“Most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is for ever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
– Carson McCullers
“Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority, and take the journey of self-discovery. Love, and don’t be caught in opinions and ideas about what love is or should be. When you love, everything will come right. Love has its own action. Love, and you will know the blessings of it. Keep away from the authority who tells you what love is and what it is not. No authority knows and he who knows cannot tell. Love, and there is understanding.”
– Krishnamurti
Excerpts from The New York Times article:
Dr. William Glasser, a psychiatrist who published more than two dozen books promoting his view that mental health is mostly a matter of personal choice, a precept that found a vast popular audience and influenced teachers, drug counselors and personal therapists, died on Aug. 23 in Los Angeles. He was 88.
Dr. Glasser’s first popular book, “Reality Therapy,” published in 1965, sold 1.5 million copies. It became the foundation for a series of how-to books about resolving emotional and mental problems by accepting responsibility for them. By avoiding the urge to blame others, or to relive past hurts, Dr. Glasser asserted, people could find happiness essentially by choosing behaviors that improved their relationships, and increased their chances for happiness.
“We choose everything we do, including the misery we feel,” he wrote in a 1998 book called “Choice Theory: A New Psychology of Personal Freedom.” “Other people can neither make us miserable nor make us happy.” He added, “Choice theory teaches that we are much more in control of our lives than we realize.”
But unlike some new therapies, Dr. Glasser’s was emphatically drug-free and built on traditions of self-reliance and some core principles, among them:
■ That the only person one controls in the world is oneself.
■ That the effort to change others is doomed and, worse, is the actual cause of most emotional problems.
■ That to meet the most profound human need — “to love and be loved,” as Dr. Glasser put it — people must repair strained relations with their family, friends and co-workers by adjusting the one variable within their control: their own behavior.
Dr. Glasser trained therapists and others mainly through the William Glasser Institute, a nonprofit organization he founded outside Chicago. In his book “Choice Theory,” he summarized its strategy as helping patients and schoolchildren to shift their view of reality fundamentally — from one where behavior is controlled externally by coercion, to one where individuals control their own behavior in an atmosphere of “love, friendship, negotiation and trust.”
Asked in a 2002 interview whether his theories were naïve, as some critics contended, Dr. Glasser said naïveté was no sin if the methods worked, and he insisted that they did.
“I am naïve,” he said, but added, “People listen to me.”
In a 1984 interview with The Los Angeles Times, Dr. Glasser said he formulated his basic ideas while serving his residency at the V.A. hospital.
“What they taught, in effect, was that you aren’t responsible for your miserable problems because you are the victim of factors and circumstances beyond your control,” he said. “I objected to that. My thrust was that patients have to be worked with as if they have choices to make. My question is always, ‘What are you going to do about your life, beginning today?’ ”
At the end of his residency, he added, “I was thrown off the staff.”
– The New York Times, William Glasser, 88, Doctor Who Said One Could Choose Happiness , Is Dead – September 4, 2013
“lover, n.
Oh, how I hated this word. So pretentious, like it was always being translated from the French. The tint and taint of illicit, illegitimate affections. Dictionary meaning:a person having a love affair. Impermanent. Unfamilial. Inextricably linked to sex.
I have never wanted a lover. In order to have a lover, I must go back to the root of the word. For I have never wanted a lover, but I have always wanted to love, and to be loved.
There is no word for the recipient of the love. There is only a word for the giver. There is the assumption that lovers come in pairs.
When I say, Be my lover, I don’t mean, Let’s have an affair. I don’t mean Sleep with me. I don’t mean, Be my secret.
I want us to go back to that root.
I want you to be the one who loves me.
I want to be the one who loves you.”
– David Levithan, The Lover’s Dictionary
