Quotes by Psychotherapists - Page 2

A wide-angle view of sails sparkling white against a cobalt sky as light dances, silver on the water. Like art, it soothes the edge, allowing you to see something simple from a different perspective.
Laurie Nadel
Untraumatized people have a natural instinct to make healthy decisions in the best interest of their true selves. They are only limited by their immaturity and the brokenness of their external world.
Daniel Mackler
MAKING THE LIE MAKE SENSE:When denial (his or ours) can no longer hold and we finally have to admit to ourselves that we’ve been lied to, we search frantically for ways to keep it from disrupting our lives. So we rationalize. We find “good reasons” to justify his lying, just as he almost always accompanies his confessions with “good reasons” for his lies. He tells us he only lied because…. We tell ourselves he only lied because…. We make excuses for him: The lying wasn’t significant/Everybody lies/He’s only human/I have no right to judge him.Allowing the lies to register in our consciousness means having to make room for any number of frightening possibilities:•tHe’s not the man I thought he was.•tThe relationship has spun out of control and I don’t know what to do•tThe relationship may be over. Most women will do almost anything to avoid having to face these truths. Even if we yell and scream at him when we discover that he’s lied to us, once the dust settles, most of us will opt for the comforting territory of rationalization. In fact, many of us are willing to rewire our senses, short-circuit our instincts and intelligence, and accept the seductive comfort of self-delusion.
Susan Forward
The world shrinks to include only two people, only one of whom -- the beloved -- has power. This inequitable distribution naturally breeds resentment and feelings of hopelessness that the dependent person dare not express for fear of alienating the necessary person even more.
Jeanne Safer
We are parts of one universe, true enough. We stand within an almost infinite network of relationships. Yet each of us is a single point of consciousness, a unique event, a private, unrepeatable world. This is the essence of our aloneness.
Nathaniel Branden
You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.
Amy Bloom
Our tears are precious, necessary, and part of what make us such endearing creatures.
David Richo
The Buddha’s criteria for Wise Speech include—in addition to the obvious expectation that speech be truthful— that it be timely, gentle, motivated by kindness, and helpful.
Sylvia Boorstein
Today let's give thanks for life. For life itself. For simply being born!
Daphne Rose Kingma
A friend drops their plans when you're in trouble, shares joy in your accomplishments, feels sad when you're in pain. A friend encourages your dreams and offers advice--but when you don't follow it, they still respect and love you.
Doris Wild Helmering
When your lover is a liar, you and he have a lot in common, you're both lying to you!
Susan Forward
The goal of individuation is wholeness, as much as we can accomplish, not the triumph of the ego.
James Hollis
Some things must remain the same in order for the universe to flow properly. One pebble dashed out across the ocean leaves a lifetime of ripples. They call it the butterfly effect.
Louise Mullins
Positively, the delinquent behavior seems to speak clearly enough. It asks for what we can’t give, but it is in this direction we must go. It asks for manly opportunities to work, make a little money, and have self-esteem; to have some space to bang around in, that is not always somebody’s property; to have better schools to open for them horizons of interest; to have more and better sex without fear or shame; to share somehow in the symbolic goods (like the cars) that are made so much of; to have a community and a country to be loyal to; to claim attention and have a voice. These are not outlandish demands. Certainly they cannot be satisfied directly in our present system; they are baffling. That is why the problem is baffling, and the final recourse is to a curfew, to ordinances against carrying knives, to threatening the parents, to reformatories with newfangled names, and to 1,100 more police on the street.
Paul Goodman
Flip a coin. Life or death. Heads or tails. You never know.
Laurie Nadel
You can teach a child the importance of pain by your behavior. You can also teach as child the importance of no pain by your behavior.
Milton H. Erickson
We're walking contradictions, seeking safety and predictability on one hand and thriving on diversity on the other.
Esther Perel
If the heartbeat is a vital sign of physical health, anger is the vital sign of emotional health. Anger protects the self in all relationships. It is rage that is damaging.
Sue Parker Hall
When there is abuse by itself it's scary enough. When there is abuse within a religious setting it is so terrifying to people. Look how long its taken the Ryan report of 2009 took till then to talk about ritualistic kinds of abuse children in Ireland went through at the hands of nuns and priests, so nobody can bear it when its linked to religion, but when it's linked to religion that is not mainstream it seems to frighten people more. As if yes, abuse exists, Satanism exists, but you can't have Satanist abuse.
Valerie Sinason
Whether you are at play in the fields of the Lord or standing next to home plate squinting at the popping pitcher, that sudden, immediate knowing can also help you envision the outcome.
Laurie Nadel
Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.
Alfred Adler
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
Men do not know what they do not know, and women should not tell them.
Amy Bloom
Just as verbally and physically abused children internalize blame, so do incest victims. However, in incest, the blame is compounded by the shame. The belief that ‘it’s all my fault’ is never more intense than with the incest victim. This belief fosters strong feelings of self-loathing and shame. In addition to having somehow to cope with the actual incest, the victim must now guard against being caught and exposed as a ‘dirty, disgusting’ person
Susan Forward
Few things are as painful as the unfulfilled desire to be near to another you love.
Sandra Lee Dennis
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
....I came to consider betrayal a moral violation of another's humanity—akin to torture.
Sandra Lee Dennis
Lose your mind and come to your senses.
Frederick Salomon Perls
The paradox of real love is that our capacity to sustain intimacy rests on our capacity to tolerate aloneness inside the relationship.
Terrence Real
She believes in will. It is so frail and delicate at night that she can’t even imagine the next morning, but it is so wide and binding by the middle of the next day that she cannot even remember the terrible night. It is as if she gives birth every day.
Amy Bloom
Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.
Amy Bloom
I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am me. And if by chance we find each other, it will be beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.
Frederick Salomon Perls
...changing one's own behavior is a much more promising strategy than insisting on change from the other.
Terrence Real
Some people with DID present their narratives of sadistic abuse in a quite matter-of-fact way, without perceptible affect. This may sometimes be done as a way of protecting themselves, and the listener, from the emotional impact of their experience. We have found that people describing trauma in a flat way, without feeling, are usually those who have been more chronically abused, while those with affect still have a sense of self that can observe the tragedy of betrayal and have feelings about it. In some cases, this deadpan presentation can also be the result of cult training and brainwashing. Unfortunately, when a patient describes a traumatic experience without showing any apparent emotion, it can make the listener doubt whether the patient is telling the truth. (page 119, Chapter 9, Some clinical implications of believing or not believing the patient)
Graeme Galton
When you study the wrongs you have committed before you study the wrongs done to you, you have no choice but to label yourself inherently evil, and be forced to dissociate emotionally to avoid the horrible pain in this lie.
Daniel Mackler
If you choose not to live self-responsibly, you count on others to make up your default. No one abjures self-responsibility on a desert island.
Nathaniel Branden
It is, of course, necessary to have rules and procedures if we wish to accomplish large and complex tasks, but the question of whether or not it is worth the cost must be perennially re-examined. (117)
Sheldon B. Kopp
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
One concrete way in which we all landscape our sanity is by having our experience of reality confirmed by others. When our experience of reality is disconfirmed by others, our confidence in our own sanity can be undermined. (page 125, Chapter 9, Graeme Galton)
Graeme Galton
Whatever sex is, and it is at least a profound mystery, is easily misused. The primary psychological purpose of sex for those men who spend their lives in the cold, cruel world, and whose relationship with their own anima is frigid, is to reconnect with a warm place. Sex is a form of emotional reassurance, a narcotic to still the pain of the bruised soul. If life batters them, then sex, like drugs or work, may numb the wound. The sexual act offers a momentary transcendence. Orgasm can be an ecstatic experience; for the moment one may feel outside the iron confines of ordinary consciousness. It is the closest many men ever come to a religious experience. Thus the act of sex may mask a desperate search for acceptance, underneath whiсh lurks the mother comple
James Hollis
The higher our self-esteem, the more likely we are to be creative in our work, which means the more successful we are likely to be. The higher our self-esteem, the more ambitious we tend to be, not necessarily in a career or financial sense, but in terms of what we hope to experience in life - emotionally, creatively and spiritually.
Nathaniel Branden
Family myths are cherished by the people who--however unwittingly--have brought them into being. In my own situation, what my father was really saying to me during that last unfortunate phone call was that I had shattered our family's myth: the myth of a close and tight-knit family in which everyone was in complete agreement about everything, that is, in complete agreement with my father. I had violated one of the tenets of this myth in a way that was unforgivable to him. For that my punishment was to be expelled from the family.
Mark Sichel
The best gift you can give your children is to keep yourself emotionally, physically, spiritually and intellectually healthy.
Iben Dissing Sandahl
It's hard to experience desire when you're weighted down by concern.
Esther Perel
Finding your own metaphor for intuition is one of the best ways to give it form, an essential step in developing your intuitive thinking.
Laurie Nadel
What makes for a good marriage isn't necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Marriage isn't a passion-fest; it's a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane and often boring non-profit business. And I mean this in a good way.
Lori Gottlieb
Always remember that writing is an alliance between author and reader. With every line we put down on the page, we need to leave room for the reader's imagination and intellect.
Hal Zina Bennett
The more importance we place on avoiding unpleasant feelings in life, the more our life tends to go downhill.
Russ Harris
With faith one attains and realises peace and harmony. With doubt one destroys and gains freedom to move ontowards.
Fazal Inayat-Khan
Instead of falling, I am dancing with the wind.
Laurie Nadel
Betrayal is a more subtle, twisted feeling than terror. It burns and eats, but terror stabs right through.
Wendy Hoffman
Anarchy could never get a man to the moon, but it may the only mode that can allow us to survive on earth.
Sheldon B. Kopp
Happiness is a state of mind, not a set of circumstances.
Richard Carlson
100: Live This Day as if It Were Your Last.
Richard Carlson
Synthesis is the gateway to Transcendence, because once you accept that you are forever changed and that life is forever different, you have to ask, "What are you going to do about that fact? Will the change be for the better or for worse?" It's the loss itself that becomes the catalyst for meaning. (pg 273)
Ashley Davis Bush
Chances are, when you were young, you were told, in effect, "Listen, kid, here is the news: life is not about you. Life is not about what you want. What you want is not important. Life is about doing what others expect of you." If you accepted this idea, later on you wondered what had happened to your fire. Where had your enthusiasm for living gone?
Nathaniel Branden
The earth will support anything that supports life. What I have found after a soul retrieval is that one cannot "numb out" anymore. Each and every one of us must make personal and planetary decisions to stop abusing life. Whether a person a has to give up an abusive relationship, take a more active political role, or increase awareness of how we continue to abuse our environment, we all now have to be responsible. Being responsible means responding to what is needed. We find a need to wake up and change our reality to a stance of power...
Sandra Ingerman
Artist colonies are notorious for breaking up marriages and housing affairs.
Kerry Cohen
Distorted history boasts of bellicose glory... and seduces the souls of boys to seek mystical bliss in bloodshed and in battles.
Alfred Adler
Obsessive love is built on a tissue of illusions: that by having sex with someone you can possess that person's soul; that you can transmute past defeats into present triumphs without understanding or mourning; that you make the unloving love you by constancy, uncomplaining availability, and molding yourself into what you thing that person wants.
Jeanne Safer