Iyanla Vanzant Quotes

We are quick to stick labels on others - especially those who don't fit in with the norm. 'Harold Fry' is about a broken marriage; 'Perfect' is about a broken person. They are both about finding kindness where you least expect it.

It's hard to be clear about who you are when you are carrying around a bunch of baggage from the past. I've learned to let go and move more quickly into the next place.

A lot of cases, what makes you an interesting and complex person makes you a really horrible person to be with romantically.

To find love is the great human undertaking...and it's always complicated by our compulsions and unconscious patterns, to say nothing of issues of trust and control.

When people come together too young, they try to become one person. As you get older, you realize that you don't want to become one person because then you lose the person you are.

You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what's broken, but to get what's broken blessed.

I would say 99 percent of the time, you're probably attracted to the other person because it is repairing something that's a little broken in yourself. When you're getting into the relationship, whether that becomes an impediment or the rocket fuel, that's the choice of the person who's in it.

I had never understood what people meant when they said they'd rather be alone if they couldn't be in the right relationship. Now I got it.

Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.

When I was in my early twenties, I fell in love at least 20 times a day. You have to be with someone where you think: if the world was full of people like you, I could not be monogamous. As you get older, you get to know yourself a little more. The older you get, the more you realize what you need. And you also realize how your choice in relationships is influenced by how you grew up. Now I feel like I've explored the dynamic of how I grew up, and I'm free to find someone who's really going to be a wonderful companion.

Sometimes broken people stay broken.

You think you're being broken but you're really being broken open...and that's where the healing happens, in those broken places...if you'll allow it.

As a therapist, I am a companion. I try to help people tune into their own wisdom.

When you are in relationship with people, in a thousand and one ways you are provoked, challenged, seduced. Again and again you come to know your pitfalls, your limitations, your anger, your lust, your possessiveness, your jealousy, your sadness, your happiness all moods come and go, you are constantly in a turmoil. But this is the only way to know who you are.

Growth is a detox process, as our weakest, darkest places are sucked up to the surface in order to be released...often, it is not a change in partners but rather a change in perception that delivers us to the love we seek.

We are two different people, Ethan. Just because you could never decide which one of us you were in love with does not make us interchangeable.

It's the idea of baggage. When you hear about people in their 40s boast about not having baggage. I think having no baggage is your baggage. That means that you haven't thrown yourself into the mess of life.

I have always been with men who were type A, alpha males. I must exist because I'm with him, I'd think. But what made them what they were also often meant they were lacking empathy genes. And now I know I don't need an alpha male; I need somebody who's interesting. I'm not pretending that I'm 100 percent healed, so I might not know if a man is right for me right away, but it wouldn't take me seven years to figure it out. Maybe a month or two.

Marriage doesn't create problems. It reveals them. You bring unresolved stuff into it.

But there is a different between mending someone who's broken and finding someone who makes you complete.

This is growing up, having to stomp out love, this is how people turn terrible.

At some point people either had to throw off the wounds of their childhood or go through life permanently crippled

Because dating is a human exercise, it can be a tightrope fraught with danger. You will be dating imperfect people, and some of them are more imperfect than others. In addition, you are not perfect either, so that complicates the picture.

Your past is not your past if it's still impacting your present.

It's part of what we call the Shadow, all the dark parts of us we can't face. It's the thing that, if we don't deal with it, eventually poisons our lives.