Quotes by Therapists - Page 3

Abuse manipulates and twists a child’s natural sense of trust and love. Her innocent feelings are belittled or mocked and she learns to ignore her feelings. She can’t afford to feel the full range of feelings in her body while she’s being abused—pain, outrage, hate, vengeance, confusion, arousal. So she short-circuits them and goes numb. For many children, any expression of feelings, even a single tear, is cause for more severe abuse. Again, the only recourse is to shut down. Feelings go underground.
Laura Davis
It is the very use of coercion, positive or negative, that breaks or deadens the spirit, which is the source of motivation.
Kelly Bryson
I love Coos Bay, and I love Acid!
Beatrice Sparks
Despite what you might believe right now, your son’s future is bright. You only need the right tools to help him get there.
Clayton Lessor MA
Over time, any deception destroys intimacy, and without intimacy couples cannot have true and lasting love.
Bonnie Eaker Weil
The first and immediate thing to do when you find yourself stuck in terror is to breathe!
Deborah Sandella
All infants and children require and deserve comfort in order to develop properly. Soft cooing voices, gentle touch, smiles, cleanliness, and wholesome food all contribute to the growing body/mind. And when these basic conditions are absent in childhood, our need for comfort in adulthood can be so profound that it becomes pathological, driving us to seek mothering from anyone who will have us, to use others to fill our emptiness with sex or love, and to risk becoming addicted to a perceived source of comfort.
Alexandra Katehakis
If our story isn’t serving us, negatively impacts our families, our communities, or our organizations, we might just have to find a way to “StoryJack” the story, transforming it, and creating a new story that we resonate with so that we can “Jack Into” a better version or experience the story – and our life - in a new way.
Lyssa Danehy deHart
I learned that when we can be absolutely present like this, our mind, body and spirit become integrated and we are fully conscious, energised, peaceful, alive, at one with the true essence of what it is to be ourselves. In that moment, we can relate with compassion to those around usand to ourselves. It is when what we have satisfies us, and when what we don’t have doesn’t matter.
Pam Billinge
Fighting is the ultimate act of intimacy.(...) Intimacy is based on shared vulnerability.
Dossie Easton
The head is in charge of thinking; the heart is in charge of feeling; and the spirit realizes the creative, infinitely thriving power of life while imagination acts as translator and synthesizer.
Deborah Sandella
Balance is the key to a long and happy life.
Janet Gallagher Nestor
Teaching a boy to be a man is the primary job of a father.
Clayton Lessor MA
Unprocessed intense emotion goes underground and creates a subconscious block that can be released as soon as the original event is integrated in the mind, heart, and body.
Deborah Sandella
Our culture, so proud of its mind-over-matter philosophy, cuts us off from our bodily experience and from the earth itself. In this severance, our sexuality is negated, our senses assaulted, our environment abused, and our power manipulated. Our ground is our form, and without it we lose our individuality.
Anodea Judith
Love changes you, grows you, and reveals all the places where your heart is small. SoulMate love is transformative. Not everyone is ready for that.
Annette Vaillancourt
When you surrender, you live in eager anticipation of the surprise. The dual weights of yearning and despair are cast off.
Annette Vaillancourt
All of us lived life when sex was the farthest thing from our minds. Try to remember the careless freedom of play, basking in the beingness of others. As adults, responsibilities and obligations can often bind us to a daily grind. For some adults, then, sex might be one of the few interactions that restores their openness and sensory exploration of play. It’s not hard to see why sexual preoccupation might take over when people become locked out from experiencing fulfilling lives.
Alexandra Katehakis
Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.
Megan Devine
How can you get through to yourself?
Alexandra Katehakis
There is an unspoken agreement in every successful relationship: "I'm not perfect and you're not perfect. I can ignore your imperfections if you can ignore mine. I choose to spend my life in your company.
Rick Cormier
Healing is achieved through turning on the light of your soul and allowing it to shine.
Janet Gallagher Nestor
I know I am planning to visit a "land" that is not entirely foreign, only foreign to me. As an adventurer, I am on a journey that I believe will last me my whole life. A new relationship, discovery, or awareness excites me.
Marilyn Barnicke Belleghem
I believe home is where the heart can be open and loving with a sense of security. It must not be a place of fear.
Marilyn Barnicke Belleghem
I looked at sky this morning and realized summer is almost gone which really made me sad because it doesn't seem as though its been here at all.
Beatrice Sparks
The initial journey towards sobriety is a delicate balance between insight into one's desire for escape and abstinence from one's addiction.
Debra L. Kaplan
The heart of compromise is the willingness of all parties to sacrifice reciprocally and equally for the greater good of a relationship. Reconciling conflicting needs for the sake of unity can't work if just one person does it. A coerced compromise, when one partner deceives or overpowers the other without allowing room for shared truths, usually results in an empty agreement that's soon undermined by unilateral acting out.
Alexandra Katehakis
Battered women who were physically abused as children develop an active coping style as adults, typically with obsessive-compulsive tendencies. It is as if she can "just get things right" then the battering will stop. Those who were sexually abused as children tend to be severely depressed and a more passive coping style.
Debra Crown LPC-S Journal of Family Violence 2006
Ultimately love is self-approval.
Sondra Ray
Deep down inside, each of us knows what our truths are. It is forgivable to lose them...It is unforgivable not to reclaim them.
Holli Kenley
Deepening awareness and nonjudgmental acceptance of one’s thoughts fosters a new relationship with them, creating the space to purposefully shift mental focus away from the ruminative thought patterns that pave the road to suffering.
Dan Mager
...Incest is rape by extortion. Thus the child's very childhood becomes a weapon used to control her.
E. Sue Blume
This dissociation from the body extends to emotional disengagement. Without access to his feelings a man can’t help but lose track of who he is, what his priorities are and what is normal for him.
Mary Crocker Cook
Left unaddressed, chronic anxiety can disrupt many aspects of development, including a child's capacity to learn and ability to connect socially as well as the opportunity for the brain to grow and make connections. In time, children with high levels of anxiety are more likely to face depression, turn to substance use, become less likely to finish high school and may therefore have a harder time keeping a job or managing financially.
Michele Kambolis
Who would you have to become and what would you have to believe about yourself to attract exactly the SoulMate you desire?
Annette Vaillancourt
The lenses and filters that we see the world through are so firmly attached to our faces that it requires great awareness and then courage to pull the lenses off and look at ourselves and the world around us from any other viewpoint.
Lyssa Danehy deHart
He was too busy checking out and checking in, making and breaking plans, buying and losing cell phones, playing computer games and pool, looking at stock quotes, and living the chaotic life that effectively took up all his energy and time.
Dalma Heyn
When a boy feels as if no one cares about him, or as if he will never amount to anything, he truly believes it doesn’t matter what he does.
Clayton Lessor MA
Writing allows you the unique and uncensored expression of whatever wants to be spoken.
Deborah Sandella
We can honestly say that everyone we've known who has used effective communication has been grateful for it in the long run. Often, effective communication brings about huge relief by showing you just how strongly your partner feels about you -- and by strengthening the bond between you two. And even though in some instances the response may not be what you hoped for and you'll be convinced that you've ruined everything -- if only you had said or done something else, he would surely have come around -- we've never heard anyone say in retrospect that they regretted raising an important issue in a dating or relationship setting. In fact, they overwhelmingly express gratitude that effective communication got them that one step closer to their long-term goal of either finding the right person or strengthening their existing bond.
Amir Levine & Rachel S.F. Heller
People who use snark attacks confuse cleverness with cruelty.
Debra Crown LPC-S LCDC
Life constantly challenges us; it’s not personal, just the natural process of growth and evolution.
Deborah Sandella
The growth of intimacy will teach us how to love—both ourselves and the other person. If we will allow ourselves to practice the skills of intimacy, we will learn to love. Boundaries protect love and intimacy. Certain behaviors support the integrity of intimacy. Other behaviors, harm, disrupt, or reverse, intimacy. By using skills that promote intimacy, boundaries are created that protect the relationship.
Anne Katherine
What is the black shadow? It's the running inner dialogue we have with ourselves all day long about our fears of being inferior as black people. It is our internalization of the white man's lie that blacks are inferior to whites -- the very lie that was the foundation of our ancestors' enslavement. The black shadow is more than simply internalized racism; it's also our complex feelings of fear and despair about being black, and consequently our longing to be less black.
Marlene F. Watson
Aside from actually manifesting your SoulMate, synchronicities, equanimity and gratitude are the three main signs that your inner work is working and you are on the right path to manifesting your SoulMate.
Annette Vaillancourt
When you undertake a daunting task, an adventure bigger than you ever thought you'd take on, you don't get to know what challenges the universe will present to you on the way. You can decide where you will go and how much money you'll spend and what your activities will be, but there will always be something unexpected, a hurdle of sorts, that offers you an opportunity to learn something about yourself if you take it in stride.
Cami Ostman
I feel like Alice in Wonderland. Maybe Lewis G Carroll was on drugs too.
Beatrice Sparks
Feelings will come and go, but you are always responsible for your actions.
Linda Mintle
Love sparkles and shines out from those giving and receiving it. It can be seen and felt. Love causes flowers to bloom providing beauty. It causes hearts to bloom, providing the beauty that is instilled within me and you.
Janet G Nestor
It's a good thing most people bleed on the inside or this would be a gory, blood-smeared earth.
Beatrice Sparks
How else to make a dent in an object as immovable as patriarchy itself...?
Dalma Heyn
What others are doing or accomplishing is irrelevant to your growth.
Janet Gallagher Nestor
For the first time in history, middle-class women do not need men in the traditional ways - for safety, for money, for a life. So they’re demanding instead what they always wanted but couldn’t ask for: emotional connection, presence, intimacy. Sex with enough foreplay, enough seduction, enough closeness to please them. Men are baffled not only because the needs they are being asked to fill differ so from what their fathers and grandfathers understood to be their jobs but also because full-fledged intimacy requires strengths and skills they’ve never learned. Moreover… they’re strengths and skills that were once left solely to women: Men didn’t have to develop them. This maturational mismatch may be contributing to distrust among lovers of all ages.
Dalma Heyn
One of the most dangerous myths surrounding eating disorders is that they are a life sentence.
Lynn Crilly
Without energy being invested in resisting the unwanted or dueling with fears, we have more energy and attention available for noticing not only the disturbing, but the wonderful...When we are not fixated on threat and defending ourselves, when we're not exhausted and burned out from chronic stress, we are able to see the daily evidence that we are in the midst of a mind-blowing miracle called Life....Then we will experience breathtaking, heart-rippling moments that counterbalance every trial and tribulation. When we're fully conscious of the universe's artistry and generosity, who needs psychodelics or Prozac?
Charlette Mikulka
Men recorded their experiences and called it history; men looked about the world and called their observations science; men wondered about the existence of God and the problem of evil and called their speculations theology; men did handiwork and called it art; men made up stories, wrote them down and called them literature; men thought about such topics as truth, beauty, justice, and the nature of existence and called their opinions philosophy.
Linda Tschirhart Sanford
What we all share in common - the real reason for this book - is a desire to love better. To love ourselves in the midst of great pain, and to love another when the pain of this life grows too large for one person to hold. This book offers the skills needed to make that kind of love a reality.
Megan Devine
We might feel that we must demonstrate explicitly when we’re upset, or not upset. This perceived need may stem from our family of origin, from how we learned to be heard when a simple “no” wasn’t enough. We may have learned to mask certain feelings, or portray feelings that weren’t ours. But as adults we each need to learn to state our personal truth without having to prove it or shout it.
Alexandra Katehakis
I didn't just feel it; I recorded each and every sensation. I can replicate each one. I will. I'll play it back plus ten for the pastardthat caused my love to fall. And before they go down, I'll wet the concrete with their brain mattter. I'll explode their marrow out of their bones and make a mess of their capillaries. I'll make a paste of their eyes, Yasmine, I promise. I'll make them bleed from their ears and turn their digestive system against them. They'll digest their own organs. I'll increase their pain receptors so that their clothes feel like sandpaper. I'll make their own breath soun d like a DC-10 is landing in their chest. I'll fill their longs with every excessive fluid in their body I can find. I'll make a decomposing mess of them, I swear I will. They'll pray to gods they don't belive in for the pain to end before I explode each taste bud in their mough and inflame their genitals with the stray parasites they immune system usually fights off.
Ayize Jama-Everett
Sometimes emotion is gentle, like rain feeding the river to nourish life, but sometimes it explodes like a rainstorm whose floodwaters wipe out bridges and homes.
Deborah Sandella