Cognitive Therapy Quotes

Because of my bipolar disorder, I tend to these mixed states, which are depressed but loud and agitated. So I can be terribly irritable. I go to cognitive behavioral therapy in order not to yell at my children. ~ Ayelet Waldman

Don't ask why the patient is the way he is, ask for what he would change. ~ Milton H. Erickson

Man is the artificer of his own happiness. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Cognitive therapy seeks to alleviate psychological stresses by correcting faulty conceptions and self-signals. By correcting erroneous beliefs we can lower excessive reactions. ~ Aaron T. Beck

Cognitive therapy is a fast-acting technology of mood modification that you can learn to apply on your own. It can help you eliminate the symptoms and experience personal growth so you can minimize future upsets and cope with depression more effectively in the future. ~ David D. Burns

He who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

The present non-aristotelian system is based on fundamental negative premises; namely, the complete denial of 'identity.' ~ Alfred Korzybski

Things can never touch the soul, but stand inert outside it, so that disquiet can arise only from fancies within. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Cognitive Therapy

Instead of behavior, cognitive therapy emphasizes changing thoughts and beliefs. Cognitive therapists believe that irrational beliefs or distorted thinking patterns lead to social anxiety so they teach patients to think in more rational, constructive ways. ~ Heather Moehn

Acceptance and commitment therapy, a variant on cognitive therapy, attempts to teach people to accept rather than change their emotions and make decisions within the context of what they value, as opposed to letting negative feelings control their behavior. ~ Joseph E. Ledoux

We should pledge ourselves to the proposition that the irresponsible life is not worth living. ~ Thomas Szasz

Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

We must take care of our minds because we cannot benefit from beauty when our brains are missing. ~ Euripides

Although no one treatment will ever be a panacea, research studies indicate that cognitive therapy can be helpful for a variety of disorders in addition to depression. ~ David D. Burns

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

Cognitive therapy is based on the idea that when you change the way you think, you can change the way you feel and behave. In other words, if we can learn to think about other people in a more positive and realistic way, it will be far easier to resolve conflicts and develop rewarding personal and professional relationships. ~ David D. Burns

The depressed man lives in a depressed world. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The relish of good and evil depends in a great measure upon the opinion we have of them. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Whatever a person frequently thinks and reflects on, that will become the inclination of their mind. ~ Gautama Buddha

Creative ideas make people uncomfortable. It turns out that, at least subconsciously, we can have a hard time recognizing ideas as both new and useful at the same time. This cognitive dissonance between creativity and practicality may actually create a subtle bias against creative ideas. ~ David Burkus

I see an actress smoking a cigarette in an old Fred McMurray movie. She's clever and beautiful and manipulative. I feel envy. I suddenly wish I smoked cigarettes and was as clever and beautiful and manipulative as she. I want to be that way at the restaurants I visit, as I'm walking to my car, with certain friends who might understand.
The actress has played her part well; she's made me want to emulate her base desires if only for a while. Does that make me impressionable, a fool, or someone who will recognize the deepest secrets of her heart?
I fight hard to stay young - to keep the lines from further etching my face and hands and breasts, presumably to trick the world into believing I am young.
I'm an actress playing a part. I'm afraid to tell the truth. I fear losing those younger or becoming those older. In the presence of youth, a sort of unseen age-osmosis occurs within me. The years drop away and I don't want to leave. It's utterly selfish but I don't care. After all, I'm no older than they - I've just been so longer. I was nineteen only yesterday and they don't retire nineteen-year-old actresses. ~ Chila Woychik

The elegant study ... is consistent with the themes of modern cognitive neuroscience . Every aspect of thought and emotion is rooted in brain structure and function, including many psychological disorders and, presumably, genius. The study confirms that the brain is a modular system comprising multiple intelligences, mostly nonverbal. ~ Steven Pinker

Last night felt good." He chuckled. "Not watching you jerk off, though that was fucking hot, but before that, when you were sleeping between me and Boris. I liked that."
A knot formed in Hans's chest, making it difficult to speak.
"So did Boris," Thomas insisted. "I know he did. Then he started worrying about you getting between me and him. He did what he did because he needed to prove I still belonged to him."
"I already fucking know that!" Hans snapped. He lowered his voice. "I know you have your special things I can't be a part of, like speaking to each other in Russian, and kissing and hugging, and all the things I wish I could do with you…." He stopped himself. He was overstepping again. "I shouldn't have said that. I've only known you guys for like two months. But I like being here. I'm lucky you haven't fired me for what I did last night, considering how much it upset Boris."
He tried to turn pull away, embarrassed, but Thomas wouldn't let go. "Boris and I have things that tie us together - things that do make me his - but despite all that, I think we both want to build something with you too."
Hans huffed out a breath. "I'm not sure how I feel about him now."
"Like I said, there will be bad days. He can't help it, other than to keep taking his meds and going to therapy. He's so much better than he was, when I met him in Russia. You have no idea!"
Hans settled into the embrace, reveling in the feel of Thomas's warm, soft skin. ~ Jamie Fessenden

we see faces in the clouds, but never clouds in faces, because we have special cognitive modules for face detection. ~ Jonathan Haidt

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

I also realized that in my family drama a very limited number of character traits were available to the players. In my mind, either I could be weak, wimpy, submissive, and pathetic, or I could be a raging tyrant and bully who demanded total compliance from everyone in my realm. The notion of being strong and assertive while staying calm, insisting on appropriate boundraries and on being treated with respect and dignity, were not in my realm of experience. Once I realized that I was much happier with the person I was in the rest of my life, I realized it was foolish not to be that "me" around my family as well. I began to feel liberated and genuinely felt they could take the new me or leave it. So far, they've chosen to leave it, but I feel a sense of integrity and self-respect that I had never experienced before. ~ Mark Sichel

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. ~ Graham Greene

The strongest and most mysterious weeds often have things to teach us. ~ F.T. McKinstry

If you have a relative who's lost interest in everything and doesn't get out of bed, who doesn't care for things they used to, can't imagine anything that would give them any pleasure, don't fool around with it; get therapy, get help, get medication if that's right for you, or talk therapy, or something. ~ Dick Cavett

The wilderness is healing, a therapy for the soul. ~ Nicholas Kristof

It is not a sudden leap from sick to well. It is a slow, strange meander from sick to mostly well. The misconception that eating disorders are a medical disease in the traditional sense is not helpful here. There is no 'cure'. A pill will not fix it, though it may help. Ditto therapy, ditto food, ditto endless support from family and friends. You fix it yourself. It is the hardest thing that I have ever done, and I found myself stronger for doing it. Much stronger. ~ Marya Hornbacher

Presence is about how every action can arise from the quality, which we call awareness – the presence of our inner being, the presence of our soul.
It is a large difference between working with people from the inner being and working with people from duty or a specific technique. Through working from the inner being, we can touch the soul of the other person, while we can only touch the personality of the other person, his surface and periphery, if we just work from a technique. ~ Swami Dhyan Giten

How can you get through to yourself? ~ Alexandra Katehakis

The narrative illusion introduces a "mind virus", which is a syntactical contagion that spreads through communicative vectors and colonizes the cognitive biases of the targeted individual's psychology, thus transforming the mental processes of that target. ~ James Scott, Senior Fellow, The Center For Cyber Influence Operations Studies

A bad song for a night such as this, mayhap, but her heart went its own way without much interest in what her head thought or wanted; always had. ~ Stephen King

The social psychologist Tom Gilovich studies the cognitive mechanisms of strange beliefs. His simple formulation is that when we want to believe something, we ask ourselves, "Can I believe it?"28 Then (as Kuhn and Perkins found), we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe. We have a justification, in case anyone asks. In contrast, when we don't want to believe something, we ask ourselves, "Must I believe it?" Then we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it. ~ Jonathan Haidt

Through therapy and a lot of thinking and writing my memoirs, I've been able to use my life as a lesson. ~ Jane Fonda

If you have trouble with finding things you should get into some kind of therapy with a good therapist if you need, I mean I just believe in therapy for everybody. I really do. I don't think any body can escape it. ~ Joy Behar

Tightly focused attention gets fatigued - much like an overworked muscle - when we push to the point of cognitive exhaustion. The signs of mental fatigue, such as a drop in effectiveness and a rise in distractedness and irritability, signify that the mental effort needed to sustain focus has depleted the glucose that feeds neural energy. ~ Daniel Goleman

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

Ultimately, of course, you must decide for yourself whether the subjective psychological effects created by your evolved cognitive biases reflect an objective reality, perhaps as evidence that God designed your mind to be so receptive to Him. Or, just maybe, you will come to acknowledge that, like the rest of us, you are a hopeless pawn in one of natural selection's most successful hoaxes ever-and smile at the sheer ingenuity involved in pulling it off, at the very thought of such mindless cleverness. One can still enjoy the illusion of God, after all, without believing Him to be real. ~ Jesse Bering

Sometimes they almost made me feel glad that I had a few extra years to play my depression out with therapy and other means, because I think its useful in youth- unless suicide or drug abuse are the alternatives- to have some faith in the mind to cure itself, to not rush to doctors or diagnosis's ... I sometimes worry that part of what creates depression in young people is their own, and their parents, and the whole worlds impatience with allowing the phases of life to run their course. We will very likely soon be living in a society that confuses disease with normal life if the panic and rush to judgment and labeling do not slow down a bit. Somewhere between the unbelievable tardiness that the medical profession was guilty of in administering proper treatment to me and the eagerness to with which practitioners prescribe Ritalin for 8 year old boys and Paxil for 14 year old girls, there is a sane course of action. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

I'm so sick of that argument. I've been hearing it for centuries. Playing God. Wolfgang, we played God when people believed they could dictate their baby's gender by having sex in a certain position. We played God when we invented birth control, amniocentesis, cesarean sections, when we developed modern medicine and surgery. Flight is playing God. Fighting cancer is playing God. Contact lenses and glasses are playing God. Anything we do to modify our lives in a way that we were not born into is playing God. In vitro fertilization. Hormone replacement therapy. Gender reassignment surgery. Antibiotics. ~ Mur Lafferty

For me, working out is a form of therapy. It's cathartic for me; it's a good stress reliever. I know that when I go to the gym I am taking care of myself, and I know I'll feel so much better afterwards. ~ Bob Harper

You know I never used to be a bad flyer, but I did start to have a fear of flying after I shot a movie where I was terrorized on a plane. I made Wes Craven's 'Red Eye'. I don't think they're linked but it does make me pause and wonder if they are, so perhaps I will explore that in therapy some day. ~ Rachel McAdams

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions. ~ John Searle

Cleaning is therapy for me. I'm not ashamed of holding the duster or broom. ~ Amisha Patel

I didn't miss any games, but Coach Knight came out and spent three days with my family in Chicago when my dad passed away. I came back and played and it was good therapy for me. Having a basketball family and a coach who understood and actually became like a father figure for that time was comforting to me, and I'm sure that will be comforting to Coleman. ~ Mike Krzyzewski

Head injuries are a significant risk to accelerated cognitive decline. ~ Steven Magee

I find a therapy in playing music, in many different ways. ~ Dave Matthews

The first thing you need to know if you are a survivor is that parts of you have probably been trained to create a variety of symptoms and behaviours. Abusers actually train child parts to cut the body, to make other parts cut, to attempt suicide, to create flashbacks by releasing pieces of visual or auditory memories, to create body memories of pain or electroshock, and to create depression, terror, anxiety, and despair by releasing the emotional components of memories to the rest of the personality system. The front person and most of the rest of the system do not know that this is the source of these feelings and behaviours. p126 ~ Alison Miller

Individuals who are prepared unflinchingly to confront the truth about their childhood and to see their parents in a realistic light. Unfortunately, it is very often the case that therapeutic success can be seriously endangered if therapy (as frequently happens) is subjected to the dictates of conventional morality, thus making it impossible for adult clients to free themselves of the compulsive persuasion that they owe their parents love and gratitude. The authentic feelings stored in the body remain untapped, and the price the clients have to pay for this is the unremitting persistence of the severe symptoms affecting them. I assume that readers who have themselves undergone a number of unsuccessful therapies will readily recognize their plight in this problem. In ~ Alice Miller

Licensed, regulated, taxed, safe. People pay for therapy, for physical training," he added, nodding at the board. "For spiritual guidance, and so on and so on. People pay for all manner of basic needs, and others train to provide those needs. Sex is a basic need. ~ J.D. Robb

If I think she' hot and it turns out she's a psychopath, then what does that say about me? I'm totally not ready for that kind of therapy. ~ Barry Lyga

No short-cut that tries to bypass the patient unfolding of the true character of God, and our relationship to him as his children, can ever succeed in providing long-term spiritual therapy. ~ Sinclair B. Ferguson

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

I think it started to feel like home when I stopped maintaining any pretense that I was ever going to be in the movie business. I went there like many writers - I had a screenplay deal and I would go to these meetings and it was the typical thing. And I hated it. I was not interested in writing screenplays, actually. But I kept feeling like that was what I was supposed to do. It was just this horrible cognitive dissonance. ~ Meghan Daum

I can spend years studying and being in therapy and having a very analytic spiritual meditation practice, but without the emotional component, without the softening that comes with love and vulnerability, everything else I do is really just surface. ~ Moby

Beyond the speculative and often fraudulent froth that characterizes much of neoliberal financial manipulation, there lies a deeper process that entails the springing of 'the debt trap' as a primary means of accumulation by dispossession. Crisis creation, management, and manipulation on the world stage has evolved into the fine art of deliberative redistribution of wealth from poor countries to the rich. I documented the impact of Volcker's interest rate increase on Mexico earlier. While proclaiming its role as a noble leader organizing 'bail-outs' to keep global capital accumulation on track, the US paved the way to pillage the Mexican economy. This was what the US Treasury–Wall Street–IMF complex became expert at doing everywhere. Greenspan at the Federal Reserve deployed the same Volcker tactic several times in the 1990s. Debt crises in individual countries, uncommon during the 1960s, became very frequent during the 1980s and 1990s. Hardly any developing country remained untouched, and in some cases, as in Latin America, such crises became endemic. These debt crises were orchestrated, managed, and controlled both to rationalize the system and to redistribute assets. Since 1980, it has been calculated, 'over fifty Marshall Plans (over $4.6 trillion) have been sent by the peoples at the Periphery to their creditors in the Center'. 'What a peculiar world', sighs Stiglitz, 'in which the poor countries are in effect subsidizing the richest. ~ David Harvey