Quotes by Counselors - Page 6

You did not invent these family habits. Your family is like mine, for thousands and thousands of years our families have embraced a dysfunctional lifestyle, passing these habits as gospel on to subsequent generations. This was not done out of malice, spite, or hate, but what they knew best. As ineffective as these habits are, you never stopped to consider another way of loving.
David W. Earle
Where there is no hope, there is Christmas. And where there is no Christmas, there is no hope.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
People pay a dear price when not dealing with the powerful emotions.
David W. Earle
When we choose to stay down, we are in reality confusing wisdom with cowardice. When we choose to stand back up, we are using wisdom to overcome cowardice.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Being our best is asking how can we take ourselves to the precipice of our own limits in any and every situation?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Shame is embarrassment multiplied against itself until it dies under it’s own weight and we with it. Forgiveness is freedom multiplied against the Cross until it flies under it’s own liberation and we with it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Have you ever suffered a sharp disappointment or a painful loss and found yourself looking for someone to blame? Have you, for example, ever been nasty to a store clerk when you were really upset about your job? Most people have an impulse to dump bad feelings on some undeserving person, as a way to relieve - temporarily—sadness or frustration. Certain days you may know that you just have to keep an eye on yourself so as not to bite someone’s head off.The abusive man doesn’t bother to keep an eye on himself, however. In fact, he considers himself entitled to use his partner as a kind of human garbage dump where he can litter the ordinary pains and frustrations that life brings us. She is always an available target, she is easy to blame — since no partner is perfect—and she can’t prevent him from dumping because he will get even worse if she tries. His excuse when he jettisons his distresses on to her is that his life is unusually painful—an unacceptable rationalization even if it were true, which it generally isn’t.
Lundy Bancroft
The problem with wearing a facade is that sooner or later life shows up with a big pair of scissors.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Too often, opinion is a lens polished by the grit of bias. And as I stare through my own lens, I might ask how much polish can the grit of bias actually create?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Christmas is not a story birthed of a humanized god for it simply doesn’t fit into the rubric of such an emaciated plot.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I cannot be afraid of being afraid. Rather, I need to realize that it is my fear that gives me the energy to wrestle that which I fear into the dirt that is soon to become the road underneath my feet.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Intelligence without wisdom is nothing more than stupidity that looks smart.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
We can only get to God through God. Every other possible avenue is a dead-end before it even starts.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The key problem I encounter working with wounded, depressed, and unhappy people is a lack of connection…starting from a disconnection from themselves and then with others. This is why love often becomes so distorted and destructive. When people experience a disconnection from themselves, they feel it but do not realize the problem.
David W. Earle
The central attitudes driving the Player are:Women were put on this earth to have sex with men—especially me.Women who want sex are too loose, and women who refuse sex are too uptight. (!)It’s not my fault that women find me irresistible. (This is a word-for-word quotation from a number of my clients.) It’s not fair to expect me to refuse temptation when it’s all around me; women seduce me sometimes, and I can’t help it.If you act like you need anything from me, I am going to ignore you. I’m in this relationship when it’s convenient for me and when I feel like it.Women who want the nonsexual aspects of themselves appreciated are bitches.If you could meet my sexual needs, I wouldn’t have to turn to other women.
Lundy Bancroft
IN ONE IMPORTANT WAY, an abusive man works like a magician: His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. He draws you into focusing on the turbulent world of his feelings to keep your eyes turned away from the true cause of his abusiveness, which lies in how he thinks. He leads you into a convoluted maze, making your relationship with him a labyrinth of twists and turns. He wants you to puzzle over him, to try to figure him out, as though he were a wonderful but broken machine for which you need only to find and fix the malfunctioning parts to bring it roaring to its full potential. His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brain in this way so that you won’t notice the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness.
Lundy Bancroft
Because I have ‘chosen’ to see something as impossible, there’s a good chance that it’s not.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The goal of comfort is at the self-same time the abandonment of great accomplishments.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The Lord teaches us of His grace and the Gospel through difficult children. We learn what it's like to love like He loved. It is there, in our personal upper room, where we learn to wash the feet of those that are betraying us. It is there, kneeling before our rebellious children, that the real power of God is demonstrated.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
Real patriotism embraces the wholly immovable belief that without freedom, the essence of the human soul and the life-breath of the human spirit is doomed to perish for lack of space and absence of light.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Starting over begins when I develop a reawakened appreciation for what I already have, a renewed recognition of what I’ve recklessly forsaken, a rehabilitated understanding that I foolishly do both of those things, and a revitalized commitment to live the rest of my life never doing either of them again.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If there’s one thing that’s irrefutably absurd, it’s believing that we can separate intelligence from wisdom and still have it be intelligence.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If we want to improve, first we have to recognize our own maladaptive coping skills, called codependency, then change.
David W. Earle
I have sometimes said to a client: “If you are so in touch with your feelings from your abusive childhood, then you should know what abuse feels like. You should be able to remember how miserable it was to be cut down to nothing, to be put in fear, to be told that the abuse is your own fault. You should be less likely to abuse a woman, not more so, from having been through it.” Once I make this point, he generally stops mentioning his terrible childhood; he only wants to draw attention to it if it’s an excuse to stay the same, not if it’s a reason to change.
Lundy Bancroft
Controlling others is the cornerstone of dysfunctional families.
David W. Earle
It’s not that I can’t remember. It’s that I prefer not to remember, which means that I prefer not to remember what not remembering did to me the last time I did it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If the baser instinct of rampant self-preservation adamantly refuses to surrender itself to the infinitely greater call of self-sacrifice, in attempting to save our lives we will have in reality completely destroyed our lives.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If you are where I was before my process began, you can't imagine the place of victory, the place you can be free from the dominating desire for sexual stimuli. I am here to tell you that there is a place of freedom that you can know--a place where your desire for purity will subdue the lust of the flesh.
Bruce Lengeman
I like a man with faults especially when he knows it. To err is human- I'm uncomfortable around gods.
Hugh Prather
It's not that we fear the place of darkness, but that we don't think we are worth the effort to find the place of light.
Hugh Prather
Somewhere, somehow, something arises out of the ashes of our losses to remind us that nothing ever ceases. Nothing ever vanishes. Nothing ever comes to nothing.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I have finally come to realize that it’s being forced to be honest with myself that’s made my pain painful all along.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Despite opinions to the contrary, restoring Godly values is the most progressive course of action that we could ever hope to take.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When I’m at the bottom looking up, the main question may not be ‘how do I get out of this hole?’ In reality, the main question might be ‘how do I get rid of the shovel that I used to dig it?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The world is shaken by major events, but it is ‘transformed’ by slight subtleties. And while we may be far too small to create even one major event, we are just the right size to craft a thousand subtleties.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The image of God infused in us never sees the light of day in the service of self, but it becomes the light of day in the service of others.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Lack of discipline leads to frustration and self-loathing.
Marie Chapian
Surrendering is intentionally laying down the power I possess. And have I considered that the power I lay down is often more powerful than that which I’m laying it down in front of? Therefore, I would be wise to recognize that surrender is less the absence of power and more the presence of fear.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It wasn’t until I slowed the car and rolled down the windows that I realized I spend most of my days driving ‘through’ life without driving ‘in’ life. So, I’ve decided to walk because the pace is slower and the windows are always down.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Bravery is not found in getting knocked down. Rather, bravery is found is getting back up knowing that you’re going to get knocked down again.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
The most elusive and ultimately impossible act of liberation is freedom from sin and self, and no document or declaration of man regardless of how exquisitely penned can do that. Such an astonishing act of liberation could only have been penned in one place: the cross.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Once faith dies, the death of hope follows hard on its heels.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Under this aura of perfection he knows how flawed he really is but his intact denial system keeps this awareness suppressed in the far recesses of his mind.
David W. Earle
To ‘stop and smell the roses’ we must first believe that there’s a rose garden out there somewhere. And in this jaded world of ours, the refusal to believe in gardens leaves most of us ref of roses.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Believe that God is strong enough to save your children, no matter how you fail.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
Other people feel love when we listen without judging and accept them without demanding change. We all desperately require these basic needs. When we can do this for another, we are indeed that person’s angel.
David W. Earle
Starting over is opportunity informed by failure, which is opportunity made intelligent.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When I read the ghastly lines of tragedy darkly penned into my life, I turn and notice that the pen in my hand is wet.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If one wants to be loved and return it full score dagger of silence closes the door.
David W. Earle
If God has the answer to every question, maybe my appreciation for God should be shaped more by the number of questions and less by the wisdom of the answers.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Mediocrity is ‘purpose’ left to rot in minds ensnared in the deluded rationalization that vision is nothing more than a collection of fanciful dreams constructed by an imaginary God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When is a train most free? Is it when it goes bouncing across the field off the track? No. It is free only when it is confined (if you will) to the track. Then it runs smoothly and efficiently, because that was the way that its maker intended for it to run. It needs to be on the track, structured by the track, to run properly. You too need to be on the track. God's track is found in God's Word.
Jay E. Adams
It’s not about describing someone as that’s typically an attempt to make whatever they are comfortable for whoever we are. Instead, we may wish to skip the agenda of the description and embrace the wonder of the person.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Acceptance” is the most beautiful word in the English language.
David W. Earle
Oh yes, I am frequently driven to an enraged frenzy by the blatantly crass actions of others. But to be painfully honest, that anger is much less driven by the reality of their actions and far more fueled by the realization that everything I am is everything that I hate in them.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
And so to tame Christmas we spin myths to temper the story, we create our own caricatures to speak our own lines into the script, we gift ourselves to enhance an adventure now lagging, and we think we’re on a grand adventure when we’ve completely forgotten what an adventure is.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Alcohol does not a change a person’s fundamental value system. People’s personalities when intoxicated, even though somewhat altered, still bear some relationship to who they are when sober. When you are drunk you may behave in ways that are silly or embarrassing; you might be overly familiar or tactlessly honest, or perhaps careless or forgetful. But do you knock over little old ladies for a laugh? Probably not. Do you sexually assault the clerk at the convenience store? Unlikely. People’s conduct while intoxicated continues to be governed by their core foundation of beliefs and attitudes, even though there is some loosening of the structure. Alcohol encourages people to let loose what they have simmering below the surface.ABUSERS MAKE CONSCIOUS CHOICES EVEN WHILE INTOXICATED
Lundy Bancroft
So, there’s this hornet’s nest. And there’s this long stick. And then there’s me. How I walk away from all of this will depend on whether I realize that some things go together and some things don’t no matter how hard you try.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
To grasp love, I must grasp the fact that it is a creation of God and therefore it is forever beyond me. But the very fact that it is forever beyond me is the very thing that prompts me to forever pursue it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When I have listened to my mistakes I have grown.
Hugh Prather