Quotes About Healing

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.

The therapist explained that often different parts of ourselves want different things, and if we silence the parts we find unacceptable, they'll find other ways to be heard.

Sometimes we imprison ourselves with a narrative of self-punishment. If

early experiences inform who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present

He let me tell my story in whatever way I needed to today.

You can have compassion without forgiving.

but the stages of change are such that you don't drop all of your defenses at the same time. Instead, you release them in layers, moving closer and closer to the tender core: your sadness, your shame.

You can't get through your pain by diminishing it,

But I assure him that he's not breaking down; he's breaking open.

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. And, of course, often what seem like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.

Are people really supposed to be done grieving after two months? Can't grief last six months or a year or, in some form or another, an entire lifetime?

This bereavement exclusion no longer exists, partly because of the timeline: Are people really supposed to be done grieving after two months? Can't grief last six months or a year or, in some form or another, an entire lifetime?

If we don't accept the notion that there's no redo, much as we try to get our parents or siblings or partners to fix what happened years ago, our pasts will keep us stuck.

losses tend to be multilayered. There's the actual loss (in my case, of Boyfriend), and the underlying loss (what it represents).

It's not that people want to get hurt again. It's that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this "repetition compulsion." Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar—but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.

What makes therapy challenging is that it requires people to see themselves in ways they normally choose not to. A therapist will hold up the mirror in the most compassionate way possible, but it's up to the patient to take a good look at that reflection

The therapy room seemed to be one of the only places left where two people sit in a room together for an uninterrupted fifty minutes. Despite its veil of professionalism, this weekly I-thou ritual is often one of the most human encounters that people experience.

There's a difference between pain and suffering. 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. ... If I'm clinging to the suffering so tightly, I must be getting something out of it. It must be serving some purpose for me.

They may not be able to imagine their depression lifting anytime soon, but they don't need to. Doing something prompts you to do something else, replacing a vicious cycle with a virtuous one. Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way.

Breakups are awful," Claire says, popping some grapes in her mouth. "But we'd be negligent if we didn't do them.

There's a difference between pain and suffering. 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.

There's a difference between pain and suffering," Wendell says. "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.

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 1 Idiots Chart note, John: Patient reports feeling "stressed out" and states that he is having difficulty sleeping and getting along

Sitting-with-you-in-your-pain is one of the rare experiences that people get in the protected space of a therapy room, but it's very hard to give or get outside of it—even for Jen, who is a therapist.