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Taking Care: An Alternative to Therapy (Psychology/self-help) QUOTES

Taking Care: An Alternative to Therapy (Psychology/self-help) QUOTES

1 " The task of couples who wish both to stay married and to maintain some kind of contact with reality must be to learn to accept in the self and permit (and tolerate) in the other an inevitable degree of isolation and 'difference'. There must be, as it were, permissible areas of non-understanding, recognition of untouchable and impenetrable uniqueness, preparedness to enter some experiences entirely alone and unaided by emotional support, not because such support is being wilfully withheld (and might be available in a 'better' relationship) but because its supply is illusory. This calls for a tolerance of pain, and an understanding of its nature, which few of us these days are able to command. Each partner needs to see in the other a man or woman with needs, weaknesses, fears and idiosyncrasies parallel to (though far from identical with) his or her own, not the more or less adequate purveyor, or indeed recipient, of satisfaction – 'love' and 'understanding' – which are the stuff of commodified relationship. "

― David Smail , Taking Care: An Alternative to Therapy (Psychology/self-help)

2 " [T]he course of development most typical of our society is ... the transformation of a lively and promising human infant, through a period of indoctrination, disillusion and rebellion, into an emotionally constricted, competitively hostile adult saturated in the values of commodity consumption, desperately conforming, anxiously pursuing an ever-receding 'happiness', bereft of any ability to criticize the society in which he or she is located, pathetically eager to enjoy those of its 'fruits' (consumer durables) which are within reach. This is the great, inertially stable backbone of our society, the guardian of its values and the target of its mass media, working tirelessly in the interests of others and blindly against its own, forced by the crushing vice of economic power into reproducing itself reliably and endlessly in its children. "

― David Smail , Taking Care: An Alternative to Therapy (Psychology/self-help)