Quotes About Healing

See, alcoholism is exactly like bubble gum. You know when you blow a bubble and it bursts, some of the gum sticks to you chin? What's the only thing that gets the bubble gum off your chin? Bubble gum. You have to take the bubble gum out of your mouth and press it against the gum on your chin and it'll pick it up. Only an alcoholic can treat another alcoholic. Only other alcoholics can get you sober.

I'm an alcoholic who doesn't (and doesn't want to) drink anymore so I exist in a state of never-ending micro-addictions that reveal themselves in the form of obsessions.

While there are some things from which you never heal, so be it. The truth about healing is that you don't need to heal to be whole.

Loss creates a greater overall surface area within a person. You expand as a result of it. Though it may very well feel like the opposite.

Normal people hadn't been molested or reared by a clinically psychotic mother, an alcoholic father, or a perversely mad psychiatrist who wore a Santa hat and performed toilet bowl readings. These were normal people, and I lived among them now. I thought, This must be what I want.

Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to "getting over" one's past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess. Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling.

You must never allow something that happened to you to become a morbidly treasured heirloom that you carry, show people, put back in its black velvet pouch and then tuck back into your jacket where you can keep it close to your heart.

Scars are nothing to hate, they are nothing to deny. They serve as our proof of what we've survived, and there is nothing more beautiful than to have survived something.

It does not matter whether or not those responsible for harming you ever understand what they did, care about what they did, or apologize for it. It does not matter. All that matters is your ability to stop fondling the experience with your brain. Which you can do right now. A good therapist can help by preventing you from spending time wallowing in the past and instead focus on organizing your future.

Exactly! What you are doing is 'telling on your addict.

The truth about healing is that you don't need to heal to be whole. By whole, I mean damaged, missing pieces of who you were, your heart—missing what feels like some of your most important parts. Yet not missing any part of you at all. Being, in truth, larger than you were before. Because all of us are made not only of what we have but of what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition.

When you have to face up to the fact that marriage to the man you love is really over, that's very tough, sheer agony. In that kind of harrowing situation, I always go away and cut myself off from the world. Also, I sober up immediately when there is genuine bad news in my life; I never face it with alcohol in my brain. I just rented a house in Palm Springs and sat there and just suffered for a couple of weeks. I suffered there until I was strong enough to face it.

My first therapist was a psychiatric resident assigned to me by University Health Services when I was a third-year law student. I was looking for help dealing with a breakup that at the time felt tragic but that now seems like that moment when you look up from your phone just in time to avoid being plowed down by a city bus.

The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought--while his hand moved rapidly--what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have not discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words.

He thought--while his hand moved rapidly--what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier.

It's a rare hurt that can stand under the advice, help, and sympathy generated by upwards of thirty people that care. Callahan loses a lot of his regulars. After they've been coming around long enough, they find they don't need to drink any more.

He argued—in a line for which Jefferson would get the dubious credit, speaking of a different revolution—that "civil wars in the political systems, like bleeding to the human body, or thunderstorms in due season, are salutary.

The fact that at the core of emotional disorders is the birth trauma, a process of life and death, explains the intensity and depth that otherwise would be incomprehensible.

We want to be women who advance. The kingdom of God is advancing, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. Don't you want to advance along with it? Don't you want to help it to advance? And don't you want to advance into the deeper realms of the heart of God? Advance into more healing, more deliverance, more intimacy, more life? Fear makes us retreat. Love causes it to advance.

The voice of Shame says, I basically hate me; I need to get rid of me. The voice of Discipline says, I've got to fix me, because me is not good. God says, I love you; let me restore you. I like that one best. 

The voice of Shame says, I basically hate me; I need to get rid of me. The voice of Discipline says, I've got to fix me, because me is not good. God says, I love you; let me restore you.

Offenses that are held on to lead to death.

He calls us to gaze not on our brokenness but on our Healer. He says, "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith" (Heb. 12:2). We move toward what we focus on.

God invites us to join him in the process whereby he heals our inner world so he can transform our outer world.