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Quote by Loren A. Olson

“As a psychiatrist, I have learned to tell my patients who are dealing with significant life conflicts to simplify the decision-making process. We have only three options: change it, put up with it, or get out. In most cases one of those three options can be eliminated immediately. Since attraction to someone of the same sex is not going to change, a married man [or woman] is only left with suffering through it or getting out.”

Quote by Loren A. Olson

Book:Finally Out: Letting Go of Living Straight, a Psychiatrist's Own Story
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Finally Out: Letting Go of Living Straight, a Psychiatrist's Own Story

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Loren A. Olson

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“The character of the disillusioned warrior soothed by the simplicity and silence of nature is an archetype of this war-driven, industrialized era. It is the story arc that traces the trail of the once-idealistic-now-misanthropic protagonist led astray by progressing culture who ultimately finds themselves and a long-sought truce with their demons in the honesty of the landscape, be it alone or among a native people with a more rightly-aligned set of values. …There is some element of hope for the hopeless found in these stories that speak to the profound depths of our weariness and sparks in even the most disillusioned soul the hope of peace and a quiet life of meaning.”

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“There are many lessons and truths we may learn from the life of Stephen. The two most important ones probably are, in my estimation, the power of the gospel of Christ (being not ashamed to preach Jesus) and forgiveness, not just the forgiveness that God offers us but the forgiveness that Stephen was able to offer to his accusers and murderers and to even pray for them as he breathed his last. Jesus did the same. It is only when we are able to truly forgive that we are set free. That we are healed. That we are restored and made whole.”

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“I hate and have always hated the word therapist. I detest the idea that my work, if it is work at all, is therapeutic work, that I am a member of what some of my colleagues call— without irony— the helping professions. My pride has sought always to refresh itself in the bracing chill of Freud’s most merciless formulations, his statement that a cure only is a renewed acquaintance with "everyday misery,” his designation of psychoanalytic work as a “school of suffering.” I reject the claim that psychotherapeutic treatment promises peace of mind, or comfort with oneself, however much these may be the happy by- products of the treatment— the accessory consolations, if you will. Rather than seeking to enhance self- esteem or contentment, the work strives for the opposite, to strip away all illusions of self- sufficiency or autonomy. At its most successful, this school of suffering is a curriculum in awe. The true object of this awe is the sheer, impossible fact of being here at all— to have precipitated like a sudden dew from lightless and dimensionless nothing. That is the horizon of the treatment, the recognition that we appear from nowhere under inscrutable stars, at a place and time we did not choose, driven by desires we do not choose, toward a death we do not choose, a death that chose us for its own even in our mother’s womb. Maybe this is only madness to you. Why shouldn’t it be?”

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“God’s ways may seem strange to us, but his ways do not have to live up to our standards or our analysis. He is who he is, and we are who we are. He is beyond error, perfect in all his ways. If his ways confuse or disappoint you, guard against the temptation to re-create him into a god you like better. You and I are to humble ourselves before him and seek to conform to his standard, not the other way around. He is sovereign and good, compassionate and merciful. If we do not accept God in his wholeness, we will never experience our own.”

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