Quotes by Psychotherapists - Page 4

I begin to learn there are certain things I shouldn't tell her. Like when we meet boys at Dorrian's and I give mine a blow job, or the time I messed around with a boy in the back near the bathrooms. Amy wants to be intimate with boys too, but to her this kind of conduct is slutty. I suppose it is. She, like most girls, including the Jennifers, has a different relationship to boys than I do. She engages in sexual acts with them if she wants, but from my vantage point it looks like she can take them or leave them if they are not just right. She considers whether she actually likes someone before she jumps into bed with him. She isn't wracked with anxiety when there aren't any boys around. And she doesn't need them to live, which is what it feels like for me.
Kerry Cohen
Well, Kessa, I am glad to see that you're taking your body seriously. I shudder when I see the girls leaving class and heading for the nearest hamburger, coke, and French fry station.The thought of them pouring all those dead calories into themselves makes me want to cry. You'd think after a rigorous dance class they'd have more respect for their bodies.
Steven Levenkron
It's the soul that's starving, not the body
Shoshana Kobrin
When you study the wrongs you have committed before you study the wrongs done to you, you have no choice but to label yourself inherently evil, and be forced to dissociate emotionally to avoid the horrible pain in this lie.
Daniel Mackler
Quality time is not the same as the everydayness of being together. Let’s neither glorify nor undervalue.
Don Elium
I complained to a friend that although I had completed six years in therapy, my mother still wouldn’t let me go. He replied, "She’s not supposed to let you go. Your father is supposed to come and get you.
Don Elium
when a child is ridiculed, shamed, hurt or ignored when she experiences and expresses a legitimate dependency need, she will later be inclined to attach those same affective tones to her dependency. Thus, she will experience her own (and perhaps others’) dependency as ridiculous, shameful, painful, or denied. - Dependency in the Treatment of complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders 2001Authors: Kathy Steele, Onno van der Hart, Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis
Kathy Steele
A good parent is not someone that knows how to be a good parent, but knows how to learn how to be a good parent.
Gary Edward Gedall
People who are not fully enlightened have no business becoming parents. This contradicts the conventionally accepted notion that people have an inherent "right" to have children. They do not. People who have a compulsion to traumatize a child, even in the mildest forms, are breaking the child's human rights, though of course the parental compulsion to find false pleasure through procreation obliterates their awareness of these rights. But interestingly, many parents would agree that convicted pedophiles and child murderers have no right to procreate, because of the dynamics in which they are so likely to engage.
Daniel Mackler
So much is asked of parents, and so little is given.
Virginia Satir
If we succumb to fear, we start holding back, and do that all-to-common dance of getting close, then pulling away. When we remember that our safe harbor depends on our awareness and honesty, we're less likely to make internal compromises, put on masks, or act like a chameleon to attract a partner or keep a hurtful relationship together. If we live by truth, we may have pain, but we will always rest securely in ourselves.
Charlotte Kasl
Kessa ran her fingers over her stomach. Flat. But was it flat enough? Not quite. She still had some way to go. Just to be safe, she told herself. Still, it was nice the way her pelvic bones rose like sharp hills on either side of her stomach. I love bones. Bones are beautiful.
Steven Levenkron
Blame is a Defense Against PowerlessnessBetrayal trauma changes you. You have endured a life-altering shock, and are likely living with PTSD symptoms— hypervigilance, flashbacks and bewilderment—with broken trust, with the inability to cope with many situations, and with the complete shut down of parts of your mind, including your ability to focus and regulate your emotions.Nevertheless, if you are unable to recognize the higher purpose in your pain, to forgive and forget and move on, you clearly have chosen to be addicted to your pain and must enjoy playing the victim.And the worst is, we are only too ready to agree with this assessment! Trauma victims commonly blame themselves. Blaming oneself for the shame of being a victim is recognized by trauma specialists as a defense against the extreme powerlessness we feel in the wake of a traumatic event. Self-blame continues the illusion of control shock destroys, but prevents us from the necessary working through of the traumatic feelings and memories to heal and recover.
Sandra Lee Dennis
....I came to consider betrayal a moral violation of another's humanity—akin to torture.
Sandra Lee Dennis
The classical anthropological question, What is man?—"how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!"—is not now asked by anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and go on to Culture.
Paul Goodman
Some people with DID present their narratives of sadistic abuse in a quite matter-of-fact way, without perceptible affect. This may sometimes be done as a way of protecting themselves, and the listener, from the emotional impact of their experience. We have found that people describing trauma in a flat way, without feeling, are usually those who have been more chronically abused, while those with affect still have a sense of self that can observe the tragedy of betrayal and have feelings about it. In some cases, this deadpan presentation can also be the result of cult training and brainwashing. Unfortunately, when a patient describes a traumatic experience without showing any apparent emotion, it can make the listener doubt whether the patient is telling the truth. (page 119, Chapter 9, Some clinical implications of believing or not believing the patient)
Graeme Galton
Betrayal is a more subtle, twisted feeling than terror. It burns and eats, but terror stabs right through.
Wendy Hoffman
The more importance we place on avoiding unpleasant feelings in life, the more our life tends to go downhill.
Russ Harris
The more you face the truth, the angrier you will probably become. You have a right to be angry about being sexually abused. You have a right to be angry with the perpetrator, regardless of who it was, how long ago the sexual abuse occurred, or how much he/she has changed.
Beverly Engel
If the heartbeat is a vital sign of physical health, anger is the vital sign of emotional health. Anger protects the self in all relationships. It is rage that is damaging.
Sue Parker Hall
If you have the tendency to repress your anger, you have lost touch with an important part of yourself. Getting angry is a way to gain back that part of yourself by asserting your rights, expressing your displeasure with a situation, and letting others know how you wish to be treated. It can motivate you to make needed changes in a relationship or other areas of your life. Finally it can let others know that you expect to be respected and treated fairly.
Beverly Engel
If you carry around a lot of suppressed or repressed anger (anger you have unconsciously buried) you may lash out at people, blaming or punishing them for something someone else did a long time ago. Because you were unwilling or unable to express how you felt in the past, you may overreact in the present, damaging a relationship.
Beverly Engel
Some Survivors think that getting angry is inappropriate and a sign that a person is out of control. Others are afraid of anger, that of others, as well as their own. They are afraid that if they get angry, they will be rejected or abandoned, afraid they will lose control and hurt someone. But, allowing yourself to get angry and express your anger in constructive ways is one of the most healthy and empowering things you can do.
Beverly Engel
The person senses what it feels like to be free from inhibitions. At the same time he feels connected and integrated – with his body and, through his body, with his environment. He has a sense of well-being and inner peace. He gains the knowledge that the life of the body resides in its involuntary aspect. […] Unfortunately these beautiful feelings do not always hold up under the stress of daily living in our modern culture. The pace, the pressure and the philosophy of our times are antithetical to life.
Alexander Lowen
If we observe ourselves truthfully and non-judgmentally, seeing the mechanisms of our personality in action, we can wake up, and our lives can be a miraculous unfolding of beauty and joy.
Don Richard Riso
Self-acceptance should not be confused with an over-vaulting aggrandisement of self over others. That individual's exaggerated positive view of self relies upon a comparison with others - they sustain their own positive self-view, relatively, by maintaining a negative view of others.
Dave Mearns
Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.
Paul Goodman
Instead of a feeling, think of love as an action. The feeling of love comes and goes on a whim; you can’t control it. But the action of love is something you can do, regardless of how you are feeling.
Russ Harris
Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.
Alfred Adler
we begin to see that we are spiritually linked with people halfway around the world, and with those who lived hundreds, even thousands of years ago. We begin to see that we emerge from, and are the expressions of, a single consciousness that is limited by neither time nor space.
Hal Zina Bennett
Only when we accept the fact that the world is never exactly as we see it through our individual lens of perception will we be able to accept ourselves or the mystery that is life itself.
Hal Zina Bennett
When the feminine and our vitality become lost to power drives and life becomes a wasteland, the stage is set for the mythic world to give rise to a hero to transform and revitalize the situation. They mythic hero is a metaphor for our struggle to transform our consciousness and bring new life to ourselves.
Massimilla Harris
To persevere with the will to understand in the face of obstacles is the heroism of consciousness.
Nathaniel Branden
The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes. The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation. We must turn away from the cacaphony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice. When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood. We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.
James Hollis
Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.
Amy Bloom
Never give up, Never surrender!!!!!If you think you can't, then you must, if you must, then you can..Tony Robbins
Paula V. Hardin
The truth is, we don't have an easy language for emotional life. That's why we have writers.
Susie Orbach
He downed the last of his coffee, carried his mug over to the pot, poured himself a refill, and returned to the
Lynda Hilburn
He hoots as he passes. Another one whistles. I know this is stupid, inviting trouble. But it feels so good to be wanted, I can't help myself.
Kerry Cohen
In addition to reaching out for help, you will also need to reach within yourself. Your biggest ally will be your emotions. Through them, you will learn more about what really happened to you, how the abuse affected you, and what you need to do in order to heal. Your emotions will enable you to reclaim the self you long ago hid away.
Beverly Engel
As you recover, you will find yourself letting go of many of your negative beliefs. You will discover that many of the so-called truths you were raised with and forced to believe are not truths at all. With this perspective, you will come to see, for example, that the names you were called as a child are simply not true. You are not ‘stupid,’ ‘lazy,’ ‘ugly,’ or a ‘liar’. You can discover just who you really are. You can let go of your pretenses and masks and discover who the real person is underneath.
Beverly Engel
Carla's description was typical of survivors of chronic childhood abuse. Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories. They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing. So they fragment the memories into hundreds of shards, leaving only acceptable traces in their conscious minds. Rationalizations like "my childhood was rough," "he only did it to me once or twice," and "it wasn't so bad" are common, masking the fact that the abuse was devastating and chronic. But while the knowledge, body sensations, and feelings are shattered, they are not forgotten. They intrude in unexpected ways: through panic attacks and insomnia, through dreams and artwork, through seemingly inexplicable compulsions, and through the shadowy dread of the abusive parent. They live just outside of consciousness like noisy neighbors who bang on the pipes and occasionally show up at the door.
David L. Calof
Some Survivors get angry at having to work at recovering from sexual abuse. They feel that it is unfair. They suffered all their life because of what someone else did to them: why do they have to suffer any more pain? This anger of “having” to do something is similar to the anger they felt at “having” to put up with the abuse.
Beverly Engel
If you want to be a good parent please heal your own wounds, heal all of them and be confident that you’ve done so before you seriously consider having children. The unresolved child within you is the real child you need to embrace and heal and raise.
Daniel Mackler
As you recover, you will feel more conscious of your surroundings. Freed from the ‘fog’ of your pain, fear, and confusion, you will awaken and see the world revealed as never before. You will begin to observe things, especially yourself. You will be aware of what you do and why you do it. You will begin to observe your own behavior and attitudes.
Beverly Engel
I don’t want to be in pain anymore. I want to be done, to be left unburdened and naked, to tear the hurt off my body like layers of clothes. At the end of the trail I stop and bend forward, hands on my knees, to catch my breath. I’m not healed, but for this moment, I’m better.
Kerry Cohen
She's terrified that all these sensations and images are coming out of her — but I think she's even more terrified to find out why." Carla's description was typical of survivors of chronic childhood abuse. Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories. They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing.
David L. Calof
Some of us will admit to a simple fascination with the inner world for its own sake, a fascination with no further goal than the thrill of discovery, the pleasure of engaging the mysterious, dark ground of our own nature.
Sandra Lee Dennis
She'd always despised the whole other woman thing, but here she was, entertaining the possibility.
Diana Stevan
Few things are as painful as the unfulfilled desire to be near to another you love.
Sandra Lee Dennis
Attitude Is EverythingWe live in a culture that is blind to betrayal and intolerant of emotional pain. In New Age crowds here on the West Coast, where your attitude is considered the sole determinant of the impact an event has on you, it gets even worse.In these New Thought circles, no matter what happens to you, it is assumed that you have created your own reality. Not only have you chosen the event, no matter how horrible, for your personal growth. You also chose how you interpret what happened—as if there are no interpersonal facts, only interpretations.The upshot of this perspective is that your suffering would vanish if only you adopted a more evolved perspective and stopped feeling aggrieved. I was often kindly reminded (and believed it myself), “there are no victims.” How can you be a victim when you are responsible for your circumstances?When you most need validation and support to get through the worst pain of your life, to be confronted with the well-meaning, but quasi-religious fervor of these insidious half-truths can be deeply demoralizing. This kind of advice feeds guilt and shame, inhibits grieving, encourages grandiosity and can drive you to be alone to shield your vulnerability.
Sandra Lee Dennis
Self-esteem wasn't the issue for my parents or their parents. Survival was their primary goal.
Julia A. Boyd
When we place ourselves in a position of judgment, then we turn ourselves into oppressors. Healthy self-esteem cannot exist side-by-side with oppression of any kind.
Julia A. Boyd
It sounded, I told him, as if he had never learned to balance projecting goals into the future with appreciating and living in the present....To the extent that our goal is to "prove" ourselves or ward off the fear of failure, this balance is difficult to achieve. We are too driven. Not joy but anxiety is our motor.But if our aim is self-expression rather than self-justification, the balance tends to come more naturally. We will still need to think about its daily implementation, but the anxiety of wounded self-esteem will not make the task nearly impossible.
Nathaniel Branden
Exercising will builds esteem from within through action on one's own behalf; it disproves the premise that only another person can provide it. The result, long in coming and always worth the effort, is the experience of authentic agency in your own life, a sense of self that cannot be destroyed because it is not dependent on anyone else.
Jeanne Safer
Of all the judgements we pass, none is as important as the one we pass on ourselves.
Nathaniel Branden
Sometimes the path to higher self-esteem is lonely and frightening. We cannot fully know in advance how much more satisfying our lives will be. But the more we are willing to experience and accept the many aspects of who we are, the richer our inner worlds, the greater our resources, the more appropriate we feel to the challenges and opportunities of life. Also, it is more likely that we will find - or create - a style of existence that will meet our individual needs.
Nathaniel Branden
Our liabilities pose the problem of inadequacy; our our assets, the challenge of responsibility. Our strengths or virtues can make us feel alone, alienated, cut off from the common herd, a target for envy and hostility, and our desire to belong can overcome any desire to actualise our highest potential.
Nathaniel Branden
The higher our self-esteem, the more likely we are to be creative in our work, which means the more successful we are likely to be. The higher our self-esteem, the more ambitious we tend to be, not necessarily in a career or financial sense, but in terms of what we hope to experience in life - emotionally, creatively and spiritually.
Nathaniel Branden
Because women tend to turn their anger inward and blame themselves, they tend to become depressed and their self-esteem is lowered. This, in turn, causes them to become more dependent and less willing to risk rejection or abandonment if they were to stand up for themselves by asserting their will, their opinions, or their needs. Men often defend themselves against hurt by putting up a wall of nonchalant indifference. This appearance of independence often adds to a woman's fear of rejection, causing her to want to reach out to achieve comfort and reconciliation. Giving in, taking the blame, and losing herself more in the relationship seem to be a small price to pay for the acceptance and love of her partner. As you can see, both extremes anger in and anger out-create potential problems. While neither sex is wrong in the way they deal with their anger, each could benefit from observing how the other sex copes with their anger. Most men, especially abusive ones, could benefit from learning to contain their anger more instead of automatically striking back, and could use the rather female ability to empathise with others and seek diplomatic resolutions to problems. Many women, on the other hand, could benefit from acknowledging their anger and giving themselves permission to act it out in constructive ways instead of automatically talking themselves out of it, blaming themselves, or allowing a man to blame them. Instead of giving in to keep the peace, it would be far healthier for most women to stand up for their needs, their opinions, and their beliefs.
Beverly Engel