Quotes by Psychiatrists - Page 3

The world does not have to change.... The only thing that has to change is our attitude.
Gerald Jampolsky
We cannot solve life's problems except by solving them.
M. Scott Peck
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward and we want to sit in their radius. When we are listened to it creates us makes us unfold and expand.
Karl Menninger
What's done to children they will do to society.
Karl Menninger
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived lives of the parents.
Carl Jung
Generous people are rarely mentally ill people.
Karl Menninger
The amount of satisfaction you get from life depends largely on your own ingenuity self-sufficiency and resourcefulness. People who wait around for life to supply their satisfaction usually find boredom instead.
Dr. William Menninger
Neurotic means he is not as sensible as I am and psychotic means he's even worse than my brother-in-law.
Karl Menninger
Fears are educated into us and can if we wish be educated out.
Dr. Karl Menninger
The proverb warns that "You should not bite the hand that feeds you." But maybe you should if it prevents you from feeding yourself.
Thomas Szasz
There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
Carl Jung
Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems ... create our courage and wisdom.
M. Scott Peck
Willfulness must give way to willingness and surrender. Mastery must yield to mystery.
Gerald G. May
No way exists in the present to accurately determine the future effect of the least of our actions.
Gerald Jampolsky
Practice easing your way along. Don't get het up or in a dither. Do your best take it as it comes. You can handle anything if you think you can. Just keep your cool and your sense of humor.
Smiley Blanton
We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate it oppresses.
Carl Jung
We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
Carl Jung
Anxiety is that range of distress which attends willing what cannot be willed.
Leslie H. Farber
The greatest and most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.
Carl Jung
The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.
Thomas Szasz
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
C.G. Jung
What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now.
William Glasser
While some accused and convicted child molesters have inappropriately influenced the media, the public, and many in the clinical and legal professions by claiming that traumatic amnesia does not occur in child sexual abuse, workers in the field of trauma psychology have accumulated solid empirical evidence over the past 100 years that it does occur and is common. Its existence and natural history are documented throughout the clinical literature. from:Traumatic amnesia: The evolution of our understanding from a clinical and legal perspective, Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment & Prevention, Volume 4, Issue 2, 1997
Charles L. Whitfield
Maternal absence, in one form or another, is always found in the background of the incest romance. Womens literature on incest generally treats the theme of maternal absence tragically. Mens literature trivializes it or treats it comically. And clinical literature tends to treat it judgmentally.
Judith Lewis Herman
As long as fathers rule but do not nurture, as long as mothers nurture but do not rule, the conditions favoring the development of father-daughter incest will prevail.
Judith Lewis Herman
..[The] disclosure of the incest secret initiates a profound crisis for the family usually...the abuse has been going on for a number of years and has become an integral part of family life. Disclosure disrupts whatever fragile equilibrium has been maintained, jeopardizes the functioning of all family members, increases the likelihood of violent and desperate behavior, and places everyone, but particularly the daughter, at risk for retaliation.
Judith Lewis Herman
For many people, the shock of sexual abuse pales before the shock of this mother’s statement, “I wish the fuck I never had her.” So thoroughly is motherhood sentimentalized that the mother who wishes to be rid of her child is considered a monster. In reality, women have always greeted the burden of motherhood ambivalently, even in the best of circumstances, and many women bear children involuntarily. But the approbrium which attaches to any woman who willing gives up her child is so great that some mothers will keep and mistreat their children rather than admit that they cannot care for them. Sometimes, the revelation of maternal neglect constitutes a plea for outside intervention, signaling the fact that a mother wants to be relieved of the duty to care for her child.
Judith Lewis Herman
Because children take everything personally, they believe that if they are being mistreated, it's because they haven't been “good enough.” Being good as an adult makes them believe, incorrectly, that they have some control in life. They think that they will be rewarded for their goodness and that it will protect them from harm.
Marcia Sirota
The capacity for dissociation enables the young child to exercise their innate life-sustaining need for attachment in spite of the fact that principal attachment figures are also principal abusers.
Warwick Middleton
Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood――establishing independence and intimacy――burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.
Judith Lewis Herman
Eighty two percent of the traumatized children seen in the National Child Traumatic Stress Network do not meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD.15 Because they often are shut down, suspicious, or aggressive they now receive pseudoscientific diagnoses such as “oppositional defiant disorder,” meaning “This kid hates my guts and won’t do anything I tell him to do,” or “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder,” meaning he has temper tantrums. Having as many problems as they do, these kids accumulate numerous diagnoses over time. Before they reach their twenties, many patients have been given four, five, six, or more of these impressive but meaningless labels. If they receive treatment at all, they get whatever is being promulgated as the method of management du jour: medications, behavioral modification, or exposure therapy. These rarely work and often cause more damage.
Bessel A. van der Kolk
Abusive parents have inappropriate expectations of their children, with a reversal of dependence needs. Parents treat an abused child as if the child were older than the parents. A parent often turns to the child for reassurance, nurturing, comfort, and protection and expects a loving response.
Benjamin James Sadock
Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul be just another human soul.
C.G. Jung
He put his ear to his own chest and listened to the heart. How could the pulse go on, beat after beat, for all of life? No machine could run that long without a stumble. Ask not if the beating cranks are going to jam, but when.
Giulio Tononi
Sometimes, soulmates may meet, stay together until a task or life lesson is completed, and then move on. This is not a tragedy, only a matter of learning.
Brian L. Weiss
Some people have the experience of being accused of lying when they do not think that they have lied. Circle a number to show what percentage of the time this happens to you.[question from the Dissociative Experiences Scale]
Frank W. Putnam
People don't usually think about the meaning of the words they say. It seems to them that words convey truth. That when someone hears the word "red" he will think of a ripe raspberry and not a pool of blood. That the word "love" will evoke Shakespeare's sonnets and not the erotic films of Playboy. And they find themselves baffled when the word they've spoken doesn't evoke the right response.
Sergei Lukyanenko
You can teach a child the importance of pain by your behavior. You can also teach as child the importance of no pain by your behavior.
Milton H. Erickson
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game
R.D. Laing
Men often have grievances against prominent and powerful persons. Historically, the grievances of the powerless against the powerful have furnished the steam for the engines of revolutions. My point is that in many of the famous medicolegal cases involving the issue of insanity, persons of relatively low social rank openly attacked their superiors. Perhaps their grievances were real and justified, and were vented on the contemporary social symbols of authority, the King and the Queen. Whether or not these grievances justified homicide is not our problem here. I merely wish to suggest that the issue of insanity may have been raised in these trials to obscure the social problems which the crimes intended to dramatize.
Thomas Szasz
There is no rule that is true under all circumstances, for this is the real and not a statistical world. Because the statistical method shows only the average aspects, it creates an artificial and predominantly conceptual picture of reality.
C.G. Jung
Modern physics, having advanced into another world beyond conceivability, cannot dispense with the concept of a space-time continuum. Insofar as psychology penetrates into the unconscious, it probably has no alternative but to acknowledge the “indistinctness” or the impossibility of distinguishing between time and space, as well as their psychic relativity. The world of classical physics has not ceased to exist, and by the same token, the world of consciousness has not lost its validity against the unconscious… “Causality” is a psychologem (and originally a magic virtus) that formulates the connection between events and illustrates them as cause and effect. Another (incommensurable) approach that does the same thing in a different way is synchronicity. Both are identical in the higher sense of the term “connection” or “attachment.” But on the empirical and practical level (i.e., in the real world), they are incommensurable and antithetical, like space and time.[…]I would now like to propose that instead of “causality” we have “(relatively) constant connection through effect,” and instead of synchronicity we have (relatively) constant connection through contingency, equivalence, or “meaning.
C.G. Jung
Synchronicity could be understood as an ordering system by means of which “similar” things coincide, without there being any apparent cause.
C.G. Jung
We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.
C.G. Jung
Families, by and large, like most groups, resist change. If one member of a family wants to move away, this is regarded as a betrayal, for example. If one member of a family is fat and tries to lose weight, often other members of the family will sabotage the effort. If one member of the family wants to get out of a role he or she has been playing for years, this is usually difficult ot do because the rest of the family tries not to let it happen. If your role is clown, you remain the clown. If your role is responsible oldest child, you probably keep that role within your family for your entire life. If you are the black sheep, you'll find it very diffcult to change colors in the eyes of your family no matter how many good deeds you do.
Edward M. Hallowell
A life of total dedication to the truth also means a life of willingness to be personally challenged.
M. Scott Peck
In reality, man is a mosaic of wills; and the will of each instinct, each desire, each purpose, is the intensity of that instinct, desire or purpose.
Myerson Abraham Myerson
It was early in my career, and I had been seeing Mary, a shy, lonely, and physically collapsed young woman, for about three months in weekly psychotherapy, dealing with the ravages of her terrible history of early abuse. One day I opened the door to my waiting room and saw her standing there provocatively, dressed in a miniskirt, her hair dyed flaming red, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a snarl on her face. “You must be Dr. van der Kolk,” she said. “My name is Jane, and I came to warn you not to believe any the lies that Mary has been telling you. Can I come in and tell you about her?” I was stunned but fortunately kept myself from confronting “Jane” and instead heard her out. Over the course of our session I met not only Jane but also a hurt little girl and an angry male adolescent. That was the beginning of a long and productive treatment.
Bessel A. van der Kolk
A refusal on the part of psychiatrists and therapists to validate the horrors of their patients' tortured past implies a refusal to take seriously the unconscious psychological mechanisms that individuals need to use to protect themselves from the unspeakable. Such a denial is, however, no longer ethical, for it is in the human capacity to dissociate that lies part of the secret of both childhood abuse and the horrors of the Nazi genocide, both forms of human violence so often carried out by 'respectable' men and women.
Felicity De Zulueta
With respect to the acceptance of dissociative disorders, as with most issues in life, it is counterproductive to spend time trying to convince people of things they don't want to know.
Warwick Middleton
Since most sexual abuse begins well before puberty, preventive education, if it is to have any effect at all, should begin early in grade school.
Judith Lewis Herman
Change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change.
Milton H. Erickson
I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness
Frantz Fanon
Let me simply state that it is wrong to regard any other human being, a priori, as an object, or an 'It.' This is so because each and every human being - you, every friend, every stranger, every foreigner - is precious.
M. Scott Peck
The laws of nature are not intelligent,’ I replied. ‘The force of gravity is not intelligent. Electricity is not intelligent. A savage looking at a television might assume that it’s a sapient being, but we—’‘A sapient being? Looking at a television these days, the only possible assumption is that it’s a loud-mouthed, hysterical madman suffering from progressive mental debility,’ Anna Tikhonovna said derisively.
Sergei Lukyanenko
The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.
C.G. Jung
those who believed in the Good Lord, for whom death was just a journey, and it didn't make them sad at all
François Lelord
There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.
Theodore Dalrymple
It is a good rule of thumb for spiritual directors to ask themselves, What truly constitutes our spiritual concern here? Am I really being attentive to the Lord in this? What things are getting in the way of our simple, humble intention towards the working of the Holy Spirit in this person's life? All human experience can be said to be spiritual in the largest sense, but spiritual direction should deal primarily with those qualities that seem most clearly and specifically spiritual, those that reveal the presence or leadings of God, or evidence of grace, working most directly in a person's life. This becomes increasingly important as spiritual direction progresses over time with any given individual. In the course of spiritual maturation, concern with superficial psychological experience must give way to a much more basic concern for the discernment of good and evil.
Gerald G. May
No one has the right to do wrong, even if wrong has been done to them.
Viktor E. Frankl