Keith Ablow Quotes

He started to feel for himself, which is the only way to start feeling for others. (24)

For nearly a hundred years, psychiatry has been striving to apply medical model thinking to psychiatric disorders. In this model, the symptoms besieging patients are sorted into specific disease entities and the causes then identified and removed. For doctors of internal medicine, this works. In the case of diabetes mellitus, for example, the symptoms of urinary frequency, fatigue, and confusion often lead to suspicion of the underlying cause, which is confirmed by blood sugar monitoring and then treated by insulin replacement.

But psychiatric symptoms are much harder to sort into diagnoses. People with depression sometimes become paranoid. People with schizophrenia sometimes become depressed. Some people who hear voices have no other symptoms whatsoever, and others who hear voices also fall victim to terrible mood swings. Thus far, the hope that psychiatry would be able to identify homogeneous disease states, uncover the biological underpinnings, and remedy them has been largely a barren one.

Kappler's symptoms, however, evolved when the hope for psychiatry's becoming a true medical specialty was bright to the point of being blinding. Over the years he would collect over a dozen diagnoses and cavalierly take a myriad of medicines, but no one would be able to bring him close to confronting the past he had disowned, to stand a chance of making peace with it and, ultimately, overcoming it. (46)

But insight doesn't necessarily produce self-control. Sometimes you just see your destructiveness more clearly.

Maybe the trying is the thing. Maybe it doesn't get better than that. Maybe you never quite get there. And maybe that's okay.

I think men should be able to veto women's abortions if they're willing to care for the child after it's born.

My throat tightened, but I held back the tears and reminded myself that withdrawing from a woman is no different than kicking a drug; you feel shaky and you want it, but eventually the need passes, and you feel restored.

Woody Allen once said that 90 percent of life is about showing up. Ninety percent of healing people in psychological pain is shutting up - at least long enough to let them bleed the truth. That sounds easy, but it isn't. (68)

The bad things don't seem to happen to bad people.'
That's because they already did. There's no original evil left in the world.

The truth will set you free. Unless you're guilty.

The roots of any evil deed can be traced to the perpetrator's refusal to experience pain.

What was it about not knowing a person that allowed you to wonder whether she might be the answer to all your problems?

Most children would rather preserve the fantasy of a loving connection with their fathers and mothers, at all costs, even if it costs them their self-esteem. When you're three or seven years old, it's less frightening to think of yourself as an unlovable, disappointing screwup than to recognize the fact that you're living with a monster.

Everyone - rich or poor, black or white, educated or not - is in emotional turmoil, in some sort of pain. (51)

A jealous husband is an ugly thing.

Everything terrible is something that needs our love. - Rilke (231)

Deep down, everyone wants the truth.

If you take the teachings of Jesus, whether you consider yourself saved or you don't, those teachings are pristine. They're wonderful guides for life. And there's nothing in them that says hurt other people.

Nothing overdone, nothing racy, which made her all the more alluring.

The horrific fact that our lives and those of the people we love are impermanent and exquisitely fragile, that any of us can cease to exist without warning, that loving anyone, anywhere, at any time, leaves you infinitely vulnerable at every single moment. (20)

But that's the hardest part of healing.'
What?'
Realizing there's no one to hate.

A man like Kappler might become angriest, most detached, even sickest at those times his psychiatrist edges closest to the truths about his life. The rage and even the psychosis has to be seen for what it is: the flamethrower of a fortress under siege. Pleasantries, humor, and easy exchanges might be clues that no real work is being done.
There can be no retreat on the psychiatrist's part. One patient with a psychotic illness has written: "the doctor has to feel sure he has the right to break into the illness, just as a parent knows he has the right to walk into a baby's room, no matter what the baby feels about it. The doctor has to know he's doing the right thing ... some people go through life with vomit on their lips. You can feel their terrible hunger but they defy you to feed them." (95, The Strange Case of Dr. Kappler)

Plenty of people who survive tragedies end up ambivalent about danger
frightened by it, yet strangely drawn to it.

When people can do something simple to avoid conflict
say, hit a button or unlock a latch
they'll generally do it.

Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land
too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men.

People blush when one of their core truths is revealed.

Some people hurt so much they can't take what they need, even when someone wants to give it to them. (106)

God is not attracted to mountaintops or church steeples. God is drawn to suffering, and the dark places it surfaces, which is why sharing pain freely feels very much like love, and may be the same thing. (207)

Relationships are never chance events.

Like most of the connections that explain the pain in our hearts, he couldn't bring it to mind. He couldn't see the truth because it was too big and it was right in front of him.

The irrational thoughts were the ones with the power to burn holes in your gut.

I shook my head at all the things that can happen to break a man as he grows up and away from the pure potential of infancy, all the things that had fractured inside me. And I prayed silently that this infant, born into chaos, might meet with kindness, experience joy and find passion in life. Every one of us ought to be able to count on that much. (308)