Sheldon Kopp Quotes

You can't make anyone love you. You just have to reveal who you are and take your chances. (105)

While most would agree with Socrates that, "the unexamined life is not worth living," a lesser-known quote by Sheldon Kopp might be more important here: "The unlived life is not worth examining.

He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.

Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. It will cost you your innocence, your illusions, your certainty. (10)

Love is more than simply being open to experiencing the anguish of another person's suffering. It is the willingness to live with the helpless knowing that we can do nothing to save the other from his pain. (23)

All of the truly important battles are waged within the self. (7)

It is not possible to know how much is just enough, until we have experienced how much is more than enough. (64)

There appear to be many people who chose to go crazy (or become alcoholics, addicts, criminals, suicides) rather than have to bear the pain and ambiguity of a life situation that they have decided that they cannot stand. (98)

In the long run we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving.

And so, it is not astonishing that, though the patient enters therapy insisting that he wants to change, more often than not, what he really wants is to remain the same and to get the therapist to make him feel better. (4)

Anarchy could never get a man to the moon, but it may the only mode that can allow us to survive on earth.

If I reveal myself without worrying about how others will respond, then some will care, though others may not. But who can love me, if no one knows me? I must risk it, or live alone.

You win some, you lose some, and your losses are never made up to you. She will simply have to do without; like it or not, she must face her losses and her helplessness to undo them.

We all live in a tragicomic situation, a life that is in part absurd simply because it is not of our own making. We are born into a disordered world, into a family we did not choose, into circumstances we would have had somewhat improved, and we are even called by a name we did not select. (40)

That is one of the reasons why a man should pick a path with heart, so that he can find his laughter.

So it is that there is nothing to be taught, but yet there is something to be learned.

Sometimes life seems like a poorly designed cage within which man has been sentenced to be free.

For each of us, the only hope resides in his own efforts, in completing his own story, not in the other's interpretation. (63)

Crises marked by anxiety, doubt, and despair have always been those periods of personal unrest that occur at the times when a man is sufficiently unsettled to have an opportunity for personal growth. We must always see our own feelings of uneasiness as being our chance for "making the growth choice rather than the fear choice.

But after a while, she began to experience the new reality of each person as being as strong and as weak as anyone else. Slowly, she learned that each of us grown-ups has as much and as little power as the other, and that we had best learn to take care of ourselves.(83)

The continuing struggle was once described in the following metaphor by a patient who had successfully completed a long course of psychotherapy: 'I came to therapy hoping to receive butter for the bread of life. Instead, at the end, I emerged with a pail of sour milk, a churn, and instructions on how to use them.' (138)

You can't get there from here, and besides there's no place else to go.

There is the image of the man who imagines himself to be a prisoner in a cell. He stands at one end of this small, dark, barren room, on his toes, with arms stretched upward, hands grasping for support onto a small, barred window, the room's only apparent source of light. If he holds on tight, straining toward the window, turning his head just so, he can see a bit of bright sunlight barely visible between the uppermost bars. This light is his only hope. He will not risk losing it. And so he continues to staring toward that bit of light, holding tightly to the bars. So committed is his effort not to lose sight of that glimmer of life-giving light, that it never occurs to him to let go and explore the darkness of the rest of the cell. So it is that he never discovers that the door at the other end of the cell is open, that he is free. He has always been free to walk out into the brightness of the day, if only he would let go. (192)

The therapist can interpret, advise, provide the emotional acceptance and support that nurtures personal growth, and above all, he can listen. I do not mean that he can simply hear the other, but that he will listen actively and purposefully, responding with the instrument of his trade, that is, with the personal vulnerability of his own trembling self. This listening is that which will facilitate the patient's telling of his tale, the telling that can set him free. (5)

It is, of course, necessary to have rules and procedures if we wish to accomplish large and complex tasks, but the question of whether or not it is worth the cost must be perennially re-examined. (117)

The most insidious of the premature responsibilities that may be foisted onto some children is the expectation that the child is somehow supposed to take care of his parents, rather than the other way around. Parents who were themselves raised with too little attention given to their own early feelings, if they have not worked out the resulting emotional problems in subsequent years, often look forward to having children of their own so that the children will make them happy. (81)

The adult May fly lives only a few hours, just long enough to mate. He has neither mouth nor stomach, but needs neither since he does not live long enough to need to eat. The eggs the May fly leaves hatch after the parent has died. What is it all about. What's the point? There is no point. That's just the way it is. It is neither good nor bad. Life is mainly simply inevitable. (41)

When a patient says he feels stuck and confused, and through good intentions he struggles to become loose and clear, he only remains chronically trapped in the mire of his own stubbornness. If instead he will go with where he is, only then is there hope. If he will let himself get deeply into the experience of being stuck, only then will he reclaim that part of himself that is holding him. Only if he will give up trying to control his thinking, and let himself sink into his confusion, only then will things become clear. (64)

So it is that God tugs at a pilgrim's sleeve telling him to remember that he is only human. He must be his own man, remain in exile, and belong to himself. He must pay attention to his own feelings and to the meaning of what he does, if he is to be for himself, and yet for others as well.

Research in self-disclosure supports my own experience that the personal openness of the guru facilitates and invites the increased openness of the pilgrim. (24)

And should I wear my mask too long, when I take it off and try to discard it, I may find that I have thrown my face away with it.

You are free to do whatever you like. You only need to face the consequences. —Sheldon Kopp

The most important things that each man must learn, no one else can teach him. Once he accepts this disappointment, he will be able to stop depending on the therapist, the guru who turns out to be just another struggling human being.

Rules for a group always violate individual rights.

Love is more than simply being open to experiencing the anguish of another person’s suffering. It is the willingness to live with the helpless knowing that we can do nothing to save the other from his pain.

Should he start out on a psychotherapeutic pilgrimage, he sets out on an adventure in narration. The principle of explanation consists of getting the story told - somehow, anyhow - in order to discover how it begins. (21)

I remember a group therapy session when one of the patients was reluctantly turning his corner. He would accept it, he said, but he wouldn't like the idea of having to solve problems every day for the rest of his life. My co-therapist told him that it was not required that he like it. She shared her own displeasure, saying: 'I remember that when I first discovered what life was like, I was furious. I guess I'm still kind of mad sometimes.' (135)

No man can be fully a man unless he comes to terms with the female double within him. So too, with women and their male shadows. Those who do not know their sexual counterparts are absurd caricatures of the identities to which they aspire. Not knowing the hidden other within themselves, they hate and distrust the opposite sex.

This wish to satisfy someone greater than the Self, to be found acceptable, to belong at last, is a struggle familiar to many psychotherapy patients. In their lives they waste themselves on wondering how they are doing, on trying to figure out the expectations of others so that they can become someone in the eyes of others. They try to be practical, to be reasonable, to figure it all out in their heads. It is as though if only they could get the words straight in their heads, if only they could find the correct formula, then everything else in their lives would be magically straightened out. They are sure there is a right way to do things, though they have not yet found it. Someone in authority must know...It is as thought if it were discovered that two and two really did not equal four (but five), then at that moment all over the world every machine would stop operating, all of the lights would go out. (110)

Only pains of life too intense to be borne could lead a man to forgo all response, to give up completely the joy of living as other men live. (153)

Wir müssen immer wissen, was wir fühlen, sagen, was wir meinen und tun, was wir sagen.

The unlived life isn't worth examining.

Sometimes it seems to me that in this absurdly random life there is some inherent justice in the outcome of personal relationships. In the long run, we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving.

while most therapists would agree with Socrates that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” a lesser-known quote by American psychologist Sheldon Kopp might be more important here: “The unlived life is not worth examining.

Of course, one other hypothetical alternative would have been for the child to decide that since she was fine the way she was, there must have been something terribly wrong with her parents. But children need at least the continuing hope that their parents may come to love them. To decide that these crazy parents will never love her, no matter what she does, no matter whom she becomes, would leave a child buried in a depth of despair in which she would surely suffocate and die. (86)

Unwilling to tolerate life’s ambiguity, its unresolvability, its inevitability, we search for certainty, demanding that someone else must provide it. Stubbornly, relentlessly, we seek the wise man, the wizard, the good parent, someone else who will show us the way. Surely someone must know. It simply cannot be that life is just what it appears to be, that there are no hidden meanings, that this is it, just this and nothing more. It’s not fair, not enough! We cannot possibly bear having to live life as it is, without reassurance, without being special, without even being offered some comforting explanations. Come on now! Come across! You’ve got to give us something to make it all right. The medicine tastes lousy. Why should we have to swallow it just because it’s the only thing we can do? Can’t you at least promise us that we will have to take it just once, that it won’t taste that bad, that we will feel just fine immediately afterward, that we will be glad we took it? No? Well then, surely, at least you have to give us a lollipop for being good. But what if we are talking to ourselves? What if there is no one out there listening? What if for each of us the only wise man, the only wizard, the only good parent we will ever have is our own helpless, vulnerable self? What then?

Whether pilgrim or wayfarer, while seeking to be taught the Truth (or something), the disciple learns only that there is nothing that anyone else can teach him. He learns, once he is willing to give up being taught, that he already knows how to live, that it is implied in his own tale. The secret is that there is no secret. Everything is just what it seems to be. This is it! There are no hidden meanings. Before he is enlightened, a man gets up each morning to spend the day tending his fields, returns home to eat his supper, goes to bed, makes love to his woman, and falls asleep. But once he has attained enlightenment, then a man gets up each morning to spend the day tending his fields, returns home to eat his supper, goes to bed, makes love to his woman, and falls asleep. The Zen way to see the truth is through your everyday eyes.2 It is only the heartless questioning of life-as-it-is that ties a man in knots. A man does not need an answer in order to find peace. He needs only to surrender to his existence, to cease the needless, empty questioning. The secret of enlightenment is when you are hungry, eat; and when you are tired, sleep. The Zen Master warns: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” This admonition points up that no meaning that comes from outside of ourselves is real. The Buddhahood of each of us has already been obtained. We need only recognize it. Philosophy, religion, patriotism, all are empty idols. The only meaning in our lives is what we each bring to them. Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying the hope that anything outside of ourselves can be our master. No one is any bigger than anyone else. There are no mothers or fathers for grown-ups, only sisters and brothers.

In a way, we each get what we deserve. Everyone is entitled to keep as much garbage as he is willing to put out or to put up with.

There is an old saying that whenever two Jews meet, if one has a problem, the other automatically becomes a rabbi.

I am not committed to the encounter group ethos of random openness at every point I reserve a right to privacy at any given moment, and I respect that right in others (including my patients). I

Now I cared, now that it was too late. The other men in group mourned Norman as they might a handicapped brother who had died, a child lost somehow because no one knew how to ask him where it hurt.

Patients in therapy all begin by protesting, “I want to be good.” If they cannot accomplish this, it is only because they are “inadequate,” can’t control themselves, are too anxious, or suffer from unconscious impulses. Being neurotic is being able to act badly without feeling responsible for what you do. The therapist must try to help the patient to see that he is exactly wrong, that is, that he is lying when he says he wants to be good. He really wants to be bad. Mortality is an empirical issue. Worse yet, he wants to be bad but to have an excuse for his irresponsibility, to be able to say, “But I can’t help it.

Sometimes it seems to me that in this absurdly random life, there is some inherent justice in the outcome of personal relationships. In the long run, we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving. We get to keep no more than we earn by our own efforts. In a way, we each get what we deserve. Everyone is entitled to keep as much garbage as he is willing to put out or to put up with.

You can run, but you can’t hide. 37. It is most important to run out of scapegoats. 38. We must learn the power of living with our helplessness. 39. The only victory lies in surrender to oneself. 40. All of the significant battles are waged within the self. 41. You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences. 42. What do you know … for sure … anyway? 43. Learn to forgive yourself, again and again and again and again.…

But it is so very hard to be an on-your-own, take-care-of-yourself-cause-there-is-no-one-else-to do-it-for-you grown-up. 27. Each of us is ultimately alone. 28. The most important things, each man must do for himself. 29. Love is not enough, but it sure helps. 30. We have only ourselves, and one another. That may not be much, but that’s all there is. 31. How strange, that so often, it all seems worth it. 32. We must live within the ambiguity of partial freedom, partial power, and partial knowledge. 33. All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data. 34. Yet we are responsible for everything we do. 35. No excuses will be accepted.

[Y]ou can't make anyone love you. You just have to reveal who you are and take your chances. Oh, sure, you can give a pleasing impression to others, flatter and appease them. Or, you can intimidate other people, threaten and menace them. But whether by cajoling or by coercing, you cannot elicit a gift of love. Instead, you may call forth a reward for good behavior. But then you are stuck with living with the aching feeling in your chest that, if people really knew what you were like, no one would really care about you. Or, if you succeed in getting your own way by bullying other people, then you must live with the dread of retaliation, if ever you should drop your menacing guard.

We are all already dying, and we will be dead for a long time. 5. Nothing lasts. 6. There is no way of getting all you want. 7. You can’t have anything unless you let go of it. 8. You only get to keep what you give away. 9. There is no particular reason why you lost out on some things. 10. The world is not necessarily just. Being good often does not pay off and there is no compensation for misfortune. 11. You have a responsibility to do your best nonetheless. 12. It is a random universe to which we bring meaning. 13. You don’t really control anything. 14. You can’t make anyone love you. 15. No one is any stronger or any weaker than anyone else. 16. Everyone is, in his own way, vulnerable. 17. There are no great men. 18. If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way. 19. Everyone lies, cheats, pretends (yes, you too, and most certainly I myself). 20. All evil is potential vitality in need of transformation. 21. All of you is worth something, if you will only own it. 22. Progress is an illusion. 23. Evil can be displaced but never eradicated, as all solutions breed new problems. 24. Yet it is necessary to keep on struggling toward solution. 25. Childhood is a nightmare.

I think we are all better off looking across at someone, rather than up. Sheldon Kopp, the author and psychologist, wrote, “There are no great men. If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way.

Loving the shadow may begin with carrying it, but even that is not enough. At one moment something else must break through, that laughing insight at the paradox of one's own folly which is also everyman's. Then may come the joyful acceptance of the rejected and inferior, a going with it and even a partial living of it. This love may even lead to an identification with and acting-out of the shadow, falling into its fascination. Therefore the moral dimension can never be abandoned. Thus is cure a paradox requiring two incommensurables: the moral recognition that these parts of me are burdensome and intolerable and must change, and the loving laughing acceptance which takes them just as they are, joyfully, forever. One both tries hard and lets go, both judges harshly and joins gladly. Western moralism and Eastern abandon: each holds only one side of the truth.

But perhaps the most poetic, symbolic retribution for being manipulative is that it leaves you completely open to the manipulations of others. He who seems to be taken in by your flattery is merely another manipulator rewarding your offerings as a way of controlling your behavior. And he who gives in to your threats is surely just waiting to get to his feet once more. His surrender is temporary and political, without any quality of loving trust and yielding.

I remember early in my practice treating men who "used" prostitutes. All they had to do to control these women was to give them some money and they could manipulate them into doing whatever they wanted. They could make a whore not only do any sexual trick they commanded, but could get her to be nice to them as well. If such men couldn't buy love, at least they could rent it. The women needed the money. The men had it. The women had to give in. The men were contemptuous, superior, in control... Later in my practice, I began to treat some hookers and strippers. They made it clear to me that the Johns with whom they dealt were suckers. Give them a little sexual excitement, and you could get them to pay all the money they had. Men were so easy to control. I now feel that trying to identify who is controlled, and who is being controlled, is a six-five, pick 'em. And when I try sorting out who is the victim and who the perpetrator of manipulation, I can't tell the knife from the wound.

When we lay claim to the evil in ourselves, we no longer need fear its occurring outside of our control. For example, a patient comes into therapy complaining that he does not get along well with other people; somehow he always says the wrong thing and hurts their feelings. He is really a nice guy, just has this uncontrollable, neurotic problem. What he does not want to know is that his "unconscious hostility" is not his problem, it's his solution. He is really not a nice guy who wants to be good; he's a bastard who wants to hurt other people while still thinking of himself as a nice guy. If the therapist can guide him into the pit of his own ugly soul, then there may be hope for him. Once this pilgrim can see how angry and vindictive he is, he can trace his story and bring it to the light, instead of being doomed to relive it without awareness. Nothing about ourselves can be changed until it is first accepted.

I do not wish

You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.’ – SHELDON B. KOPP

Sheldon Kopp’s delightful book If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!: The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients

The unlived life is not worth examining.

Erich Fromm made an extensive diagnosis of this in his book The Revolution of Hope. He saw our overactivism as a sign of the restlessness and lack of inner peace that flows from our shame. We are human doings because we have no inner life. Our toxic shame won’t let us go inward. It is too painful. It is too hopeless. As Sheldon Kopp says, “We can change what we are doing, but we can’t change who we are.” If I am flawed and defective as a human person, then there’s something wrong with me. I am a mistake. I am hopeless.

Wir müssen immer wissen, was wir fühlen, sagen, was wir fühlen und tun, was wir sagen.

Distorted views of the world do not always constitute corruption of the purpose of one’s quest.

The Man of Knowledge has come to see that any efforts on his part to try to control the nature of things, or to change others, is useless. At that point he is free to continue to insist on trying, so long as he does not fool himself about the uselessness of his acts.

Never a Magdalene without a Madonna to spoil it.

lilt of the synagogue liturgy. She always told the

Sheldon Kopp, the author and psychologist, wrote, “There are no great men. If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way.

Nothing about ourselves can be changed until it is first accepted. Jung

In their lives they waste themselves on wondering how they are doing, on trying to figure out the expectations of others so that they can become someone in the eyes of the others. They

If facing the individual evil in each of us can prevent further social horrors, that would be reward enough. But there is something of purely personal importance to be gained by anyone who will not turn away from the darkness of his own heart In Conrad’s tale, Marlow turns back short of realizing full awareness of his secret self. At the journey’s end, when it is too late to complete his personal pilgrimage, Marlow compares his own flinching failure of nerve with Kurtz’s willingness to go all the way.

Sheldon Kopp titled his book If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him to encourage us to bypass this detour and save ourselves from the unnecessary self-sabotage of emotional perfectionism.

By way of example, Bertolt Brecht somewhere tells the story of a European peasant caught in the holocaust of the Nazi invasion. A Storm Trooper comes to his cottage, drags him out and tells him: “From now on I am in charge. I will live in your house. You will feed me and polish my boots every day. I will be the master and you the servant. If you disagree, I will kill you. Will you submit to me?” Without answering, the peasant gives over his cottage, feeds the invader each day, and polishes his boots. Months later the Allied armies of liberation come through the village. They drag the Storm Trooper out of the cottage. Just as the Allied soldiers are taking the oppressor off to a prison camp, the peasant goes to him, stands proudly before him, and into his face, answers: “No.

His goal is to become a more effective neurotic, so that he may have what he wants without risking getting into anything new.

We must always see our own feelings of uneasiness as being our chance for 'making the growth choice' rather than the fear choice.

What is to be learnt [about life] is too elusively simple to be grasped without struggle, surrender, and experiencing of how it is.