“The focus of adulthood has been on stability: find a job and don't leave it, find a partner and don't get divorced, have babies, you know, white picket fence. That vision of adulthood has been so wedded to stability that it was hard for me, even in writing the book and sorting this out, to pull them apart. That the understanding full stop is that the goal of adulthood is to gain stability and then midlife, we now understand people have to search for meaning because there wasn't time for that prior. I'm trying to revise that and name what I think all of us have known for a long time, which is that it just doesn't work that way. It's not that easy. And actually, if we aren't finding our own personal sense of meaning in this world, while also working to gain some sense of physical, emotional, relational stability, then there's gonna just continue to be a lot of angst and confusion and pain and, and, you know, all sorts of symptoms resulting from that.”

“So natural intelligence has this ability to bring order when we allow it to. The reason that we don't see it so often in operation in human systems is because we are constantly interrupting those patterns. So that human intervention is constantly getting in the way of and disrupting the natural order. Therefore, every time it tries to express itself or reveal itself, we come in again and we see that most clearly, you know, during the pandemic. Here, I think many places around the world, it happened here in the UK, nature was able to establish itself very, very quickly within a week of the first lockdown. You know, we were seeing dolphins in the Thames.”

“If you don't know how to say no, your body will eventually say no for you. I think there is so much depth to that. And that's why it's so important that we help people begin asking, is there a message that my body is trying to give me about this illness many times. There's different ways to language this for different situations, but, is there a way in which a person is spending so much time taking care of others or responding to the perceived needs of others instead of taking up space in the world, doing the things that put a light in your own eyes, the things that create authentic wellbeing. It took me years to begin understanding the deeper sense of what's true here. But I think the truth is sometimes the illness is really a message that this inauthentic self that we have become—that needs to die. And if we can let that death occur, which can be messy and painful and scary, but if we can let that occur and let a more authentic version of who we really are be born, well, I'll tell you sometimes that's astonishing, sometimes what then becomes possible.”

“I think I find great comfort in this idea that when you form that bond, when you fall in love, your neurons are actually changed. The way that the electrical firing patterns happen in your brain, the way that proteins are folded are changed, because of this one and only person that you have spent time with. And from that perspective, when my dad died, he is still here literally right in my physical brain. He's physically in my brain. Now. That's not, I mean, that's data on the one hand, but I also find it comforting on the other hand that he is still with me. And because it's with the brain that I perceive the whole world, he's also in a sense with me as I experience everything.”

“As a therapist, I started to discover that when people need boundaries, they start to have issues around anxiety in their relationships, some depression, because they're not able to really stand up or they feel hopeless about improving certain scenarios. Burn out when people start to say, oh my gosh, I hate work. I have to work on weekends. Oh, this person keeps talking to me about this thing. So burn out, frustration, sometimes moodiness, when we get really mad at other people for asking us stuff, that could be a sign that we need some boundaries around maybe saying no and not giving them the freedom to constantly use us as a resource. Our feelings are really huge indicators on where we need boundaries. When we're feeling upset, frustrated, anxious, confused, angry, those are all huge indicators that boundaries are very likely needed.”

“As scientists, we often look at one thing and we say, oh, that's the one thing, it's competing for light. That's what people did. You know, the science, the experiments were simple, looking at one resource and not at the whole ecosystem. And so you miss all these other ways they're interacting. And if we could look at the whole thing all at once, we would make completely different decisions about how to manage that ecosystem. But because people were so focused that Birch is competing for light and not just Birch, but Aspen and all kinds of like Red Alder, all kinds of other species. And that led to the wholesale herbicide of these native plant communities to get rid of these so-called competitors. And if we'd just known ahead that they were also collaborating at the same time, any thinking person would never have gone in and poisoned these other plants. Because they create balance in the ecosystem.”

“There are 12 questions that enable every person who's willing to answer them, to reevaluate their life and their legacy. Because what I have found, with my father's death, is I miss not a single material thing about my father. I mean, I have his hat on the shelf behind me and I have a couple of his old tools, but that's it, what I really cherish, the inheritance I really cherish are the values, the laughter, the music, the food, my love of nature. That's his legacy, his powerful bullshit meter, his powerful moral compass, his love of peoplehood. And that's what we wanna be sure we bequeath to our loved ones when we're gone. But it's more than just a bequest because when you ask yourself questions, like what is love? What makes me happy? What has been my greatest failure? What do I regret? What do I want my epitaph to be? What would I say at my own funeral as a final blessing to my loved ones? These are the kinds of questions that enable us to ask whether or not we are living the life we say, we believe in and the life we say matters.”

“I didn't wanna be still, I had to be still, but I wanted more than anything to continue being a human doing. And the universe was insisting that I became a human being and it's profound. I mean, it's the greatest transformation of my life. You know, I went from being extremely supported on a business perspective to having to go buy stamps. And it takes me all day to mail a letter. You know, I'm really, I'm only able to do what I can do in a day and I love it. I really love it because as I often said, I can do bad all by myself. I don't need somebody else confirming a reservation and rubbing somebody the wrong way so that when I get there, the energy is weird. It's like now off I get somewhere and the energy's weird it's because of me.”

“I talk about dysfunctional relational stances that we repeat over and over again. For example, angry pursuit is an oxymoron. Angry pursuit is complaining about how the person isn't close to you. You will never get them closer to you. It is dysfunctional. That's what dysfunctional means. It doesn't work. It'll never get you what you want. And the first phase of the therapy that we do, relational life therapy. And in some ways, the first phase of this book is identifying what your repetitive, adaptive child relational stance is the thing you do over and over and over again,automatically knee jerk. I talk about whoosh comes up like a wave. I just gotta do this. I've gotta fix this person. I've gotta stand enough for myself. I gotta get outta here. And that is the hallmark of your adoptive child that is automatic andcompulsive. And this whole book is about moving beyond that part of you into the wise adult part of you, that can take a breath and do something, not automatic, but chosen deliberate, more skillful.”

“The key is to really believe it when you see something that you're doing every day in your diet that is making your hormones off, or your skin off, a lot of women know what's happening to their bodies. We're more intuitive in that way than men are. So I think it sounds really cheesy and we've heard it over and over again, but please listen to your body because it's telling you something. It’s important to listen and make a note of things that make us feel terrible and things that make us feel good.”

“If you are in a Western life and are designed as an empath or a spiritual being that feels things very deeply, it is important for you to hold and maintain your peace and to send, to usher that energy to others that may be experiencing pain and suffering at any given time. If you were in a period in your life in which you are in pain or suffering, would you want everyone else in the world to be suffering along with you? Probably not. If you were sick, you wouldn't want all of your family members to be miserable and sad, just because you're feeling sick. You would want people to be in their peace. You would want people to hold that energy of joy, because that is what creates healing, energy and meaning and purpose.”

“This to me is basic, but it feels like we've drifted really far from it in our culture. That to be a human, the basic condition of being a human is being needful. You know, like we need air, we need housing, we need food, we need companionship. We need all of these things. And somehow in our culture, it feels like you're asking for too much, if you need things, right, you're supposed to be super self-sufficient. You're supposed to be able to like pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You're supposed to be able to like handle everything and it's just it's work. And it is it's too much for one person to do.”

“When we talk about thoughts of the unsaid, we're talking about the inherited feelings of our parents, unprocessed trauma, and the phantoms that lived inside them. We're talking about traumas that our parents and grandparents would not process, and they are transmitted to us in some raw way. I quote in the book, Holocaust survivors, Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham, who said, “What haunts us are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.”

“I talk to so many women who, you know, we talk about Huddle and we talk about back catalog friends, people who I've known for years and years, you are never too late to add to your huddle. You are never, it is, you are never too old to, to add to your circle of friends. And what Elise is alluding to is certainly something that I feel as well, which is, you know, we live in these various chapters in our, in our lifetimes, you know, things change. We go through different. We have these various aha moments, I think for you. And I, we've both really deepened our spiritual practices and our intentionality around life and what we wanna do and how we wanna share ourselves. And I think as we've been in these more vulnerable spaces on the other side of giant things, we've been a part of, we've gotten to know ourselves better.”

“One reason I wrote the book is that the lack of recognition is such a powerful harm done to patients. And I think until you've gone through an experience like this, it's really hard to convey why that is. But basically it comes down to having the dignity of your suffering possessing. Some kind of meaning, I think, right. And we're all social creatures, right. We don't actually get sick totally alone. It feels lonely. But one reason that my illness was doubly hard was that I had the loneliness of physical symptoms. And then I had the additional of never having them recognized or validated, which made it so much harder.”

“Usually in high conflict, the conflict becomes the whole point. So you make a lot of mistakes and you can miss opportunities that would actually be in the interest you are fighting for. The reason you got into the fight to begin with, whereas good conflict is the kind of conflict where again, you can be angry, you can be yelling, you can have radical visions for the future. You can and must, you know, organize and protest and hold people accountable. But you do it much more skillfully. You make fewer mistakes because you're not essentially being controlled by the conflict. You're not in the trance of high conflict. And it's, you know, it's not easy to stay in good conflict. Everybody is gonna visit high conflict, even if it's for, you know, a few minutes, but you don't wanna live there because you, you and your cause will suffer.”

“I've won arm wrestles with big muscular men, right out of prison because you align the energy. Everything wants to harmonize with it and things start to flow with you and it's silent and it's, it's quiet, it's gentle, but it's incredibly powerful. The strength you can access when you're in a state of integrity. So as that starts to grow, we're seeing the Putins and we're seeing the Trumps because they are so freaking loud. And we don't even know that in the silence all over the world, there's another power rising and rising and rising and looking at what's happening in Ukraine and looking at the atrocities and saying, okay, we're not going, we're not gonna do this anymore.”

“You have to have something new to hope for. You might still keep hoping that somebody with a terminal illness might get better and indeed they do sometimes. Or you might hope as, after 9/11, that somebody will be found who was in the trade towers when they fell down. And in fact, a few people were found in another country or in a psychiatric ward and not being able to remember who they were, but for the most part, you keep hoping and you move forward with, life in a new way. Without that missing person, you must do both. You cannot just hope because that means you're immobilized, you're frozen in place and the children will suffer, the family will suffer, you will suffer from that. It has to be both/and.”

“So if we take that off the table, if we take off this, this goal of changing somebody's mind, then what are you left with? What's what's your purpose in the conversation? I feel like not only is that more attainable to have a conversation in which you are exchanging ideas, just exchanging ideas, exchanging information, that's attainable every time, but also it, it relieves some pressure, right? I mean, sometimes I feel like people see conversations as frustrating because they keep trying to do something that's impossible. Maybe it would be more enjoyable for you if you weren't trying to beat your head against the wall. I feel like that paragraph from Carl Rogers is not just something that is useful to tell the other person. I think it's mostly for you. For you to tell yourself, I'm not here to change you. I'm just here to listen and understand.”

“I increasingly feel that modern life is becoming intolerable for everyone, whether they're neurodivergent or not. I think we've noticed it earlier. I think we've reached our point of unbearable discomfort earlier along the line. But I just begin to think that the way we are living is generally hostile to our brains and our neurology. We are, all of us, completely overwhelmed all the time. And you know, like the idea that some people had a good pandemic, well that's because the world called a truce on some of us, and we didn't realize we needed it until that moment. I mean, I don't know what it's gonna take for us to all pull the break on this because it's not good. It's not good for us.”