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Psychotherapy Quotes

Browse 223 quotes about Psychotherapy.

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Psychotherapy Quotes

“Practical Mindfulness (The Sonnet) When someone's world is crumbling down, Reach out to lend a shoulder not analysis. If the world had more carers and sharers, We wouldn't need the services of therapists. Most humans are raised to be selfish robots, Then they spend their life on a therapist's sofa. When someone's going through a period of grief, Only the mindless comments, 'have you tried yoga!' For the human mind to be whole and healthy, You gotta empty it of all the unhealthy junk. And there is no greater junk on the face of earth, Than the traditions that make us self-centric drunk. Elimination of coldness is the highest of all wisdom. Treat the common cold, and you'll treat all descension.”

MeditationEmpathyIndifferenceWholenessEmotional IntelligenceMental Health AwarenessPsychotherapySpiritual PoetryMental BreakdownPsychology Poem
Book:Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None
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“How does your patient, doctor? Doctor: Not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from rest. Macbeth: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart. Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself.”

SorrowDepressionHeartbreakMental HealthPsychiatryPsychotherapyAntidepressants
Book:Macbeth
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“The freedom of an unscheduled afternoon brought confusion rather than joy. Julius had always been focused. When he was not seeing patients, other important projects and activities-writing, teaching, tennis, research-clamored for his attention. But today nothing seemed important. He suspected that nothing had ever been important, that his mind had arbitrarily imbued projects with importance and then cunningly covered its traces. Today he saw through the ruse of a lifetime. Today there was nothing important to do, and he ambled aimlessly down Union Street.”

PhilosophyPsychologyPsychotherapySchopenhauer
Book:The Schopenhauer Cure
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“Being Scared-off by Evil Lastly, we deny the presence of evil because we are terrified by the horrendously hurtful, cruel, and bloody kinds of evil people tell us about—if we are willing to listen. This was poignantly brought home during an interdisciplinary case conference involving a resident who was counseling for the first time a woman who had been sexually abused. As we worked with him, it became clear that he was resisting entering what he called the 'psychic cave" of her sealed—off experience from which she was shouting for assistance. Because of his resistance, he was not providing her the support and guidance she so desperately needed, and he was not facilitating her working through the abuse and hurt that were continuing to impact her life. As he was confronted about this at one point in the conference, he stated tearfully: "I'm afraid if I help her move into her memories. I will have to go with her, and if I go with her, my view of the world as a basically good and safe place will be shattered. I'm not sure I can handle that for myself, or be able to think about the fact that my wife and kids may be more vulnerable living in this world than I can be comfortable believing" (Means 1995, 299).”

EvilFearAbuseVictimMental IllnessVulnerabilitySurvivorChild AbusePtsdSexual AbuseWorldviewChild Sexual AbusePsychotherapyCounselingRapidJust WorldNature Of The WorldJust World Beliefs
Book:Trauma and Evil: Healing the Wounded Soul
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“There are a great number of ego defenses, and the combinations and circumstances in which we use them reflect on our personality. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum of its ego defenses, which are constantly shaping, upholding, protecting, and repairing it. The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home.”

PersonalityEgoPsychoanalysisSelf DeceptionPsychotherapyMasksPersonhoodFreudPhilosophy Of MindSelfhoodEgo DefencesEgo Defenses
Book:Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception
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“Where were Christians before Freud? Up a tree? Were the bereft of all crucial knowledge about man's relationship to God and his neighbor? Was the church's counseling a hopeless, primitive, stone-age activity that should have disappeared with flint knives? Were Christians shut up to sinful, harmful living before the advent of psychotherapy? Did God withhold truth for living until our present age?”

LifeGodChristianChurchPsychologyBibleTherapyPsychotherapyCounselingFreud
Book:Theology of Christian Counseling, A
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“Persuading people they have more power than they do and ignoring the very real social barriers to attainment primes them for self-blame when reality fails to deliver. The worst extremes of phoney empowerment, argues Frayne, can be found in the trite aphorisms of the self-help industry, where popular psychologists ascribe to us almost magical abilities to alter circumstances despite the harsh realities constraining us. In a world where problems like disadvantage, unemployment and work-related distress are so socially embedded, downplaying the very real obstacles to opportunity is regularly experienced as yet another form of punishment, yet another form of blaming and shaming the individual.”

WorkEmpowermentWorkersHealthcarePsychoanalysisPsychotherapySocial Care
Book:Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis
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“The most effective weapon a parent has to control a child is the withdrawal of love or its threat. A young child between the ages of three and six is too dependent on parental love and approval to resist this pressure. Robert's mother, as we saw earlier, controlled him by "cutting him out." Margaret's mother beat her into submission, but it was the loss of her father's love that devastated her. Whatever the means parents use, the result is that the child is forced to give up his instinctual longing, to suppress his sexual desires for one parent and his hostility toward the other. In their place he will develop feelings of guilt about his sexuality and fear of authority figures. This surrender constitutes an acceptance of parental power and authority and a submission to the parents' values and demands. The child becomes "good", which means that he gives up his sexual orientation in favor of one directed toward achievement. Parental authority is introjected in the form of a superego, ensuring that the child will follow his parents' wishes in the acculturation process. In effect, the child now identifies with the threatening parent. Freud says, "The whole process, on the one hand, preserves the genital organ wards off the danger of losing it; on the other hand, it paralyzes it, takes its function away from it.”

LifeFearGuiltSexualityPsychotherapySuppressionFreudBioenergetics
Book:Fear Of Life
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“It happens all the time. People lie to themselves or their therapists because they’re ashamed or they don’t want to deal with the reality of their circumstances. Sometimes people are manipulative and twist the narrative to get something from the therapist: attention, empathy, love. Or the most likely reason: Sometimes the truth really hurts.”

Human NatureSelf RealizationTruth QuotesPsychology QuotesPsychotherapyTruth And LiesHonest With YourselfPsychological FictionTruth QuotationsTruth Hurts
Book:Let Love Rule
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“I must assume that knowing is better than not know, venturing better than not venturing; and that magic and illusion, however rich, however alluring, ultimately weaken the human spirit. I take with deep seriousness Thomas Hardy's words, 'If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.”

RealityTruthSelf ImprovementHumanismPsychotherapyPracticality
Book:Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
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“Once all the technical mystique has been stripped away from psychotherapy, it does seem that a likely explanation for its almost explosive expansion over the last few decades is that it provides something which is otherwise in very short supply in a world in which a kind of watchful defensiveness against our vulnerability has replaced any kind of spontaneous generosity which people may more often once have felt for each other.”

KindnessGenerosityPsychotherapy
Book:Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety
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“The manic relief that comes from the fantasy that we can with one savage slash cut the chains of the past and rise like a phoenix, free of all history, is generally a tipping point into insanity, akin to believing that we can escape the endless constraints of gravity, and fly off a tall building. “I’m freeeee… SPLAT!”.”

PsychologyCrazyAbuseMadnessTraumaDenialTherapyChild AbuseSelf KnowledgeAvoidanceUnhealthyPsychotherapyChildhood Trauma
Author:Stefan Molyneux
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“It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say "This foolishness") any time I need to. When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true but just put on, I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would have been easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I'm guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days. Three weeks later Sybil reaffirmed her belief in the existence of her other selves in a letter to Miss Updyke, the school nurse of undergraduate days.”

TruthMental IllnessDenialTherapyDependenceDissociative Identity DisorderPsychotherapyMultiple Personality DisorderTruth And LiesPretenceMultiple PersonalitiesDenial Of RealitySybilRuseNot PretendingFaking NormalNot Fake
Book:Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities
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“Societal pressures work to pull you up to the line of psychological adequacy, and psychotherapy can be used when society falls short. But these aims are far too low. Falling within the current normal range of psychological health is nothing to aspire to. We are interested in far exceeding this line - in psychological greatness.”

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Book:Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture
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“From a Buddhist perspective, there is really nothing but resistance to be analyzed; there is no true self waiting in the wings to be released. Only by revealing the insecurity can a measure of freedom be gained. When we can know our fear as fear and surround it with the patience of Buddha, we can begin to rest in our own minds and approach those to whom we would like to feel close.”

MindFearFreedomResistanceTherapyInsecurityPsychotherapyBuddhist Perspective
Book:Thoughts Without A Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective
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“What we need is a profound rethinking of the nature of suffering itself, and what it is trying to highlight and ask us to change. We need to repoliticise emotional discontent in the minds of teachers, parents and policy-makers, rather than continue reducing it to dysfunctions that allegedly reside within the self. We need to acknowledge that suffering also reflects family/socio/political dynamics we would do well to better acknowledge and address.”

SufferingMental HealthTherapyHealthcarePsychotherapyNeoliberalismDepoliticisation
Book:Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis
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“The knowledge of Good and Evil, no matter how systematically or thoroughly consumed, will by no means make us gods. Rather, modern ethics, modern psychotherapy, and modern political ideologies all tend to produce not superhumans but pitiable slaves to the rationalizations generated by our distorted human desires. In order to gain control over the world, we have been too willing to renounce essential aspects of our own freedom.”

BeautyEthicsDesiresPsychotherapyEthics And Moral PhilosophyReligion Christianity
Book:The Ethics of Beauty
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“During one of our sessions I had the feeling that the therapist was trying to lead me to some major insight that might help save the day for me. When I asked if that was the case, she acknowledged it, but when I asked if she would be willing simply to tell me in some many words what the insight was, she demurred. That was not the sway psychotherapy worked, she said. It was something I would have to come to on my own if it was to have any real value for me, she said, or something like that. But then as the end of the hour drew near, she relented and put into words what it was she had been trying to lead me to see. There was nothing in the world just then that I was more fascinated to hear - for all I knew my recovery itself might depend on it - but even later that same day I couldn't have told you what she said nor could I possibly tell you now. I was simply not ready to hear it yet. The words I could hear all right, but in terms of their meaning I was as deaf as my mother before me, and possibly, like her, because I chose to be deaf. Possibly I was not ready to be well yet either.”

LearningCoachingPsychotherapy
Book:Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister
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“Somewhere here I want to bring in a learning which has been most rewarding, because it makes me feel so deeply akin to others. I can word it this way. What is most personal is most general. There have been times when in talking with students or staff, or in my writing, I have expressed myself in ways so personal that I have felt I was expressing an attitude which it was probable no one else could understand, because it was so uniquely my own…. In these instances I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. This has helped me to understand artists and poets as people who have dared to express the unique in themselves.”

VulnerabilityArtistsSelf ExpressionPsychotherapyCommon Ground
Book:On becoming a person: a therapist's view of psychotherapy
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“The shame, embarrassment, feeling of low self-worth, and scores of "labels" we give ourselves are not fitting. I am beginning to see how I had no control over the situation. He was a big man, I was a little boy.”

HealingJourneyRegretVictimBlameGuiltPainfulProtectionRecoveryTherapySurvivorRapePsychologistPsychotherapySexual AssaultPriestOnionClergy AbusePriest AbuseSexdual Abuse
Book:In the Shadow of the Cross: The True Account of My Childhood Sexual and Ritual Abuse at the Hands of a Roman Catholic Priest
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“It wasn't a sign of weakness to tell what happened to me. I feel guilt no longer, only regret. The other emotions are coming around too. How much further do I need to go? I'm not sure, but there is comfort in the fact that I am in the hands of expert guides, both in the doctor's office and at home with Sue.”

HealingJourneyRegretVictimGuiltPainfulProtectionRecoveryTherapySurvivorRapePsychologistPsychotherapySexual AssaultPriestSurvivors Of AbuseOnionClergy AbusePriest AbuseSexdual Abuse
Book:In the Shadow of the Cross: The True Account of My Childhood Sexual and Ritual Abuse at the Hands of a Roman Catholic Priest
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“As I let it out, layer by layer, Dr. Driscoll helped with the bumps and valleys. He knew just how much to draw out of me and how much I could handle. He is such an expert in his profession. He told me that the guilt I was feeling was not guilt, but regret. Guilt is a good thing. It is a mechanism by which we shouldn't make the same mistake twice. If you do something questionable, then the next chance you get to do it, guilt should stop you. I had no guilt. I had regrets, many regrets, but no guilt. It took some convincing, but he prevailed. There was always a nagging in my head, that if only I had had the guts to kill Neary myself, it would have stopped him from harming others, but that was not to be as a small boy. It does hurt that, maybe, just maybe, if I had carried out one of my many plans to kill him and myself then I could have saved victims younger than I. As victims come forward from almost all the churches where he served—and some are twenty—five plus years my junior—I feel that they would have been spared, if only I hadn't chickened out as a boy. Therein lies the answer; I was a little boy, a ten—year—old boy. Other victims of Neary were as young as six.”

HealingJourneyRegretVictimBlameGuiltPainfulProtectionRecoveryTherapySurvivorRapePsychologistPsychotherapySexual AssaultPriestOnionClergy AbusePriest AbuseSexdual Abuse
Book:In the Shadow of the Cross: The True Account of My Childhood Sexual and Ritual Abuse at the Hands of a Roman Catholic Priest
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“First, the physiological symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder have been brought within manageable limits. Second, the person is able to bear the feelings associated with traumatic memories. Third, the person has authority over her memories; she can elect both to remember the trauma and to put memory aside. Fourth, the memory of the traumatic event is a coherent narrative, linked with feeling. Fifth, the person's damaged self-esteem has been restored. Sixth, the person's important relationships have been reestablished. Seventh and finally, the person has reconstructed a coherent system of meaning and belief that encompasses the story of trauma.”

HealingTraumaRecoveryTherapyPtsdPsychotherapyHealing ProcessPost Traumatic Stress DisorderComplex PtsdRecovery From AbuseHealing AbusePosttraumatic Stress DisorderTraumatic StressTrauma Therapy
Book:Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
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“Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up”

HealingAbuseMental HealthRecoverySexual AbusePsychiatryDissociative Identity DisorderDissociationPsychotherapyAmnesiaMultiplicityMultiple PersonalitiesDissociative AmnesiaMpdFugue
Book:Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities
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“Indeed, analyst Robert Bak calls orgasm "the perfect promise between love and death," the means by which we repatriate separation of mother and child through the momentary extinction of the self. It is true that few of us consciously climb into a lover's bed in the hope of finding our mommy between the sheets. But the sexual loss of our separateness (which may scare people so badly they cannot have orgasm) brings us pleasure, in part, because it unconsciously repeats our first connection.”

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Book:Necessary Losses: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow
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“Завдання психотерапії полягає не в тому, щоб довести, що ви добрі люди, а в тому, щоб ви усвідомили, що завжди такими були.”

PsychologyPsychotherapy
Book:Емоційні гойдалки війни. Роздуми психотерапевта про війну
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“For example, in order to identify these schemas or clarify faulty relational expectations, therapists working from an object relations, attachment, or cognitive behavioral framework often ask themselves (and their clients) questions like these: 1. What does the client tend to want from me or others? (For example, clients who repeatedly were ignored, dismissed, or even rejected might wish to be responded to emotionally, reached out to when they have a problem, or to be taken seriously when they express a concern.) 2. What does the client usually expect from others? (Different clients might expect others to diminish or compete with them, to take advantage and try to exploit them, or to admire and idealize them as special.) 3. What is the client’s experience of self in relationship to others? (For example, they might think of themselves as being unimportant or unwanted, burdensome to others, or responsible for handling everything.) 4. What are the emotional reactions that keep recurring? (In relationships, the client may repeatedly find himself feeling insecure or worried, self-conscious or ashamed, or—for those who have enjoyed better developmental experiences—perhaps confident and appreciated.) 5. As a result of these core beliefs, what are the client’s interpersonal strategies for coping with his relational problems? (Common strategies include seeking approval or trying to please others, complying and going along with what others want them to do, emotionally disengaging or physically withdrawing from others, or trying to dominate others through intimidation or control others via criticism and disapproval.) 6. Finally, what kind of reactions do these interpersonal styles tend to elicit from the therapist and others? (For example, when interacting together, others often may feel boredom, disinterest, or irritation; a press to rescue or take care of them in some way; or a helpless feeling that no matter how hard we try, whatever we do to help disappoints them and fails to meet their need.)”

PsychologyPsychotherapyCounselingCounsellingCore BeliefsObject RelationsCore Belief
Book:Interpersonal Process in Therapy: An Integrative Model
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“Fui acusado de ser um utópico, de querer eliminar o desprazer do mundo e defender apenas o prazer. Contudo, tenho declarado claramente que a educação tradicional torna as pessoas incapazes para o prazer encouraçando-as contra o desprazer. Prazer e alegria de viver são inconcebíveis sem luta, experiências dolorosas e embates desagradáveis consigo mesmo. A saúde psíquica não se caracteriza pela teoria do nirvana dos iogues e dos budistas, nem pela hedonismo dos epicuristas, nem pela renúncia monástica; caracteriza-se, isso sim, pela alternância entre a luta desprazerosa e a felicidade, o erro e a verdade, o desvio e a correção da rota, a raiva racional e o amor racional; em suma, estar plenamente vivo em todas as situações da vida. A capacidade de suportar o desprazer e a dor sem se tornar amargurado e sem se refugiar na rigidez, anda de mãos dadas com a capacidade de aceitar a felicidade e dar amor.”

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Book:The function of the orgasm
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“As the renowned clinical psychologist Dr Anne Cooke put it to me in conversation: ‘The mental illness narrative encourages us to see mental health problems as nothing to do with life and circumstances, so no wonder we don’t look at structural or social causes; and of course this perspective is a great fit with the current neoliberal approach – where individuals have to reform themselves to fit with existing social structures.’ The trouble with programmes that are blind to the perils of such adaptations is that they essentially neuter political reflection on why distress proliferates in our schools, certainly when compared to schools in most other developed nations.”

PsychologyMental HealthSocial IssuesPsychotherapyNeoliberalismHealthcare ReformDepoliticisationAnne Cooke
Book:Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis
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“Nisam propustio, ipak, da zapazim šta je značila istinska vera, samim tim i snažna motivacija za fizički rad, kod onih medicinara sa kojima sam studirao, a koji su sa četrdesetak kilograma telesne težine postajali udarnici. Ništa im nije bilo teško da urade, nisu se razboleli od preteškog rada, a još su stizali da uče i da spremaju za večernje konferencije markstističke referate! To mi je bila prva vera i iskreno ubeđenje, kao što sam, još tada, naslutio na kojim temeljima počiva psihosomatska medicina, tj. kada se i zbog čega ljudi uopšte razboljevaju.”

ReligionPsychologyMedicinePsychotherapyMedicinaReligijaPsihoterapija
Book:50 pitanja i 50 odgovora iz hrišćansko-psihoterapeutske prakse
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