Quotes About Therapy

Sometimes I wonder, Who am I to make the important decisions in my own life? Am I really qualified for this? Everyone wages this internal battle to some degree: Child or adult? Safety or freedom? But no matter where people fall on those continuums, every decision they make is based on two things: fear and love. Therapy strives to teach you how to tell the two apart.

In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you've told yourself about who you are so that you aren't trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you've been telling yourself about your life.

Every day, our patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves. If they can see themselves more clearly through our reflections, we can see ourselves more clearly through theirs.

You are not the best person to talk to you about you right now.

transition back to the world outside? The second people felt alone, I noticed, usually in the space between things — leaving a therapy session, at a red light, standing in a checkout line, riding the elevator — they picked up devices and ran away from that feeling. In a state of perpetual distraction, they seemed to be losing the ability to be with others and losing their ability to be with themselves.

As the late psychotherapist John Weakland famously said, "Before successful therapy, it's the same damn thing over and over. After

Sitting-with-you-in-your-pain is one of the rare experiences that people get in the protected space of a therapy room,

Because therapists know that at first, each patient is simply a snapshot, a person captured in a particular moment. It's like a photo of you taken from an unfortunate angle and with a sour expression on your face. There might also be a photo in which you're glowing, caught opening a present or mid-laugh with a lover. Both are you in that fraction of time, and neither is you in your entirety.

Often people talk about suicide not because they want to be dead but because they want to end their pain.

Of course, therapists aren't persuaders. We can't convince an anorexic to eat. We can't convince an alcoholic not to drink. We can't convince people not to be self-destructive, because for now, the self-destruction serves them. What we can do is try to help them understand themselves better and show them how to ask themselves the right questions until something happens — either internally or externally — that leads them to do their own persuading.

Therapists talk a lot about how the past informs the present—how our histories affect the ways we think, feel, and behave and how at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past. 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.

Therapists will be supportive, but our support is for your growth, not for your low opinion of your partner.

When pressed to tell people how I got myself into my current nepotism-gone-bad situation, I like to describe it as a mini-breakdown. The prefix makes all the difference. It makes it sound more like a vacation than a condition best treated with medication and art therapy.

Was it cathartic or a form of self-torture?

Chocolate is cheaper than therapy, and you don't need an appointment.

My imagination needs therapy.

My imagination needs therapy.

Post-traumatic stress disorder from life-threatening injuries

do you know the difference between a therapist and a terrorist?" "No," I replied. "Well," he said, "you can negotiate with a terrorist.

I used to tell John my dreams, not to understand them but to get rid of them, clear my mind for the day.

Garden work clears the mind.

It's like the psychiatrists themselves are buying into that stupid belief that therapy is something to hide.

I relax by taking my bicycle apart and putting it back together again.

Anger is the first step toward emotional healing.