Tragedy and Regret

We ought not conflate the pain of tragedy with the suffering of regret. Pain is inevitable; suffering is gratuitous. Tragedy is the painful experience of acknowledging an unfortunate reality. Regret is the experience of acknowledging an unrealized opportunity that could have led to avoiding an unfortunate reality.  —Steven R. Hobbs

To Be a Therapist

“A therapist must find a way to follow the rules of his clinical profession and also be a therapist, and at times the two are incompatible. Similarly, to be both human and a professional expert is a difficult task for some therapists. Because the situations a therapist encounters are so various, he needs a wide range of behavior. Sometimes he must take charge; at other times he must be helpless so that others will take charge. He must be serious but at times introduce humor; he must be flirtatious at one moment and distant at another. One of the therapist’s tasks is to be intensely involved in a situation at one moment and to sit on the periphery of it in the next. Sometimes the therapist must be repetitive, insisting over and over on the same behavior; at other times he must be changeable and not offer the same directive twice.” --Jay Haley in Leaving Home: the Therapy of Disturbed Young People, pg. 281