Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

12 annotations • Nov 2022 – Sep 2023 • data

Above all, I didn't want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion—an apt phrase, given John's worldview. In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people's feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.

I once heard creativity described as being the ability to grasp the essence of one thing and the essence of some very different thing and smash them together to create some entirely new thing.
"Resistance is a therapist's friend. Don't fight it—follow it." In other words, try to figure out why it's there in the first place.
In projection, a patient attributes his beliefs to another person; in projective identification, he sends them into another person. For instance, a man may feel angry at his boss at work, then come home and say to his spouse, "You seem angry." He's projecting, because the spouse isn't angry.
In projective identification, on the other hand, the man may feel angry at his boss, return home, and essentially insert his anger into his partner, actually making the partner feel angry. Projective identification is like tossing a hot potato to the other person. The man no longer has to feel his anger, since it's now living inside his partner

I think of a Flannery O'Connor quote: "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."

from Einstein: "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it."

In the hopes of making it work with a person he genuinely enjoyed, he wanted to postpone his confession for the same reason I did: so that we could continue to be together even though we couldn't.

Yes, they may have asked to be told—repeatedly, relentlessly—but after you comply, their initial relief is replaced by resentment. This happens even if things go swimmingly, because ultimately humans want to have agency over their lives, which is why children spend their childhoods begging to make their own decisions

Speed is about time, but it's also closely related to endurance and effort. The faster the speed, the thinking goes, the less endurance or effort required. Patience, on the other hand, requires endurance and effort. It's defined as "the bearing of provocation, annoyance, misfortune, or pain without complaint, loss of temper, irritation, or the like."
The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had made this point more than fifty years earlier: "Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it."