Quotes by Psychotherapists - Page 2

Some of us will admit to a simple fascination with the inner world for its own sake, a fascination with no further goal than the thrill of discovery, the pleasure of engaging the mysterious, dark ground of our own nature.

Sandra Lee Dennis

Crises marked by anxiety, doubt, and despair have always been those periods of personal unrest that occur at the times when a man is sufficiently unsettled to have an opportunity for personal growth. We must always see our own feelings of uneasiness as being our chance for "making the growth choice rather than the fear choice.

Sheldon B. Kopp

Belief is the basis of intuitive behavior.

Laurie Nadel

In an age of rampant chronic disease, reconnecting with the Earth's energy beneath our very feet may provide a way back to better health and keeping our bodies in top condition throughout our lives.

Jed Diamond

Exercising will builds esteem from within through action on one's own behalf; it disproves the premise that only another person can provide it. The result, long in coming and always worth the effort, is the experience of authentic agency in your own life, a sense of self that cannot be destroyed because it is not dependent on anyone else.

Jeanne Safer

Life's difficulties are merely necessary roughage.

Milton H. Erickson

With faith one attains and realises peace and harmony. With doubt one destroys and gains freedom to move ontowards.

Fazal Inayat-Khan

Dare to be as physically robust and varied as you always were.

Susie Orbach

He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.

Sheldon B. Kopp

We are not designed to deal with the many stress-inducing situations of the twenty-first century. For most of human history, the stressors we faced were mainly physical, like running away from wild animals. Now they are almost entirely psychological. When was the last time you were frightened by a lion? The things that cause us stress in our modern world are the ones that go inside our heads.

Jed Diamond

A mind that trusts itself is light on its feet.

Nathaniel Branden

The Buddha’s criteria for Wise Speech include—in addition to the obvious expectation that speech be truthful— that it be timely, gentle, motivated by kindness, and helpful.

Sylvia Boorstein

A boddhisattva is someone who is on the way to becoming a buddha. All of us become boddhisattvas as soon as we start to take our Zen work seriously and the work we do contributes to creating a world in which all good actions become more efficacious.

David Brazier

Anarchy could never get a man to the moon, but it may the only mode that can allow us to survive on earth.

Sheldon B. Kopp

Men do not know what they do not know, and women should not tell them.

Amy Bloom

Reality CheckHis lying is not contigent on who you are or what you do. His lying is not your fault. Lying is his choice and his problem, and if he makes that choice with you, he will make it with any other woman he’s with. That doesn’t mean you’re an angel and he’s the devil. It does mean that if he doesn’t like certain things about you, he has many ways to address them besides lying. If there are sexual problems between you, there are many resources available to help you. Nothing can change until you hold him responsible and accountable for lying and stop blaming yourself. The lies we tell ourselves to keep from seeing the truth about our lovers don’t feel like lies. They feel comfortable, familiar, and true. We repeat them like a mantra and cling to them like security blankets, hoping to calm ourselves and regain our sense that the world works the way we believe it ought to.tSelf-lies are false friends we look to for comfort and protection—and for a short time they may make us feel better. But we can only keep the truth at bay for so long. Our self-lies can’t erase his lies, and as we’ll see, the longer we try to pretend they can, the more we deepen the hurt.

Susan Forward

Love is making friends with fear because fear is the constant companion of intimacy ~ and when you bring fear out of the darkness and into the light, you realize it was an illusion based on our own insecurities.

Allen L. Roland

Each of us has more intelligence than we are trained to use and the part that we get graded on in school doesn’t amount to much.

Laurie Nadel

The kiss intimately relates to the most primitive kind of human contact, which can satisfy all of our needs, like: feeding, enjoying pleasure, tasting, wanting, rejecting, everything we associate with love.

Mabel Iam

Learning to listen relationally, listen with cool heads and clear boundaries, listen with the quietness of the heart and the gentleness of the body, means having a self so developed it can afford to yield.

Terrence Real

I care about who you are, who you have been, who you want to be. I open myself to you to listen and learn about you. I cherish you, not just my fantasy of who you are, not just who I need you to be, but who you really are...

Betty Berzon

Chances are, when you were young, you were told, in effect, "Listen, kid, here is the news: life is not about you. Life is not about what you want. What you want is not important. Life is about doing what others expect of you." If you accepted this idea, later on you wondered what had happened to your fire. Where had your enthusiasm for living gone?

Nathaniel Branden

Whatever the dangers in sex, gay men's innate drive to make love to other men corrects, redeems, and intervenes on a world gone mad with man-to-man violence.

Douglas Sadownick

In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was better if they had the sex, so they could give their undivided attention to mathematics, which was the main thing.

Paul Goodman

Some never escape from the imprisoning conviction that a cold or unattainable lover can be persuaded to become warm or attainable if they only discover the key.

Jeanne Safer

There are many ways to become mistress (or master) of one's fate after a betrayal, but they all have things in common: conscious effort and a fighting spirit, embodied in what I call 'the Affirmative No.' The Affirmative No incorporates self-enhancing outrage, independence, and courage. It is a stance through which a traumatized person actively proclaims her will by rejecting the role of victim.... Unable to change our predicaments, we actively changed their meaning and our relationship to them, and in the process, we discovered that we could exert power when we thought we had none.

Jeanne Safer

According to Hugh Thomas, author of 'A History of the World', the greatest medical advance in history has been garbage collection. The greatest psychological advance in history is just around the corner and will also have to do with cleaning up. Cleaning up lies and "coming out of the closet" is getting more attention these days. Some day we will look back on these years of suffocation in bullsh*t in the same way we look back on all the years people lived in, and died from, their garbage.

Brad Blanton

The feeling of love comes and goes on a whim; you can't control it. But the action of love is something you can do, regardless of how you are feeling.

Russ Harris

The human psyche is a self-correcting mechanism.

Laurie Nadel

...when you let go of your expectations, when you accept life as it is, you're free.To hold on is to be serious and uptight. To let go is to lighten up.

Richard Carlson

Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.

Paul Goodman

If I reveal myself without worrying about how others will respond, then some will care, though others may not. But who can love me, if no one knows me? I must risk it, or live alone.

Sheldon B. Kopp

... being with people who don't understand is worse than being alone with her grief.

Kerry Cohen Hoffmann

A human has seven litres of blood. This they had taught him in the army. Seven litres, which, with an arterial cut will vent a fountain two or three metres, and take three to four minutes to bleed out.

Richard House

Life consists of many different stories. A person has not just one but countless life stories that weave in between each other and together create exactly that specific life and that specific human being.

Iben Dissing Sandahl

When one has let go of that great hidden agenda that drives humanity and its varied histories, then one can begin to encounter the immensity of one's own soul. If we are courageous enough to say, "Not this person, nor any other, can ultimately give me what I want; only I can," then we are free to celebrate a relationship for what it can give.

James Hollis

when a child is ridiculed, shamed, hurt or ignored when she experiences and expresses a legitimate dependency need, she will later be inclined to attach those same affective tones to her dependency. Thus, she will experience her own (and perhaps others’) dependency as ridiculous, shameful, painful, or denied. - Dependency in the Treatment of complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders 2001Authors: Kathy Steele, Onno van der Hart, Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis

Kathy Steele

He downed the last of his coffee, carried his mug over to the pot, poured himself a refill, and returned to the

Lynda Hilburn

I think they paid attention to their lives and became wise. For those of us who don’t arrive at wisdom naturally, meditation is one way to get there through practice.

Sylvia Boorstein

I am touched by your kindness and loving comments on how the messages from the Danish way of Parenting - which comes from my heart - have changed your and your children's lives. Each and every one I keep in my personal treasure chest. Your support means everything.

Iben Dissing Sandahl

Buddha also said that the Dharma, like a bird, needs two wings to fly, and that the wing that balances Wisdom is compassion.

Sylvia Boorstein

Choose being kind over being right and you'll be right every time.

Richard Carlson

As I turned my head and looked out the window, I saw that everything around me was glowing from within. The sunlight on the trees, the swaying of the leaves in the wind, the slight rattle of the panes of glass in the old window frame, were too beautiful for words. I was enthralled at how miraculous everything was. Absolutely everything was beautiful. . . .I saw clearly that everyone is made of light—that we are like forms of light—but that a crust has formed over it. The crust is black and rubbery like tar and has obscured the inner light that is everyone’s real, inner self. Some blotches of tar are very thick; other areas are thinner and more transparent. Those who have worked on themselves for longer have less tar and they radiate more of their inner light. Because of their personal history, others are covered with more tar and need a great deal of work to get free of it. . .If we observe ourselves truthfully and non-judgmentally, seeing the mechanisms of our personality in action, we can wake up, and our lives can be a miraculous unfolding of beauty and joy.

Don Richard Riso

It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

Alfred Adler

The body often contains emotional truths that words can too easily gloss over.

Esther Perel

If there’s a takeaway from working here, it’s an understand that, as bioorganisms, we are a walking time bomb programed for cellular self-destruction. Not if, when.

Laurie Nadel

Worrying about life’s circumstances of those I love, but over which I have no control is a dangerous, never-ending and pointless game to play.

Iben Dissing Sandahl

Women are unhappy in their marriages because they want men to be more related than most men know how to be. And men are unhappy in their marriages because their women seem so unhappy with them.

Terrence Real

The opposite of interpersonal trust is not mistrust. It is despair. This is because we have given up on believing that trustworthiness and fulfillment are possible from others. We have lost our hope in our fellow humans.

David Richo

Regression in grief must be seen and supported as a means toward adaptation and health.

Lily Pincus

Happiness is a state of mind, not a set of circumstances.

Richard Carlson

Quote of the day."Al, for want of anything better to do, is standing nodding his head. This reminds Faron of those stupid dogs that people put in their cars, that when the car moves, the dogs frantically nod their heads, like some demented, freshly graduated psychologist, with their first patients.

Gary Edward Gedall

There are two kinds of special events: planned and unplanned.

Laurie Nadel

I am very confident. I look confident. I act confident. I speak in a confident way...

Milton H. Erickson

If we succumb to fear, we start holding back, and do that all-to-common dance of getting close, then pulling away. When we remember that our safe harbor depends on our awareness and honesty, we're less likely to make internal compromises, put on masks, or act like a chameleon to attract a partner or keep a hurtful relationship together. If we live by truth, we may have pain, but we will always rest securely in ourselves.

Charlotte Kasl

to judge darkness as bad or wrong is akin to judging whether up is better than down, or whether blue is better than red

Timothy Roderick

Discovering passion and purpose requires figuring out what works and what doesn't. Mature, successful people establish their on rules. These rules are measured by only one standard: do they work?

Robert A. Glover

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