Quotes by Psychologists

Although stigmatizing attitudes are not limited to mental illness, the public seems to disapprove persons with psychiatric disabilities significantly more than persons with related conditions such as physical illness (34-36). Severe mental illness has been likened to drug addiction, prostitution, and criminality (37,38). Unlike physical disabilities, persons with mental illness are perceived by the public to be in control of their disabilities and responsible for causing them (34,36). Furthermore, research respondents are less likely to pity persons with mental illness, instead reacting to psychiatric disability with anger and believing that help is not deserved (35,36,39)."World Psychiatry. 2002 Feb; 1(1): 16–20.PMCID: PMC1489832Understanding the impact of stigma on people with mental illnessPATRICK W CORRIGAN and AMY C WATSON
Patrick W. Corrigan
The more we idealized the past, however, and refuse to acknowledge or childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.
Alice MIller
Instead, every precaution was taken not to violate his rights. Remember, many administrators have no difficulty in expelling a student who utters an unwelcome opinion about the immorality of homosexuality.
James C. Dobson
If we conform our behavior to God’s ancient moral prescription, we are entitled to the sweet benefits of life. But if we defy its imperatives, then death is the inevitable consequence. AIDS is only one avenue by which sickness and death befall those who play Russian roulette with God’s eternal moral law.
James C. Dobson
God Himself even "forgets" the wickedness committed by those whom He has forgiven. That's why it is never too late to clean up your life.
James C. Dobson
Don't tell me I'm "too tall" just because my height happens to threaten your rather fragile sense of masculinity. The fact that men cannot look down upon women who are taller than them is the very reason that many men find tall women so intimidating.
Miya Yamanouchi
At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered false and my alcoholic father's memory is considered rational and sane. Am I not believed because I am a woman? If Peter Freyd were a man who lived in my neighborhood during my childhood instead of my father, would he and his wife be so believable? If not, what is it about his status as my father that makes him more credible?
Jennifer J. Freyd
Biologists will teach us that the survival of the species depends on cooperation, not competition.
Robert Holden
We must know something about malevolence, about how to recognize it, and about how not to make excuses for it. We must know that we cannot expect fair play.That is, perhaps, most crucial of all. Those of us who practice in this field must face the implications of the fact that we are dealing with sexual abuse. Child sex offenders-people who exploit children’s bodies and betray their trust-are not going to hesitate to lie outright. This is obvious but nonetheless frequently seems to catch people by surprise.Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998
Anna C. Salter
Our analyses of the FDA data showed relatively little difference between the effects of antidepressants and the effects of placebos. Indeed, the effects were so small that they did not qualify as clinically significant. The drug companies knew how small the effect of their medications were compared to placebos, and so did the FDA and other regulatory agencies. The companies found various ways to make the data seem more favorable to their products, and the FDA helped them keep their negative data secret. In fact, in some instances, the FDA urged the companies to keep negative data hidden, even when the companies wanted to reveal them. My colleagues and I hadn't really discovered anything new. We had merely revealed their 'dirty little secret'.
Irving Kirsch
Even in that difficult hour when he knew death was imminent, he never indulged in self-pity. He knew intuitively that a person is only a victim if he accepts himself as one.
James C. Dobson
Positive emotions and mental states may make people more resilient to stress, like sturdy tree branches that bend but don’t break when battered by a storm
Melanie Greenberg
Our work calls on us to confront, with our patients and within ourselves, extraordinary human experiences. This confrontation is profoundly humbling in that at all times these experiences challenge the limits of our humanity and our view of the world...
John P. Wilson
Several psychologists (L. Armstrong, 1994; Enns, McNeilly, Corkery, & Gilbert, 1995; Herman, 1992; McFarlane & van der Kolk, 1996; Pope & Brown, 1996) contend that the controversy of delayed recall for traumatic events is likely to be influenced by sexism. Kristiansen, Gareau, Mittleholt, DeCourville, and Hovdestad (1995) found that people who were more authoritarian and who had less favorable attitudes toward women were less likely to believe in the veracity of women’s recovered memories for sexual abuse. Those who challenged the truthfulness of recovered memories were more likely to endorse negative statements about women, including the idea that battered women enjoy being abused. McFarlane and van der Kolk (1996) have noted that delayed recall in male combat veterans reported by Myers (1940) and Kardiner (1941) did not generate controversy, whereas delayed recall in female survivors of intrafamilial child sexual abuse has provoked considerable debate.
Rachel E. Goldsmith
35. God is entitled to a portion of our income—not because He needs it but because we need to give it.
James C. Dobson
Recovering is a process of coming to experience a sense of self. More precisely, it is a process of learning to sense one's self, to attune to one's subjective physical, psychic, and social self- experience. These woman's core sense of shame and their difficulty tolerating painful emotions had led them to avoid turning their attention inward to their internal sense of things. In recovering, they "came to their senses" and learned to trust their sensed experience, in particular their sense of "enoughness"".
Sheila M. Reindl
Often, her mate is the child of a narcissist, already indoctrinated to regard exploitation and disregard as love. Others lured by the narcissistic aura are those in whom healthy childhood exhibitionism has been repressed. . . . If the parent puts the child to shame for showing off, the need for attention gets repressed into the unconscious. Repression means that the need is not satisfied and continues to press for expression in the adult without her being aware of it. The repressed adult may select an exhibitionistic mate to achieve vicarious satisfaction.
Elan Golomb
My definition of Fun Game is when everyone wins.
Kirtida Gautam
Too often the survivor is seen by [himself or] herself and others as "nuts," "crazy," or "weird." Unless her responses are understood within the context of trauma. A traumatic stress reaction consists of *natural* emotions and behaviors in response to a catastrophe, its immediate aftermath, or memories of it. These reactions can occur anytime after the trauma, even decades later. The coping strategies that victims use can be understood only within the context of the abuse of a child. The importance of context was made very clear many years ago when I was visiting the home of a Holocaust survivor. The woman's home was within the city limits of a large metropolitan area. Every time a police or ambulance siren sounded, she became terrified and ran and hid in a closet or under the bed. To put yourself in a closet at the sound of a far-off siren is strange behavior indeed—outside of the context of possibly being sent to a death camp. Within that context, it makes perfect sense. Unless we as therapists have a good grasp of the context of trauma, we run the risk of misunderstanding the symptoms our clients present and, hence, responding inappropriately or in damaging ways.
Diane Mandt Langberg
You’re too sensitive’ victims of sexual abuse are told over and over by those whose reality depends on being insensitive. Most adults who have been in the victim role cringe when anyone tells them they are sensitive. In fact, sensitivity is a lovely trait and one to be cherished in any human being.
Renee Fredrickson
At the most basic level, self-deception is fooling ourselves into believing something that is false -- or -- not believing something that is true.
Cortney S. Warren
Be wary of someone who has never failed, or seem to have no faults... Too good to be true usually is. Perfection hides something.
Henry Cloud
Love makes people do crazy things. And not feeling loved can bring people to the edge of madness.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
The sun glowed behind the monotonous, gray January sky, a tease of light through the heavy hazy. Noah gazed out the window. He hated when the sun shined against the overcast sky creating a white, blinding glare while the ball of yellow remained hidden, a tantalizing possibility without a promise. Maybe it would poke through; maybe it wouldn't. That type of sun was a capricious as a woman.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
You were born to be among the advisors and thinkers, the spiritual and moral leaders for your society. There is every reason for pride.
Elaine N. Aron
Few would argue that a simpler consciousness, no matter how harmonious, is preferable to a more complex one. While we might admire the serenity of the lion in repose, the tribesman’s untroubled acceptance of his fate, or the child’s wholehearted involvement in the present, they cannot offer a model for resolving our predicament. The order based on innocence is now beyond our grasp. Once the fruit is plucked from the tree of knowledge, the way back to Eden is barred forever.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.
Joyce Brothers
Several themes describe misconceptions about mental illness and corresponding stigmatizing attitudes. Media analyses of film and print have identified three: people with mental illness are homicidal maniacs who need to be feared; they have childlike perceptions of the world that should be marveled; or they are responsible for their illness because they have weak character (29-32)."World Psychiatry. 2002 Feb; 1(1): 16–20.PMCID: PMC1489832Understanding the impact of stigma on people with mental illnessPATRICK W CORRIGAN and AMY C WATSON
Patrick W. Corrigan
Dissociative identity disorder is conceptualized as a childhood onset, posttraumatic developmental disorder in which the child is unable to consolidate a unified sense of self. Detachment from emotional and physical pain during trauma can result in alterations in memory encoding and storage. In turn, this leads to fragmentation and compartmentalization of memory and impairments in retrieving memory.2,4,19 Exposure to early, usually repeated trauma results in the creation of discrete behavioral states that can persist and, over later development, become elaborated, ultimately developing into the alternate identities of dissociative identity disorder.
Bethany L. Brand
But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Every word that I utter matters and this makes me speechless.
Amit Abraham
so often victims end up unnecessarily prolonging their abuse because they buy into the notion that their abuser must be coming from a wounded place and that only patient love and tolerance (and lots of misguided therapy) will help them heal.
George K. Simon
Dissociation gets you through a brutal experience, letting your basic survival skills operate unimpeded…Your ability to survive is enhanced as the ability to feel is diminished…All feeling are blocked; you ‘go away.’ You are disconnected from the act, the perpetrator & yourself…Viewing the scene from up above or some other out-of-body perspective is common among sexual abuse survivors.
Renee Fredrickson
Society has seldom considered the vicarious effects of domestic violence between partners on the lives of children.
Asa Don Brown
Take time to reflect, let ideas flow on their own schedule and let yourself have numerous bad ideas to inspire the good ones.
Joanie Connell
The principle locations of exploitation have moved, through the mechanism of 'globalisation', to where most of us can't see them and don't really care about them if we do.
David Smail
Second, you should examine the Scriptures for principles that relate to the issue at hand. The Lord will never ask you to do anything that is morally wrong or in contradiction to His Word. If what you are considering violates a concept you find in the Word, you can forget it.
James C. Dobson
Indeed, we should be trying to reach out to those who don’t know Jesus Christ, which is impossible in an atmosphere of hostility.
James C. Dobson
Don't judge me by my mistakes, judge me by the implications they had.
Amit Abraham
Make good boundaries your goal. They are your right, your responsibility, your greatest source of dignity.
Elaine N. Aron
Well before she became famous — or infamous, depending on where you cast your vote — Loftus's findings on memory distortion were clearly commodifiable. In the 1970s and 1980s she provided assistance to defense attorneys eager to prove to juries that eyewitness accounts are not the same as camcorders. "I've helped a lot of people," she says. Some of those people: the Hillside Strangler, the Menendez brothers, Oliver North, Ted Bundy. "Ted Bundy?" I ask, when she tells this to me. Loftus laughs. "This was before we knew he was Bundy. He hadn't been accused of murder yet." "How can you be so confident the people you're representing are really innocent?" I ask. She doesn't directly answer. She says, "In court, I go by the evidence.... Outside of court, I'm human and entitled to my human feelings. "What, I wonder are her human feelings about the letter from a child-abuse survivor who wrote, "Let me tell you what false memory syndrome does to people like me, as if you care. It makes us into liars. False memory syndrome is so much more chic than child abuse.... But there are children who tonight while you sleep are being raped, and beaten. These children may never tell because 'no one will believe them.'" "Plenty of "Plenty of people will believe them," says Loftus. Pshaw! She has a raucous laugh and a voice with a bit of wheedle in it. She is strange, I think, a little loose inside. She veers between the professional and the personal with an alarming alacrity," she could easily have been talking about herself.
Lauren Slater
Fear and anxiety affect decision making in the direction of more caution and risk aversion... Traumatized individuals pay more attention to cues of threat than other experiences, and they interpret ambiguous stimuli and situations as threatening (Eyesenck, 1992), leading to more fear-driven decisions. In people with a dissociative disorder, certain parts are compelled to focus on the perception of danger. Living in trauma-time, these dissociative parts immediately perceive the present as being "just like" the past and "emergency" emotions such as fear, rage, or terror are immediately evoked, which compel impulsive decisions to engage in defensive behaviors (freeze, flight, fight, or collapse). When parts of you are triggered, more rational and grounded parts may be overwhelmed and unable to make effective decisions.
Suzette Boon
Throughout the history of the Kensington Rune Stone in the twentiethcentury, memories of an ancient battle were repeatedly evoked toaddress the concerns about more recent battles. The skræling enduredas a convenient symbol of the threats posed by secularization, urbanization,and diversification. As sociologist Richard K. Fenn observes,“Any society is a reservoir of old longings and ancient hatreds. Theseneed to be understood, addressed, resolved and transcended if a societyis to have a future that is different from its past.” Furthermore, whena society does not adequately confront its past, it perpetually finds “anew target that resembles but also differs from the source of originalconflict.” If Fenn is correct, old enemies will continue to emerge inthe face of new enemies unless Minnesotans can understand, address,resolve, and transcend the state’s original sin: the unjust treatment ofthe region’s first inhabitants.
David M. Krueger
Sometimes, we miss the truth when it's right in front of us, she thought. Sometimes the closer we are, the harder it is to see.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
I am because I feel.
Amit Abraham
And becoming aware of one's true inner nature, instinctive gut feelings, is not generally thought by those who experience it to be in conflict with the essence of one's spiritual knowledge, but more of a Gnostic direct experience of the Sacred experienced in the gut or all of nature that is greater than us and is connected to us through the gut instincts.
Martha Char Love
I mean, I really liked him to the point where being around him was sort of wonderful and painful all at the same time, you know?
Kenneth Logan
When you consider the many pressures that couples face today, only an iron-clad determination will hold them together for a lifetime. Those who go into marriage with a mushy commitment are likely to wobble and fall apart when the hard times come. And as we all know, hard times will come.
James C. Dobson
Unhealthy relationships are most commonly lacking in the most essential of ingredient: healthy communication.
Asa Don Brown
Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
Rollo May
It takes more than just awareness for us to change. It takes courage and humility and the willingness to occasionally feel like fools and laugh at ourselves.
Bud Harris
My only sin in this world has been that I have been truthful and honest and God has blessed me for this earthly sin.
Amit Abraham
Perhaps adjustment and stabilization, while good because it cuts your pain, is also bad because development towards a higher ideal ceases?
Abraham H. Maslow
When people are vulnerable to control, they feel that they are selfish for deciding what to do with their own property. In reality, deciding for ourselves is the only way we can ever have true love, for then we are giving freely.
Henry Cloud
My child, may you live happily forever. May you experience great success and happiness in life! But you will never be able to experience bliss. For, the one who sins cannot attain bliss, he might get everything in his life but not bliss ~ Gayatri Kashyap
Kirtida Gautam
On a lighter but serious side I believe that homework was meant for parents to take a keen interest in the studies of children rather than leave it completely for the teacher. This way the parent child communication also developed. However with the passage of time the world become more mechanical and commercial. Quality time suffixed for quantity time and homework became a means of earning for many an educated unemployed teachers. How sad we sure have progressed but yet in many ways have lost our basic values, ethics and morality. It’s time to wake up and DO OUR HOMEWORK.
Amit Abraham
Science is rooted in the will to truth. With the will to truth it stands or falls. Lower the standard even slightly and science becomes diseased at the core. Not only science, but man. The will to truth, pure and unadulterated, is among the essential conditions of his existence; if the standard is compromised he easily becomes a kind of tragic caricature of himself.
Max Wertheimer
Specific parts of you personality may be angry and are usually easily evoked. because these parts are dissociated, anger remains an emotion that is not integrated for you as a whole person. Even though individuals with dissociative disorder are responsible for their behavior, just like everyone else, regardless of which part may be acting, they may feel little control of these raging parts of themselves.Some dissociative parts may avoid or even be phobic of anger. They may influence you as a whole person to avoid conflict with others at any cost or to avoid setting healthy boundaries out of fear of someone else’s anger; or they may urge you to withdraw from others almost completely.
Suzette Boon
When the anger is intense, the person with Asperger's syndrome may be in a 'blind rage' and unable to see the signals indicating that it would be appropriate to stop. Feelings of anger can also be in response in situations where we would expect other emotions. I have noted that sadness may be expressed as anger.
Tony Attwood
It will no doubt be agreed that there are multitudes of these defiant, aggressive types in our culture. But they do not frequent psychoanalysts' offices because our competitive culture (in which, to a considerable extent, the individual who can aggressively exploit others without conscious guilt feeling is 'succesful') supports and 'cushions' them to a greater extent than the opposite types. It is generally the culturally 'weak' individuals who get to the psychoanalyst; for in cultural terms they have the 'neurosis' and the succesfully agressive person does not.
Rollo May