Emotional Systems

Excerpts We Like

Quotes

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People separate because they can’t separate.

/ Edwin Friedman /

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Don’t do something, just stand there.

/ MurrAy Bowen /

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The main finding of our study at NIMH (1954-59) was the concept of the family as an emotional unit. It means that symptoms in one person reflect emotional processes involving the entire unit.

/ MURRAY BOWEN /

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You never get the problem you can handle.

/ Edwin Friedman /

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Playfulness is a broad spectrum antibiotic.

/ Charles Ten Eyck /

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Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.

/ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross /

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To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

/ Joseph Chilton Pearce /

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Certainty is the enemy of change.

/ Salvador Minuchin /

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Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.

/ Henry David Thoreau /

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The first thing to do is to choose a sacred place and live in it.

/ Pawnee Tribe Elder, Tahirussawichi /

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You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours.

/ Anne-Wilson Schaef /

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Conceptually stuck systems cannot become unstuck simply by trying harder. For a fundamental reorientation to occur, that spirit of adventure which optimizes serendipity and which enables new perceptions beyond the control of our thinking processes must happen first. This is equally true regarding families, institutions, whole nations, and entire civilizations.

/ Edwin H. Friedman /

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People prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.

/ Virginia Satir /

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Society is an insane asylum run by the inmates.

/ Erving Goffman /

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Society is not a mere sum of individuals. Rather, the system formed by their association represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics.

/ Emile Durkheim /

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A sailor without a destination cannot tell a good wind from an ill wind.

/ Seneca /

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The most difficult habit to break is breaking the habits of others.

/ Edwin Friedman /