Brad Blanton Quotes Page 2

“Telling stories about your memory of what happened may be entertaining for a while, but if that is all you can do it gets boring pretty fast.”

“The best people in a dying culture are the outcasts considered crazy by the leaders; the ones most disillusioned with their own culture. In Yeats' phrase, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

“The kind of lying that is most deadly is withholding, or keeping back information from someone we think would be affected by it.”

“The problem is that ideas about forgiveness are not forgiveness. They don't even help. What you are left with is the experience of resentment and the concept of forgiveness and a deteriorating relationship.”

“The stress that kills or cripples most of the population comes from people being too hard on themselves when they don't live up to their own imaginings about how other people think they should behave.”

“Therapy doesn't always work. Sometimes when it does work, it works only for a while and then the person degenerates back to living out of more bullsh*t - this time about how well therapy worked - and loses whatever relearning occurred.”

“Therapy is over when a person stops incessantly demanding that other people be different from what they are, forgives his or her parents and other begrudged former intimates, reclaims the power to make life work, and takes responsibility for doing so.”

“Thinking and deciding what to do about the person only serves to suppress the anger. Even though you think the anger is over, it will manifest itself in other ways. Your communication will be less honest and spontaneous; you may be more critical of him; you may find being
with him more physically tiring, forget appointments with him, and find yourself inexplicably angry at him more and more. After a while, your friendship may feel more superficial than before and you may not like spending as much time with him as you used to.”

“We all lie like hell. It wears us out. It is the major source of all human stress. Lying kills people.”

“We are against politeness as a substitute for the truth because that politeness kills. Politeness and diplomacy are responsible for more suffering and death than all the crimes of passion in history. F*ck politeness. F*ck diplomacy. Tell the truth.”

“We learn to act nice and deny that we are angry, and we make ourselves sick in the process of denial. This is one of the main areas in which something we can't tell the truth about ruins our lives.”

“We would rather be sure of a correctly predicted negative outcome than face the realistic uncertainty of an unpredictable future even if it includes the possibility of great joy and success.”

“What is true changes, so we can't tell the truth once and be done with it. It's an ongoing game.”

“Whatever your main struggle is, it is insignificant in the face of your death; it is petty and unimportant and has no meaning at all. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

“When incessant grieving occurs, it is usually out of the person's attempt to handle anger by crying and feeling bad and having obsessional thoughts.”

“When the truth changes from your speaking, you know you've spoken the truth.”

“When we learn to live in the present we are no longer chained to the past. We say to each other: “I am a being who notices. I have a particular psychological history but it doesn't have to dictate the rest of my life. I can choose how I live, rather than just react from my past the rest of my life.” If people don't like that, we say: “F*ck ‘em if they can't take a joke!'”

“When you are lying, when you are keeping a secret, when you are withholding information or feelings in any moment, you are always doing that to protect something meaningless.”

“When you speak descriptively about a present-tense experience, and it changes, you have spoken the truth. It's okay that it is no longer true. Don't worry about it. It is the way things are, and it is fine that they are that way. It's more fun and less boring than trying to keep track of everything. It's called freedom.”

“Wishing is a way to remove oneself from what is going on now. Hope springs eternal. F*ck hope. Hope is how most of us avoid growing up.”

“Yesterday's truth is today's bullsh*t. Even yesterday's liberating insight is today's jail of stale explanation.”

“You can be really mad at someone and hurt by him or her and stay stuck there. Or you can tell them and express it out loud and what was true a moment ago becomes no longer true.”

“Your anger is unreasonable and unfair. Let it stay that way. Trying to make it seem reasonable - which usually consists of trying to make the resented person wrong - is the source of all the judgments and explanations that remove you further from the person and further from your experience of the sensations that arose in your body.”

“Most of us would rather kill ourselves than be, particularly if who we think we are keeps dying. Many of us do.”