Stephanie Dowrick Quotes

How we feel about our own self, how well or little we know our own self, whether we feel alive inside, largely determine the quality of the time we spend alone, as well as the quality of the relationships we have with other people.

Sound crazy? It may well be, but it is precisely in relationships of intimacy that your craziness (and mine) will be hardest to conceal. p.215

Restraint offers a space between intention and action and the opportunity to protect others from actions or reactions that should exist only in your imagination

من المستحيل تمامًا أن تعرف شخصا آخر بصورة كاملة ، حتى إن كان هذا الشخص ، أو على الأخص في كثير من الأحيان ، هو الأكثر قربًا من قلبك

What helps most is remembering that such a cry or attack or sly blow is a reflection of that other person’s inner state; it is not an omniscient summary of you. Your reaction reflects your own inner state, and that can tell you which aspects of your own inner world are needy of attention. p.291

It should not be difficult to accept the idea that someone else is, in 'your experience of them', in part your self-creation. But it is difficult and sometimes impossible. Impossible because accepting the idea that you are in part creating your 'other' forces you to take on board a high degree of self responsibility. Few of us easily do that. p.234

[...] the responsibility for their wellbeing and for the fundamental meaning they give to their own life must, in adulthood, be theirs. To accept the burden that someone 'can't live without you' is unrealistic. It infantilises that person and overburdens you. p.226

I have been using the word 'other' as though it were self-explanatory, yet who the 'other' is must always be something of a mystery. It is a mystery at an immediate level in the sense that no person is entirely knowable.

Someone who is comfortable in their own company and can be alone without feeling unduly anxious, defensive or half-alive is experiencing solitude

السهام المميتة تشق طريقها بكلمات النقد و النظرات الغاضبة و العابسة ، امنعها من أن تشق طريقها إلى منزلكما

You are a self and an other. Your 'others' are in part your own creation. This in turn affects and shapes your experiences of self. Your levels of self-awareness and self-acceptance largely shape how you perceive others. p.231

Knowing you can enjoy your own company is a vital precursor to being able to enjoy other people’s company without feelings of panic or neediness. And valuing your own company precedes believing that you can matter to other people in much the same way they matter to you.

[...] as I have seen with other people whose sense of their work is vocational rather than pragmatic, my desire to write, to understand things at a depth I can reach in no other way, pushes me to write and go on writing, even when my wants—for an easier or more sociable life, or one less exposed and fraught—are certainly well known to my rational mind. p.293

A relationship doesn’t work until you accept that it may break up tomorrow, and if it does you’ll be all right.

The crucial question is not: am I with Someone, but rather, am I Someone?

Art is childhood, after all,” wrote Rilke

كن شريك الحياة الذي تحلم به

إن المشاجرة لن تمنحك ما تريد ، لان المشاجرة نادرًا ما تدور حول نقطة الخلاف الأساسية بينكما

Intimacy is not a matter of extending your self-absorption to include someone else. Much more than that, it is a matter of tuning into someone else’s reality and risking being changed by that experience.

Many people who find it hard to be alone blame or despise themselves (or know themselves so little they do not realise that they can’t be alone but fill their lives with work, people, noise, booze or drugs).

The capacity to be comfortably alone flows from satisfying experiences of being with someone else. What’s more, satisfying experiences of being with someone else fuel a continuing capacity to be alone, without feeling adrift or lonely.

Put another way, narcissism gives way to intimacy when each person can clearly see the other one as a separate individual and not just as an extension of their own needs, wishes and desires. (‘I can still love you even if you don’t always do what I want, when I want it, and how I want it.’)

Someone who has a similar confidence in their own inner reality, and who trusts that they go on existing whether or not anyone else is present, does not need to be constantly checking on their sense of self. They are, without much thinking about it, ‘calm, restful, relaxed and feeling one with people and things when no excitement is around’.

Are things going the way we both want them? Are things going the way that suits us individually? What are the values we hold, separately and together? How is our relationship supporting those values? Is one of us developing at the expense of the other? Can we look at difficulties from the other’s point of view? Would we both be willing to make behavioural changes if those are needed?

Intimacy comes alive when you can consciously accept, cope with and even welcome the differences between your inner ideal and the real live person who is sharing your life and perhaps your bed. Someone who is gradually revealed to you with all the surprises, glories, disappointments, human faults and gifts that each of us has in varying measures. And you can accept that. And wish the person well.

After all, what is 'poetry itself'? Where are its horizons? What draws a reader to 'read' the world and their own self through this particular medium, even if only occasionally? Because it is often on 'occasions'—sacred or ritualised moments, or moments made holy by celebration or grief—that poetry is reached for, its peculiar intensity and compression instinctively demanded. But this is not a separation from life; rather, it is an illumination of it.

your connections with others can only be as rewarding as the connection you have with the only ‘someone’ with whom you live every moment of your life: your own self. Being in good contact with your own self, welcoming time with your own self as you might welcome time with a friend: this makes being with others less essential (I can’t bear to be alone) or perhaps less dangerous (I can’t be with others. They are sure to hate me/find me out/ignore me/crush me).

NO BEATING UP ON YOURSELF It’s self-love, and a simple trust that we can learn from our mistakes, that allows us to be compassionate rather than ruthless as we try to lift our game, psychologically and spiritually. There’s no merit, it seems to me, in giving ourselves a hard time while struggling to be more generous to others! Self-respect requires that we notice, learn from our mistakes and clean up our messes. It doesn’t require that we beat up on ourselves, compare ourselves to other people or remind ourselves how hopeless we are.

many relationships depend for daily ease and survival on one person’s capacity to be flexible: to be able to give more than take; to be able to accept rather than demand; to be able to hold back rather than rush forward; to change when change is needed. It is no coincidence that in heterosexual relationships it is far more likely to be the woman whose sense of self is less ‘ego-bound’ and more adaptable. It is also no coincidence that it is likely to be the woman who is in much greater danger of allowing her sense of her own unique self to slide or be submerged into a ‘we-self’ which largely serves the needs of the male partner. This comes about for many reasons: • The woman is likely to have been socialised into emphasising an awareness of others rather than self-awareness (believing that self-awareness may be synonymous with selfishness). • The woman may be more flexible than her male partner. • She may unconsciously collude with her partner’s equally unexamined assumptions that his interests, career, sense of purpose have greater legitimacy than her own. • Her self-worth may depend on her capacity to make life pleasant and agreeable for others.

Understanding yourself better, you will see that what happens to you matters less than your own reactions. This is wonderful because you always have far more choice and control about your reactions than you do about “what happens.

A split between the way a person feels on the inside and the way they appear on the outside is usually maintained at considerable cost, with increasing feelings of meaninglessness and decreasing feelings of choice. Such a pattern of splitting is likely to be set in place when there has been a trauma which the child is not encouraged to recover from or speak about so that what the child is feeling on the inside is given no legitimacy of ‘mattering’ on the outside. Inevitably, then, inner and outer become unbearably divided.

while other people can bring insight and support (and trouble and pain) into our lives, no-one can save us: we can only save ourselves.

Yet ‘getting it together’ with someone else is no more of a challenge than ‘getting it together’ with your own self. Not to wallow in egocentricity, just to be able to trust and enjoy who you are, to be able to take yourself for granted and so be open to others. The paradox is worth repeating. I cannot be ‘together’ with you unless I have some sense of my own separateness and autonomy. I can’t be my own self with you if I am bound to you in dependency. When our togetherness enhances my life but my life does not depend on it—I can be together with you and still be myself.

With some sense of your own separateness and autonomy you can go on being yourself, and make satisfying and varied connections with other people, whether or not you have a special someone in your life. This is because you know that your liveliness—your sense of being alive—comes from within. It is enriched by connections with people outside yourself, but does not depend on them. In solitude you are aware of being alive and having needs, and of being able to meet some of those needs without turning to others. In solitude you do not feel empty. In solitude you do not fear death by emotional starvation.

Theo’s freedom from the illusion that someone else will meet all or most of his emotional needs emphasises a crucial point.When you limit yourself along gender lines you have to look to the so-called opposite sex to take up the slack, whether this is expressed unconsciously (Who will feel my feelings for me?) or openly (Who will fix the bathroom shelf for me?). And that is often a fruitless search, or a search that insists the other person provides those aspects you do not want to develop or recognise in yourself. No matter how difficult it may be, it is infinitely more vitalising to attempt to develop in yourself the qualities you need in other people. Even partial success will mean you are taking responsibility for your own self, and gaining greater knowledge of your own self. It will also mean that you can approach others on steady feet, rather than as someone lurching towards the crutch held out by a potential or actual ‘other half’. This

Heterosexuals often fall into the trap of expecting all their emotional needs to be met by the other person.

Clearly the crucial issue in the success of an intimate sexual relationship or very close friendship is not one of sexuality or of gender. More important than either is the conscious willingness of two people or a whole family or community to think about each other with generosity, openness, tolerance and respect, conscious that this counts for something only when it is also translated into behaviours that are routinely respectful, thoughtful and kind.

The greater part of our lives is spent with ourselves, no matter where or with what other people we may live . . . our imagination is the only companion chained to us for the whole of existence.’ Charlotte Wolff

You are a self and an other. • Your ‘others’ are in part your own creation. • This in turn affects and shapes your experiences of self. • Your levels of self-awareness and self-acceptance largely shape how you perceive others.

You are a different ‘other’ for each person you come into contact with, depending on how they ‘read’ or experience you. And, of course, each person you meet is an other for you in a way which comes very much out of your subjective reading of who that person is, your unconscious assumptions, as well as what could be called facts about the person.

To the flow of recognition between my ‘I’ and your ‘you’ I bring my desires, my prejudices, and the force of my needs—conscious and unconscious—to the ‘evidence’ before me. In doing this, I create my own version of you. What this adds up to is that you are a somewhat different other for each person with whom you have contact.

different aspects of our complexity are ‘drawn out’ by different people, and that it is also possible to experience ourselves differently and more positively in a less stressed, more mutually accepting relationship.

You have to find somebody who doesn’t want to control you and who wants you to be yourself, and who actually likes what you are and not what they want you to be.

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