Quotes About Therapy

Still, children seem like empty vessels who pick up on everything and are so affected by their surroundings. I mean, that's what they tell me in therapy and it seems to be true. Stuff I don't consciously remember affects my behavior every day. I see that now

Still, for all the therapy I had, none of it ever really fixed that feeling of torn-apartness inside of me. I learned how to express myself, that was all. And, for whatever reason, identifying the root cause of my problem - like fear of abandonment or something - didn't change a goddamn thing. I could see quite clearly why I acted a certain way, but that wouldn't make me any different. I sought out craziness. I was attracted to it. No therapy could take that away.

Basically I've just really been trusting in the process here. I want it to work. I want to change and I actually have hope that it might be possible. A lot of this is due to some of the more intense alternative therapies they offer here, like Somatic Experiencing. Through these sessions I've been able to recall events from my childhood that I had completely suppressed from my memory.

And, for whatever reason, identifying the root cause of my problem - like fear of abandonment or something - didn't change a goddamn thing. I could see quite clearly why I acted a certain way, but that wouldn't make me any different. I sought out craziness. I was attracted to it. No therapy could take that away.

What people discover about themselves during therapy may not lead to peace or to happiness. Indeed, it often doesn't. But it can lead to the possibility of turning what is unbearable into what is bearable, of taking responsibility for yourself and having a degree of control over your own life.

Frieda smiled. "It's lesson number one in therapist school," she said. "It's the way of avoiding being put on the spot. So that whatever your patient says to you, you just say, 'What do you mean by that?' And then you're off the hook.

Can we treat animal behavior with the same medicines, therapies, and approaches we use on humans? To me, the answer is an obvious yes. You could effectively teach medical students brain anatomy using the brains of dogs. Transferring what you learned about dog brains to knowledge of human brain anatomy would be a breeze.

Can we treat animal behavior with the same medicines, therapies, and approaches we use on humans? To me, the answer is an obvious yes. You

You have to step away from other people's craziness at some point. I learnt that in therapy. You have to stop owning it on their behalf. Even when they're your parents.

For someone grieving, cook with chives, ginger, coriander, and rosemary. Theirs is the pungent flavor, which draws grief up and out of the body and releases it into the air.

Painting calmed the chaos that shook my soul.

being unable to initiate and maintain satisfying and enduring relationships; being unable to say no and stick to it; and other negative behaviors and attitudes with others as well as with the self-aborbed parent. Some try to work through their issues or concerns with mental health professionals, but find that it is just about impossible to adequately describe what their formative years were like.

Did I need medication? Or did I need someone to talk to? Someone, that is, who would do more than charge the going rate for nodding and whip out a prescription pad before the first fifty minutes were up. Was I physiologically depressed? At an innate biochemical disadvantage? Or was reaching for the pad just the way things were done because the doc had been well patronized by the drug reps and had plenty of samples in her file cabinet?

ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.

Laughter is a powerful way to tap positive emotions

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history.

Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to "relive" or "reenact" them, especially if they were traumatic.

To my mind, every emergency room should have a low-intensity laser for people with stroke or head trauma. This therapy would be especially important for head injuries, because there is no effective drug therapy for traumatic brain injury. Uri Oron has also shown that low-intensity laser light can reduce scar formation in animals that have had heart attacks; perhaps lasers should be used in emergency rooms for cardiac

When such patterns are triggered in therapy, it gives the patient a chance to look at them and change them, for as we saw in chapter 4, "Acquiring Tastes and Loves," positive bonds appear to facilitate neuroplastic change by triggering unlearning and dissolving existing neuronal networks, so the patient can alter his existing intentions.

and in one moment, his completely conscious brain turned all his pain off. If only he could learn how to flip that switch for his patients!

had shown that patients who had been paralyzed for twenty years were capable of making late recoveries with brain-stimulating exercises.

Psychotherapy works by going deep into the brain and its neurons and changing their structure by turning on the right genes. Psychiatrist Dr. Susan Vaughan has argued that the talking cure works by 'talking to neurons,' and that an effective psychotherapist or psychoanalyst is a 'microsurgeon of the mind' who helps patients make needed alterations in neuronal networks.

Thus he might start working on a part of the body farthest from where the pupil thought the problem was, often on the opposite side. He might begin to gently move a toe, far from a painful upper body part. If he felt a restriction, he would never force it. What he discovered was that the brain would sense this relaxation in the toe, and the person would become immersed in that image of relaxed movement, which would soon generalize, so that that entire side of the body relaxed.

THE SECOND SPEAKER, ANITA SALTMARCHE, focused specifically on studies of light therapy used for traumatic brain injury, stroke, and depression.