Aversion Therapy Quotes

The Magician should devise for himself a definite technique for destroying "evil." The essence of such a practice will consist in training the mind and the body to confront things which case fear, pain, disgust, shame and the like. He must learn to endure them, then to become indifferent to them, then to become indifferent to them, then to analyze them until they give pleasure and instruction, and finally to appreciate them for their own sake, as aspects of Truth. When this has been done, he should abandon them, if they are really harmful in relation to health and comfort. ~ Aleister Crowley

Most girls, however much they resent their mothers, do become very much like them. Rebellion can rarely survive the aversion therapy that passes for being brought up female. Male violence acts directly on the girl through her father or brother or uncle or any number of male professionals or strangers, as it did and does on her mother, and she too is forced to learn to conform in order to survive. A girl may, as she enters adulthood, repudiate the particular set of males with whom her mother is allied, run with a different pack as it were, but she will replicate her mother's patterns in acquiescing to male authority within her own chosen set. Using both force and threat, men in all camps demand that women accept abuse in silence and shame, tie themselves to hearth and home with rope made of self-blame, unspoken rage, grief, and resentment. ~ Andrea Dworkin

It's like aversion therapy. You keep doing scenes over and over again with three women in the bed with you, and we had to do them all in one week. Three girls would step out and another three girls would step into the bed.It sounds like a fantasy but by the end of it, I just wanted to go for a hike on my own in the north of England, in the hills. Because it became a sort of "be careful what you wish for" kinda thing. ~ Steve Coogan

Food is a lot of people's therapy - when we say comfort food, we really mean that. It's releasing dopamine and serotonin in your brain that makes you feel good. ~ Brett Hoebel

No type of therapy compares to accomplishing heavy and intimidating goals. ~ Miriam Khalladi

The first step of any therapy is a little self-awareness. I want you to think about the ways your habits, your belief systems, your personality quirks have been developed to help you and protect you. Then ask yourself if they are truly working or if they're hurting you. For instance, when you feel a headache coming on, focus on something in front of you. Something real, like your hand, to keep you in the moment. It sounds small, but it helps, I promise. ~ Sara Shepard

Or perhaps she would be applying her innovative light therapy to the White House staff. ~ Ayse Kulin

Countless hours of physical therapy - and the talents of the medical community - have brought me new movement in my right arm. It's fractional progress, and it took a long time, but my arm moves when I tell it to. ~ Gabrielle Giffords

The Truth the Dead Know


For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Anne Sexton was a model who became a confessional poet, writing about intimate aspects of her life, after her doctor suggested that she take up poetry as a form of therapy. She studied under Robert Lowell at Boston University, where Sylvia Plath was one of her classmates. Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967, but later committed suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning. Topics she covered in her poems included adultery, masturbation, menstruation, abortion, despair and suicide. ~ Anne Sexton

you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I always had a dissociative disorder. But I healed from it over the course of 14 years of big-time therapy. But, you know, I mean, everybody's kind of loony now. So I was kind of a pioneer in the mental illness thing, too. ~ Roseanne Barr

In many ways, cartooning is my therapy. I've always said they're like my diaries. It's thoughts and feelings and things I've seen on any particular day. ~ Bruce Eric Kaplan

I suspect that in the late '90s alone, youth group games were responsible for millions of mono breakouts, thousands of broken bones, dozens of stomach pumps, and countless hours of therapy, for they typically involved placing insecure, hormonally charged teenagers in as physically awkward and borderline dangerous a situation as possible, preferably in the company of food, in a misguided effort to "break the ice" that invariably resulted in someone either throwing up or getting an erection. ~ Rachel Held Evans

At sixty one, I was at the top of my professional career, a wife, mother, and grandmother with many wonderful friends--and absolutely terrified....I was unaware of living as multiple identifies, but did spend my life running away from a 'me' I could neither understand nor tolerate....The first step to becoming one whole person happened to me the day in therapy when I became aware of the three adults who had been living in separate compartments in my brain. I saw them and they saw each other....A perfect three-point landing. ~ Janyne McConnaughey

Everyone is in pain. Most people think pain in massage means something is happening, and if they can endure it, they will be improved, but sometimes the only thing pain means is pain.
It a very easy mistake to make, though.. She'd refused for the longest time to get therapy or take any psychoactive drugs because she'd felt that the "darkness" was necessary, not just for her as an actor, but as a human being.
You didn't have to feel slightly terrible all the time, as it turns out. Her only worry now was that slightly terrible was not a flaw in her chemistry, but an appropriate response to being the kind of person that she was. "You're very hard on yourself," Luke said.
"Can you imagine the kind of person that I'd be if I wasn't hard on myself?" she said back. Luke should be sympathetic. He was hoping to improve the human race, and it would be hard to get there if the human race thought it was already fantastic, thanks very much.
Well, she could still go dark, if she needed to, she could go dark right now. Yesterday she had done Terror. She'd done Fear and Dejection and Remorse. And because she had done Remorse as fully as a person could do it, she knew that she hadn't ever experienced that kind of pure Remorse before. What she'd felt in the past was polluted Remorse, because half the time she was sorry she was also privately resentful and building a case about why the actions that had led to Remorse could be justified. ~ Meg Howrey

Employing ... nutrition and vitamin therapy ... one of the nation's largest alcoholism treatment programs reports a 71% success rate. This contrasts with ... (a) national ... rate (of) 25% as reported by NIAAA. ~ Irwin Stone

It's one of these juvenile therapy scams," he went on, sprinkling a pinch of the Golden Virginia tobacco along the rolling paper. "They advertise help for your troubled teen by staring at the stars and singing 'Kumbaya'. Instead, it's a bunch of bearded nutjobs left in charge of some of the craziest kids I've ever seen in my life - bulimics, nymphos, cutters trying to saw their wrists with the plastic spoons from lunch. You wouldn't believe the shit that went on." He shook his head. "Most of the kids had been so mentally screwed by their parents they needed more than twelve weeks of wilderness. They needed reincarnation. To die and just come back as a grasshopper, as a fucking weed. That'd be preferable to the agony they were in just by being alive. ~ Marisha Pessl

He sat with his arm still around her, watching her face and smiling as she fumbled with the elegant gold wrapping, her agile fingers suddenly clumsy. She lifted the lid off and stared speechlessly at the simple pendant that lay on satin lining like a cobweb of gold. A dark red heart, chiseled and planed, was attached to the chain.
"That's a ruby," she stammered.
"No," he corrected gently, lifting it from the box and placing it around her neck. "That's my heart." The chain was long, and the ruby heart slid down her chest to nestle between her breasts, gleaming with dark fire as it lay against her honeyed skin.
"Wear that forever," he murmured his eyes on the lush curves that his gift used as a pillow.
"And my heart will always be touching yours. ~ Linda Howard

BLOOM: I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
INTERVIEWER: It's always interminable?
BLOOM: I do not know anyone who has ever benefited from Freudian or any other mode of analysis, except by being, to use the popular trope for it, so badly shrunk, that they become quite dried out. That is to say, all passion spent. Perhaps they become better people, but they also become stale and uninteresting people with very few exceptions. Like dried-out cheese, or wilted flowers. ~ Harold Bloom

The fear of what might happen stops people but the trauma process is so beautiful and transformational.
There is nothing to fear in our emotions, they will not swallow you whole - they will speak to you in profound ways. ~ Adele Theron

The cerebral processing of that visceral input as a signal of death was accurate. Without the kinds of therapy that had been developed over the decades, this cancer would have been fatal. Hope, then, is constructed not just from rational deliberation, from the conscious weighing of information; it arises as an amalgam of thought and feeling, the feelings created in part by neural input from the organs and tissues. ~ Jerome Groopman

To sleep with a woman: it can seem of the utmost importance in your mind, or then again it can seem like nothing much at all. Which only goes to say that there's sex as therapy (self-therapy, that is) and there's sex as pastime. ~ Haruki Murakami

We may find ourselves in a role similar to that of a gardener as we cultivate a space in which healing can naturally unfold.

In terms of neurobiology, this stance encourages us to lean into the reassuring awareness that our systems already contain seeds awaiting our attention.

For some examples, we humans are always seeking the warmest possible attachments we can imagine (Cozolino, Siegel), our brains are continuously yearning for the arrival of a co-organizing other (Badenoch, Cozolino, Schore), emotional regulation flows naturally from being in the presence of someone we trust (Beckes & Coan) and even our nervous systems have a preference for the social engagement circuitry that sustains connection (Porges).

With this kind of support from the biology inherent in both practitioner and patient, our bodies may begin to open into a welcoming state as others come towards us, with a sense of partnership being established rather than someone doing something to us.

However this also means letting go of the potential certainty that comes from feeling we are in charge. ~ Bonnie Badenoch

In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth? ~ Carl R. Rogers

The first principle of cognitive therapy is that all your moods are created by your 'cognitions,' or thoughts. A cognition refers to the way you look at things - your perceptions, mental attitudes, and beliefs. It includes the way you interpret things - what you say. about something or someone to yourself. ~ David D. Burns

What saddens me is seeing patients who have been going to therapy for years and years with no change, but they keep going to the same therapist. To me, that's not right. ~ David D. Burns

To embrace love, we risk heartbreak. To resist love, we risk emptiness. ~ Jennifer Lane

All these guiding principles in therapy confront the doctor with important ethical duties which can be summed up in the single rule: be the man through whom you wish to influence others. ~ C. G. Jung

Imbalanced systems,whether internal or external, will tend to polarize. ~ Richard C. Schwartz

I briefly did therapy, but after a while, I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can't fix the weather - you just have to get on with it. ~ Douglas Adams

You do not see anything when you experience pure consciousness; you become everything. ~ Sebastian Pole

Riding across Nebraska in a covered wagon was a monthlong immersion therapy in kindness, a reminder of the essential decency of my country. ~ Rinker Buck

I'm against big bureaucracy in Washington making health care decisions. I just have an aversion to bureaucrats. But it's not just government bureaucrats. I don't like HMO bureaucrats and insurance company bureaucrats either. ~ Gary Bauer

All my shows are therapy, trying to navigate interesting subjects so I can work them out and to be honest and say some things are beyond the wit of this man. ~ Marcus Brigstocke

(They) were found guilty of continuing to promote the merits of Laetrile in cancer therapy in violation of terms of probation they had originally secured following their 1973 conviction. ~ Ernst T. Krebs

I've never found therapy to be a sign of weakness; I've found the opposite to be true. The willingness to have a mirror held up to you definitely requires strength. ~ Brooke Shields

We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter
exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place
the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan. ~ Mark Twain

Forgive and forget.If there's anything that I've learnt this far, it's to forgive people - Balqis ~ Diyar Harraz

We try not using medications initially, and we use something called behavioral therapy for insomnia. This changes behaviors people do in bed, none of the tossing and turning. ~ Shelby Harris

I did a little bit of acting - some guest spots here and there. I got a job working as a therapist doing individual and group crisis intervention and family therapy. I did that for two years. I left to do 'Boston Legal.' So my psychology career has been interwoven into my acting career, and it's my safety net and fallback. ~ Meredith Eaton

He smiled without his teeth. Small, shyly. I found myself smiling back. Like an impulse
Then he ruined it by saying…
"You're not like other girls, are you?"
And I activated.
Every single emotion I'd been squashing into my guts exploded like a burst appendix. I jumped off the bed and turned to him with a scowl I was sure he'd need permanent therapy to recover from.
"Are you kidding me Harry?"
"Woah Audrey. Hey, hey, hey. It's a compliment."
I felt like screaming.
"It's NOT a compliment.
I threw my arms up, any motion to get rid of the rage pulsing through me.
It's an insult to every single woman on this PLANET. Don't you DARE try and pull that shit on me.
"What shit?!" Harry was stupid enough to ask. "I was saying something nice…"
I shook my head so hard.
"No, you were saying something clichéd and UNTRUE. I AM like other girls, Harry. Don't misinterpret my hatred of romance as some kooky, laid-back, manic pixie NONSENSE. I am DAMAGED. I am not CUTE. I am emotionally-fucking-traumatised right now, okay? I am screaming on the inside. I am too angry and messed up to contain all the stuff girls spend every day containing. That's why I seem different. That is NOT sexy. ~ Holly Bourne

I would say that I began with a very edgy, very driven personality and after a sufficient amount of therapy over many, many years, I managed to become rather relaxed and happy. ~ John Cleese

You don't realise how much you're holding onto until you start to let go of it. I had had loads of therapy and thought I had come to terms with who I am, but there's something in the process of writing that unlocks other experiences, other emotions and you have to be prepared for that. ~ Damian Barr