak wisely.
When
we're drowning in emotions, it's impossible to think creatively or
clearly. We may think we're thinking,
but in reality we're just reacting.
Come to
understand that the other person's insensitive response is fueled by anxiety
and history -- not lack of love.
The
challenge of intimacy tends not to evoke our most mature selves.
The
clarity of our voice rests on the clarity of our self-awareness.
A
bottom-line position evolves from a focus on the self, from a deeply felt
awareness -- which one cannot fake, pretend, or borrow -- of what we need and
feel entitled to, and the limits of our tolerance.
Honesty
is the only foundation on which trust can be built.
Silence
and stonewalling are simply ways of managing intense emotional reactivity.
Kindness,
timing, and tact are not the opposite of honesty: rather they are precisely
what makes honesty possible with the most difficult people and in the most
difficult circumstances.
No one
person creates the pattern in which all the other family members participate.
We need
to be able to listen before we can get our own message across.
If you
want a recipe for failure in any important relationship, just dig in your heels
and refuse to change yourself until after the other person shapes up.
Having an
authentic voice is not about speaking from a place of angry reactivity,
righteousness, or criticism. Rather,
it's about constructing a more solid and whole self, modeling the behavior we
want from others, and thinking about relationship problems with clarity,
creativity, and wisdom.
Our
conversations invert us. Through our
speech and our silence, we become smaller or larger selves. Through our speech and our silence, we
diminish or enhance the other person, and we narrow or expand the possibilities
between us.