66+ Frank Pittman Quotes On Education, Psychotherapy And Healing

Frank Pittman was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who specialized in family therapy, addiction, and the treatment of men. He was the author of many books and articles on psychotherapy, including Private Lies: Infidelity and Betrayal of Intimacy, Grow Up: A Man's Guide to Masculine Emotional Intelligence, and Men in Therapy: The Challenge of Change. He was a founding member of the American Academy of Psychotherapists and was the founding editor of the journal Psychotherapy in Private Practice. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Frank Pittman on leadership, education, life.

Top 10 Frank Pittman Quotes

1. Bad marriages don't cause infidelity; infidelity causes bad marriages.
2. The secret to having a good marriage is to understand that marriage must be total, it must be permanent, and it must be equal.
3. Fidelity is the single most important element in solidly enduring marriages.
4. The more things we can laugh about, the more alive we become: The more things we can laugh about together, the more connected we become.
5. Marriage, like a submarine, is only safe if you get all the way inside.
6. Fathering is the most masculine thing a man can do.
7. Parents can make us distrust ourselves. To them, we seem always to be works-in-progress.
8. Why do otherwise sane, competent, strong men, men who can wrestle bears or raid corporations, shrink away in horror at the thought of washing a dish or changing a diaper?
9. Fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man.
10. Becoming Father the Nurturer rather than just Father the Provider enables a man to fully feel and express his humanity and his masculinity. Fathering is the most masculine thing a man can do.

Frank Pittman Short Quotes

• A boy is not free to find a partner of his own as long as he must be the partner to his mother.
• Happy people learn that happiness, like sweat, is a by-product of activity.
• . . . in the end, there is nothing a man can do that a woman can't, except be a father.
• Marriage isn't supposed to make you happy - it's supposed to make you married.
• The most likely cause of a man's depression is his failure to be the man he thinks he should be

Frank Pittman Quotes About Life

Common courtesy plays a big role in happy marriages. People who are permanently married are polite to one another. They don't want to hurt one another's feelings, and they don't try to make the other one feel humiliated. People who are married for life are extremely kind to one another. — Frank Pittman

For most people, a life lived alone, with passing strangers or passing lovers, is incoherent and ultimately unbearable. Someone must be there to know what we have done for those we love. — Frank Pittman

A man doesn't have to have all the answers; children will teach him how to parent them, and in the process will teach him everything he needs to know about life. — Frank Pittman

We know how powerful our mother was when we were little, but is our wife that powerful to us now? Must we relive our great deed of escape from Mama with every other woman in our life? — Frank Pittman

Frank Pittman Quotes About Love

We perversely see mother love as the problem--when it is all we have to sustain us--rather than blaming the fathers who have run out on our mothers and on us. We seem willing to forgive fathers for loving too little even as we still shrink in terror from mothers who love too much. — Frank Pittman

Fathering makes a man, whatever his standing in the eyes of the world, feel strong and good and important, just as he makes his child feel loved and valued. — Frank Pittman

At the heart of the matter of masculine excess is a great longing for the love and approval of a father, a man who can tell another man that his masculinity is splendid enough and he can now relax. — Frank Pittman

Family love can be a bore, but only when you are hearing it, never when you are relating it to the ones who will be carrying it out for you. A family without a storyteller or two has no way to make sense out of their past and no way to get a sense of themselves. — Frank Pittman

Love is not something people feel, but something people try to express no matter how they feel. — Frank Pittman

Frank Pittman Quotes About Parents

The guys who fear becoming fathers don't understand that fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man. The end product of child-raising is not the child but the parent. — Frank Pittman

The end product of child raising is not the child but the parent. — Frank Pittman

Parents have subtle ways of humbling you, of reminding you of your origins, perhaps by showing up at the moment of your greatest glory and reminding you where you came from and demonstrating that you still have some of it between your toes. — Frank Pittman

No one, however powerful and successful, can function as an adult if his parents are not satisfied with him. — Frank Pittman

Each generation's job is to question what parents accept on faith, to explore possibilities, and adapt the last generation's system of values for a new age. — Frank Pittman

There are great advantages to seeing yourself as an accident created by amateur parents as they practiced. You then have been left in an imperfect state and the rest is up to you. Only the most pitifully inept child requires perfection from parents. — Frank Pittman

Parents have to get over the idea that their children belong just to them; children are a family affair. — Frank Pittman

Frank Pittman Famous Quotes And Sayings

As boys without bonds to their fathers grow older and more desperate about their masculinity, they are in danger of forming gangs in which they strut their masculinity for one another, often overdo it, and sometimes turn to displays of fierce, macho bravado and even violence. — Frank Pittman

To insult a friend implies that you respect his masculinity enough to know he can take it without acting like a crybaby. The swapping of insults, like the fighting between brothers, becomes the seal of the male bonding. — Frank Pittman

Mother love has been much maligned. An over mothered boy may go through life expecting each new woman to love him the way his mother did. Her love may make any other love seem inadequate. But an unloved boy would be even more likely to idealize love. I don't think it's possible for a mother or father to love a child too much. — Frank Pittman

Character, not passion keeps marriages together long enough to do their work of raising children into mature, responsible, productive citizens. — Frank Pittman

It's not that we have too much mother, but too little father. We can't forgive our mothers for taking the place of our fathers until we are ready to see that the point of a man's life is to be a father and a mentor, and we can't do that because we don't know how we would be a father or a mentor when we never had one. — Frank Pittman

Most of us have felt barriers between ourselves and our fathers and had thought that going it alone was part of what it meant to be a man. We tried to get close to our children when we became fathers, and yet the business of practicing masculinity kept getting in the way. We men have begun to talk about that. — Frank Pittman

In considering the ledger equal, understand the greatest gift you have given your parents is the opportunity to raise you. The things a child gets from parents can't compare to the things a parent gets from raising a child. Only by experiencing this can you understand the degree to which children give meaning to parents' lives. — Frank Pittman

Our father has an even more important function than modeling manhood for us. He is also the authority to let us relax the requirements of the masculine model: if our father accepts us, then that declares us masculine enough to join the company of men. We, in effect, have our diploma in masculinity and can go on to develop other skills. — Frank Pittman

If fathers who fear fathering and run away from it could only see how little fathering is enough. Mostly, the father just needs to be there. — Frank Pittman

We become male automatically because of the Y chromosome and the little magic peanut, but if we are to become men we need the helpof other men--we need our fathers to model for us and then to anoint us, we need our buddies to share the coming-of-age rituals with us and to let us join the team of men, and we need myths of heroes to inspire us and to show us the way. — Frank Pittman

Men who have been raised violently have every reason to believe it is appropriate for them to control others through violence; they feel no compunction over being violent to women, children, and one another. — Frank Pittman

Parents offer an open womb. More than anyone else in your life, mothers, and sometimes fathers, can kiss it, and make it well whentheir grown children need to regress and repair. More than anyone else in your life, mothers, and sometimes fathers, can catch you when you start to fall. When you are in disgrace, defeat, and despair, home may be the safest place to hide. — Frank Pittman

Nothing is quite so horrifying and paralyzing as to win the Oedipal struggle and to be awarded your mother as the prize. — Frank Pittman

Fathers who compete hard with their kids are monstrous. The father, for a throw-away victory, is sacrificing the very heart of hischild's sense of being good enough. He may believe he is making his son tough, as he was made tough by a similarly contending father, but he is only making his child desperate and mean like himself. Fathers must let their sons (and daughters) have their victories. — Frank Pittman

We long for our father. We wear his clothes, and actually try to fill his shoes. . . . We hang on to him, begging him to teach ushow to do whatever is masculine, to throw balls or be in the woods or go see where he works. . . . We want our fathers to protect us from coming too completely under the control of our mothers. . . . We want to be seen with Dad, hanging out with men and doing men things. — Frank Pittman

In colonial America, the father was the primary parent. . . . Over the past two hundred years, each generation of fathers has hadless authority than the last. . . . Masculinity ceased to be defined in terms of domestic involvement, skills at fathering and husbanding, but began to be defined in terms of making money. Men had to leave home to work. They stopped doing all the things they used to do. — Frank Pittman

Every boy was supposed to come into the world equipped with a father whose prime function was to be our father and show us how tobe men. He can escape us, but we can never escape him. Present or absent, dead or alive, real or imagined, our father is the main man in our masculinity. — Frank Pittman

Masculinity varies from time to time and place to place. But it doesn't exist just in the mind of a single guy: it is shared withthe other guys. It is a code of conduct that requires men to maintain masculine postures and attitudes (however they are defined) at all times and in all places. Masculinity includes the symbols, uniforms, chants, and plays that make this the boys' team rather than the girls' team. — Frank Pittman

It is necessary but insufficient to stay married for the children's sake. It is also necessary to stay happily married for the children's sake. I'm so glad someone noticed that marriage doesn't have to make you miserable. It is just so easy to be happy I don't understand why it isn't more popular. — Frank Pittman

Parents vary in their sense of what would be suitable repayment for creating, sustaining, and tolerating you all those years, andwhat circumstances would be drastic enough for presenting the voucher. Obviously there is no repayment that would be sufficient . . . but the effort to call in the debt of life is too outrageous to be treated as anything other than a joke. — Frank Pittman

The child who would be an adult must give up any lingering childlike sense of parental power, either the magical ability to solveyour problems for you or the dreaded ability to make you turn back into a child. When you are no longer hiding from your parents, or clinging to them, and can accept them as fellow human beings, then they may do the same for you. — Frank Pittman

Our ability to fall in love requires enough comfort with our masculinity to join it with someone's femininity and feel enhanced. .. . If our mother made us feel secure and proud in our masculinity, then we want to find that again in our wife. If we are really comfortable with our mother, we can even marry a woman who is a friend rather than an adversary, and form a true partnership. — Frank Pittman

Mothers who are strong people, who can pursue a life of their own when it is time to let their children go, empower their childrenof either gender to feel free and whole. But weak women, women who feel and act like victims of something or other, may make their children feel responsible for taking care of them, and they can carry their children down with them. — Frank Pittman

In time, after a dozen years of centering their lives around the games boys play with one another, the boys' bodies change and that changes everything else. But the memories are not erased of that safest time in the lives of men, when their prime concern was playing games with guys who just wanted to be their friendly competitors. Life never again gets so simple. — Frank Pittman

The problem is simply this: no one can feel like CEO of his or her life in the presence of the people who toilet trained her and spanked him when he was naughty. We may have become Masters of the Universe, accustomed to giving life and taking it away, casually ordering people into battle or out of their jobs . . . and yet we may still dirty our diapers at the sound of our mommy's whimper or our daddy's growl. — Frank Pittman

However patriarchal the world, at home the child knows that his mother is the source of all power. The hand that rocks the cradlerules his world. . . . The son never forgets that he owes his life to his mother, not just the creation of it but the maintenance of it, and that he owes her a debt he cannot conceivably repay, but which she may call in at any time. — Frank Pittman

At the heart of male bonding is this experience of boys in early puberty: they know they must break free from their mothers and the civilized world of women, but they are not ready yet for the world of men, so they are only at home with other boys, equally outcast, equally frightened, and equally involved in posturing what they believe to be manhood. — Frank Pittman

Infidelity flows from a belief that women have the power to make you feel like a man if you only find a woman that thinks you're perfect; if you can only find a woman that you haven't hurt or disappointed yet. — Frank Pittman

When the masculine mystique is pulling boys and men out into the world to growl manly noises at one another, the only power with astronger pull on the male psyche is maternally induced guilt. The guilt is quite necessary for our moral development, but it is often uncomfortable. — Frank Pittman

When it comes to little girls, God the father has nothing on father, the god. It's an awesome responsibility. — Frank Pittman

A real man doesn't have to run from his mother, and may even have to face the reality that no great deed is going to be great enough for him to ransom himself completely, and he may always be in his mother's debt. If he understands that . . . he won't have to feel guilty, and he won't have to please her completely. He can go ahead and be nice to her and let her be part of his life. — Frank Pittman

We never really are the adults we pretend to be. We wear the mask and perhaps the clothes and posture of grown-ups, but inside ourskin we are never as wise or as sure or as strong as we want to convince ourselves and others we are. We may fool all the rest of the people all of the time, but we never fool our parents. They can see behind the mask of adulthood. To her mommy and daddy, the empress never has on any clothes--and knows it. — Frank Pittman

What we men share is the experience of having been raised by women in a culture that stopped our fathers from being close enough to teach us how to be men, in a world in which men were discouraged from talking about our masculinity and questioning its roots and its mystique, in a world that glorified masculinity and gave us impossibly unachievable myths of masculine heroics, but no domestic models to teach us how to do it. — Frank Pittman

Parents can fail to cheer your successes as wildly as you expected, pointing out that you are sharing your Nobel Prize with a couple of other people, or that your Oscar was for supporting actress, not really for a starring role. More subtly, they can cheer your successes too wildly, forcing you into the awkward realization that your achievement of merely graduating or getting the promotion did not warrant the fireworks and brass band. — Frank Pittman

The men who are messing up their lives, their families, and their world in their quest to feel man enough are not exercising truemasculinity, but a grotesque exaggeration of what they think a man is. When we see men overdoing their masculinity, we can assume that they haven't been raised by men, that they have taken cultural stereotypes literally, and that they are scared they aren't being manly enough. — Frank Pittman

Life Lessons by Frank Pittman

1. Life is a journey and it is important to take the time to enjoy it and appreciate the small moments. From Dr. Frank Pittman, we can learn to be mindful of our thoughts and feelings, and to take responsibility for our own happiness.
2. Dr. Pittman also encourages us to be honest with ourselves and others, and to be open to new experiences and perspectives. He emphasizes the importance of self-care and self-love, and encourages us to be kind and compassionate to ourselves and others.
3. Finally, Dr. Pittman teaches us to accept our flaws and imperfections, and to strive for balance and harmony in our lives. He reminds us that we are all human, and that life is full of ups and downs. With his