Quotes by Counselors - Page 5

The truth is, we tend to train people how we want to be treated. If others know you have wishy-washy boundaries then they are free to walk all over you; the results…you become a doormat. We have actually trained others to do this when we will allow people to wipe their muddy feet on us. After all, we are doormats.

David W. Earle

...the state of perfection is an elusive goal; demanding something so obscure as almost unattainable and can become a compulsive, crazy making squirrel-on-a-wheel way of living.

David W. Earle

Starting over begins when I develop a reawakened appreciation for what I already have, a renewed recognition of what I’ve recklessly forsaken, a rehabilitated understanding that I foolishly do both of those things, and a revitalized commitment to live the rest of my life never doing either of them again.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

And who would dare write their own death into the script so that the rest of the characters in the tale might live? God of course.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Once I have impounded love and towed it into the confine of words, I have lost it altogether.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

My fear of endings too often blocks my hope of beginnings.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

My first mistake is to humanize God. My second mistake is to hold those wretched human characteristics up against all of the majestic things that I sense God should be. The blatant discrepancy which is certain to ensue then allows me to not only justify my rejection of Him, it grants me unbridled permission to discount His existence altogether. And that third and final mistake is without a doubt the most costly of all.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

As a product of Anglo-Saxon-Protestant culture, I am familiar with its centuries-old tradition of hiding its abuse of women under pretty packaging.

Lundy Bancroft

The key problem I encounter working with wounded, depressed, and unhappy people is a lack of connection…starting from a disconnection from themselves and then with others. This is why love often becomes so distorted and destructive. When people experience a disconnection from themselves, they feel it but do not realize the problem.

David W. Earle

The contrast between earthly and spiritual is not a contrast between the tangible and the intangible; it is between the transitory and the eternal. Earthly is temporary, spiritual is everlasting. [Ed Welch, Running Scared, 127]

Edward T. Welch

Codependency is a learned set of behaviors, thought processes, and habits. When combined together, they fit a very loose definition. All people exhibit these traits to some degree, but some of us allow them to dictate our relationships with others and ourselves.

David W. Earle

Words can be honed to crafted perfection by the finest wordsmiths. Yet, if we trust solely in the expanse of them to explain this God of ours or articulate our experience of Him, we will have brutally destroyed the very things we are attempting to explain. And if I should do that, no words can describe how badly I wish I had no words.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Of course I don’t want to get knocked down. But the single and sole solution to that fear is to not go anywhere where I can be knocked down. And is that not already being knocked down?

Craig D. Lounsbrough

IN ONE IMPORTANT WAY, an abusive man works like a magician: His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. He draws you into focusing on the turbulent world of his feelings to keep your eyes turned away from the true cause of his abusiveness, which lies in how he thinks. He leads you into a convoluted maze, making your relationship with him a labyrinth of twists and turns. He wants you to puzzle over him, to try to figure him out, as though he were a wonderful but broken machine for which you need only to find and fix the malfunctioning parts to bring it roaring to its full potential. His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brain in this way so that you won’t notice the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness.

Lundy Bancroft

Do I make up some ‘god’ in my mind, or do I make up my mind to know God?

Craig D. Lounsbrough

I am thankful that I can be thankful, for if thankfulness did not exist my heart would be irretrievably imprisoned by the crazed twins of acquisition and possession, and my soul would exist as a forever slave to greed.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

As utterly irrational as it might seem, the greed within me has the most limited vision I can possibly imagine as it has eyes only for the few things it doesn’t have, and it is completely blind to all the many remarkable things that it does.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

The change most needed in our lives isn't change in our situations and relationships but in us. The thing God is most intent on rescuing us from is ourselves.

Timothy D. Lane

The initial confrontation of the root is the most critical part of this journey.

Bruce Lengeman

If one looks at a balancing scale putting “fear of change” on one side and “status quo” on the other, they are often in balance. Change is hard. We tend to accept our condition and no matter how painful, we will not change until the balancing scale is tipped - only when the discomfort becomes greater than the fear of change does the scale tip.

David W. Earle

When we actually refer to God’s blueprint, we gladly work in fascinated conjunction with it, suddenly realizing that any other action outside of that blueprint is foolhardiness and lunacy of the worst sort.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

The ‘gods’ that do us the greatest harm are the gods we deny having.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

I find that I spend a tremendous amount of time chasing the praises of men rather than sitting with the praises of God. The former is something I attempt to catch, the latter catches me.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

I cannot make my kids obey. But I can control my responses to their disobedience—that is, I can respect their choices and provide wise consequences for their actions, so they can learn just as much about wisdom from disobeying as from obeying. And I can respond in ways that create an environment in which their poor choices are their problem.

Jeff VanVonderen

If your dream doesn't scare you, it's not big enough.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Sometimes chaos is the very thing that deliberately shakes up our neatly ordered world’s in order to get us out of the neatly ordered ruts that have kept us stuck.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

What is an adventure, I might ask? And in the asking, I might begin to understand that my adventures are sorely limited to the confines of my lackluster imagination. Therefore, an adventure of the most robust and wild sort must be constructed by an unlimited imagination. And unless I am mistaken, only God has an imagination like that.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

It’s about recognizing that the great movements and moments in history laid on the backs of ordinary people who simply chose to do extraordinary things.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Talk like an ambassador (Eph 4:29-30). 1)Consider the person ("only what is helpful for building others up")2) Consider the problem ("according to their needs")3) Consider the process ("that it may benefit those who listen")

Timothy S. Lane

Maybe we don’t ever feel that sweetly untainted and wholly majestic kind of love that takes every longing captive because we are hopelessly entangled in the illogical fear that despite all of love’s grand goodness, it might not be good enough to keep us safe.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

My prayer is that God would continue to love me enough to refuse to answer the prayers I'm praying that I shouldn't be praying.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

If I have refused to risk, I have in the self-same decision refused to love. And if indeed I have refused to love, tragically I have refused to live. And when will I realize that that in and of itself is an unacceptable risk.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

You can dress up greed, but you can’t stop the stench.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

We somehow have led ourselves to believe that our questions are big enough to encircle life, and that life is small enough to be contained by the answers. The real question might be, are we ignorant or just plain stupid?

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Maybe the real miracle in any miracle is our ability to believe that despite our own depravity, in the eyes of God we are worthy of a miracle.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Sometimes the very things that we’re expending our lives to sustain are the very things that are killing our ability to live. And against our blind and frequently raging protests, these are the very things that God let’s die so that we can live.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

To declare myself as a genius immediately evidences that I am not.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Uncommon solutions can always overcome problems of the most common or uncommon kind if I am sufficiently committed to overcoming them.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Speaker says psychology has commandeered "everything hard" and partitioned it from Scripture with the assumption that its causes are biological

Edward T. Welch

To seek the praise of men as our motivation is to abandon truly great things, for more often than not truly great things elicit the ire of men far more than they garner their praises.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

If I am always standing at the bottom of the mountain longingly looking up, in all probability it is because I have heeded the pillaging dogma of mediocrity which persistently tells me that the dream is not worth the climb.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

If I were to be brutally honest with myself, how often is my journey actually a path designed to circumvent my journey?

Craig D. Lounsbrough

With God, the word ‘impossible’ is itself impossible.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Being a mother is not about ‘birthing a child into the world.’ Rather, it is about repeatedly ‘birthing into the child’ a steady sense of their inestimable worth, a prized understanding of their authentic self, a conviction that the impossible is largely the stuff of myth, and an utterly unwavering belief that the cold actions of men never represent the warm heart of God. It is the relentless act of birthing these things into the innermost soul of a thirsty child that makes a woman a mother.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Just when I think I have learned the way to live life changes.

Hugh Prather

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