Quotes About Therapy

Psychiatric services - that is, the attempt to help a person overcome his emotional difficulties in living - are priceless if successful or worthless if they fail.

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.

Art is a form of catharsis emotional release, purging, cleansing, purifying.

It is painful to relive things that have caused emotional crises or whatever and find ways to express that musically.

While medicine creates material for writing, perhaps even more important is that it also creates a psychological and emotional need to write.

People who have addictive problems usually have some subset of emotional difficulties that causes them to abuse substances.

Emotional troubles are like landfill. Get them outside, and the air disintegrates them.

My psychiatrist prescribed a game of golf as an antidote to the feelings of euphoria I experience from time to time.

Among its many uses, dance/movement therapy aims to help people overcome trauma, often by nonverbally bringing the elements of the experience to the fore.

The majority of my patients consisted not of believers but of those who had lost their faith.

Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.

Above all, the clinician must not shake what little faith the patient has in himself.

There is simply no way that a year from now you're going to feel the way you feel today", a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven't really changed.

But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?

Karen Blixen wrote, in her Seven Gothic Tales, 'I know a cure for everything: salt water . . . in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.

I would have thought that you'd be tired of vomiting blood and going to therapy and the prospect of being a nervous wreck all your life. Trés masochistic.

For example, in treating patients, I find that it is typically useless to concentrate a lot on why a patient is in trouble; that tends to be academic masturbation and can go on for years with no beneficial results.

Trauma occurs when something happens that's too horrible for your brain to deal with, so you just store it away. Over time, the horrible thing, which is still there, starts coming out in a variety of ugly ways, causing mental problems that you don't even associate with the trauma because it happened so long ago.

COOKING WAS a form of meditation

Catrin Mattsson was doing all right. She was still screwed up and admitted it, but drugs and shrinks were moving her around to the place where she could live with herself. She'd become friends with his wife and daughter, and would occasionally drop around for dinner and a chat.

Oh, God," I said. "Thank you so very much for the mental image of Dad as a teenage sack of hormones. That's the sort of image that takes therapy to get rid of.

She used religion as a therapy for the ills of the world and herself, and she changed the religion to fit the ill. When she found that the theosophy she had developed for communication with a dead husband was not necessary, she cast about for some new unhappiness.

Take it's something kind of long—you start at the beginning and remember everything you can, right to the end. Every time it comes back you do that, from the first right through the finish. Pretty soon it'll get tired and pieces of it will go, and before long the whole thing will go." I tried it and it worked. I don't know whether the headshrinkers know this but they should.

A growing body of clinical observation has pointed to the conclusion that the family therapy must be oriented to the family as a whole.