Quotes by Psychologists - Page 2

Often, her mate is the child of a narcissist, already indoctrinated to regard exploitation and disregard as love. Others lured by the narcissistic aura are those in whom healthy childhood exhibitionism has been repressed. . . . If the parent puts the child to shame for showing off, the need for attention gets repressed into the unconscious. Repression means that the need is not satisfied and continues to press for expression in the adult without her being aware of it. The repressed adult may select an exhibitionistic mate to achieve vicarious satisfaction.
Elan Golomb
Our perceptions are influenced by our surroundings.
Asa Don Brown
Feel not obliged to make good use of every ripe fruit on the vine.
Kathryn Hall
There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.
John Dewey
12. There will come a day, much quicker than your parents would wish, when you will no longer be comfortable living at home. You will want to move out and establish a home of your own. After that time, your mother and father will be more like your friends than your parents. And someday, if they live long enough, you will be more like a parent to them than a son or daughter.
James C. Dobson
Instinct is untaught ability.
Alexander Bain
But there also seems to be in our culture a curious cautiousness—“You’ll get these abundant gratifications only if you don’t feel too much, don’t let on you want too much.” The result is that, instead of conquering the world like Horatio Alger, we should wait passively until the genie of technology—which we don’t push or influence, only await—brings us our appointed gratifications. All of this is a part of the rewards which go with belief in the vast myth of the machine in the twentieth century.
Rollo May
Given these differences between the sexes, the sexual revolution was the biggest joke men ever played on women. By convincing them that the old rules didn’t apply and that two could play the predator game, men enticed women to do what men have always wanted women to do. But what a price was paid for the new “freedom.” And predictably, women were the ones who got stuck with the bill.
James C. Dobson
Healing is anything that restores your inner sense that all is well, and that returns you to a healthy state of empowerment.
Susan Barbara Apollon
Trauma is any stressor that occurs in a sudden and forceful way and is experienced as overwhelming.
Stephanie S. Covington
Disinformation is distinguished from misinformation in that it is intentionally fraudulent.
Ellen P. Lacter
Modern man thinks he loses something-time-when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains- except kill it.
Erich Fromm
We can all make the world a better place through the moment-to-moment decisions we make as we interact with people.
Morton Shaevitz
Hearing has consequences. When I truly hear a person and the meanings that are important to him at that moment, hearing not simply his words, but him, and when I let him know that I have heard his own private personal meanings, many things happen. There is first of all a grateful look. He feels released. He wants to tell me more about his world. He surges forth in a new sense of freedom. He becomes more open to the process of change. I have often noticed that the more deeply I hear the meanings of the person, the more there is that happens. Almost always, when a person realize he has been deeply heard, his eyes moisten. I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy. It is as though he were saying, "Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what it's like to be me.
Carl Rogers
Begin your day with gratitude and end your day with gratitude. A heart filled with loving expressions of thanks is a beautiful offering to the universe.
Susan Barbara Apollon
I trust people with my eyes and ears wide open.
Amit Abraham
We have nothing against playing video games; they have many good features and benefits. Our concern is that when they are played to excess, especially in social isolation, they can hinder a young man's ability and interest in developing his face-to-face social skills. Multiple problems, including obesity, violence, anxiety, lower school performance, social phobia and shyness, greater impulsivity and depression, have all been associated with excessive gaming. The variety and intensity of video game action makes other parts of life, like school, seem comparatively boring, and that creates a problem with their academic performance, which in turn might require medication to deal with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which then leads to other problems down the road in a disastrous negative cycle...
Philip G. Zimbardo
The DID patient should be seen as a whole adult person with the identities sharing responsibility for daily life. Despite patients’ subjective experience of separateness, clinicians must keep in mind that the patient is a single person and generally must hold the whole person (i.e., system of alternate identities) responsible for the behavior of any or all of the constituent identities, even in the presence of amnesia or the sense of lack of control or agency over behavior.From p8 International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. (2011). Guidelines for treating dissociative identity disorder in adults, third revision: Summary version. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 12, 188–212.
James A. Chu
To have been possessed by something so awful and so alien, and then the next morning wake up from it, remember what happened, and realize what I had done, with a clear mind and all my essential moral and ethical feelings intact at that moment, [I was] absolutely horrified that I was capable of doing something like that.
James C. Dobson
When a person has swum, traveled, run a lathe, planted flowers, ridden a motorcycle, made wine, painted a picture, parachuted, he has increased the fund from which he may draw for new figural developments. In other words, as the background of his experience becomes more diversified, it also becomes potentially more harmonious with a whole range of happenings.
Erving Polster
Traumatic experiences in early childhood may interfere with the child's ability to securely attach.
Asa Don Brown
People who do not have a price tag attached to them are priceless.
Amit Abraham
Practical wisdom," Aristotle told us, "is the combination of moral will and moral skill.
Barry Schwartz
While art should never become exclusionary and elitist, any culture which fails to support its artists is only contributing to its own impoverishment. (Beyond Religion, p. 122)
David N. Elkins
Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.p97.
Erich Fromm
It is important to note that the acquisition of wealth, as the accepted standard of succes, does not refer to increasing material goods for sustenance purposes, or even for the purpose of increasing enjoyment. It refers rather to wealth as a sign of individual power, a proof of achievement and self-worth.Modern economic individualism, though based on belief in the free individual, has resulted in the phenomenon that increasingly large numbers of people have to work on the property (capital) of a few powerful owners. It is not surprising that such a situation should lead to widespread insecurity, for not only is the individual faced with a criterion of succes over which he has only partial control but also his opportunities for a job are in considerable measure out of his control.
Rollo May
The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness.Thus paradoxical logic leads to the conclusion that the love of God is neither the knowledge of God in thought, nor the thought of one's love of God, but the act of experiencing the oneness with God.
Erich Fromm
Everyone belongs to a society, whether he wishes it or not, whether he chooses it or not, whether he contributes constructively to its development or does the reverse. Community, on the contrary, implies one's relating one's self to others affirmatively and responsibly. Community in the economic sense implies an emphasis on the social values and functions of work. Community in the psychological sense involves the individual's relating himself to others in love as well as creativity.
Rollo May
I've spoken of the patient Peter who was obsessively forced to make conquests with women, to seduce and then to abandon them, until he was at last able to experience how he himself had repeatedly been abandoned by his mother.
Alice MIller
Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence, hence if each one of them experiences himself from the center of his existence.Only in this "central experience" is human reality, only here is aliveness, only here is the basis for love. Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves. There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognized.
Erich Fromm
Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality —people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.
Jonathan Haidt
All politicians are said to be thieves but all thieves are not politicians which implies that some thieves do have a conscience.
Amit Abraham
On a lighter but serious side I believe that homework was meant for parents to take a keen interest in the studies of children rather than leave it completely for the teacher. This way the parent child communication also developed. However with the passage of time the world become more mechanical and commercial. Quality time suffixed for quantity time and homework became a means of earning for many an educated unemployed teachers. How sad we sure have progressed but yet in many ways have lost our basic values, ethics and morality. It’s time to wake up and DO OUR HOMEWORK.
Amit Abraham
An abuser isn't abusive 24/7. They usually demonstrate positive character traits most of the time. That's what makes the abuse so confusing when it happens, and what makes leaving so much more difficult.
Miya Yamanouchi
It is extremely important to be able to make negative assertions. We must be able to say what is ‘not me’ in order to have a ‘me’. What we like has no meaning unless we know what we don’t like. Our yes has no meaning if we never say no. My chosen profession has no passion if ‘just anyone would do’. Our opinions and thoughts mean very little if there is nothing we disagree with.
Henry Cloud
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking of it.
Daniel Kahneman
The Queen is controlling, the Witch is sadistic, the Hermit is fearful, and the Waif is helpless.And each requires a different approach. Don't let the Queen get the upper hand; be wary even of accepting gifts because it engenders expectations. Don't internalize the Hermit's fears or become limited by them. Don't allow yourself to be alone with the Witch; maintain distance for your own emotional and physical safety. And with the Waif, don't get pulled into her crises and sense of victimization. Pay attention to your own tendencies to want to rescue her, which just feeds the dynamic.
Christine Ann Lawson
Domestic violence is frequently excused when alcohol and other substances are involved.
Asa Don Brown
Many of my colleagues operate from a mistaken notion that rational thought can come from only objective discourse, devoid of emotions. To me, speaking from the heart and with passion is not antagonistic to reason.
David Sue
Our work calls on us to confront, with our patients and within ourselves, extraordinary human experiences. This confrontation is profoundly humbling in that at all times these experiences challenge the limits of our humanity and our view of the world...
John P. Wilson
A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.
Havelock Ellis
It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decision to die a vastly complex web of reasons; and, of course, such complexity is warranted. No one illness or event causes suicide; and certainly no one knows all, or perhaps even most, of the motivations behind the killing of the self. But psychopathology is almost always there, and its deadliness is fierce. Love, success, and friendship are not always enough to counter the pain and destructiveness of severe mental illness
Kay Redfield Jamison
In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?
Carl R. Rogers
People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love - or to be loved by - is difficult.
Erich Fromm
The deep self has been referred to by many names over the ages. You may know it as Essence, Spirit, Soul, Source...or, perhaps by no name at all. I prefer to call it The Inner Shaman...The Inner Shaman simply waits for your sanity, that glimmer of light or recognition on your part. In short, it is waiting for your readiness to be aware of it.
José Luis Stevens
Abhijit Naskar is a self-trained scientist and thinker who discovers the paradigm shifting phenomena of the human mind.
Michael A. Persinger
Are we to conclude that these chief gods, Zeus and Yahweh, did not wish humankind to have moral consciousness and the arts of civilization? It is a mystery indeed.The most obvious explanation is that the creative artist and poet and saint must fight the actual (as contrasted to the ideal) gods of our society—the god of conformism as well as the gods of apathy, material success, and exploitative power. These are the “idols” of our society that are worshiped by multitudes of people.
Rollo May
The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgement passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
William James
A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
B.F. Skinner
We move in response to our conversation partner’s face, and our brain also fires as we move those muscles and stirs the passions. Paralyzing the face is idiotic.
John M. Gottman
But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual & ideological diversity.
Jonathan Haidt
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
Life has ceased to be lived in a closed world the center of which was man; the world has become limitless and at the same time threatening. By losing his fixed place in a closed world man loses the answer to the meaning of his life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life. He is threatened by powerful superpersonal forces, capital and the market. His relationship to his fellow men, with everyone a potential competitor, has become hostile and estranged; he is free - that is, he is alone, isolated, threatened from all sides. [H]e is overwhelmed with a sense of his individual nothingness and helplessness. Paradise is lost for good, the individual stands alone and faces the world - a stranger thrown into a limitless and threatening world. The new freedom is bound to create a deep feeling of insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety.
Erich Fromm
I simply love Drosera plants! Those tentacles, I love those tentacles...~ Aarush Kashyap
Kirtida Gautam
You teach what you need to learn.
Andrea Goeglein
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
William James
Lacan wrote about two levels of speaking, one in which we know what we are saying (even when struggling with something difficult or contradictory) and another in which we have no idea of what we are saying. In this second level of speaking there are repeating words, phrases, and even sounds that function as magnets of unconscious meaning, condensing multiple scenes, times, and ideas. He called such markers in speech 'signifiers.
Annie Rogers
Our twenties can be like living beyond time. When we graduate from school, we leave behind the only lives we have ever known, ones that have been neatly packaged in semester-sized chunks with goals nestled within. Suddenly, life opens up and the syllabi are gone. There are days and weeks and months and years, but no clear way to know when or why any one thing should happen. It can be a disorienting, cave-like existence. As one twentysomething astutely put it, "The twentysomething years are a whole new way of thinking about time. There's this big chunk of time and a whole bunch of stuff that needs to happen somehow.
Meg Jay
By loving them for more than their abilities we show our children that they are much more than the sum of their accomplishments.
Eileen Kennedy-Moore
Despite its revolutionary promises, Facebook can turn our everyday lives into that wedding we have all heard about: the one where the bride chooses her prettiest friends, not her best friends, to be bridesmaids. It can feel like a popularity contest where being Liked is what matters, being the best is the only respectable option, how our partners look is more important than how they act, the race to get married is on, and we have to be clever all the time. It can be just another place, not to be, but to seem.
Meg Jay