Quotes by Psychotherapists - Page 9

So what about the cats?”“What about them?”“The cats he killed. He killed all those cats. Dumped them in the tank.”“So he didn’t like cats.”“With a slingshot.”“They were strays. Nobody missed them.”“But you don’t kill cats. That’s not normal.”Rino shrugged. “Cats are cats.
Richard House
When our hearts are in a state of coherence, we more easily experience feelings such as love, care, appreciation, and kindness. On the other hand, feelings such as irritation, anger, hurt, and envy are more likely to occur when the head and heart are out of alignment.
Jed Diamond
The potential for loss of soul--to one degree or another--is the affliction of a society that as a collective has lost its sense of the holy, of a culture that values everything else above the spiritual. We live in such a spiritually impoverished culture--and in such a time. Loss of soul, to one degree or another, is a constant teasing possibility. We are invited at every corner to hedge on the truth, indulge outselves, act as if our words and actions have no ultimate consequence, make an absolute of the material world, and treat the spiritual world as if it were some kind of frothy, angelic fantasy. In such a world the soul struggles for survival; in such a world a man can lose his own soul and have the whole culture support him, and in such a world, conversely, the light of a single, great soul that lives in integrity can truly illumine the world.
Daphne Rose Kingma
The only sharks I’m afraid of are the ones that wear three-piece suits and write memos.
Laurie Nadel
If you want your life to stand for peace and kindness, it's helpful to do kind, peaceful things.
Richard Carlson
As women shut down their needs, they also shut down their sense of pleasure.
Terrence Real
Life didn't come with a fool-proof manual.
Richard Carlson
Building a good relationship with ourselves is essential for inner fulfilment, especially when we run into a large reality gap.
Russ Harris
Sufism is about connecting with the intuitive parts of ourselves so that we can attune to the highest vibration in the universe, which is pure love. It's about joining together in the mystical heart.
Charlotte Kasl
The more deeply we dive, the less we mind upsetting waves, finding within intimate relationship an increasingly compelling invitation to seek and find freedom through our shared heart, our shared body, our shared limitations, our shared boundlessness, our shared mortality, our shared yes, our shared being, our shared all...P.14
Robert Augustus Masters
Lucid dreams often feel like this—as if you are observing yourself from a point over your shoulders-arm flexed, hands curving around the boom, breathing, in three dimensional silence.
Laurie Nadel
Like Salvador Dali’s paintings of watches melting in the sand, time wanders at its own curious pace whenever you’re on vacation in a foreign country.
Laurie Nadel
Once a human being has arrived on this earth communication is the largest single factor determining what kinds of relationships he makes with others and what happens to him in the world about him.
Virginia Satir
Integrity is congruence between what you know, what you profess, and what you do.
Nathaniel Branden
If you want to be a good parent please heal your own wounds, heal all of them and be confident that you’ve done so before you seriously consider having children. The unresolved child within you is the real child you need to embrace and heal and raise.
Daniel Mackler
Mrs. Gruber said that happiness was not something she aspired to, that when we had seen as much of the world as she had, we would know that what lies right behind the horseshit is not a prize pony, my dears, it's more horseshit.
Amy Bloom
...when you let go of your expectations, when you accept life as it is, you're free.To hold on is to be serious and uptight. To let go is to lighten up.
Richard Carlson
Fear of our own depths is the enemy.
James Hollis
The feeling of love comes and goes on a whim; you can't control it. But the action of love is something you can do, regardless of how you are feeling.
Russ Harris
Opening up to your intuition represents a commitment to pay closer attention to how you think and feel.
Laurie Nadel
Men today cannot claim their identity via culture because they are obliged to find other uninitiated males as their models or succumb to the empty values of a materialistic society. Again, before healing may begin, men must acknowledge the reality of what lies within. Among those confusing emotions is a deep grief for the loss of the personal father as companion, model and support, and a deep hunger for the fathers as a source of wisdom, solace and inspiration.
James Hollis
In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was better if they had the sex, so they could give their undivided attention to mathematics, which was the main thing.
Paul Goodman
In an age of rampant chronic disease, reconnecting with the Earth's energy beneath our very feet may provide a way back to better health and keeping our bodies in top condition throughout our lives.
Jed Diamond
The art of writing is not as solitary as one might think. When it finally dawns on us one day that our task as writers is to share what we know of the human spirit, we suddenly discover that we were never truly alone.
Hal Zina Bennett
Brain waves are like personal handwriting.
Laurie Nadel
Most people do not erode their self-esteem over big issues but over small ones, little acts of betrayal and hypocrisy forgotten (repressed) very quickly. But the computer in your subconscious mind forgets nothing. It records your spiritual profit and loss. The balance sheet reflects your present level of self-esteem--and sends you the information via your emotions.
Nathaniel Branden
Every misfortune is a blessing in disguise.
Laurie Nadel
The opposite of interpersonal trust is not mistrust. It is despair. This is because we have given up on believing that trustworthiness and fulfillment are possible from others. We have lost our hope in our fellow humans.
David Richo
To be a better person, spend less time filling out your personal scorecard and more time being kind . . . to you.
Philip Chard
Higher states of consciousness correlate strongly with attributes like compassion, forgiveness, generosity and kindness. The more one is self-aware and other-aware, and the greater one's connection with the spiritual, the more likely one will be a force for good in our world.
Philip Chard
to judge darkness as bad or wrong is akin to judging whether up is better than down, or whether blue is better than red
Timothy Roderick
There are few things more mysterious than endings. I mean, for example, when did the Greek gods end, exactly? Was there a day when Zeus waved magisterially down from Olympus and Aphrodite and her lover Ares, and her crippled husband Hephaestus ) I always felt sorry for him), and all the rest got rolled up like a worn-out carpet?
Salley Vickers
Mindfulness, the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience, is at the heart of what the Buddha taught.
Sylvia Boorstein
Love is a verb, not a noun. It is active. Love is not just feelings of passion and romance. It is behavior. If a man lies to you, he is behaving badly and unlovingly toward you. He is disrespecting you and your relationship. The words “I love you” are not enough to make up for that. Don’t kid yourself that they are.
Susan Forward
According to Hugh Thomas, author of 'A History of the World', the greatest medical advance in history has been garbage collection. The greatest psychological advance in history is just around the corner and will also have to do with cleaning up. Cleaning up lies and "coming out of the closet" is getting more attention these days. Some day we will look back on these years of suffocation in bullsh*t in the same way we look back on all the years people lived in, and died from, their garbage.
Brad Blanton
Now is the only time we have, and the only time that we have any control over.
Richard Carlson
My thought is that the average adjusted boy is, if anything, more humanly wasted than the disaffected. So let us go on to discuss his stupidity, his lack of patriotism, his sexual confusion, and his lack of faith.
Paul Goodman
Where tradition tells us that people are best kept under control and denied freedom of expression and action, humanistic psychology argues for liberation, more open decision-making and a sharing of power and control.
Keith Tudor
As adults, we hvae many inhibitions against crying. We feel it is an expression of weakness, or femininity or of childishness. The person who is afraid to cry is afraid of pleasure. This is because the person who is afraid to cry holds himself together rigidly so that he won't cry; that is, the rigid person is as afraid of pleasure as he is afraid to cry. In a situation of pleasure he will become anxious. As his tensions relax he will begin to tremble and shake, and he will attempt to control this trembling so as not to break down in tears. His anxiety is nothing more than the conflict between his desire to let go and his fear of letting go. This conflict will arise whenever the pleasure is strong enough to threaten his rigidity.Since rigidity develops as a means to block out painful sensations, the release of rigidity or the restoration of the natural motility of the body will bring these painful sensations to the fore. Somewhere in his unconscious the neurotic individual is aware that pleasure can evoke the repressed ghosts of the past. It could be that such a situation is responsible for the adage "No pleasure without pain.
Alexander Lowen
Windsurfing, the sound of the word contains all the mystery of a solitary buoy in the fog, echoing across the water at the end of the day.
Laurie Nadel
Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33TAT: No. I don't know anymore than you know they're not. But, I'm talking about boundaries and privacy here. As a therapist working with survivors, I have been harassed by people who claim to be affiliated with the false memory movement. Parents and other family members have called or written me insisting on talking with me about my patients' cases, despite my clearly indicating I can't because of professional confidentiality. I have had other parents and family members investigate me -- look into my professional background -- hoping to find something to discredit me to the patients I was seeing at the time because they disputed their memories. This isn't the kind of sober, scientific discourse you all claim you want.
David L. Calof
Why Is It So Important to Remember?When you were abused, those around you acted as if it weren’t happening. Since no one else acknowledged the abuse, you sometimes felt that it wasn’t real. Because of this you felt confused. You couldn’t trust your own experience and perceptions. Moreover, others’ denial led you to suppress your memories, thus further obscuring the issue.You can end your own denial by remembering. Allowing yourself to remember is a way of confirming in your own mind that you didn’t just imagine it. Because the person who abused you did not acknowledge your pain, you may have also thought that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as you felt it was. In order to acknowledge to yourself that it really was that bad, you need to remember as much detail as possible. Because by denying what happened to you, you are doing to yourself exactly what others have done to you in the past: You are negating and denying yourself.
Beverly Engel
Bioenergetics is an adventure in self-discovery. It differs from similar explorations into the nature of the self by attempting to understand the human personality in terms of the human body. Most previous explorations focused their investigations on the mind.
Alexander Lowen
Through play, children experience a greater confidence in their bodies, surroundings and themselves. They become familiar with what they can and cannot do.
Iben Dissing Sandahl
Life happens at the level of events not words.
Alfred Adler
When your partner overreacts 1st try to understand their “hot spot” before overreacting; otherwise you lose your ability to think clearly, communicate effectively and the cycle continues.
Dr. Deborah Hecker
The essence of diversity is the individual's experience of it. Diversity is about personalised shades of experience emanating from universal colours of humanity, but each person takes from the universal what is relevant to them and alters it by their own interpersonal experience.
Camila Batmanghelidjh
Self-trust firms up your inner territory and grounds you with solid premises for believing in who you are.
Laurie Nadel
I complained to a friend that although I had completed six years in therapy, my mother still wouldn’t let me go. He replied, "She’s not supposed to let you go. Your father is supposed to come and get you.
Don Elium
Well, Kessa, I am glad to see that you're taking your body seriously. I shudder when I see the girls leaving class and heading for the nearest hamburger, coke, and French fry station.The thought of them pouring all those dead calories into themselves makes me want to cry. You'd think after a rigorous dance class they'd have more respect for their bodies.
Steven Levenkron
The idea of original sin--of guilt with no possibility of innocence, no freedom of choice, no alternatives--inherently militates against self-esteem. The very notion of guilt without volition or responsibility is an assault on reason as well as on morality. Sin is not original, it is originated--like virtue.
Nathaniel Branden
It is humiliating to realize that when you drive yourself underground, when you fake who you are, often you do so for people you do not even like or respect.
Nathaniel Branden
They believed the devil would rise from here,” she said. “I’m serious. They thought he would come up through the cracks in the ground, that there would be an earthquake and he would rise. Dust. Fire. The end of the world. They calculated the day and built churches to protect themselves.
Richard House
How do we find words for describing levels of betrayal and emotional, physical, sexual and spiritual torture that fragment and destroy a child or cast and case traumatic shadows over the whole of adult life? We might, as a society, slowly find it possible to accept that one in four citizens are likely to have experience some form of emotional, psychical, sexual or spiritual abuse (McQueen, Itzin, Kennedy, Sinason, & Maxted, 2008), in itself a figure unimaginable and hidden twenty years ago. However, accepting the way a hurt and hurting parent or stranger re-enacts their disturbance with a vulnerable child or children remains far easier to digest than to consider the intellectually planned, scientific, methodical, procedures of organized child-abusing perpetrators-in other words, torture.
Valerie Sinason
The novel comes from a long shamanic tradition wherein the shaman-storyteller himself is transformed, no longer storyteller but a character, an animal, a god, a goddess, or a natural force that is not his everyday identity. And these moments, when the characters come alive and the author disappears, take us into another world.
Hal Zina Bennett
Finally Exi spoke. "There are some important things to remember always, no matter how hard life presses at you. One of these things is that wherever you are, and no matter for how long, there must be a home to hold you. You cannot know who you are unless you are contained in some way that gives you shape. Otherwise you are like a small wind, or like water losing itself in sand." He paused thoughtfully, looking at us, who had all stopped to listen. "You see," he continued, "at any place or time we have no way of knowing if we will be there a day or a week. We must let our destiny come to us. In one sense this is always true. Therefore it is needful for each of us to be defined-to live, not just wait to live. Do you understand?
Sheila Moon
When faced with choosing between attributing their pain to “being crazy” and having had abusive parents, clients will choose “crazy” most of the time. Dora, a 38-year-old, was profoundly abused by multiple family perpetrators and has grappled with cutting and eating disordered behaviors for most of her life. She poignantly echoed this dilemma in her the
Lisa Ferentz
Instead of turning our heads from pain, we merge with it, neither holding on to it nor pushing it away, becoming instead an instrument of transformation. Recently, on my early morning drive to a health club, I saw a deer in the middle lane, trying to get up, but obviously crippled. Her eyes looked confused and frightened. As I drove by, I breathed in her pain and breathed out a blessing. I could feel a dark cloud swirling inside of me, but I also had an image of a deer running freely in the woods. I can never know if it helped her, but something loosened inside of me. Instead of turning away from her pain, I joined her. It was then I realized more deeply the power of Tonglin...When you feel hurt, confused, lonely, or sad, breathe into your pain, feel it, be with it, then breathe out an image of clarity, light, and a blessing. This alone will start to change your life.
Charlotte Kasl
Self-esteem wasn't the issue for my parents or their parents. Survival was their primary goal.
Julia A. Boyd
You have the power to treat your own pain, and you can do it without surgery, drugs, or other invasive interventions.
Jed Diamond