How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual Integration – David Richo, 1991

This was mentioned in a comment at the great Ask a Manager, and the title grabbed me.

  • “There are ghosts asleep inside every one of us: arcane issues never addressed, ancient griefs never laid to rest, suspicions, self-doubts, banished longings, secret meanings. Something in this book may call one of these ghosts by name. It will then arise from its slumber and begin speaking. … You are hearing the vote of a part of yourself long ago disenfranchised. When this happens, put the book aside and listen in rapture to the irrepressible ‘Yea.'”
  • Quoting from Anais Nin’s diary: “every day the real caress replaces the ghostly lover”
  • “…neediness itself tells us nothing about how much we need from others; it tells us how much we need to grieve the irrevocably barren past and evoke our own inner sources of nurturance.”
  • “The fear of revealing the True Self is disguised in these words: ‘If people really knew me, they would not like me.’ We can change that sentence to read: ‘I am free enough to want everything I say and do to reveal me as I am. I love being seen as I am.'”
  • affirmation: “I grant myself a margin of error in my work and relationships. I release myself from the pain of having to be right or competent all the time.”
  • “Allow every feeling and thought to pass through you as good hikers through the woods: taking nothing away, leaving nothing behind. Make no attempt to think them away, to interpret, or to interrupt them no matter how irrational or inconvenient they may seem.”
  • “Recurrent dreams are not so much to be interpreted as to be exhausted. They are played repeatedly like dramas, until integration and closure happen naturally.”
  • There was an interesting active imagination technique that I would like to go back to someday…

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