Quotes by Psychologists - Page 42

A BILL OF ASSERTIVE RIGHTSI: You have the right to judge your own behavior, thoughts, and emotions, and to take the responsibility for their initiation and consequences upon yourself.II: You have the right to offer no reasons or excuses for justifying your behavior.III: You have the right to judge if you are responsible for finding solutions to other people’s problems.IV: You have the right to change your mind.V: You have the right to make mistakes—and be responsible for them.VI: You have the right to say, “I don’t know.”VII: You have the right to be independent of the goodwill of others before coping with them.VIII: You have the right to be illogical in making decisions. IX: You have the right to say, “I don’t understand.”X: You have the right to say, “I don’t care.”YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO SAY NO, WITHOUT FEELING GUILTY
Manuel J. Smith
It is not clear that married people are, on average, happier than those who never married, because unhappily married people are the least happy group of all and they pull down the average.
Jonathan Haidt
Why couldn't Mr. Darcy, in the first half hour of the movie, simply walk up to Elizabeth and say, "Hey, I like you. Do you want to go out on a date? And, by the way, I'm filthy rich." I'll tell you why. Because that would defeat the purpose of a chick flick, which is to entertain women and torture men.
David E. Clarke
If we can prevent just one marriage from disintegrating--or just one child from suffering the loss of a family--our effort will be justified.
James C. Dobson
Dr. Morris soon recognized that the difference between successful and unsuccessful marriages can often be traced to how well couples are able to "bond" during the courtship period. By bonding he referred to the process by which a man and woman become cemented together emotionally. It describes the chemistry that permits two previous strangers to become intensely valuable to one another. It helps them weather the storms of life and remain committed in sickness and health, for richer or poorer, for better or worse, forsaking all others until they are parted in death. It is a phenomenal experience that almost defies description.
James C. Dobson
Anger WorksAnger can be extremely rewarding in the short term. It can distract you from pain and threatening feelings. You may use anger to provoke fear and anxiety in others. Such anger makes others feel threatened, allowing you to gain control. But regularly directing anger at someone is likely to make him or her even less supportive. Ultimately, that person will withdraw completely- leaving you feeling even more isolated.
Bernard Golden
Marriage requires a radical commitment to love our spouses as they are, while longing for them to be what they are not yet. Every marriage moves either toward enhancing one another's glory or toward degrading each other.
Dan B. Allender
Remember that pornography is dangerous. It can warp the mind and destroy sexual intimacy in marriage. Stay away from it. A monster is crouched behind that door.
James C. Dobson
Learning how to fight properly and deciding what to fight about are two of the secrets to a successful marriage. It usually comes down to the "line of respect" one way or the other.
James C. Dobson
Well, that brings us to the point: There is only one way to protect ourselves from the deadly diseases that stalk the human family. It is abstinence before marriage, then marriage and mutual fidelity for life to an uninfected partner.
James C. Dobson
For love to work, each spouse has to realize his or her freedom. And boundaries help define the freedom we have and the freedom we do not have. Marriage is not slavery. It is based on a love relationship deeply rooted in freedom. Each partner is free from the other and therefore free to love the other. Where there is control, or perception of control, there is not love. Love only exists where there is freedom.
Henry Cloud
Couples in distress too often turn to solutions that can be summed up by "You do your thing and I'll do my thing" or "You take care of yourself and I'll take care of myself." We hear pop psychology pronouncements such as "I'm not ready to be in a relationship" and "You have to love yourself before anyone can love you."Is any of this true? Is it really possible to love yourself before someone ever loves you?Think about it. How could this be true? If it were true, babies would come into this world already self-loving or self-hating. And we know they don't. In fact, human beings don't start by thinking anything about themselves, good or bad. We learn to love ourselves precisely because we have experienced being loved by someone. We learn to take care of ourselves because somebody has taken care of us.
Stan Tatkin
Devote yourself to your partner's sense of safety and security and not simply to your idea about what that should be. What may make you feel safe and secure may not be what your partner requires from you. Your job is to know what matters to your partner and how to make him or her feel safe and secure.
Stan Tatkin
The couple bubble is an agreement to put the relationship before anything and everything else. It means putting your partner's well-being, self-esteem and distress relief first. And it means your partner does the same for you. You both agree to do it for each other. Therefore, you say to each other, "We come first." In this way, you cement your relationship. It is like making a pact or taking a vow, or like reinforcing a vow you already took with one another.
Stan Tatkin
As she breaks the silence, the upscale abused wife begins to feel affirmed and validated. The rationalizations she once relied on to sustain her within the marriage and to maintain the marital relationship begin to break down. Soon they become useless and obsolete. She slowly rejects them as she confronts the cognitive dissonance, the contradiction between her own knowledge and what she sees going on. It is remarkable yet not surprising that battered women have the highest tolerance for cognitive dissonance and can square two disparate realities that will never match – hatred and violence in a “loving marriage.” At this point the woman is relieved to step away from her self-deception.
Susan Weitzman
When others witness or comment on abusive behaviors, the little voice that the upscale abused wife once heard inside her and ignored or muffled becomes amplified. Slowly she starts to recognize that she must stop enduring the abuse. . . . each woman comes to grips with her situation at her own pace. However, talking to others is key to her growing capacity to recognize and label her experiences, reclaim herself, target important turning points, and ultimately leave her tormentor.
Susan Weitzman
But if he is angry at the world for doing him harm, why does he take it out on his loving partner? Couldn’t he just as readily express his rage by playing racquetball or pounding pillows. His ideas about her role seem paradoxical. On the one hand, the narcissistic husband has vested his wife with tremendous power. She is necessary for his self-repair, but instead of valuing her and seeking comfort in her arms, he beats and humiliates her. Because he sees her as available to meet any and all of his needs, he releases his rage and any self-hate at her; such an act helps him ultimately feel powerful again, making him realize he is not weak and shattered.When the narcissistic man eels the terror and rage associated with his own internal fragmentation, his outburst restores his sense of power and control. He turns the anger expanding within him away from himself, toward his wife. He insists that she’s the defective one, she’s to blame, because she has not met his needs. Such acts of externalization are key to the NPD batterer. His violent behavior restores his self-esteem. He believes that his actions are not his fault; he is just trying to take care of himself.
Susan Weitzman
When a woman is convinced that she can stop the violence in her marriage, her stubborn determination feeds her sense of failure each time she sees that she can’t regulate her husband’s demands and abuses. In a perverse type of review, she may then ask herself how she could have been so stupid as to overlook the early warnings. This further diminishes her self-esteem.
Susan Weitzman
Once this bubble of self-deception is burst and the mask that shielded her and others from what she wished to ignore is lifted, it is difficult for the woman to return to her life as it was. It has been said that “the discovery of a deceiving principle, a lying activity within us, can furnish an absolutely new view of all conscious life.” This reawakened awareness changes the upscale abused woman’s life forever. Suddenly, new choices stand before her. This can be a frightening and sad phase in therapy, a moment when the woman is grappling with a kaleidoscope of loss and potential future gain. Some women experience this period as the dark night of the soul. It can be sickening to face the truths one has chosen to ignore in hopes of maintaining the status quo. Even if the woman wishes to stay married, she will never perceive her life in the same way again.
Susan Weitzman
Canadian researcher Donald Dutton . . has written that marital work with a man who has a history of relationship violence may be a “conflict-generator” and that individual work . . should come first for both husband and wife. …Marital therapy does not provide the battered woman the kind of safety she needs for rebuilding her strength and finding her identity. The consequences may be severe if she is truthful in a couple’s session. She may be too afraid. Moreover, many upscale batterers can be charming and persuasive and may convey a far different image of themselves to the therapist than the one that reflects the woman’s reality at home.
Susan Weitzman
We tell ourselves that intimacy (and marriage) takes two people who are willing to work at it-but, unfortunately, we rarely have the slightest inkling of our "job" assignments in this project.
David Schnarch
Marriage is a necessary evil
Amit Abraham
My husband and I have never considered divorce... murder sometimes, but never divorce.
Joyce Brothers
Reframing your past painful experiences and seeing them in a humorous light takes away the power and emotional charge attached to the memory of the hurtful event.
Miya Yamanouchi
One major cost of self-deception is that we use painful life experiences to justify being non-ideal versions of ourselves.
Cortney S. Warren
We would all benefit by shifting our focus from seeing pain as bad to seeing pain as motivation to change.
Cortney S. Warren
It is no better if your son rapes a woman than when your daughter gets raped. It is equally painful, may be more.~ Rudransh Kashyap
Kirtida Gautam
Comedy is not the opposite of darkness, but its natural bedfellow. Pain makes laughter necessary; laughter makes pain tolerable.
Mindy Greenstein
I don't want to die. I deserve, certainly, the most extreme punishment society has, and I think society deserves to be protected from me and from others like me. That's the irony. What I'm talking about is going beyond retribution because there is no way in the world that killing me is going to restore those beautiful children to their parents and correct and soothe the pain.
James C. Dobson
The idea that Love Must Be Tough dictates that we be willing to set another person free- even if it causes us great pain to let go. When we do this, we maximize the chances that that loved one will not leave, because the cage door has been opened and self-respect has been affirmed.
James Dobson
If someone suffers enough pain and abuse, his volitional capacities will diminish to nothing.
David L. Conroy
To be subjected to pain that threatens to exceed coping resources is not something that people choose.
David L. Conroy
This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering…Does not mother love belong to the ‘smallest’, but also indispensable, things in life, for which many people paradoxically have to pay by giving up their living selves?
Alice MIller
The question of desirable grief and pain or the necessity for it must also be faced. [Are] growth and self-fulfillment possible at all without pain and grief and sorrow and turmoil? If grief and pain are sometimes necessary for growth of the person, then we must learn not to protect people from them automatically as if they were always bad. Not allowing people to go through their pain, and protecting them from it, may turn out to be a kind of overprotection, which in turn implies a certain lack of respect for the integrity and the intrinsic nature and the future development of the individual.
Abraham H. Maslow
I knew this guy he'd been in a motorcycle accident and it really ruined him and he was a linesman working on the power and he was working with someone who had Parkinsons so they both had complimentary inadeqacies and so two of them could do the job of one person so they're out there fixing powerlines in the freezing cold despite the fact that one was three quarters wrecked and the other one had Parkinsons That's how our civilization works, there's all these ruined people out there they've got problems like you can't believe, off they go to work to do things they don't even like and look! The Lights Are On
Jordan B Peterson
Real peace goes beyond explanation.
Asa Don Brown
Happiness is not giddiness or some overly inflated sense of being.
Asa Don Brown
Prayer is vastly superior to worry. With worry, we are helpless; with prayer, we are interceding. When I hear sad news, I try to say a prayer for the victims. When I am troubled, I will say a prayer that asks for relief for myself and for all those who suffer as I do. When I am concerned about my relatives or friends I say a short prayer to myself - "May they be happy and free of suffering." Book: Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddist in the World
Mary Pipher
Nature, too, supports our personal blossoming (if we have any quiet exposure to her) through her spontaneities, through her beauty, power, and mirroring, through her dazzling variety of species and habitats, and by way of the wind, Moon, Sun, stars, and galaxies.
Bill Plotkin
Given that the human soul is the very core of our human nature, we might note that, when we are guided by soul, we are guided by nature. Both soul and greater nature do guide us in our individual development, whether or not we ask for this guidance.
Bill Plotkin
It has often been said that our environmental crisis is a crisis of perception. We do not readily see the patterns that would reveal our dependence on the natural world, nor are we commonly aware of the systems within which we are deeply embedded. Our attention, entrained on objects and focused on flat screens, is far removed from the dynamic and animated nonhuman world. We are as good as blind to the wonder at our feet or the daily spectacle of an ever-changing sky.
Laura Sewall
Number ... should not be understood solely as a construction of consciousness, but also as an archetype and thus as a constituent of nature both without and within.
Marie-Louise von Franz
As I indicated in an earlier chapter, it is so important to pause and think through some of these basic issues while you are young, before the pressures of job and family become distracting. Everyone must deal with the eternal questions sooner or later. You will benefit, I think, from doing that work now. As I said earlier, whether you are an atheist, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew, a New Ager, an agnostic, or a Christian, the questions confronting the human family are the same. Only the answers will differ.
James C. Dobson
17. One of the secrets of successful living is found in the word balance, referring to the avoidance of harmful extremes. We need food, but we should not overeat. We should work, but not make work our only activity. We should play, but not let play rule us. Throughout life, it will be important to find the safety of the middle ground rather than the imbalance of the extremes.
James C. Dobson
Work usually follows will.
William James
A vivid - if somewhat melodramatic - firsthand description of what deliberate practice can feel like comes from dancer Martha Graham: 'Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of that achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration. There are daily small deaths.
Angela Duckworth
Follow your passion was not the message I heard growing up. Instead, I was told that the practical realities of surviving "in the real world" were far more important than any person living a "sheltered life" such as my own could imagine. I was warned that overly idealistic dreams of "finding something I loved" could in fact be a breadcrumb trail into poverty and disappointment.
Angela Duckworth
The supreme principle of socialism is that man takes precedence over things, life over property, and hence, work over capital; that power follows creation, and not possession; that man must not be governed by circumstances, but circumstances must be governed by man.
Erich Fromm
Universities are renowned for their tolerance of unusual characters, especially if they show originality and dedication to their research. I have often made the comment that not only are universities a 'cathedral' for worship of knowledge, they are also 'sheltered workshops' for the socially challenged.
Tony Attwood
Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order.
Anne Wilson Schaef
No matter how much pressure you feel at work, if you could find ways to relax for at least five minutes every hour, you’d be more productive.
Joyce Brothers
Every evil starts with 15 volts.
Philip G. Zimbardo
Four minutes of eye contact brings people closer to each other better than everything else.
Arthur Aron
Democracy is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature. Belief in the Common Man is a familiar article in the democratic creed. That belief is without basis and significance save as it means faith in the potentialities of human nature as that nature is exhibited in every human being irrespective of race, color, sex, birth and family, of material or cultural wealth. This faith may be enacted in statutes, but it is only on paper unless it is put in force in the attitudes which human beings display to one another in all the incidents and relations of daily life. To denounce Nazism for intolerance, cruelty and stimulation of hatred amounts to fostering insincerity if, in our personal relations to other persons, if, in our daily walk and conversation, we are moved by racial, color or other class prejudice; indeed, by anything save a generous belief in their possibilities as human beings, a belief which brings with it the need for providing conditions which will enable these capacities to reach fulfillment. The democratic faith in human equality is belief that every human being, independent of the quantity or range of his personal endowment, has the right to equal opportunity with every other person for development of whatever gifts he has.
John Dewey
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
Erich Fromm
Mohammed took his tribal customs and traditions and injected them into his new religion. Many of the ideas and traditions he implemented were already contained in the tribes he conquered, so in many cases, no major changes were required of his new followers. For example, most, if not all, of the tribes were polygamous. Women were seen primarily as chattel and under the complete control of their fathers or husbands. The communities of the new Islamic religion in the 600s CE often converted en masse. With minor modifications, they kept practicing their traditions. Mecca was already a major pagan religious shrine; Mohammed conveniently changed it into a place of worship and pilgrimage for Allah.Practically speaking, Mohammed unified a fracture region under a single religion and did it with a superior military. Conquest, war, and male predominance were the hallmarks of Islam. Despite political splits over the centuries, the tribal nature of Islam remains intact.
Darrel Ray
I don't like regressing - I move beyond. Life belongs to the future and I believe in creating History rather than visiting and revisiting the past.
Amit Abraham
Physicians do not systematically prescribe placebos to their patients. Hence they have no way of comparing the effects of the drugs they prescribe to placebos. When they prescribe a treatment and it works, their natural tendency is to attribute the cure to the treatment. But there are thousands of treatments that have worked in clinical practice throughout history. Powdered stone worked. So did lizard's blood, and crocodile dung, and pig's teeth and dolphin's genitalia and frog's sperm. Patients have been given just about every ingestible - though often indigestible - substance imaginable. They have been 'purged, puked, poisoned, sweated, and shocked', and if these treatments did not kill them, they may have made them better.
Irving Kirsch
The songs of our ancestors are also the songs of our children
Philip Carr-Gomm
The songs of our ancestors are also the songs of our children
Philip Carr-Gomm