Quotes by Psychologists - Page 25

What is the return on investment of being wedded to your suffering? What do you receive from stewing in victim consciousness? Righteous indignation or an excuse not to change?
Lisa Cypers Kamen
Becoming aware of the intense suffering of billions of animals, and of our own participation in that suffering, can bring up painful emotions: sorrow and grief for the animals; anger at the injustice and deception of the system; despair at the enormity of the problem; fear that trusted authorities and institutions are, in fact, untrustworthy; and guilt for having contributed to the problem. Bearing witness means choosing to suffer. Indeed, empathy is literally 'feeling with.' Choosing to suffer is particularly difficult in a culture that is addicted to comfort--a culture that teaches that pain should be avoided whenever possible and that ignorance is bliss. We can reduce our resistance to witnessing by valuing authenticity over personal pleasure, and integration over ignorance.
Melanie Joy
My mother once told me that holding on to the past is like walking around with a pebble in your shoe. You can still keep walking, keep moving forward, but that pebble is always there nagging at you, begging for your attention. After a while, that pebble is all you can feel. Sometimes, you just have to stop walking for a minute and get rid of it once and for all.
Ellery A. Kane
Living your life through negative feelings and memories is doing yourself a dishonour.If you want to change you need to be willing to leave your past wounds behind you. -If you wish to remain stuck in your attachment to past pains then dare to ask yourself exactly why you feel the need to define yourself by your past traumas or tragedies.
Miya Yamanouchi
You are NOT an abuse survivor or victim. Leave your labels elsewhere because they are no longer serving you.
Miya Yamanouchi
Sometimes in order to be happy in the present moment you have to be willing to give up all hope for a better past.
Robert Holden
The most stable, and therefore, the most healthy self-esteem is based on deserved respect from others rather than on external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation.
Abraham H. Maslow
If you have realistic ideals and can generally live up to them, your self-esteem will not be threatened. If your ideals are exaggerated and you cannot reach them, your good feelings from successes may be short lived, and you may feel that you are never good enough.The continued hope for the impossible, the expectation that you will or can be unconditionally loved and adored, is not facing reality but rather holding onto an idealized image of yourself and an idealized version of what others can provide. If this is the case, your sense of self may be threatened by shame and its resulting depression, or by feelings of inadequacy for not living up to your unrealistic ideals. A better understanding of shame may help you recognize your tendency to hide what you feel from yourself and others.
Mary C. Lamia
The purpose of school is for children to learn, not for them to feel good about themselves all the time.
Jean M. Twenge
If everybody likes you, you are doing it wrong.
Ben Michaelis
The image that concerns most people is the reflection they see in other people's minds.
Edward de Bono
There’s a widespread belief that if you have solid self-esteem you don’t need outside affirmation and praise. This is patently untrue, by the way.
Harriet Lerner
Yes, you ARE important enough; and yes, your needs and wants DO matter.
Miya Yamanouchi
Remember that this is YOUR LIFE, and nothing is more important than YOU.
Miya Yamanouchi
Practise really seeing yourself in the mirror. This is NOT about examining yourself. This is about you looking beyond your external image to connect with your soul. Look upon yourself with complete appreciation and acceptance. You are so beautiful.
Miya Yamanouchi
We can choose partner, make friends, hire people who make us feel faultless. But think about it – do you never want to grow? Next time you’re tempted to surround yourself with worshippers, go to church.
Carol S. Dweck
Self-esteem is a barometer of your overall internal makeup.
Asa Don Brown
Love yourself and that is all the love you need.
Amit Abraham
If we demand perfection from ourselves we are not living in the real world...The inherent problem in the relationship between the ideal & the real is that the ideal judges the real as unacceptable and brings down condemnation and wrath on the real. This sets up an adversarial relationship between the two and like all adversaries, they move further and further apart.
Henry Cloud
Intrapersonal communication is a reflection of your self-esteem.
Asa Don Brown
Your emotions are meant to fluctuate, just like your blood pressure is meant to fluctuate. It’s a system that’s supposed to move back and forth, between happy and unhappy. That’s how the system guides you through the world.
Daniel Todd Gilbert
10. Comparison is the root of all feelings of inferiority. The moment you begin examining other people’s strengths against your most obvious weaknesses, your self-esteem starts to crumble!
James C. Dobson
We want to hear the story first and let the meaning unfold, rather than to be present with expectations of a certain significance into which all behavior is then fitted.
Erving Polster
The meaning of life is not a search—it is a choice. Meaning is not found in things; meaning is what you make of things. The world means nothing by itself. You give it all the meaning it has. Thus, the meaning of life is a choice you make, not just once, but every waking hour of your day. 

Life is like art—it is all about interpretation. The moment anything happens to you, you interpret a meaning for it. The meaning you vote for then governs your perception, your thinking, your faith, your choices, your feelings, your behaviors, everything! Whenever you elect a new meaning, this changes everything.
Robert Holden
Jan Hindman knows all too well that people who have lied for decades about their offending would lie to her about being victimized as a child, so she compared the reports of abuse by child molesters who were not being polygraphed on their answers with a later group who was informed that they would have to take a polygraph after the interview. The group that was being polygraphed was also given immunity from prosecution for crimes previously unknown in order to take away one of the many reasons that offenders lie
Anna C. Salter
Before embarking on a voyage, first speak with the ancient sailors, listen to and understand the winds, then patiently make a boat and sail. Yet, even then, be open to other dreams, changes, circumstances. Throughout our lives, we limit ourselves to fixed goals, only to get on the local ferry and just travel the distance between two known points. Yet, we create an illusion of freedom and choice, accompanied by a sense of independence. Thus, we carefully study weather reports, ride on the port side on odd numbered days, starboard on holidays, have tea at fixed times, never speak with those who wear glasses, always smile at those who wear green and of course allow ourselves just the slight possibility of a dream about jumping ship and going off to our island one day. C'est la vie? Our predictably totalitarian lives are an insult to the human spirit.
Gündüz Vassaf
Science is about our passionate conviction that we are placed within a universe that is not simply the result of our imaginings, and our longing and determination to understand it. Ultimately, science is about reality, truth and freedom.
David Smail
The myth of Oedipus . . . arouses powerful intellectual and emotional reactions in the adult-so much so, that it may provide a cathartic experience, as Aristotle taught all tragedy does. [A reader] may wonder why he is so deeply moved; and in responding to what he observes as his emotional reaction, ruminating about the mythical events and what these mean to him, a person may come to clarify his thoughts and feelings. With this, certain inner tensions which are the consequence of events long past may be relieved; previously unconscious material can then enter one's awareness and become accessible for conscious working through. This can happen if the observer is deeply moved emotionally by the myth, and at the sametime strongly motivated intellectually to understand it.
Bruno Bettelheim
When you strip away all the layers one by one, not much remains to “discover.” You will never find real meaning among your selfish interests, feelings, and aspirations. The answers do not lie within you.
James C. Dobson
Levinas describes that faith as crucial to what it means to be human: (...) "its capacity to fear injustice more than death, to prefer to suffer than to commit injustice, and to prefer that which justifies being over that which assures it".
Bert H. Hodges
Change from the inside out involves a steadfast gaze upon our Lord that's life changing because it reflects a deep turning from a commitment to self-sufficiency. Without repentance, a look at Christ provides only the illusion of comfort.
Larry Crabb
To the extent that we retain the critical attitudes and destructive elements we have incorporated into our own personalities, we remain undifferentiated from our parents throughout our lifetime.
Lisa Firestone
They implicitly trust that their thoughts, beliefs, and feelings are their own, and fail to recognize that they may be “channeling” someone else’s thoughts and feelings.
Lisa Firestone
Personality is a strategy devised by a child. Our true, original self lies under our personality, in the transpersonal ground of our being, at our core.
Neal M. Goldsmith
You are never alone as long as you are in the company of your precious self.
Miya Yamanouchi
Much self-condemnation, thus, is a cloak for arrogance. Those who think they overcome pride by condemning themselves could well ponder Spinoza's remark, 'One who despises himself is the nearest to a proud man'. In ancient Athens, when a politician was trying to get the votes of the working class by appearing very humble in a tattered coat with big holes in it, Socrates unmasked his hypocrisy by exclaiming, 'Your vanity shows forth from every whole in your coat'.
Rollo May
If you have control over yourself, you have no desire to control others.
Miya Yamanouchi
Why should anyone be so grateful for acceptance unless he doubts that he is acceptable, and why should a young, educated and successful couple have such doubts, if not due to the fact that they cannot accept themselves because they are not themselves.
Erich Fromm
Indeed, with the experience of self disappears the experience of identity - and when this happens, man could become insane if he did not save himself by acquiring a secondary sense of self; he does that by experiencing himself as being approved of, worthwhile, successful, useful - briefly, as a salable commodity which is he because he is looked upon by others as an entity, not unique but fitting into one of the current patterns.
Erich Fromm
Our sense of being a conscious agent who does things comes at a cost of being technically wrong all the time.
Daniel M. Wegner
Most important, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.
Daniel Kahneman
When you are filled with self-hate your mind is reversed. Meaning you will love the things that destroy you, and you will hate the things that advance your growth.
Amos N. Wilson
Elliott was disarmingly bright, according to everyone who knew him, an avid reader of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Stendhal, Freud, the Buddha, all of whom destabilized notions of identity. I think he knew how little we know about who we are. The idea comes through in lyrics. “I don’t know who I am,” he says simply; at times he wishes he were no one. He’s a stickman shooting blanks at emptiness, living with “one dimension dead.” He’s an invisible man with a see-through mind. He’s a junkyard full of false starts. He’s a ghost-writer, feeling hollow.
William Todd Schultz
Don't try to tell me what I am because I know what I am not
Amit Abraham
One of the main tasks of adolescence is to achieve an identity—not necessarily a knowledge of who we are, but a clarification of the range of what we might become, a set of self-references by which we can make sense of our responses, and justify our decisions and goals.
Terri Apter
Shoulds can masquerade as high standards or lofty goals, but they are not the same. Goals direct us from the inside, but shoulds are paralyzing judgments from the outside. Goals feel like authentic dreams while shoulds feel like oppressive obligations. Shoulds set up a false dichotomy between either meeting an ideal or being a failure, between perfection or settling. The tyranny of the should even pits us against our own best interests.
Meg Jay
Abundant evidence exists to prove that we are continually creating excuses to explain why we do not reach our goals.
Andrea Goeglein
It is not important who the leader is. Its important where they lead you to.
Amit Abraham
We lie to reflect the aspirational goals that we unconsciously know we will not uphold.
Cortney S. Warren
4 Don’t Die™ Principles:•tChange your awareness and your perspective changes.•tYou teach what you need to learn.•tYou can make excuses or you can achieve your goals, but you cannot do both.•tExperience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.
andrea T Goeglein
Motivation may be what starts you off, but it's habit that keeps you going back for more. Are your habits working for you or against you? Are your habits helping you to achieve your goals or hindering the process?
Miya Yamanouchi
...By the time I would finish school I'll be fifty? He smiled."You're going to be fifty anyhow
Edith Eva Eger
The difference between a professional victim and an empowered person is NOT what has happened to them, but the way in which they REACT to what has happened to them.
Miya Yamanouchi
Growth occurs when individuals confront problems, struggle to master them, and through that struggle develop new aspects of their skills, capacities, views about life.
Carl Rogers
In a word, growth and improvement can come through pain and conflict.
Abraham H. Maslow
Each new step into his new human existence is frightening. It always means to give up a secure state, which was relatively known, for one which is new, which one has not yet mastered. Undoubtedly, if the infant could think at the moment of the severance of the umbilical cord, he would experience the fear of dying. A loving fate protects us from this first panic. But at any new step, at any new stage of our birth, we are afraid again. We are never free from two conflicting tendencies: one to emerge from the womb, from the animal form of existence into a more human existence, from bondage to freedom; another, to return to the womb, to nature, to certainty and security.
Erich Fromm
When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world--the world of fixed traits--success is about proving you're smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other--the world of changing qualities--it's about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.
Carol S. Dweck
So much of personal development and growth comes down to the decisions you make when you hit a wall. Do you spend your time feeling bad for yourself, or do you invest your time in continuing to build toward your dreams?
Andrea Goeglein
The studies of women's lives over time portray the role of crisis in transition and underline the possibilities for growth and despair that lie in the recognition of defeat. The studies of Betty and Sarah elucidate the transitions in the development of an ethic of care. The shifts in concern from survival to goodness and from goodness to truth are elaborated through time in these two women's lives. Both studies illustrate the potential of crisis to break a cycle of repetition and suggest that crisis itself may signal a return to a missed opportunity for growth. These portraits of transition are followed by depictions of despair, illustrations of moral nihilism in women who could find no answer to the question "why care?
Carol Gilligan
I would prefer my experiences in communication to have a growth-promoting effect, both on me and on the other, and I should like to avoid those communication experiences in which both I and the other person feel diminished.
Carl R. Rogers