Quotes About Therapy

If we can actually decrease the failure rate from nine out of 10 drugs failing in clinical trials and instead have seven out of 10 instead failing, that is a major victory for drug discovery and for people having better therapy.

The idea is to improve somebody's day. That's how I've always viewed my job. I'm a distraction therapist. I make people's problems go away for just a little bit.

It's not like I didn't think I had any demons. I did, but I could name them- and even provide an address and telephone number for each. As far as I was concerned, those demons could go to therapy instead of me.

How do you tell the psychiatrists from the patients in the hospital? The patients get better and leave.

lulled by the doses of morphine and scopolamine administered

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind.

Chocolate may be cheaper than a psychiatrist, but the latter doesn't generally adhere to your ass for the rest of your natural life.

if i dont write to empty my mind, i go mad

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.

don't think anything really heals trauma. You just find some kind of narrative to learn to cohabit with it. I suppose now is the time to admit to you, Dear Diary, I never had a therapist. I always imagined that if I did she would coax me to start a journal.

And you didn't ask why she was in therapy?" "Who asks people why they go to see a psychologist? It's not right to ask such things.

Being a therapist is like being a detective looking for clues to solve a mystery, to find the reasons underlying the "presenting problem," which in this case is the shoplifting

Matthew figures it must be pretty horrible to need therapy if it makes people so sad.

But many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can't mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You'll also mute the joy.

If you stay in therapy," I say softly, "you might have to let go of the hope for a better childhood—but that's only so that you can create a better adulthood.

every decision they make is based on two things: fear and love. Therapy strives to teach you how to tell the two apart.

Therapy elicits odd reactions because, in a way, it's like pornography. Both involve a kind of nudity. Both have the potential to thrill. And both have millions of users, most of whom keep their use private.

One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current predicaments, because once they realize that they can (and must) construct their own lives, they're free to generate change.

A supervisor once likened doing psychotherapy to undergoing physical therapy. It can be difficult and cause pain, and your condition can worsen before it improves, but if you go consistently and work hard when you're there, you'll get the kinks out and function so much better.

I think of something else Wendell once said: "The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change." It was a paraphrase of something he'd read that had resonated with him both personally and as a therapist, he told me, because it was a theme that informed nearly every person's struggles.

Typically, a patient might have a difficult session about a childhood trauma, then come in the next week and announce that therapy is no longer needed.

Half my life is over, I would say, seemingly out of nowhere, in our very first session—and Wendell would jump right on this. He was picking up where my internship supervisor had left off years earlier. You won't get today back. And the days were flying by.

Unfortunately, sometimes people leave just as their symptoms lift, not realizing (or perhaps knowing all too well) that the work is just beginning and that staying will require them to work even harder.

Changing our relationship to the past is a staple of therapy. But we talk far less about how our relationship to the future informs the present too. Our notion of the future can be just as powerful a roadblock to change as our notion of the past. In