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Working with Your Enemies

By Sharon Salzberg — 2008

It takes strong insight and often a good deal of courage to break away from our habitual ways of looking at things, to be able to respond from a different place.

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When forgiveness experts talk in binary language (’You either forgive the wrongdoer or you are a prisoner of your own anger and hate’), they are collapsing the messy complexity of human emotions into a simplistic dichotomous equation.

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Harriet Lerner
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Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run, but it will never make you less afraid.

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Harriet Lerner
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If you treat man as he appears to be, you make him worse than he is. But if you treat man as if he already were what he potentially could be, you make him what he should be.

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Harriet Lerner
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Letting go of anger and hate requires us to give up the hope for a different past, along with the hope of a fantasized future. What we gain is a life more in the present, where we are not mired in prolonged anger and resentment that doesn’t serve us.

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Harriet Lerner
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But one of the hallmarks of emotional maturity is to recognize the validity of multiple realities and to understand that people think, feel, and react differently. Often we behave as if ‘closeness’ means ‘sameness.’

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Harriet Lerner
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The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships

Anger is something we feel. It exists for a reason and always deserves our respect and attention. We all have a right to everything we feel—and certainly our anger is no exception. "Anger is a signal and one worth listening to," writes Dr.

Book
Harriet Lerner
2014
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EXPLORE TOPIC

Anger Management