
As a trauma and couples therapist, I’m sharing a hundred reminders—of what matters, of what lasts, and of those who’ve moved me along the way with their words.
Bonus: let the tune accompany you as you read through them.
… Every year
Mary Oliver
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
- Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. Frederick Buechner
- If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. Agnès Varda
- Love reveals everything unlike itself. When we offer ourselves unconditional love, we discover the conditions under which we were not loved. Inherently, self-compassion opens wounds, and because of that, it heals wounds. Dr. Christopher Germer
- Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. Anaïs Nin
- “It’s dark because you’re trying too hard,” said Susila. Dark because you want it to be light. Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. ‘Lightly, child, lightly. You’ve got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.’ Aldous Huxley
- Sometimes, it’s not the light at the end of the tunnel that will get you out of a funk on the ball field…It’s simply adjusting to the dark. Mark Brooks
- Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. Rainer M. Rilke
- There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet. Matt Haig
- Healing is not about feeling better, it’s about getting better at feeling. Gabor Maté
- There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen. Rumi
- But you know what they say about plans—humans make them and God laughs. Yiddish Proverb
- Arthur Morgan: “I guess I… I’m afraid.” Sister Calderón: “There is nothing to be afraid of, Mr. Morgan. Take a gamble that love exists, and do a loving act.” Red Dead Redemption 2
- Lonely does not merely come from having nobody around oneself but instead from having nobody to talk about what is important to us.
- What is to give light must endure burning. Viktor Frankl
- The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget. Arundhati Roy
- We often think resilience is about how much we can take, but real strength lies in how we recover.
- Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasures. Rainer M. Rilke
- The highest form of self-confidence is believing in your ability to learn. Adam Grant
- Impostor syndrome: “I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s only a matter of time until everyone finds out.”
- Growth mindset: “I don’t know what I’m doing yet. It’s only a matter of time until I figure it out.”
- Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood, and untreated cause of human suffering. Peter A. Levine
- Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. Walt Whitman
- We all have the capability to heal. I believe there exists in humans a fundamental, primal drive toward wholeness and health. Peter A. Levine
- You can observe a lot just by watching. Peter A. Levine
- Silence is not empty. Silence is full of answers. Silence is full of hope. Maybe Buddha
- Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream. Euripides
- The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not “get over” the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal, and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
- The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents. Carl G. Jung
- The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves. Bessel V. D. Kolk
- Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death. Irvin D. Yalom
- Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough. Ernest Hemingway
- Unresolved past is destiny; it repeats. Thomas Hübl
- One of the most useful insights that I’ve ever gotten out of mindfulness practice was that in the final analysis, all that I am afraid of is sensations. Particularly the sensations associated with unpleasant emotions: getting stuck in sadness, getting stuck in fear, getting stuck in anger. Dr. Christopher Germer
- To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. Carl G. Jung
- The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you. Carl G. Jung
- Trauma in a person, decontextualized over time, looks like personality. Trauma in a family, decontextualized over time, looks like family traits. Trauma in a people, decontextualized over time, looks like culture. Resmaa Menakem
- If you can’t regulate your own emotional temperature, you’ll regulate everyone around you to keep yourself comfortable. David Schnarch
- Change is not a bolt of lightning that arrives with a zap. It is a bridge built brick by brick, every day, with sweat and humility and slips. It is hard work, and slow work, but it can be thrilling to watch it take shape. Sarah Hepola
- Our mistakes and regrets are not barriers to becoming who we can be; they are a necessary ingredient. David Schnarch
- You don’t think your way to a new way of living. You live your way to a new way of thinking. David Schnarch
- As you start to walk on the way, the way appears. Clarity doesn’t come before action. It comes from action. Rumi
- “I want to write a novel about Silence,” he said; “the things people don’t say.” Virginia Woolf
- Without memory, there can be no insight. Without love, there can be no appreciation. Anne Rice
- The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable. James A. Garfield
- Self esteem is our ability to see ourself as a flawed individual and still hold ourself in high regard. Esther Perel
- The creative adult is the child that has survived. Julian F. Flerin
- Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair. Irvin D. Yalom
- I now believe that fears are not born of darkness; rather, fears are like the stars—always there, but obscured by the glare of daylight. Irvin D. Yalom
- We suffer more in imagination than in reality. Seneca
- Live when you live! Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one’s life! If one does not live in the right time, then one can never die at the right time. Irvin D. Yalom
- What is the seal of liberation?– “No longer being ashamed in front of oneself!” Irvin D. Yalom
- Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead–when I exist in no one’s memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead? Irvin D. Yalom
- How much of life have I missed, he wondered, simply by failing to look? Or by looking and not seeing? Irvin D. Yalom
- We’re all fellow sufferers unable to see each other’s truths. Irvin D. Yalom
- Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called ‘amor fati: the love of your fate.’ Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, ‘This is what I need.’ It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment–not discouragement–you will find the strength is there… Joseph Campbell
- I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Albert Camus
- [Rich] has a theory: When we travel, we actually take three trips. There’s the first trip of preparation and anticipation, packing and daydreaming. There’s the trip you’re actually on. And then, there’s the trip you remember. ‘The key is to try to keep all three as separate as possible,’ he says. The key is to be present wherever you are right now. Suleika Jaoaud
- We are all terminal patients on this earth—the mystery is not ‘if’ but ‘when’ death appears in the plotline. Suleika Jaoaud
- Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. Aldous Huxley
- The truth is liberating—but only when you have the courage to live it. David Schnarch
- We can do hard things and hard is not bad.
- The world we live in, which demands perfection and achievement, teaches us we cannot love ourselves as we are. The myth teaches us to think greatness always resides outside us instead of within us. We must become stronger, taller, richer, thinner, smarter, prettier – and perhaps then, we think, we may be worthy of love. Yet we cannot love ourselves and we cannot love each other well so long as we are preoccupied by the desire to leave ourselves, to abandon ourselves in search of something beyond ourselves. Serving the myth teaches us how to belong but severs our ability to connect. Prachi Gupta
- …and maybe, just maybe, I didn’t need to meet so many conditions or work so hard to be worthy of love. Maybe love was simpler than I thought, maybe it was a willingness to witness someone, to be curious and empathize with them, as they are. Prachi Gupta
- You have to meet people where they are, and sometimes you have to leave them there. Iyanla Vanzant
- In the search for truth, human beings take two steps forward and one step back. Suffering, mistakes, and weariness of life thrust them back, but the thirst for truth and stubborn will drive them forward. And who knows? Perhaps they will reach the real truth at last. Anton Chekhov
- Nothing records the effects of a sad life so graphically as the human body. Naguib Mahfouz
- There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche
- Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says ‘I’ll try again tomorrow.’ Mary Anne Radmacher
- …hatred and aggression—and carnivorous sexual intent—aren’t our “dark” side. Our dark side is the side that denies its own existence. David Snarch
- There is such a powerful eloquence in silence. True genius is knowing when to say nothing, to allow the experience, the moment itself, to carry the message, to say what needs to be said. Words are less important, less effective than feeling. When you can sit in perfect silence with someone, you truly know how to communicate. Richard Wagamese
- Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to. Arundhati Roy
- Once we’ve adopted a survival mechanism, it’s not easy to get rid of. It becomes a habit. Not being ourselves. Not being authentic becomes a habit. Gabor Maté
- …things are so easily lost. things just can’t be kept forever. Charles Bukowski
- It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not. Thich Nhat Hanh

Relationships Quotes:
- You cannot save people. You can only love them. Anaïs Nin
- To become the vigilante of relationship is that you become the person who protects the relationship by showing the other person they really matter. Esther Perel
- For a relationship to grow and thrive in a healthy way, it takes consistent effort, genuine investment, and intentional nurturing. Relationships don’t just happen—they’re built.
- Nobody’s ready for marriage—marriage makes you ready for marriage. David Snarch
- Love isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice. Eric Fromm
- If we really dropped illusions for what they can give us or deprive us of, we would be alert. The consequence of not doing this is terrifying and unescapable. We lose our capacity to love. If you wish to love, you must learn to see again. Anthony de Mello
- Distance isn’t the amount of space between us—it’s the amount of things we don’t say to each other.
- We expect one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide, and we live twice as long. Esther Perel
- Therapy begins when blame ends and responsibility emerges. Irvin D. Yalom
- Curiosity is an antidote to reactivity… But It’s very challenging to invite curiosity when people are hurt, wounded, and defensive. In these situations, their bodies shut down and self-protect. This is where the brain and the neurobiology go against what is psychologically and existentially in your best interest. Esther Perel & Andrew Huberman
- The Drive to attach (someone to turn to and say hold me tight) is as important to survival like the drive to eat, drink, and procreate. Sue Johnson
- We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know. Carl Roger
- A good apology is when we take clear and direct responsibility without a hint of evasion, blaming, obfuscation, [or] excuse-making—and without bringing up the other person’s crime sheet. Harriet Lerne
- Holding space means to be with someone without judgment. To donate your ears and heart without wanting anything back. To practice empathy and compassion. To accept someone’s truth, no matter what they are. To allow and accept. Embrace with two hands instead of pointing with one finger. To come in neutral. Open. For them. Not you. Holding space means to put your needs and opinions aside and allow someone to just be. ThemSelf! Yung Pueblo
- To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another. Irvin D. Yalom
- When relationships fail, it is not increasing conflict that is the cause. It is decreasing affection and emotional responsiveness… Sue Johnson
- You have to help your partner come through for you. Tell them how you’d like them to be. Help them win. Help your partner succeed, because it’s in your interest to act like a team. In our individualistic culture, your partner either comes through for you or they don’t. But when you begin thinking relationally, ecologically, you realize that you have something to say about how things go between you. “What can I do to help you come through for me?” is an entirely relational question. Thinking like a team is the clear antidote to thinking like two individuals. It’s a shift from “I don’t like how you’re talking to me” to “Honey, I want to hear what you’re saying. Could you please lower your voice so I can hear it?” A shift from “I need more sex” to “We both deserve a healthy sex life. What should we do about it?” Terry Real
- There are only two relationships that mirror themselves: The one we had with our parents and with our romantic partners. Esther Perel & Andrew Huberman
- Sexuality is a coded language for our deepest emotional needs, wounds, fears, and longings…Your sexual preferences and fantasies are a translation of your deepest emotional needs. Esther Perel
- When we enter into a relationship, we want to matter to our partner, to be visible and important…We want to know our efforts are noticed and appreciated. We want to know our relationship is regarded as important by our partner and will not be relegated to second or third place because of a competing person, task, or thing. Stan Tatkin
- Devote yourself to your partner’s sense of safety and security and not simply to your idea about what that should be. What may make you feel safe and secure may not be what your partner requires from you. Stan Tatkin
- Love and hate can coexist in relationships: It’s amazing how people can feel contradictory emotions simultaneously. Esther Perel
- Successful long-term relationships are created through small words, small gestures, and small acts. John Gottman
- Trust is the active engagement with the unknown. Trust is risky. It’s vulnerable. It’s a leap of faith. Esther Perel
- Maturity comes when we tend to our inner children and don’t inflict them on our partners to care for. Terry Real
- Being an adult involves disambiguating 2 things: Trusting your own experiences and admitting when you are wrong. Esther Perel
- A key task in romantic relationships is straddling the fundamental set of dual needs—togetherness and separateness: “How do I get close to you without losing me? How do I hold on to me without losing you?” Esther Perel
- Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other: “Can I count on you, depend on you? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me when I need, when I call? Do I matter to you? Am I valued and accepted by you? Do you need me, rely on me?” The anger, the criticism, the demands, are really cries to their lovers, calls to stir their hearts, to draw their mates back in emotionally and reestablish a sense of safe connection. Sue Johnson

I invite you to sit with one—or a few—of these gems. Or return to a quote of your own. Let it find you again and again.
Reflect on it. Write about it. Live into it. And see what unfolds.
If you’re seeking a trauma or a couples therapist to explore these themes of life, death, and relationship, you’re welcome to visit my services page.