Embodying Psychotherapy Quotes

One of my teachers at the psychoanalytic institute where I trained used to say, only half humorously, that 'the most important prerequisite for a vocation as a psychotherapist is a depressed mother'; based on my history, I think that a suffering but inaccessible father and a damaged sibling should be added to the list of qualifications. ~ Jeanne Safer

Emotional literacy is a prerequisite for empathy and psychological resilience. ~ Gina Senarighi

To psychotherapists, I say, don't just leave us abandoned because you think you don't know enough to help us, or because the world doesn't believe in what we went through, or because our trauma is too awful to hear about. ~ Wendy Hoffman

I listened to a lot of The Stooges when I was writing "Oscillate," imagining our hero moving through his days naturally embodying the spirit of a real punk. I say real, because today's idea of 'punk as fashion accessory' doesn't even register with him, it's more about the way he engages with the world. ~ Travis Mathews

NVC urges me to ask myself the following questions rather than think in terms of what is wrong with a patient: "What is this person feeling? What is she or he needing? How am I feeling in response to this person, and what needs of mine are behind my feelings? What action or decision would I request this person to take in the belief that it would enable them to live more happily?" Because our responses to these questions would reveal a lot about ourselves and our values, we would feel far more vulnerable than if we were to simply diagnose the other person. ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg

Ultimately the most profound problems with psychotherapy have always been that instead of possessing any contrarian or transcendent values to enable it to produce insights countervailing against our dysfunctional and incoherent and humanly destructive culture, its "therapists" have been virtually all shills or agents for this culture, trying to accommodate their patients to a fundamentally unhealthy and insane way of life. ~ Kenny Smith

When we ourselves are not truly in a place of peace and we go out and try to create peace in the world, it becomes a fragmented and sometimes even corrupt form of peace. This happens because only peace can create peace, and unless we are the embodiment of it, we are projecting our bias of what peace should look like onto other people's lives. To be at peace means to accept reality as is. Embodying peace is, in fact, the very essence of what it means to be free, as well as offering this freedom to others. ~ Alaric Hutchinson

The word Tocqueville used was "mores" - meaning those habits "of central importance accepted without question and embodying the fundamental moral views of a group." He wrote: "I considered mores to be one of the great general causes responsible for the maintenance of a democratic republic." And then he said that by the term "mores" he meant "habits of the heart." In the same book Tocqueville put it as bluntly as Franklin or Adams had, writing: "Liberty cannot be established without morality." This ~ Eric Metaxas

A man shrinks or expands into the degree and nature of his ambition. Ambition needs to be cultivated and refined, and yet has no teachers. ~ Neel Burton

This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world's first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths. Elliott's raw, naked, LSD-fueled sessions lasted for epic eleven day stretches. The psychopaths spent every waking moment journeying to their darkest corners in an attempt to get better. There were no distractions - no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least one hundred hours every week) of their feelings. When they got hungry, they sucked food through straws that protruded through the walls. As during Paul Bindrim's own nude psychotherapy sessions, the patients were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for one another ... ~ Jon Ronson

Lithium prevents my seductive but disastrous highs, diminishes my depressions, clears out the wool and webbing from my disordered thinking, slows me down, gentles me out, keeps me from ruining my career and relationships, keeps me out of a hospital, alive, and makes psychotherapy possible. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

A linguistically informed literary criticism is the key to resolving conflict and frustration, from psychotherapy and law to philosophy and politics. Call this the messianic theory. It is based on the idea that TO THINK IS TO GRASP A METAPHOR-the metaphor metaphor. ~ Steven Pinker

My great-grandmother raised nine children to adulthood in a world without supermarkets, refrigerators, or washing machines. She did not have much time to search for "unconditional love" or "commitment," because she was too busy practicing it herself. Most of her life was taken up with the unceasing procurement and preparation of food for her husband and children. Yet she got along fine without romance novels, child custody gamesmanship, or psychotherapy; she was, I am told, always cheerful and contented. This is something beyond the imagination of barren, resentful feminists. It is the satisfaction which results from knowing that one is carrying out a worthwhile task to the best of one's abilities, a satisfaction nothing else in life can give. We are here today because this is the way women used to behave; we cannot continue long under the present system of rotating polyandry. ~ F. Roger Devlin

It is the psychic depression of decadence which has come to this place and time. It is what happens to people who ignore their artists and deny their children. It is a terminal case of involutional melancholia which comes from within and cannot be cured by T.V. or psychotherapy or anything but a creative life, which is hard to come by in a country where it doesn't pay to do anything for yourself. ~ Jennifer Stone

The reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are that belated objectives of nearly all Psychotherapy ~ Brock Chisholm

Therapy isn't Radio.We don't need to constantly fill the air with sounds. Sometimes, when its quite, surprising things happen. ~ Mary Pipher

Although Megan "knew" she was not in danger, her body told her that she was. If sensorimotor habits are firmly entrenched, accurate cognitive interpretations may not exert much influence on changing bodily orgamzation and arousal responses. Instead, the traumatized person may experience the reality of the body rather than that of the mind. To be most effective, the sensorimotor psychotherapist works on both the cognitive and sensorimotor levels. With Megan, a purely cognitive approach might foster some change in her integrative capacity, but the change would be only momentary if the cowering response were reactivated each time she received feedback at work... However, if she is encouraged to remember to "stand tall" in the face of criticism, her body and her thoughts will be congruent with each other and with current reality. ~ Pat Ogden

Psychotherapy is a demanding vocation, and the successful therapist must be able to tolerate the isolation, anxiety, and frustration that are inevitable in the work. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Maybe I needed that somebody else could cry over my pain, to become able to cry over it myself. Nobody ever cried or was moved when I suffered as a child. (Lisa) ~ Giovanni Liotti

Most pointedly, nature-based people manifest the very qualities that contemporary psychotherapy, the recovery movement, and spiritual practices continually aim for: a visible sense of inner peace, unselfconscious humility, an urge to communal cooperation, and heartfelt appreciation for the world around them. ~ Chellis Glendinning

Psychotherapy is the art of finding the angel of hope in the midst of terror, despair and madness. ~ Cloe Madanes

You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy. ~ James Hillman

[On Female Attraction to Men in Uniform] That male military persona feeds a subconscious, passive-aggressive female desire to dominate the warrior as he is perceived an iconic example of masculinity (particularly amongst traditionally warlike cultures). The damsel in distress theme always struck me as embodying this: the hapless, innocently beautiful woman unwittingly enraptures the heroic male so completely that he would risk all to submit to her at his own peril, and quite in spite of it. ~ Tiffany Madison

You were lost in the darkness of the world until you asked for light. And then God sent His Son to give it to you. Psychotherapy-3. III. 8:9-13. ~ Robert Holden

The limbic connectedness of a working psychotherapy requires uncommon courage. A patient asks to surrender the life he knows and to enter and emotional world he has never seen; he offers himself up to be changed in ways he can't possibly envision. As his assurance of successful transmutation he has only the gossamer of faith. At the journey's end, he will no longer be who he was, and his guide is someone he has every reason to mistrust ... only human love keeps this from being the act of two madmen. (190) ~ Thomas Lewis

When two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunctive propositions embodying them. Thus a purchaser may say that he bought a left-hand glove and a right- hand glove, but not that he bought a left-hand glove, a right- hand glove, and a pair of gloves. 'She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair' is a well known joke based on the absurdity of conjoining terms of different types. Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds. ~ Gilbert Ryle

I had been introduced to psychotherapy, in which the doctors let you talk, talk, talk, until you find the source of your problem or find another doctor. ~ Gene Tierney

I've never been to rehab, I've never been to psychotherapy or the doctor or anything like that. I went to a church and I was prayed for, and I've always had a great relationship with God. ~ Smokey Robinson

What the Ellison Foundation and I are hoping to encourage is a more holistic approach to psychiatry, in which psychotherapy is put on as rigorous a level as psychopharmacology. ~ Eric Kandel

Each person is a unique individual. Hence, psychotherapy should be formulated to meet the uniqueness of the individual's needs, rather than tailoring the person to fit the Procrustean bed of a hypothetical theory of human behavior. ~ Milton H. Erickson

elders serve as conduits between the divine realm and the mundane world, making the abstract truths of spirituality accessible to the community by embodying them in their everyday behavior. ~ Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

I don't want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. After a lifetime of embodying difference, I have no desire to be equal. I want to deconstruct the structural power of a system that marked me out as different. I don't wish to be assimilated into the status quo. I want to be liberated from all the negative assumptions that my characteristics bring. The same onus is not on me to change. Instead it's the world around me.. ~ Reni Eddo-Lodge

I'm not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy. ~ James Hillman

Psychotherapy is the prostitution of friendship. ~ Hans Eysenck

The theoretical casting part of movies is the funnest part. You really can imagine so many different versions of a story based on who's embodying it. ~ Cary Fukunaga

Your genes may be causing your blues! We now know depression runs in families and chemical changes in the brain coincide with clinical depression. Medications, psychotherapy, and other treatments can adjust these changes and chase depression away. ~ Joni E. Johnston

I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine. ~ Frederick Salomon Perls

Beginning therapists must learn that there are times to sit in silence, sometimes in silent communion, sometimes simply while waiting for patients' thoughts to appear in a form that they may be expressed. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

In one sense, all causes of a problem are 'current', although many of them represent the residue of earlier learning or unprocessed memories. ~ Richard S. Hallam

To voice something you're feeling and put observations into words with another person who is totally present is a creative act embodying soul and love. ~ Jean Shinoda Bolen

You are right, Sahara. There are no mists, or veils, or distances. But the mist is surrounded by a mist; and the veil is hidden behind a veil; and the distance continually draws away from the distance. That is why there are no mists, or veils, or distances. That is why it is called The Great Distance of Mist and Veils. It is here that The Traveler becomes The Wanderer, and The Wanderer becomes The One Who Is Lost, and The One Who Is Lost becomes The Seeker, and The Seeker becomes The Passionate Lover, and The Passionate Lover becomes The Beggar, and The Beggar becomes The Wretch, and The Wretch becomes The One Who Must Be Sacrificed, and The One Who Must Be Sacrificed becomes The Resurrected One and The Resurrected One becomes The One Who has Transcended The Great Distance of Mist and Veils. Then for a thousand years, or the rest of the afternoon, such a One spins in the Blazing Fire of Changes, embodying all the transformations, one after the other, and then beginning again, and then ending again, 86,000 times a second. Then such a one, if he is a man, is ready to love the woman Sahara; and such a one, if she is a woman, is ready to love the man who can put into song The Great Distance of Mist and Veils. Is it you who are waiting, Sahara, or is it I? ~ Leonard Cohen

Ironically your greatest spiritual asset is what appears to be your greatest obstacle: your obsession with yourself. Today we live in the age of individualism. – Richard Harvey ~ Richard Harvey

I'm trapped inside of me and I don't go out at all. I go to bed at eight o'clock at night. I never go out during the week. I'm in psychotherapy four days a week, pretty heavy commitment to it. ~ Howard Stern

When you're sick, who does the shopping or takes you to the doctor? Who do you talk to when you are upset?" In other words, who provides you with emotional and practical support? Some patients gave us surprising answers: "my dog" or "my therapist" – or "nobody". ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

If you criticize others, they don't dare to hurt you. If you are perfect, nobody can criticize you. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk