Quotes About Healing

So what I say is this: You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn't one of them.

You're going to have to feel pain—everyone feels pain at times—but you don't have to suffer so much. You're not choosing the pain, but you're choosing the suffering.

Therapy elicits odd reactions because, in a way, it's like pornography. Both involve a kind of nudity.

I want some sign of the scar tissue left behind. I want to know, in the end, that I mattered.

There's a difference between pain and suffering,

Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of "feeling felt.

such as depression and anxiety, personality

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. —James Baldwin

dance allows our bodies to express our emotions in a way that words sometimes can't. When we dance, we express our buried feelings, talking through our bodies instead of our minds — and that can help us get out of our heads and to a new level of awareness. That's partly what dance therapy is about. It's another technique some therapists use.

So many of our destructive behaviors take root in an emotional void, an emptiness that calls out for something to fill it.

You can't get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me.

Because life happens and therapy helps us confront our demons when they pay a visit. And visit they will, because everyone has demons — big, small, old, new, quiet, loud.

When we dance, we express our buried feelings, talking through our bodies instead of our minds—and that can help us get out of our heads and to a new level of awareness

You can't get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can't change what you're denying or minimizing.

but you don't have to suffer so much. You're not choosing the pain, but you're choosing the suffering.

I know that often people create faulty narratives to make themselves feel better in the moment even though it makes them feel worse over time—and that sometimes, they need somebody else to read between the lines.

I point out to her that pain can be protective; staying in a depressed place can be a form of avoidance. Safe inside her shell of pain, she doesn't have to face anything, nor does she have to emerge into the world, where she might get hurt again.

the upside of being a therapist's child is that nothing gets shoved under the rug; the downside is that you'll be totally screwed up anyway).

we are asking forgiveness of others to avoid the harder work of forgiving ourselves.

I've sat with patients who describe their grief as "monstrous" and "unbearable"; one patient, quoting something she heard, said it made her feel "alternately numb and in excruciating pain.

know that therapy won't make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I'll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don't perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are.

As a therapist, I know a lot about pain, about the ways in which pain is tied to loss. But I also know something less commonly understood: that change and loss travel together. We can't have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same. To help John, I'm going to have to figure out what his loss would be,

The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.

The internet can be both a salve and an addiction, a way to block out pain (the salve) while simultaneously creating it (the addiction).