Psychology Quotes - Page 11

Don't you agree that if I act like there is nothing going on, other people will behave that way too?

The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it—just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her.

Ironically enough, in the same way that fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes... Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.

Took me a few years to understand what intelligence is; Took me an entire lifetime to understand ignorance. I still haven't found an explanation for ignorance, because the ignorant are too ignorant to justify their ignorance.

We do not have to be mental health professionals to identify the traits of the possible sociopaths among us.

All have some artificial badge which the world, and themselves among the first, learn to consider as a genuine characteristic.

At times, the confident lose confidence, the patient lose their cool, the generous act selfish, and the knowledgeable second guess what they know. And guess what? We’re all human. We all make mistakes, we lose our tempers, and we get caught off guard. We stumble, we slip, and we spin out of control sometimes. But that’s usually the worst of it. We all have our moments. Most of the time, we’re remarkable. So stand beside the people you love through their trying times of imperfection, and offer yourself the same courtesy. For more tips on how to live a productive life, read "The Angel Affect" and join the mission.

Do not give up on yourself as you encounter your worst version and do not take it easy as you experience your higher self.

One of the most astounding dynamics in human relationships is how the unconscious intuition of our brain's right hemisphere is able to act as radar to find us just the right person to provoke and recreate our childhood attachment relationship ...I've given much thought to the question of why we are designed to be drawn -like a moth to a flame- to the very person who is most likely to resurrect all our childhood anguish. It seems like a cruel hoax to play on two wounded souls.

Perception is a vice with which each person is capable of perceiving his or her reality.

To swear day and night by media slander will make one a bigger victim than the slandered. It doesn't take much to begin to fear a mere illusion of human badness.

Show a man too many camels' bones, or show them to him too often, and he will not be able to recognize a camel when he comes across a live one. (Mirza Ahsan of Tabriz)

...the only way out consists of using a social mask.This is why those under depression will smile more as well as make efforts to please and entertain compared to anyone else....If they could hide in public, and they do hide in other ways, both psychological and physical.The psychological feeling of being trapped comes afterwards from the need to have social life, and that's when the anti-social personality starts developing furthermore.

It is fascinating to discover that individuals who are asked to assign a punishment to a criminal are influenced by factors that they are unaware of (like the presence of a flag in the room) or that they would consciously diavow (like the color of the criminal's skin). It is boring to find that individuals' proposed punishments are influenced by rational considerations such as the severity of the crime and the criminal's previous record. Interesting: we are more willing to help someonw if there is the smell of fresh bread in the air. Boring: we are more willing to help someone if he or she has been kind to us in the past. We sometimes forget that this bias in publication exists and take what is reported in scientific journals and the popular press as an accurate reflection of our best science of how the mind works. But this is like watching the nightly news and concluding that rape, robbery, and murder are part of any individual's everyday life - forgetting that the nightly news doesn't report the vast majority of cases where nothing of this sort happens at all.

I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, "homeostasis," i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

The difficult thing is not to pick up the information but to recognise it - to accept it into our consciousness. Most of us find it difficult to know what we are feeling about anything. In any situation it is almost impossible to know what is really happening to us. This is one of the penalties of being human and having a brain so swarming with interesting suggestions and ideas and self-distrust.

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

Why are the desert blooms that spring to life after a monsoon so magnificent? The answer is – their impermanence. The lush growth and blooming flowers do not last very long here in the desert, and this new growth only happens once a year. If this growth was never-ending, we would soon take it for granted. Likewise, our human lives. What makes them so special and unique? Our fleeting impermanence.

I see love as a force of nature. No matter how much you want to, you cannot control or demand love. No one can. It cannot be bought, bartered, or sold. It is priceless.

We train the mind so that we can enjoy greater peace, happiness, wisdom & equanimity.

My job is to assist you in finding the answer that is right for you. Not the answer that would be right for me.

Most of our failures in understanding one another have less to do with what is heard than with what is intended and what is inferred.

Empty Spaces I wanted to feel less.To not be burdened by emotion,To not feel sadness,To not know loss.I envied the inanimate,The trees that stand proudly in winter,Not missing their leaves.I wanted to be weightless,To not experience limitation.I didn’t want time to pass,The blur of days, months, years.It moved too quickly,I wanted to grasp on,Hold it.It eluded me,Intangible,Like light.I wanted to preserve life before you were gone.I didn’t want to know grief.But the pain kept me connected.It meant that I loved you,It meant that I would always be a little broken,It meant that our love filled all of the empty spaces.It meant that you would be with me... forever.

The unconscious operation of the attachment system via internal working models probably plays an important part in the choice of marital partner and relationship patterns in marriage. Holmes (1993) has described a pattern of 'phobic-counterphobic' marriage in which an ambivalently attached person will be attracted to an avoidant 'counter-phobic' spouse in a system of mutual defence against separation anxiety.

All I know was that Dirva stayed with Liro in the days immediately after, and that it was Liro who slowly coaxed him back from the jaws of grief. Dirva had Liro, he had no one else, and it was then that I began to understand that the things we need from others make their own kind of sense, have their own logic, create their own legitimacy regardless of what we've been taught. If he hadn't had Liro, I am not sure Dirva would have been able to patch himself back together.I am grateful for this, but in the years since, I cannot help but wonder at the sacrifice it required of Liro. It is not easy to hold someone through their grief. It is hard to see someone you love in pain, in irreparable pain. It takes an extraordinary type of kindness, a rare patience, to let the loss run its course. We always want to help, but there are times when there is no help, and the pressure to take help only makes things harder on the ones trapped in mourning. I don't know what transpired between them. I don't. But I do know that Dirva left him without explanation, reappeared without warning, and that there was nothing for Liro to do but offer himself up. I never knew Liro well, but he seemed to me a very bright man. Like anyone who scraped a childhood by on the street and survived to adulthood, he had a watchfulness about him and an uncannily honed feel for other people. Liro knew the moment Dirva set foot in the City what he would need, and what he would take, and Liro let him take it anyway.

Sarah, insight doesn't produce change.

Any society which enjoins its members to adhere to both of these (politeness and truth) is a fraud.

Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.

Controlling unwanted thoughts is not the problem. Believing, thrusting, and taking direction from them is.

Selfishness is self-absorption, self-seeking behaviour that either disregards the rights and needs of others or tramples them deliberately in favour of personal gain.

The "apparently normal personality" - the alter you view as "the client"You should not assume that the adult who function in the world, or who presents to you, week after week, is the "real" person, and the other personalities are less real. The client who comes to therapy is not "the" person; there are other personalities to meet and work

Mindless action without a real understanding of the ramifications is only likely to result in serious miscalculations or a colossal waste of time. Avoid both by using your judgment, filtered through both knowledge and experience. Use common sense and logic as a counterbalance to emotion.

A synthesis—an abstraction, chunk, or gist idea—is a neural pattern. Good chunks form neural patterns that resonate, not only within the subject we’re working in, but with other subjects and areas of our lives. The abstraction helps you transfer ideas from one area to another. That’s why great art, poetry, music, and literature can be so compelling. When we grasp the chunk, it takes on a new life in our own minds—we form ideas that enhance and enlighten the neural patterns we already possess, allowing us to more readily see and develop other related patterns. Once we have created a chunk as a neural pattern, we can more easily pass that chunked pattern to others, as Cajal and other great artists, poets, scientists, and writers have done for millennia, Once other people grasp that chunk, not only can they use it, but also they can more easily create similar chunks that apply to other areas in their lives—an important part of the creative process.

Freedom" -- we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it. We had said this word so often during all the years we dreamed about it, that it had lost its meaning. Its reality did not penetrate into our consciousness; we could not grasp the fact that freedom was ours.

The greater a child’s terror, and the earlier it is experienced, the harder it becomes to develop a strong and healthy sense of self.

Emptiness and the not-“I” is the quality that arises when the therapist consciously moves out of his own way without hindering the therapeutic process through his own ideas, attitudes, expectations and concepts. He is present, available and responds with the truth in the moment.

Sometimes life seems like a poorly designed cage within which man has been sentenced to be free.

Life is a fierce duel with emotions and a slow war with psychology.

The most talented people are always the nicest.

Sometimes when a person is not being heard, it is appropriate to blame him or her. Perhaps he or she is speaking obscurely; perhaps he is claiming too much; perhaps she is speaking rather too personally. And one can, perhaps, charge Spielrein on all three counts. But, on balance, her inability to win recognition for her insight into repression was not her fault; it was Freud’s and Jung’s. Preoccupied with their own theories, and with each other, the two men simply did not pause even to take in the ideas of this junior colleague let alone to lend a helping hand in finding a more felicitous expression for her thought. More ominously still, both men privately justified their disregard by implicitly casting her once more into the role of patient, as though that role somehow precluded a person from having a voice or a vision of his or her own. It was and remains a damning comment on how psychoanalysis was evolving that so unfair a rhetorical maneuver, one so at odds with the essential genius of the new therapeutic method, came so easily to hand. In the great race between Freud and Jung to systematize psychoanalytic theory, to codify it once and for all, a simpler truth was lost sight of: Sometimes a person is not heard because she is not listened to.

Our Universe is a multidimensional one; every individual life unit consciously functions in a particular vibratory level (dimension or density) but unconsciously/ subconsciously functions in and through all the other levels, and as the awareness increases it moves to the conscious existence of the next immediate level.

If you have ever felt slightly nauseous walking through an aged care facility, puckered your face against a smell, observed a grown woman clutching a dolly with desperation, felt a flood of melancholy as death fills your view – then you are in a perfect position to be a supportive psychotherapist for those whose lives are peppered with this everyday.

Tennis is the loneliest sport

In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagines past

The world is mere change, and this life, opinion.

You tell them one real thing and then the doctor thinks he knows you. He starts getting arrogant and overfamiliar, making insulting suggestions left and right. You have to protest constantly just to set the record straight. Finally he makes offensive assumptions and throws them in your face. A stranger in a bar could do the same…

Yet because her needs and yearnings are real and pressing, she must find some way to express them: she puts into body what she cannot yet put into words. Her eating disorder serves as her voice, her attempt to express and meet her needs and desires without directly asking for anything".

The traumatic stress field has adopted the term “Complex Trauma” to describe the experience of multiple and/or chronic and prolonged, developmentally adverse traumatic events, most often of an interpersonal nature (e.g., sexual or physical abuse, war, community violence) and early-life onset. These exposures often occur within the child’s caregiving system and include physical, emotional, and educational neglect and child maltreatment beginning in early childhood- Developmental Trauma Disorder

Physiologically, the union of two opposites is a pleasurable affair. Why should the psyche be any different?

How do we distinguish between the legitimate skepticism of those who scoffed at cold fusion, and the stifling dogma of the seventeenthcentury clergymen who, doubting Galileo's claim that the earth was not the center of the solar system, put him under house arrest for the last eight years of his life? In part, the answer lies in the distinction between skepticism and closed-mindedness. Many scientists who were skeptical about cold fusion nevertheless tried to replicate the reported phenomenon in their own labs; Galileo's critics refused to look at the pertinent data.

The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.

Prospective research looks forward in time to see how a group of individual change over time while retrospective research looks backward in time and attempts to reconstruct the conditions that led to the current situation.

People carry on whole conversations in proverbs. But they are not LIVING the proverbs.

Is it logical that two people can disagree and that both can be right? It's not logical: it's psychological. And it's very real.

It's in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous.

Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language―a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.

The biggest challenge for human mind is human mind.

Imagine you are in a classroom and they hand you a test with many interesting multiple choice questions, until you get to “Can you just explain what exactly you believe how the Universe started?” & here are the options. a) The Big Bang b) It’s always been therec) God! or Godsd) A bowl of cherries e) I don’t know…. If you choose (a) then what or who & why caused it? & the test continues…..If you choose (b) that would be my choice. If you choose (c) then who or what created God or Gods? And where do they come from? And if you think they have always been there, the same thing could be said about the universe. If you choose (d) It doesn’t make sense, it is odd, an anomaly, not supposed to be etc :) if you choose (e) then you are being honest. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing. You can make “assumptions” or “pretending” that you know or a book (bible) “knows” or “tells” you but I just don’t buy that. The beauty of it is that you are here today & you can be thankful & enjoy all the life that you have ahead of you. And the test (life) continues with more wonderful questions and experiences :)

Families can also be divided into subgroups with different values, perspectives, and and communication styles, even if a subgroup consists of only one individual.

Cognitive insight (knowing something) is not like emotional insight (feeling something). It has no psychodynamic effects. It does not affect the narcissist's behavior patterns, or his interpersonal interactions - the products of well entrenched and rigid defense mechanisms.