5 posts tagged “quotes”

I have a collection of quotes from various places. This week I decided to sort through them with the intent of having quotes in my office that are "therapeutic". Good thing I get to make the decision on that one. Anyway, as I'm going through literally hundreds of quotes I start thinking about the people who find the quotes. If I had the time then I'd try and find the real source of the quotes instead of just taking the shortcut. One of my favorite quotes is by Ralph Waldo Emerson and so with the plan of finding the quote, I bought a book. I'm about ten pages in and have been there for about the length of time I've been in my new place.

One day, I'll be someone who finds quotes in books and posts them somewhere. It makes me miss the times when there were people who actually wrote about success and virtues and honor and all that jazz. Not that there are not people that do it now, but it just seems to not be as abundant. Oh the old days, haha. :) In any case, I should finish this RWE book so I can justify buying the next one. So far the most quoted people are (aside from the obvious) Eric Hoffer and George Eliot.

We'll see how long it takes me to pick that back up again.

I was sitting at my practicum site working on paperwork when I overheard a conversation. There was a therapist, a mother and a son getting on the elevator and the mother said "Watch your toes son, remember, mommy is dangerous."

At first I laughed at it. But then I thought about it a little more and it's less funny. Last week I was sitting outside waiting for my classmates to pick me up because I finished early and I watched this same mother/son combination leave the building and wondered many things about them.

The mother is the resident of a motorized wheelchair. The boy is probably five or six. Maybe a small seven. He was lagging far behind her to get to the car and leave the hospital. Most of my musings was trying to figure out how she was going to get out of the wheelchair and into the car and then put the chair in a place where she could bring it with them. Then, if she's capable of using a walker from the chair to the door of the car...is she really someone that requires a wheelchair or is she just lazy?

I'm not saying that every person in a wheelchair is lazy. That's the last thing coming to my mind. It was obvious that she wasn't seriously handicapped because she would have had assistance with her. More assistance than a six-year-old boy at least. I can just imagine how difficult it would be to be a parent of an active boy if I were wheelchair-bound by either necessity or choice. Granted, there are those who have serious pain and use chairs for that reason. There are all kinds of reasons, but like I said, I went through a lot of variations in my mind as I was waiting.

The comment I heard today caught me off guard because it seemed...I don't know the best word...selfish? Small boy. Huge chair. Mom warns the boy that she's "dangerous" and I'm guessing she complains when he stands away from her or keeps himself emotionally safe from her. And, is it really the job of a six-year-old boy to watch out and make sure he doesn't get hurt by his mom? Maybe I'm wrong, but isn't that usually the job of the parents to make sure their children don't get hurt. Or at least to try to do what they can to prevent it? It almost sounded like "I'm going to do what I want. I'm not going to put forth the effort to pay attention to someone as small/unimportant as you, so you better just take care of yourself."

Yeah. She sure is dangerous.

[*sidenote* I have never met these people. I don't know what their reporting problem is. There are certain things I could pick up from the twenty minutes I have watched them. Others are just general thoughts and not really out to point the finger at all physically handicapped parents. There are good and bad parents in every category and I will never know if this woman truly is either.]

A week or so ago I had a conversation with a friend regarding forgiveness. I had the next day off and I picked up a book I purchased a while back, but hadn't made the time to actually read it.

In our discussion it was suggested that it was possible to forgive others without an apology. While there is part of me that has grown up hearing the Christian philosophy that we should "turn the other cheek" and "forgive seventy times seven". I've heard a great deal about how failing to forgive impacts the person that is unwilling to forgive. At the same time, there have been people in my past that have acted in injurious ways toward me. Maybe they do not know they hurt me or they do not remember the events. The majority of those "smaller" instances have been forgiven. The larger ones, especially the ones that continue to be justified by the "offending" person are rather difficult to outright drop.

Maybe I'm unforgiving because of my inability or unwillingness to just "drop" something. While we were doing our ropes course training we functioned under the "Full Value Contract". I'm pretty sure I covered that before so I'm not going into that all over again. The idea was that we were honest with our feedback toward others so that we could help them 1) become better therapists 2) friends and 3) build trust.

Often, people are unwilling to tell someone that they hurt them because there is a risk and vulnerability in that confession. There is this belief permeating society that we aren't allowed to be hurt and if we are, we should just hide it. Or it should only last for X amount of days. When you say nothing, that person will continue to do it, injuring your relationship, without even knowing it. Granted, if you tell someone that something hurts you or even annoys you and they choose not to change in an effort to protect you, there are other choices that must be made. So many times when there are "repeat offenses" nobody speaks up and the person continues to act in painful ways and then the "victim" only feels that this injury is intentional because the other person should know that hurts them.

It doesn't work that way. There is a section in the first chapter that addresses this argument. To assist in understanding, I'll quote the entire section. If you disagree (or agree), please share your thoughts.

"Genuine forgiveness and reconciliation are two-person transactions that are enabled by apologies. Some, particularly within the Christian worldview, have taught forgiveness without an apology. They often quote the words of Jesus, "If you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." Thus, they say to the wife whose husband has been unfaithful and continues in his adulterous affair, "You must forgive him, or God will not forgive you." Such an interpretation of Jesus' teachings fails to reckon with the rest of the scriptural teachings on forgiveness. The Christian is instructed to forgive others in the same manner that God forgives us. How does God forgive us? The Scriptures say that if we confess our sins, God will forgive our sins. Nothing in the Old or New Testament indicates that God forgives the sins of people who do not confess and repent of their sins.

"When a pastor encourages a wife to forgive her erring husband while he still continues in his wrongdoing, the minister is requiring of the wife something that God Himself does not do. Jesus' teaching is that we are to be always willing to forgive, as God is always willing to forgive, those who repent. Some will object to this idea, indicating that Jesus forgave those who were killing Him. But that is not what the Scriptures say. Rather, Jesus prayed, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." Jesus expressed His heart of compassion and His desire to see His murderers forgiven. That should be our desire and our prayer. But their forgiveness came later when they acknowledged that they had indeed killed the Son of God.

"Forgiveness without an apology is often encouraged for the benefit of the forgiver rather than the benefit of the offender. Such forgiveness does not lead to reconciliation. When there is no apology, the Christian is encouraged to release the person to God for justice and to release one's anger to God through forbearance. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great theologian who was martyred by the Nazis in a concentration camp in 1945, argued against the "preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance." He referred to such forgiveness as "cheap grace...which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner."

"Genuine forgiveness removes the barrier that was created by the offense and opens the door to restoring trust over time. If the relationship was warm and intimate before the offense, it can become loving again. If the relationship was simply one of casual acquaintance, it may grow to a deeper level through the dynamic process of forgiveness. If the offense was created by an unknown person such as a rapist or a murderer, there was no relationship to be restored. If they have apologized and you have forgiven, each of you is free to go on living your lives, although the criminal will still face the judicial system created by the culture to deal with deviant behavior."

For me, it makes sense. I'm not saying it's impossible to forgive people overall, but without a confession/apology there is little or no chance of repairing the previous relationship. In a later chapter there is discussion regarding what to do when no apology is offered. A quote in that section that stood out to me read as follows: "...moral failures always stand as a barrier that can be removed only by apologizing and forgiveness."

While the details regarding languages of apology address nearly every type of relationship and make valid points, I have found that the sections regarding forgiveness are the hidden pearls in this book. I expect to use these in several scenarios over the years in my therapy sessions.

Over the time in my classes several books have been suggested as necessary reading. Seeing as my readers likely have a little more free time than I do, I'm going to continue to post the books here, but this is the list so far. :)

I'd pretty much read all of them, but I can't very well go buy every book they suggest. :) Eventually. In any case, there are a couple things from class last week that I never got to post. Particularly a couple things Hickman said.

"Sin is self-centered. The more you do, the more self-centered we become." - All I'm going to say is . . . DUH!

"Comparison kills contentment." - This statement was actually in reference to pornography in particular, but I think it counts for everything. When you begin comparing things in your life with things in the lives of others or the lives of pretend others then you are not content with your own life.

Then another book I just want to read. :)

 

I finished my family story early this morning. From about 4:30 to 7:45 I was writing and managed to tell the story instead of live it. I left out a lot of things, but page restrictions made it such. One day I may finish it all, for my own clarity, but today is not that day and that day isn't coming anytime soon.

In other news, a couple weeks ago I was taking a break and decided to read one of my "coffee table" books. I picked up "The World According to Mr. Rogers" and read through it and found myself wanting to mark many of the quotes in it. If you haven't read the book, you should. For this purpose, I'm going to post the quotes that I found particularly poignant. :) I should note, all of these quotes are credited to Mr. Fred Rogers unless otherwise noted.

"Some days 'doing the best we can' may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn't perfect-on any front- and doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else."

"There is a nurturing element to all human beings, whenever they themselves have been nurtured, and it's going to be one way or another."

"Part of the problem with the word disabilities is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities."

"Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn't have to be a lonely kind of thing."

"All life events are formative. All contribute to what we become, year by year, as we go on growing. As my friend the poet Kenneth Koch once said, 'You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you have ever been!'"

"I believe it is a fact of life that what we have is less important than what we make out of what we have. The same holds true for families: It's not how many people there are in a family that counts, but rather the feelings among the people who are there."

"I must be an emotional archaeologist because I keep looking for the roots of things, particularly the roots of behavior and why I feel certain ways about certain things."

"Deep within us-no matter who we are-there lives a feeling of wanting to be lovable, of wanting to be the kind of person that others like to be with. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving."

"Each generation, in its turn, is a link between all that has gone before and all that comes after. That is true genetically, and it is equally true in the transmission of identity. Our parents gave us what they were able to give, and we took what we could of it and made it part of ourselves. If we knew our grandparents, and even great-grandparents, we will have taken from them what they could offer us, too. All that helped to make us who we are. We, in our turn, will offer what we can of ourselves to our children and their offspring."

"It's the people we love the most who can make us feel the gladdest . . . and the maddest! Love and anger are such a puzzle! It's hard for us, as adults, to understand and manage our angry feelings toward parents, spouses, and children, or to keep their anger toward us in perspective. It's a different kind of anger from the kind we may feel toward strangers because it is so deply intertwined with caring and attachment."

"Forgiving and forgetting are often paired together, but the one certainly doesn't necessarily follow the other. Some injuries, real or imagined, we may never be able to forget, even though we say we've forgiven them. Other injuries we may never even be able to say that we forgive. Those are the ones, it seems to me, most likely to involve people we've loved, and so I'm inclined to look at what our experiences of forgiveness may have been like from the first people who loved us.
    The first time we required forgiveness, we probably did something we shouldn't  have when our closest grown-ups thought we should have known better. We made someone angry. We were to blame. What did the first brush with blame begin to teach us?
    If we were fortunate, we began to learn that 'to err is human.' Even good people sometimes do bad things. Errors might mean corrections, apologies, repairs, but they didn't mean that we, as a person, were a bad person in the sight of those we loved. The second thing we learned (if we were fortunate) was that having someone we loved get mad at us did not mean that person had stopped loving us; we had their unconditional love, and that meant that we would have their forgiveness, too."

"There's something unique about being a member of a family that really needs you in order to function well. One of the deepest longings a person can have is to feel needed and essential."

"I received a letter from a parent who wrote: 'Mister Rogers, how do you do it? I wish I were like you. I want to be patient and quiet and even-tempered, and always speak respectfully to my children. But that just isn't my personality. I often lose my patience and even scream at my children. I want to change from an impatient person into a patient person, from an angry person into a gentle one.'
    Just as it takes time for children to understand what real love is, it takes time for parents to understand that being always patient, quiet, even-tempered, and respectful isn't necessarily what 'good' parents are. In fact, parents help children by expressing a wide range of feelings-including appropriate anger. All children need to see that the adults in their lives can feel anger and not hurt themselves or anyone else when they feel that way."

"I believe that infants and babies whose mothers give them loving comfort whenever and however they can are truly fortunate ones. I think they're more likely to find life's times of trouble manageable, and I think they may also turn out to be the adults most able to pass loving concern along to the generations that follow after them."

"In the external scheme of things, shining moments are as brief as the twinkling of an eye, yet such twinkling of an eye, yet twinklings are what eternity is made of-moments when we human beings can say 'I love you,' 'I'm proud of you,' 'I forgive you,' 'I'm grateful for you.' That's what eternity is made of: invisible, imperishable good stuff."

"When we love a person, we accept him or her exactly as is: the lovely with the unlovely, the strong along with the fearful, the true mixed in with the facade, and of course, the only way we can do it is by accepting ourselves that way."

"There is no normal life that is free of pain. It's the very wrestling nwith our problems that can be the impetus for our growth."

"I hope you're proud of yourself for the times you've said 'yes,' when all it meant was extra work for you and was seemingly helpful only to someone else."

"I wrote in a song that in the long, long trip of growing, there are stops along the way. It's important to know when we need to stop, reflect, and receive. In our competitive world, that might be called a waste of time. I've learned that those times can be the preamble to periods of normal growth. Recently, I declared a day to be alone with myself. I took a long drive and played a tape. When I got to the mountains, I read and prayed and listened and slept. In fact, I can't remember having a calmer sleep in a long, long time. The next day I went back to work and did more than I usually get done in three days."

"It's true that we bring a great deal of our own upbringing on into our adult lives and our lives as parents; but it's true, too, that we can change some of the things that we would like to change. It can be hard, but it can be done."

"A few years ago I was asked to be a part of a White House meeting about children and television. Many broadcasters from all over the country were there. During my speech, I asked the audience to spend one minute thinking of someone who'd made a difference in the person they'd become. As I was leaving that enormous room, I heard something from one of the military guards who was all dressed up in white and gold, looking like a statue. I heard him whisper, 'Thanks, Mister Rogers.'
    So I went over to him and noticed his eyes were moist, and he said, 'Well, sir, as I listened to you today, I started to remember my grandfather's brother. I haven't thought about him in years. I was only seven when he died, but just before that, he gave me his favorite fishing rod. I've just been thinking, maybe that's why I like fishing so much and why I like to show the kids in my neighborhood all about it.'
    Well, as far as I'm concerned, the major reason for my going to Washington that day was that military guard and nourishing the memory of his great-uncle. What marvelous mysteries we're privileged to be part of! Why would that young man be assigned to guard that particular room on that particular day? Slender threads like that weave this complex fabric of our life together."

"Whether we're a preschooler or a young teen, a graduating senior or a retired person, we human beings all want to know that we're acceptable, that our being alive somehow makes a difference in the lives of others."

"One of the mysteries is that as unlike we are, one human being from another, we also share much in common. Our lives begin the same way, by birth. The love and interdependence of parents and children is universal, and so are the many difficulties parents and children have in becoming separate from one another. As we grow, we laugh and cry at many of the same things. At the end, we all leave the same way-by death. Yet no two threads-no two lives-in that vast tapestry of existence have ever been, or ever will be, the same."

Well, that's all I have from Mister Rogers. I love this book and it is therapy in itself. Buy it, read it, love it.