Quotes by Psychologists - Page 5

When a child hits a child, we call it aggression.When a child hits an adult, we call it hostility.When an adult hits an adult, we call it assault.When an adult hits a child, we call it discipline.
Haim G. Ginott
Every great artist gives birth to a new universe, in which the familiar things look the way they have never before looked to anyone.
Rudolf Arnheim
Always seek to allow others space to be imperfect.
Alan Downs
When our grandparents failed, they had comfortable spiritual furniture to rest in. They had, for the most part, their relationship to God, their relationship to a nation they loved, their relationship to a community and a large extended family. Faith in God, community, nation, and the large extended family have all eroded in the last forty years, and the spiritual furniture that we used to sit in has become threadbare.
Martin E.P. Seligman
The choice in this life is not between easy and hard, but between kinds of hardship, between a hardship that gives birth to wisdom, compassion and mercy, and the hardship that keeps on replicating itself to no end.
Noam Shpancer
She was the kind of woman a person could die over or kill over.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
Optimism is denial for chumps with no life experience"."What's pessimism?" I said."Religion without God.
Jonathan Kellerman
The lack of culpability of the perpetrator and his or her transference of blame onto alcohol or other substances only perpetuates the violent behaviors.
Asa Don Brown
The bureaucrat is a man who administers things and people, and who relates himself to people as to things.
Erich Fromm
I fell in love with the expression in his eyes when he looked at me.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
The human tendency toward confirmatory thinking - all of us are bias to seek information that fits what we already believe.
Valerie Tarico
What is freedom as a human experience? Is the desire for freedom something inherent in human nature? Is it an identical experience regardless of what kind of culture a person lives in, or is it something different according to the degree of individualism reached in a particular society? Is freedom only the absence of external pressure or is it also the presence of something—and if so, of what? What are the social and economic factors in society that make for the striving for freedom? Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from? Why then is it that freedom is for many a cherished goal and for others a threat?
Erich Fromm
People wish for good dreams I wish people don't dream of me.
Amit Abraham
May you begin living beyond.
Asa Don Brown
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.
William James
Like antidepressants, a substantial part of the benefit of psychotherapy depends on a placebo effect, or as Moerman calls it, the meaning response. At least part of the improvement that is produced by these treatments is due to the relationship between the therapist and the client and to the client's expectancy of getting better. That is a problem for antidepressant treatment. It is a problem because drugs are supposed to work because of their chemistry, not because of the psychological factors. But it is not a problem for psychotherapy. Psychotherapists are trained to provide a warm and caring environment in which therapeutic change can take place. Their intention is to replace the hopelessness of depression with a sense of hope and faith in the future. These tasks are part of the essence of psychotherapy. The fact that psychotherapy can mobilize the meaning response - and that it can do so without deception - is one of its strengths, no one of its weaknesses. Because hopelessness is a fundamental characteristic of depression, instilling hope is a specific treatment for it it. Invoking the meaning response is essential for the effective treatment of depression, and the best treatments are those that can do this most effectively and that can do without deception.
Irving Kirsch
Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.
Rollo May
Perspective-changing events can have many parts. One part can be a tense, laughter-filled promise. Another part can have no laughter at all.
Andrea Goeglein
There are extremes within any population, but on average, at least among young adults, those who feel lonely actually spend no more time alone than do those who feel more connected. They are no more or less physically attractive than average, and they do not differ, on average, from the non-lonely in terms of height, weight, age, education, or intelligence. Most important, when we look at the broad continuum (rather than just the extremes) of people who feel lonely, we find that they have the capacity to be just as socially adept as anyone else. Feeling lonely does not mean that we have deficient social skills.
John T. Cacioppo
Behavior has consequences, and stupid behavior often has terrible consequences.
James C. Dobson
All questions need to be explored from our hearts first & then embraced by our heads.
andrea T Goeglein
There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
William James
A noble leader answers not to the trumpet calls of self promotion, but to the hushed whispers of necessity.
Mollie Marti
Once in a while a new government initiates a program to put power to better use, but its success or failure never really proves anything. In science, experiments are designed, checked, altered, repeated-- but not in politics... We have no real cumulative knowledge. History tells us nothing. That's the tragedy of a political reformer.
B.F. Skinner
[U]sing religion to treat depression often makes the problem worse. It's like treating the disease with more of the disease. It is effective in getting people to give time and money to the church, but it does not help the victim.
Darrel Ray
We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.
Daniel M. Gilbert
Some experimenters have reported that an angry face “pops out” of a crowd of happy faces, but a single happy face does not stand out in an angry crowd. The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.
Daniel Kahneman
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
William James
Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that is no longer exists, continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time.
Alice MIller
Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)
Rollo May
Jealousy that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive.
Havelock Ellis
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
William James
What is so 'only' about 'yourself'? Is not the first thing one has to learn in this respect that to do something for yourself--I mean, the right kind of thing--is just as valuable and ethical than to do it for somebody else? Wouldn't you say that the good feeling we get simply because we did 'it' (whatever) for somebody else is cheating, in that it postpones the question: what is it good for?
Rudolf Arnheim
Having a low opinion of yourself is not 'modesty.' It's self-destruction. Holding your uniqueness in high regard is not 'egotism.' It's a necessary precondition to happiness and success.
Bobbe Sommer
The circles of shame are vicious. Painful feelings of shame help cause people to be depressed and suicidal, these in turn become shameful aspects of the self. Being angry does not necessarily cause more anger, being envious does not necessarily cause more envy (though once we envy, we can also envy someone's lack of envy), but, in our culture at least, shame (and envy and self-pity) are things to be ashamed about. The two common feelings of suicide are hopelessness and powerlessness; each is shameful, and this additional experience of shame adds pain on pain. A man who despairs because he feels his prospects of having a family are hopeless also feels he will never lose the feeling of shame over being wifeless and childless. To be powerless to change one's life in ways that others can is cause to feel ashamed of one's powerlessness.
David L. Conroy
I understood then why people were so often defeated by this world. Perhaps the web of support that they required just did not come into alignment when it had to. Or perhaps our culture lacked the channels by which to offer this support.
Guy Mankowski
Imagination may be the most essential, uniquely human capacity - creating both the dead-end crises of our time and the doorway through them.
Bill Plotkin
Some dissociative parts of the personality, living in trauma time, may experience the same emotion no matter the situation, such as fear, rage, shame, sadness, yearning and even some positive ones just as joy.
Suzette Boon
Here's champagne for our real friends, and real pain for our sham friends.
Mardy Grothe
Pass down the good that I do unto you when you are done with it
Amit Abraham
But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Battles for truth are fought all alone but at the end its a victory for many.
Amit Abraham
Don't let society fool you into believing that if you don't have a girlfriend or boyfriend then you're destined for a life of misery. The Dalai Lama has been single for the last 80 years and he is one of the happiest people on earth. Stop searching for happiness in places outside of yourself, and start finding it where it has always been: within you.
Miya Yamanouchi
As our children turn even five or six degrees away from us, we have to be aware of our fear and our excitement and our hope for them. And as that five or sex degrees turns into ten or twenty degrees, even ninety degrees, we have to monitor those feelings every step of the way-and ultimately realize that our child is another human being and not necessarily and extension of us.
Daniel Gottlieb
My own studies on the natural history of DID indicate only 20% of DID patients have an overt DID adaption on a chronic basis, and 14% of them deliberately disguise their manifestations of DID. Only 6% make their DID obvious on an ongoing basis. Eighty percent have windows of diagnosability when stressed or triggered by some significant event, interaction, situation or date. Therefore, 94% of DID patients show only mild or suggestive evidence of their conditions most of the time. Yet DID patients often will acknowledge that their personality systems are actively switching and/or far more active than it would appear on the surface (Loewenstein et al., 1987).R.P. Kluft (2009) A clinician's understanding of dissociation. pp 599-623.
Paul F. Dell
over and over victims are blamed for their assaults. and when we imply that victims bring on their own fates - whether to make ourselves feel more efficacious or to make the world seem just - we prevent ourselves from taking the necessary precautions to protect ourselves. Why take precautions? We deny the trauma could easily have happened to us. And we also hurt the people already traumatized. Victims are often already full of self-doubt, and we make recovery harder by laying inspectors blame on them.
Anna C. Salter
People who reported having a terrible traumatic experience and who kept the experience a secret had far more health problems than people who openly talked about their traumas. Why would keeping a secret be so toxic? More importantly, if you asked people to disclose emotionally powerful secrets, would their health improve? The answer, my students and I soon discovered, was yes.We began running experiments where people were asked to write about traumatic experiences for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for three to four consecutive days. Compared to people who were told to write about nonemotional topics, those who wrote about trauma evidenced improved physical health. Later studies found that emotional writing boosted immune function, brought about drops in blood pressure, and reduced feelings of depression and elevated daily moods. Now, over twenty-five years after the first writing experiment, more than two hundred similar writing studies have been conducted all over the world. While the effects are often modest, the mere act of translating emotional upheavals into words is consistently associated with improvements in physical and mental health.
James W. Pennebaker
I don't believe in ghosts but they blindly believe in me
Amit Abraham
If one has failed to develop curiosity and interest in the early years, it is a good idea to acquire them now, before it is too late to improve the quality of life. To do so is fairly easy in principle, but more difficult in practice. Yet it is sure worth trying. The first step is to develop the habit of doing whatever needs to be done with concentrated attention, with skill rather than inertia. Even the most routine tasks, like washing dishes, dressing, or mowing the lawn become more rewarding if we approach them with the care it would take to make a work of art. The next step is to transfer some psychic energy each day from tasks that we don’t like doing, or from passive leisure, into something we never did before, or something we enjoy doing but don’t do often enough because it seems too much trouble. There are literally millions of potentially interesting things in the world to see, to do, to learn about. But they don’t become actually interesting until we devote attention to them.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
It has been a long road for us as family therapists to reach an understanding of just this phenomenon-the sense of the whole, the family system. While we could have explained the theory of meeting with the whole family to the Brices, at that anxious moment it would not have touched them. There are situations where, in the words of Franz Alexander, the woice of the intellent is too soft. The family needed to test us. They needed the experience of our being firm. As unpleasant as it was, our response must have reassured them. They knew, and we sensed, how difficult their situation was and how tumultuous it could become. They simply has to know that we could withstand the stress if they dared open it up.
Augustus Y. Napier
A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.
Robert B. Cialdini
We will remember what it was like to lose you, our pain the black background of our electric blue joy. We will remember that there are few answers to our questions; the questions that seem to float into an endless expanse of sky.
Kelly Wilson
For those of us who question, your whole life becomes a question. Do you then reach some level of understanding, and then it's static? I don't think so" (age twenty-two, unlabeled)
Lisa Diamond
Jesus Christ is the source—the only source—of meaning in life. He provides the only satisfactory explanation for why we’re here and where we’re going. Because of this good news, the final heartbeat for the Christian is not the mysterious conclusion to a meaningless existence. It is, rather, the grand beginning to a life that will never end. That same Lord is waiting to embrace and forgive anyone who comes to Him in humility and repentance. He is calling your name, just as He called the name of Pete Maravich. His promise of eternal life offers the only hope for humanity. If you have never met this Jesus, I suggest that you seek spiritual counsel from a Christian leader who can offer guidance. You can also write to me, if that would help. Thanks for reading along with me. I hope to meet you someday. If our paths don’t cross this side of heaven, I’ll be looking for you in that eternal city. By all means, Be there!
James C. Dobson
There is a secret about human love that is commonly overlooked: Receiving it is much more scary and threatening than giving it.
John Welwood
I realized that it was not that I didn’t want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn’t know why I wanted to go on
Kay Redfield Jamison
It's impossible to be neutral when even doing nothing is a decision.
Lisa Cypers Kamen
A key to healthy problem solving is good communication.
Asa Don Brown
Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
William James
If you are not wrong only Pontius Pilate can crucify you.
Amit Abraham