Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

You can run away from home But you can't run away from your pain I sit here alone There's always someone else to blame.

Explanations don't comfort. You won't feel better if you know why. It won't hurt any less.

When we have emotional pain in our lives, we are going to seek to relieve that pain in some way.

I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?

I think that, very often there's a pain that's just too painful to touch. You'll break apart. And I think her mother's death and disappearance and abandonment was something she just never could deal with. Eleanor Roosevelt, when she's really very unwell in 1936, she takes to her bed. She has a mysterious flu.

Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

I grew up bar-singing and saw all kinds of ways people tried to outrun their emotional pain. It doesn't work. You end up with the original pain, as well as new pain added on top of it from the tactics you used trying to avoid it in the first place. It's best to take a deep breath, bolster yourself, and walk through it.

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

One day at a time. You rise, you eat, you bathe, and you talk to the few people you can tolerate while feeling so wretched. Over time, it hurts a little less. Then a little less. And so on...Until one morning, you will awake and realize the pain is only a memory. It will always be with you, but it will eventually lack the power to cripple you.

I try to get through emotional pain and not go around it, it always ends sooner that way. I also use chocolate.

I have a skill set that often helps me get through hurtful moments or experiences. However, sometimes when the pain cuts really deep, my normal go-to exercises just won't work.

I realize now I didn't really want to die. I just wanted to stop the hurt and pain.

No one wants to spend too long inside their own darkness.

I believe that everybody comes from pain and a certain amount of dysfunction.

People have so much pain inside them that they're not even aware of.

The root of the problem I have is anxiety, and it's all derived from something - I'm just going to say it, some kind of sadness. It manifests in so many different ways and it affects people differently.

It's important to wallow and grieve when you have a health issue. I don't think you really get the best stuff out of life until you've had the worst stuff.

What's wrong with being angry? There's a lot of stuff to be angry about. If you're angry, anger covers pain. I don't know if you can truly deal with pain.

It's not easy to talk about things that are still hurting.

If you hear somebody say something absolutely horrendous about their own life, in quite a flippant, offbeat kind of way, when you meet people clearly trying to be strong and brave, the ones who are really good at it are the ones who break my heart the most.

I started having anxiety attacks and panic attacks. I would cry myself to sleep every night and wish I could go back in time and get my life back and be a human again instead of a photo op.

I couldn't deal with a normal life.

For me, 2016-17 was hell, and there's no way around it for me. I went through pain, depression, fear, doubt, and all of that was a journey that I was able to write through, and then I wrote when I was coming out of that dark place as well.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.