Quotes About Therapy

Cognitively oriented therapists believe that we contribute to our own suffering by holding on to outdated beliefs and conclusions that keep us stuck in a particular story.

Why do we pay for psychotherapy when massages cost half as much?

hardest things about recovery is coming to terms with the fact that you can't trust your brain

If emotional pain or problems have cropped up in your life, you must insist on getting closure. Closure means you don't carry the problem or the pain. You address the issue, then you slam shut the book and put it away.

I don't want it to end, and so, as every therapist knows, the ego does not want an end to its "problems" because they are part of its identity. If no one will listen to my sad story, I can tell it to myself in my head, over and over, and feel sorry for myself, and so have an identity as someone who is being treated unfairly by life or other people, fate or God. It gives definition to my self-image, makes me into someone, and that is all that matters to the ego.

Debajo de la ira siempre hay dolor.

There is nothing wrong with psychoanalysis or finding out about your past as long as you don't confuse knowing about yourself with knowing yourself.

Reading, as he has explained to Trevelyan, is for him the purest imaginative therapy.

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.

We teach people that they upset themselves. We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.

I had used eclectic therapy and behavior therapy on myself at the age of 19 to get over my fear of public speaking and of approaching young women in public.

A bumptious, outgoing soul, Tillotson would later earn a footnote in literary history as the doctor whose electroshock therapy so traumatized Smith College junior Sylvia Plath that she attempted suicide shortly thereafter.

Happiness is the consciousness of growth. [...] If my definition has validity, it suggests that most people come to therapy because they sense their growth has been arrested. Certainly many patients look to therapy to reinstitute the growth process. (33)

It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.

The ego exists as a powerful force in Western man that cannot be dismissed or denied. The therapeutic goal is to integrate the ego with the body and its striving for pleasure and sexual fulfilment.

You will stay in therapy as long as you feel it is worth the time, effort and money you invest.

A tree grows taller to the degree that its roots go deeper and wider. If we wish to jump high, we must first bend close to the ground to get the impetus for the spring. Like a jet engine, we move forward by thrusting backward. In therapy each backward move provides the energy for the leap forward. Regression and progression go on side by side.

Crying is the most primitive mechanism the body has to relieve tension and pain.

Therapy takes us backward into a forgotten past, but this was not a safe and secure time, else we would not have emerged from it scarred by battle wounds and armoured in self-defense.

Many masochistic characters engage in the game of failure to cover an inner feeling of superiority.

If getting older has taught me one thing, it's that I feel so many conflicting things about so many different things, and to negate or stifle any of them doesn't make them go away. Emotions don't necessarily have a moral compass. Feelings can't be shamed into disappearing. Suppressing and ignoring them will only make them come back to bite you in the therapist's chair.

Prayer is the force as real as terrestrial gravity. As a physician, I have seen men, after all other therapy had failed, lifted out of disease and melancholy by the serene effort of prayer. Only in prayer do we achieve that complete and harmonious assembly of body, mind and spirit which gives the frail human reed its unshakable strength.

In the investigation of a neurotic style of life, we must always suspect an opponent, and note who suffers most because of the patient's condition. Usually this is a member of the family.

Every therapeutic cure, and still more, any awkward attempt to show the patient the truth, tears him from the cradle of his freedom from responsibility and must therefore reckon with the most vehement resistance.