Tuula Rasen BACP BPC FPC 

"When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in

“As a young man I believed if I could just find the “right” person, happiness would automatically follow. There was so much I didn’t understand. That each of us is responsible for our own happiness. That if I didn’t treat myself with consideration and care, chances are others wouldn’t treat me that way either. I didn’t understand pain. I thought the many kinds of pain we suffer when we love another person – longing, anxiety, grief – were feelings to avoid, symptoms to be remo

"People will often avoid mentioning our loved one's name for fear it will remind us and make us sad. As if we could ever forget! As if we had stopped for a moment, being sad! Our sorrow is directly connected to our love, and we refuse to be shamed into relinquishing it. In fact, when someone is brave enough to speak of our loved one, it can be such a relief. It means she existed; she mattered. For a moment, there is another being to help lift and carry the great weight of her

" You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal. " "I think about this and a passage from Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel" Life will break you. Nobod