Quotes by Therapists - Page 4

Never compare your grief.You - and only youwalk your path.
Nathalie Himmelrich
Grieving is not a race, nor is it a predictable experience - it is as unique as each and every one of us. Therefore by creating your own path you will find your own way through.
Corrie Sirota
We must learn to live in this world, because we have no other choice. What we do have a choice in is how we choose to live. We can remain gray and immobile in the wake of our losses or we can open ourselves up to the world, let the sunshine in, fill our surroundings with heaps of flowers, and know that we loved someone truly and deeply.
Claire Bidwell Smith
I am them. And they are me. All of us, we are each other. There is no such thing as good-bye.
Claire Bidwell Smith
I realize in this moment that all my life I've felt that I deserve to be punished, for wanting so much, for taking so much from this world, from the people who love me.
Claire Bidwell Smith
When you've gone through something traumatic, when you've faced death and loss as much as we have, it's only natural that it changes your entire view of life.
Claire Bidwell Smith
Deep down inside, each of us knows what our truths are. It is forgivable to lose them...It is unforgivable not to reclaim them.
Holli Kenley
The head is in charge of thinking; the heart is in charge of feeling; and the spirit realizes the creative, infinitely thriving power of life while imagination acts as translator and synthesizer.
Deborah Sandella
Even you, the professional helper, often mistaken for the enlightened Guru or Staretz, can become lost in your thoughts that you must be competent without fault. You may become enthralled with your identity as a professional, even the pressures of the culture of mastery that expects you to heal your clients without fail. Never mind all of the variables over which you have no control, it is up to you, according to the canons of mastery, to control the health and well-being of those for whom you provide professional care. This potentiates a furthering alienation between you and your clients. You are at risk to become, if you have not already, the one who does to your clients; to be the one the active subject acting upon the passive and receptive objects, your clients; to be the one in possession of special knowledge, technique and mastery. All of this conspires to coax or coerce you into treating your client as reduced, a mere case. Unawareness to these influences gives you little chance to consider their influence on your practice in the clinical setting, much less give attentive efforts to resist or change them.
Scott E. Spradlin
The heart of compromise is the willingness of all parties to sacrifice reciprocally and equally for the greater good of a relationship. Reconciling conflicting needs for the sake of unity can't work if just one person does it. A coerced compromise, when one partner deceives or overpowers the other without allowing room for shared truths, usually results in an empty agreement that's soon undermined by unilateral acting out.
Alexandra Katehakis
When our caregivers are unavailable, most of time it has nothing to do with LOVE for the child, however, the child cannot possibly know this. The child winds up believing that the unavailable parent is not available due to some defect within the child. We believe that if we were “enough” the parent would CHOOSE to be available.
Mary Crocker Cook
With intimacy comes the possibility of “engulfment” or being taken hostage by the demands of others. We may have distorted perceptions of the “demands” and obligations placed upon us by those who claim to love us. Trusting that love to be unconditional is almost impossible for us, and we are always scanning for the unstated “subtext” or hidden “agenda” connected to this love.
Mary Crocker Cook
Along with our over-giving is our own conditional giving pattern, which can fuel so much of our resentment and feelings of “victimization” by the people to whom we are giving. We may be completely unaware of our expectations of those we assist, and our own anger and resentment may catch us off guard. This is why our martyrdom is so hard on those around us. They are aware of the price we are exacting, even when we are in denial about our own motives and expectations.
Mary Crocker Cook
When we are anxiously attached, our inability to trust the intentions and behaviors of others will often lead us to escalate situations and then reject attempts to reassure us. It is a painful and dramatic spiral.
Mary Crocker Cook
Avoiding awareness of our own reality is often an attempt to deny thoughts, desires, or intentions that we feel will threaten or contradict the needs of those with whom we feel strong attachment. We instinctively hide feelings and thoughts we assume would be threatening to other people, and might cause them to leave us. . . People who learned early in life to adapt to parental needs to an extent that we were unable to focus on our own developmental tasks and needs will often continue to play out this working mode” of conditional attachment. “You will attach to me as long as I meet your needs.
Mary Crocker Cook
In healthy development, trust evolves. How do we decide whether to trust? We share a feeling with someone and watch their reaction; if the response feels safe, if it is caring, noncritical, non-abusive, the first step of trust has developed. For trust to grow, this positive response must become part of a relatively reliable pattern… Trust develops with consistency over time.
E. Sue Blume
It’s crucial to practice self-empathy, for trust can’t be willed into existence. That didn’t work when our caregivers tried to impose their will on us, and it won’t work internally, either. Only when we can tap into a place of self-trust, with a reliable process of reparation for inevitable mistakes, can we build trust with another person.
Alexandra Katehakis
As you notice your whole being, your entirety, your wise inner nature, there are messages there for you. Quietly give permission for your wholeness, your entirety, to share its deepest wisdom.
Janet Gallagher Nestor
Most of our healing occurs during quiet moments of rest when we are in contact with unconscious feelings and experiences. I can't imagine life without the peaceful, insightful moments I have during meditation.
Janet Gallagher Nestor
Devotion is a spiritual act of egoless surrender. When the Self blinds the spirit too tightly, then devotion expands the blinding by lifting us beyond ourselves. We get the powerful lesson that the Self survives even without constant attention.
Anodea Judith
Right where you are, the potential of the universe is.
Alexandra Katehakis
Love can flow like the river, fly with the bird, sing with the crickets at night. It is in the energy of the river, the flight of the bird, the song from the cricket. There is nowhere where love is not.
Janet G Nestor
Once your heart overflows with love, another heart will follow. And so it goes. Yeshua: One Hundred Meaningful Messages for Messengers
Janet G Nestor
Battered women who were physically abused as children develop an active coping style as adults, typically with obsessive-compulsive tendencies. It is as if she can "just get things right" then the battering will stop. Those who were sexually abused as children tend to be severely depressed and a more passive coping style.
Debra Crown LPC-S Journal of Family Violence 2006
When inhibition has become the de facto setting in a person's manner, stiffness and lack of spontaneity produces an unnatural self-repression. Life looks gray, dull, and rigid, without space for relaxation or play to burst forth in natural ways.
Alexandra Katehakis
Desire is the impulse that sparks the flame.
Cathy Wild
Whenever new knowledge causes you to question your previous assumptions, the stage is set for creative transformation.
Cathy Wild
Solitude is a gift you give yourself every day.
Rachel Astarte
Both thinking over feeling provide vital feedback to support your survival and help you flourish.
Deborah Sandella
Success or failure in your work and relationships is dependent on how you manage your feelings.
Deborah Sandella
Should you operate upon your clients as objects, you risk reducing them to less than human. Following the culture of appropriation and mastery your clients become a kind of extension of yourself, of your ego. In the appropriation and objectification mode, your clients’ well-being and success in treatment reflect well upon you. You “did” something to them, you made them well. You acted upon them and can take the credit for successful therapy or treatment. Conversely, if your clients flounder or regress, that reflects poorly on you. On this side of things the culture of appropriation and mastery says that you are not doing enough. You are not exerting enough influence, technique or therapeutic force. What anxiety this can breed for some clinicians! DBT offers a framework and tools for a treatment that allows clients to retain their full humanity. Through the practice of mindfulness, you can learn to cultivate a fuller presence to the moments of your life, and even with your clients and your work with them. This presence potentiates an encounter between two irreducible human beings, meeting professionally, of course, and meeting humanly. The dialectical framework, which embraces contradictions and gives you a way of seeing that life is pregnant with creative tensions, allows for your discovery of your limits and possibilities, gives you a way of seeing the dynamic nature of reality that is anything but sitting still; shows you that your identity grows from relationship with others, including those you help, that you are an irreducible human being encountering other irreducible human beings who exert influence upon you, even as you exert your own upon them. Even without clinical contrivance.
Scott E. Spradlin
There is no such thing as isolated stress. Stress is always system wide.
Janet Gallagher Nestor
Prolonged stress causes the human body to make adaptations so it can continue to serve you at a functional level. The more stress, the more adaptations.
Janet Gallagher Nestor
There are as many life missions as there are people. We are all unique. We are all important.
Janet Gallagher Nestor
What is the black shadow? It's the running inner dialogue we have with ourselves all day long about our fears of being inferior as black people. It is our internalization of the white man's lie that blacks are inferior to whites -- the very lie that was the foundation of our ancestors' enslavement. The black shadow is more than simply internalized racism; it's also our complex feelings of fear and despair about being black, and consequently our longing to be less black.
Marlene F. Watson
In general, people are not drawn to perfection in others. People are drawn to shared interests, shared problems, and an individual's life energy.Humans connect with humans. Hiding one's humanity and trying to project an image of perfection makes a person vague, slippery, lifeless, and uninteresting.
Robert Glover
Anyone who has physically incarnated on the Earth is energetically connected to the people they love, and to the Earth, indefinitely...
Jonni Gray
When you're anxious, don't immediately trust your automatic thoughts because oftentimes these thoughts are irrational. Thoughts are not facts. They're just thoughts and sometimes don't need to be given so much importance.
John Tsilimparis
Psychotherapy isn't a twentieth-century artifice imposed on nature, but the reinstatement of a natural healing process.
Patricia Love
You can’t change your past, but you can begin your journey by understanding it.
Michelle Skeen
If you have ever felt slightly nauseous walking through an aged care facility, puckered your face against a smell, observed a grown woman clutching a dolly with desperation, felt a flood of melancholy as death fills your view – then you are in a perfect position to be a supportive psychotherapist for those whose lives are peppered with this everyday.
Felicity Chapman
People who seek psychotherapy for psychological, behavioral or relationship problems tend to experience a wide range of bodily complaints...The body can express emotional issues a person may have difficulty processing consciously...I believe that the vast majority of people don't recognize what their bodies are really telling them. The way I see it, our emotions are music and our bodies are instruments that play the discordant tunes. But if we don't know how to read music, we just think the instrument is defective.
Charlette Mikulka
The process of dissociation is an elegant mechanism built into the human psychological system as a form of escape from (sometimes literally) going crazy. The problem with checking out so thoroughly is that it can leave us feeling dead inside, with little or no ability to feel our feelings in our bodies. The process of repair demands a re-association with the body, a commitment to dive into the body and feel today what we couldn’t feel yesterday because it was too dangerous.
Alexandra Katehakis
One Nice Guy asked me, "If a man is talking in the forest and no woman is there to hear him, is he still wrong?
Robert Glover
In these writings, and in all my teaching work, I continue to ask the question, “What about the children?
Albert J. LaChance
Left unaddressed, chronic anxiety can disrupt many aspects of development, including a child's capacity to learn and ability to connect socially as well as the opportunity for the brain to grow and make connections. In time, children with high levels of anxiety are more likely to face depression, turn to substance use, become less likely to finish high school and may therefore have a harder time keeping a job or managing financially.
Michele Kambolis
Every Moment Offers Us ChoicesChoose wiselyBecause the Choices You Make, Make You
Lyssa Danehy deHart
The initial journey towards sobriety is a delicate balance between insight into one's desire for escape and abstinence from one's addiction.
Debra L. Kaplan
When sex and money are fused in the service of exploitation, the two create an even more destructive form of rage of a type often exhibited in narcissistic and potentially psychopathic populations.
Debra L. Kaplan
Perhaps the most important sexual tool is consciousness. If we think we are "not enough" or "too much," we surely are. Similarly, when you give a gift, create artwork, or perform any task with the thought that it's "not enough" or "too much," it surely will be.
Alexandra Katehakis
One of the most valuable things we can learn from open sexual lifestyles is that our programming is changeable.
Dossie Easton
If you believe that you can use sex to shore up your fragile self-esteem by stealing someone else's, we feel sorry for you, because this will never work to build a solid sense of self worth, and you will have to go on stealing more and more and never getting fulfilled.
Dossie Easton
All of us lived life when sex was the farthest thing from our minds. Try to remember the careless freedom of play, basking in the beingness of others. As adults, responsibilities and obligations can often bind us to a daily grind. For some adults, then, sex might be one of the few interactions that restores their openness and sensory exploration of play. It’s not hard to see why sexual preoccupation might take over when people become locked out from experiencing fulfilling lives.
Alexandra Katehakis
Remember, sex is never a thing you just had. Sex is the intercourse, the merging or convergence, of who the two of you are—your spirits merging. People ask, “How was it for you?” The reply is often, “It was great.” But is this really the right question and answer? Instead, personalize your question and ask, “How are you?” Respond with depth. Gaze into each other’s eyes and speak your truth: “I’m over the moon,” or “I love you,” or “I melted and I’m just coming back into myself.
Alexandra Katehakis
Take a trip to the exotic landscape of your lover’s body.
Alexandra Katehakis
Much healing can occur through the sexual act with a person you love and trust if the two of you can stay with each other during your most vulnerable moments. You enter into a sacred space, this unknown territory, from which you’ll emerge into new and unexpected states of being.
Alexandra Katehakis
When you are secure in yourself, know what turns you on, and enjoy watching your partner watch you experience sexual pleasure, you have a highly novel relationship grounded in love. The experience of seeing and being seen fuels lust and desire. This is exactly the way you integrate healthy lust and love into your sex life. It’s relational sex, not the old pornographic sex of past addictions.
Alexandra Katehakis
Stories are epically important to how we view and interact in the world around us. We define ourselves, our abilities and even our goals by the stories we believe and share. These stories become part of our personal view of our world.
Lyssa Danehy deHart
To develop emotional and erotic intelligence we need to practice enlarging our inner passion at every moment. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in our world, or even how we feel about ourselves in the moment. In fact, the best time to accomplishing something may be when we least feel like trying, because the hopeless part of ourselves most needs the light.
Alexandra Katehakis
If you’re living in the present...you only have to deal with what’s actually going on in that moment.
Sheri Van Dijk