Book Titles

One of the most insidious things about side-by-side comparison is that it leads us to pay attention to any attribute that distinguishes the possibilities we are comparing.

…the temptation to view the past through the lens of the present is nothing short of overwhelming.

…the comparisons we make have a profound impact on our feelings, and when we fail to recognize that the comparisons we are making today are not the comparisons we will make tomorrow, we predictably underestimate how differently we will feel in the future.

Because time is such as slippery concept, we tend to imagine the future as the present with a twist, thus our imagined tomorrows inevitably look like slightly twisted versions of today.

…the absence of grief is quite normal, and rather than being the fragile flowers… most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma.

…studies of those who survive major trauma suggest that the vast majority do quite well, and that a significant portion claim that their lives were enhanced by the experience.

The fact is that negative events do affect us, but they generally don’t affect us as much or for as along as we expect them to.

Studies suggest that people are quite adept at finding a positive way to view things once those things become their own.

A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it.

In order to maintain the delicate balance between reality and illusion, we seek positive views of our experience, but we only allow ourselves to embrace those views when they seem credible.