Quotes by Psychotherapists - Page 8

The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development.
Dave Mearns
Reading is a gift. It's something you can do almost anytime and anywhere. It can be a tremendous way to learn, relax, and even escape. So, enough about the virtues of reading. Time to read on.
Richard Carlson
The fact that we can't see the beauty in something doesn't suggest that it's not there. Rather, it suggests that we are not looking carefully enough or with a broad enough perspective to see it.
Richard Carlson
You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.
Amy Bloom
...changing one's own behavior is a much more promising strategy than insisting on change from the other.
Terrence Real
Our identity is like a kaleidoscope. With each turn we reset it not to a former or final state but to a new one that reflects the here-and-now positions of the pieces we have to work with. The design is always new because the shifts are continual. That is what makes kaleidoscopes, and us, so appealing and beautiful.
David Richo
(...) psychiatrists today recognize the contortionist's act that was required of women in an age when they were expected to stifle their own healthiest impulses. (...) "To be able to renounce your own achievements without feeling that you were sacrificing requires constant effort. To be lovely and unaggressive, a woman spends a lifetime keeping hostile or resentful impulses down. Even healthy self-assertion is often sacrificed since it may be mistaken by hostility. Therefore, [women] often repress their initiative, give up their aspirations, and unfortunately end up excessively dependent with a deep sense of insecurity and uncertainty about their abilities and their worth.
Colette Dowling
The psychological need to avoid independence - the "wish to be saved" - seemed to me an important issue, quite probably the most important issue facing women today. We were brought up to depend on a man and to feel naked and frightened without one. We were taught to believe that as women we cannot stand alone, that we are too fragile, too delicate, needful of protection. So that now, in these enlightened days, when our intellects tell us to stand on our own two feet, unresolved emotional issues drag us down.
Colette Dowling
Much of what is considered "good" in little girls is considered downright repulsive in little boys. Physical timidity or hypercautiousness, being quietly "well behaved", and depending on others for help and support are thought to be natural - if not outright charming - in girls. Boys, however, are actively discouraged from the dependent forms of relating, which are considered "sissyish" in male children.
Colette Dowling
While we avoid taking credit for success, women leap at the opportunity to take responsibility for failure. Men tend to externalize the reasons for their failure, putting it off on something or someone else. Not so women, who absorb blame as if they were born to be societys doormats. (Some women like to speak of their willingness to take blame as if it were a form of altruism. It isn't. Women take the blame because they find it scary to confront those who are actually culpable of wrongdoing.)
Colette Dowling
Men do not know what they do not know, and women should not tell them.
Amy Bloom
We, who are so schooled in the art of listening to the voices of others, can often hear our own voice only when we are alone. . . For many women, the first choice, then, is to give ourselves the necessary time and space in which to renew our acquaintance with our lost voice, to learn to recognize it, and to rejoice as we hear it express our truth.
Florence Falk
The language we use is extremely powerful. It is the frame through which we perceive and describe ourselves and our picture of the world.
Iben Dissing Sandahl
Yesterday I bought myself a new, very sharp kitchen knife.And I managed to cut my finger within 5 minutes of getting home!Those plastic packages are bloody dangerous!!!
Gary Edward Gedall
To imagine that I was pleased would have been an understatement, if I was a dog, my tail would be wagging my arse off.
Gary Edward Gedall
Doing the forbidden is a normal function of growth.
Paul Goodman
The challenge for people today--and it is not and easy one--is to maintain high personal standards even while feeling that one is living in a moral sewer.
Nathaniel Branden
External relationships seem to have been emptied by a massive withdrawal of the real libidinal self. Effective mental activity has disappeared into a hidden inner world; the patient's conscious ego is emptied of vital feeling and action, and seems to have become unreal. You may catch glimpses of intense activity going on in the inner world through dreams and fantasies, but the patient's conscious ego merely reports these as if it were a neutral observer not personally involved in the inner drama of which it is a detached spectator. The attitude to the outer world is the same: non-involvement and observation at a distance without any feeling, like that of a press reporter describing a social gathering of which he is not a part, in which he has no personal interest, and by which he is bored. Such activity as is carried on may appear to be mechanical. When a schizoid state supervenes, the conscious ego appears to be in a state of suspended animation in between two worlds, internal and external, and having no real relationships with either of them. It has decreed an emotional and impulsive standstill, on the basis of keeping out of effective range and being unmoved.
Harry Guntrip
We evolved haphazardly within a random universe; no purpose underpins us, no God watches over us, and no assured glorious future awaits us. We are saddled with a dualistic consciousness that weighs us down and plays tricks on us. We have built and seem unable to dismantle a dehumanizing and destructive civilization and mindset that perpetuates deceit and greed. We can make ourselves as comfortable as possible, as doctors tell their terminally ill patients, but we are sadly incurable.
Colin Feltham
Self-discipline is the ability to organize your behavior over time in the service of specific goals.
Nathaniel Branden
Given our socialization into dependency, women are also poor risk takers. (...) We avoid new situations, job changes, moves to different parts of the country. Women are afraid that if they should make a mistake, or do "the wrong thing", they'll be pun
Colette Dowling
Some time ago, my son Emilio was going back to school after vacation. He did not like the idea at all and was filled with anxiety. To him, the approach of school days was like a monster that threatened him and wanted to squash him. What is a parent supposed to do? I tried to lift his spirits, to distract him, convince him it was not as bad as it seemed, but in vain. Then I hit upon the idea of offering him something that is almost taboo in our family: French fries at a fast-food place. Usually anything that is prohibited appeals to Emilio, especially junk food. I thought I had the ace up my sleeve. But no. Emilio's reply ought to be chiseled in stone: "Dad, you don't solve problems with french fries."Touche. You don't pretend problems do not exist, and you can't solve them with ephemeral distractions. You have to face them with open-eyed honesty. Offering French fries to my son in order to console and distract him from his anxiety was by no means a kind act. I was simply choosing the easier option--far too easy. I had found a comfortable way out.
Piero Ferrucci
People who avoid their fears also avoid their power.
Timothy Roderick
You have done well," Grandfather said. "We thank you.""We were afraid sometimes," Jetsam replied."Good." Grandfather's eyes smiled. "That means you had the courage to keep trying.
Sheila Moon
Fear and pain should be treated as signals not to close our eyes but to open them wider.
Nathaniel Branden
Fear of our own depths is the enemy.
James Hollis
There are many roles that people play and many images that they project. There is, for example, the "nice" man who is always smiling and agreeable. "Such a nice man," people say. "He never gets angry." The facade always covers its opposite expression. Inside, such a person is full of rage that he dares not acknowledge or show. Some men put up a tough exterior to hide a very sensitive, childlike quality. Even failure can be a role. Many masochistic characters engage in the game of failure to cover an inner feeling of superiority. An outward show of superiority could bring down on them the jealous wrath of the father and the threat of castration. As long as they act like failures they can retain some sexuality, since they are not a threat to her father.
Alexander Lowen
The most effective weapon a parent has to control a child is the withdrawal of love or its threat. A young child between the ages of three and six is too dependent on parental love and approval to resist this pressure. Robert's mother, as we saw earlier, controlled him by "cutting him out." Margaret's mother beat her into submission, but it was the loss of her father's love that devastated her. Whatever the means parents use, the result is that the child is forced to give up his instinctual longing, to suppress his sexual desires for one parent and his hostility toward the other. In their place he will develop feelings of guilt about his sexuality and fear of authority figures. This surrender constitutes an acceptance of parental power and authority and a submission to the parents' values and demands. The child becomes "good", which means that he gives up his sexual orientation in favor of one directed toward achievement. Parental authority is introjected in the form of a superego, ensuring that the child will follow his parents' wishes in the acculturation process. In effect, the child now identifies with the threatening parent. Freud says, "The whole process, on the one hand, preserves the genital organ wards off the danger of losing it; on the other hand, it paralyzes it, takes its function away from it.
Alexander Lowen
He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.
Sheldon B. Kopp
there isn't shame in having shadows - we all have them to varying degrees. it's simply a part of being human
Timothy Roderick
to judge darkness as bad or wrong is akin to judging whether up is better than down, or whether blue is better than red
Timothy Roderick
The potential for loss of soul--to one degree or another--is the affliction of a society that as a collective has lost its sense of the holy, of a culture that values everything else above the spiritual. We live in such a spiritually impoverished culture--and in such a time. Loss of soul, to one degree or another, is a constant teasing possibility. We are invited at every corner to hedge on the truth, indulge outselves, act as if our words and actions have no ultimate consequence, make an absolute of the material world, and treat the spiritual world as if it were some kind of frothy, angelic fantasy. In such a world the soul struggles for survival; in such a world a man can lose his own soul and have the whole culture support him, and in such a world, conversely, the light of a single, great soul that lives in integrity can truly illumine the world.
Daphne Rose Kingma
PTSD is a whole-body tragedy, an integral human event of enormous proportions with massive repercussions.
Susan Pease Banitt
Perhaps a book becomes a classic in proportion to how broadly its characters can be scavenged, how many readers find within it something they experience as desirable or even intimately necessary.
Janna Malamud Smith
There are few things more mysterious than endings. I mean, for example, when did the Greek gods end, exactly? Was there a day when Zeus waved magisterially down from Olympus and Aphrodite and her lover Ares, and her crippled husband Hephaestus ) I always felt sorry for him), and all the rest got rolled up like a worn-out carpet?
Salley Vickers
Life consists of many different stories. A person has not just one but countless life stories that weave in between each other and together create exactly that specific life and that specific human being.
Iben Dissing Sandahl
Sometimes life seems like a poorly designed cage within which man has been sentenced to be free.
Sheldon B. Kopp
So it is that there is nothing to be taught, but yet there is something to be learned.
Sheldon B. Kopp
When your partner overreacts 1st try to understand their “hot spot” before overreacting; otherwise you lose your ability to think clearly, communicate effectively and the cycle continues.
Dr. Deborah Hecker
Marriage is more about snore strips and flannel nightgowns than candlelight dinners.
Barbara Bartlein
It's hard to experience desire when you're weighted down by concern.
Esther Perel
When one has let go of that great hidden agenda that drives humanity and its varied histories, then one can begin to encounter the immensity of one's own soul. If we are courageous enough to say, "Not this person, nor any other, can ultimately give me what I want; only I can," then we are free to celebrate a relationship for what it can give.
James Hollis
Sound crazy? It may well be, but it is precisely in relationships of intimacy that your craziness (and mine) will be hardest to conceal. p.215
Stephanie Dowrick
Be real and be unashamed, even of your faults. I do truly know what my husband is made of and vice versa.
Amy Bloom
The kiss intimately relates to the most primitive kind of human contact, which can satisfy all of our needs, like: feeding, enjoying pleasure, tasting, wanting, rejecting, everything we associate with love.
Mabel Iam
All positive interactions with other human beings involve, to some degree, the experience of visibility-- that is, the experience of being seen and understood.
Nathaniel Branden
Love is more about being the right person than finding the right person.
Barbara Bartlein
Among the many answers I have found, I believe love is the most beautiful and simple art that reflects the beauty of life.
Mabel Iam
Love is beyond reason. Love is not measurable in words. Love cannot be partial it cannot have owners. Love is essentially beyond definition or concept.
Mabel Iam
Trust in someone means that we no longer have to protect ourselves. We believe we will not be hurt or harmed by the other, at least not deliberately. We trust his or her good intentions, though we know we might be hurt by the way circumstances play out between us. We might say that hurt happens; it’s a given of life. Harm is inflicted; it’s a choice some people make.
David Richo
The foundation of adult trust is not "You will never hurt me." It is "I trust myself with whatever you do.
David Richo
Be sure it's your real self you're showing. Because it is your real self that needs to be loved.
Daphne Rose Kingma
The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity. Prudence and responsibility are not middle-class virtues but human virtues.
Paul Goodman
Education is a natural community function and occurs inevitably, since the young grow up on the old, towards their activities, and into (or against) their institutions; and the old foster, teach, train, exploit and abuse the young. Even neglect of the young, except physical neglect, has an educational effect -- not the worst possible.
Paul Goodman
Catholic education and law schools provide me with a lot of miserable people as psychotherapy clients. I should be grateful. These people are looking for rescue from their education.
Brad Blanton
When I wanted to know something, I wanted it undistorted by somebody else's imperfect knowledge.
Milton H. Erickson
So it is that God tugs at a pilgrim's sleeve telling him to remember that he is only human. He must be his own man, remain in exile, and belong to himself. He must pay attention to his own feelings and to the meaning of what he does, if he is to be for himself, and yet for others as well.
Sheldon B. Kopp
A boddhisattva is someone who is on the way to becoming a buddha. All of us become boddhisattvas as soon as we start to take our Zen work seriously and the work we do contributes to creating a world in which all good actions become more efficacious.
David Brazier
Crises marked by anxiety, doubt, and despair have always been those periods of personal unrest that occur at the times when a man is sufficiently unsettled to have an opportunity for personal growth. We must always see our own feelings of uneasiness as being our chance for "making the growth choice rather than the fear choice.
Sheldon B. Kopp
The opposite of interpersonal trust is not mistrust. It is despair. This is because we have given up on believing that trustworthiness and fulfillment are possible from others. We have lost our hope in our fellow humans.
David Richo