Stephen Grosz Quotes

“Closure is just as delusive-it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.”

— Stephen Grosz

“It is less painful, it turns out, to feel betrayed than to feel forgotten.”

— Stephen Grosz

“Being present, whether with children, with friends, or even with oneself, is hard work. But isn't this attentiveness
the feeling that someone is trying to think about us
something we want more than praise?”

— Stephen Grosz

“In trying so hard to be different from our parents, we're actually doing much the same thing
doling out empty praise the way an earlier generation doled out thoughtless criticism. If we do it to avoid thinking about our child and her world, then praise, just like criticism, is ultimately expressing our indifference.”

— Stephen Grosz

“For a minute, the fantasy frightened her, but ultimately, this fear saved her from feeling alone.”

— Stephen Grosz

“I knew tht we all have the capacity to act in self-destructive ways, nevertheless i had a kind of faith that the desire to live was more powerful. now, instead, i felt its fragility. peter's suicide made me feel that the battle between the forces of life and death was far more evenly pitched.”

— Stephen Grosz

“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. But if we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us- we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don't understand.”

— Stephen Grosz

As he spoke, I had the mental image of a small boy switching on the nightlight, not because he wants to be able to find his parents during the night, but because he fears his parents will forget him - lose him - in the dark.

— Stephen Grosz

“My breakdown was like a furnace and what was burned away was any belief in my own feelings”

— Stephen Grosz

“At one time or another, most of us have felt trapped by things we find ourselves thinking or doing, caught by our own impulses or foolish choices; ensnared in some unhappiness or fear; imprisoned by our own history. We feel unable to go forward and yet we believe that there must be a way.”

— Stephen Grosz

“There cannot be change without loss”

— Stephen Grosz

“The bigger the front, the bigger the back.”

— Stephen Grosz

“Pyschoanalysts are fond of pointing out that the past is alive in the present. But the future is alive in the present too. The future is not some place we're going to, but an idea in our mind now. It is something we're creating, that in turn creates us. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present.”

— Stephen Grosz

“He seemed never to have acquired a skill that we all need: the ability to make another person worry about us.”

— Stephen Grosz

“I want to change, but not if it means changing.”

— Stephen Grosz