Best 148 quotes in «counseling quotes» category

I squeeze my eyes shut and practice being not seen. I open one eye. “Well? Can you see me?” “Yes, Bob, I can see you.” She said my name. Bob. It makes me feel … well, seen. And heard. Like I’m a person. Or whatever I am. I’m glad I’m not invisible after all.

It has been a long road for us as family therapists to reach an understanding of just this phenomenon-the sense of the whole, the family system. While we could have explained the theory of meeting with the whole family to the Brices, at that anxious moment it would not have touched them. There are situations where, in the words of Franz Alexander, the woice of the intellent is too soft. The family needed to test us. They needed the experience of our being firm. As unpleasant as it was, our response must have reassured them. They knew, and we sensed, how difficult their situation was and how tumultuous it could become. They simply has to know that we could withstand the stress if they dared open it up.

Loss has no friend, no allies, no benefit to the human spirit.

It's not conversion 'therapy;' it's conversion brainwashing.

It turns out that up to 35 percent of people with bipolar disorder also have ADHD.

I've had a lot of therapists, so I've had the opportunity to approach my fear in many different ways. I've faced it head on and sideways and tried to tiptoe up behind it.

Love is divine force of existence.

It wasn't uncommon to hear rationalizations of this sort--the longing to transform bad deeds into good ones. No one ever wanted to hear that God didn't work that way; the Lord would never want a young woman to trade her body to follow a commandment. Sins couldn't be laundered by good results.

Love is not enough, you also need hope and faith for your marriage to stand firm.

Love, love again.

One must always forgive another's passion.

My traumatic experience was life changing

Often, our misunderstandings about love are born in disruptive family relationships, where someone was either one-up or one-down to an extreme. There is an appropriate and necessary difference in the balance of power between parents and young children, but in the best situations, there should be no power struggles by the time those children have become adults - just deep connection, trust, and respect between people who sincerely care about each other. In disruptive families, children are taught to remain one-up or one-down into adulthood. And this produces immature adults who either seek to dominate others (one-up) or who allow themselves to be dominated (one-down) in their relationships - one powerful and one needy, one enabling and one addicted, one decisive and one confused. In relationships with these people, manipulation abounds. Especially when they start to feel out of control.

most of us can only deny short-term pleasures because we see a realistic path between self-denial now and something better down the road.

Nobody should be in a position where they are suffering abuse at the hands of another, and if this is the case for you, stopping the abuse by leaving the situation is the only course of action to take.

Perfectionists are not all negative, miserable, unhappy and over controlling individuals

Part of the genius of (Nick) Sabin's system was that he understood that no matter the skill set, he was inheriting vulnerable kids from various backgrounds. For those times when they made poor decisions, as they invariably did, the safety net must be strong as far and wide as possible.

Perfectionism is adaptive if you are mindful of your humanhood.

People who are toxic are rarely aware of their own toxicity.

Perception and worldview are one's summary of life.

Perception is a vice with which each person is capable of perceiving his or her reality.

Psychopaths are rarely in touch with their own feelings, emotional well-being, and psychological needs.

Quietly, dispassionately, Russell would make sure the senator understood not only the reasons why he should take the same position on the bill that Russell was taking, but the reasons why he should take an opposing position.

Psychotherapy isn't a twentieth-century artifice imposed on nature, but the reinstatement of a natural healing process.

Real happiness provides you the confidence that you never thought was obtainable.

Real comfort is found when I understand that I am held in the hollow of the hand of the One who created and rules all things. The most valuable thing in my life is God's love, a love that no one can take away. When my identity is rooted in him, the storms of trouble will not blow me away. This is the comfort we offer people. We don't comfort them by saying things will work out. They may not. The people around them may change, but they may not. The Bible tells us again and again that everything around us is in the process of being taken away. God and his love are all that remain as cultures and kingdoms rise and fall. Comfort is found by sinking our roots into the unseen reality of God's ever-faithful love.

Reflective listening reinforces that you have been actively listening.

Respect your needs and limitations as you work through your grief and begin to heal

Relationships are such that if one person changes, the relationship changes.

Should you operate upon your clients as objects, you risk reducing them to less than human. Following the culture of appropriation and mastery your clients become a kind of extension of yourself, of your ego. In the appropriation and objectification mode, your clients’ well-being and success in treatment reflect well upon you. You “did” something to them, you made them well. You acted upon them and can take the credit for successful therapy or treatment. Conversely, if your clients flounder or regress, that reflects poorly on you. On this side of things the culture of appropriation and mastery says that you are not doing enough. You are not exerting enough influence, technique or therapeutic force. What anxiety this can breed for some clinicians! DBT offers a framework and tools for a treatment that allows clients to retain their full humanity. Through the practice of mindfulness, you can learn to cultivate a fuller presence to the moments of your life, and even with your clients and your work with them. This presence potentiates an encounter between two irreducible human beings, meeting professionally, of course, and meeting humanly. The dialectical framework, which embraces contradictions and gives you a way of seeing that life is pregnant with creative tensions, allows for your discovery of your limits and possibilities, gives you a way of seeing the dynamic nature of reality that is anything but sitting still; shows you that your identity grows from relationship with others, including those you help, that you are an irreducible human being encountering other irreducible human beings who exert influence upon you, even as you exert your own upon them. Even without clinical contrivance.

Teams that spend a lot of time learning the tricks of the trade will probably never really learn the trade.

Some people spend years in counselling trying to cope with being fucked up. I just move on. The fucked-upness always goes. The conventional wisdom is that you're running away, you should learn to cope with being fucked-up. I don't hold with that. Life is a dynamic rather than a static process, and when we don't change it kills us. It's not running away, it's moving on.

soon he’ll reach for her because she’s beautiful, and she’s his wife. If she cringes away from him because you’ve convinced her he isn’t good enough for her, how will that make him feel? If she submits to him out of obligation, how will that make her feel? What if she approaches him and later is ashamed of wanting her own husband because he isn’t good enough for her? It’ll be hard for a marriage to last under those conditions. This isn’t what you want for Susan. Forgive him. Accept him. You’ll be doing your daughter a favor.

Techniques are like tools: The more you have, the more options for getting a job done - but you have to know what you are building first.

Someone mentioned therapy to me once. I read a book instead. ~ Drew Stirling

Survivors of trauma may have difficulty initiating relationships ...

The benefits of forgiveness are limitless.

The benefit of personal growth and self-discovery is that we become better human beings with the strength to endure and carry on, and then we may experience something magical when we begin to reach out to others. We discover a feeling that is so rewarding and fulfilling: that fact that we can make a difference. Here is to your willingness to begin with making a difference with yourself! Michael James

The actions and emotional responses of others are not your responsibility. You cannot rescue people from themselves. This is for them to do. — André Chevalier

their anxiety, justified or not, was genuine,

The biblical counselor must always remember that the ROOT problem is deeper than skin; it is sin. The ultimate cure is not culture, but Christ.

The bond of love must be kept strong.

The fact that you do not trust your spouse or lover doesn’t necessarily mean that they are cheating on you; and the fact that you do doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t.

The counselor says that with more time and more surgeries, I will begin to feel normal again. She says this with a mouth that can still smile. It’s so easy to be reassuring when you have lips.

The Crucified is the One most traumatized. He has borne the World Trade Center. He has carried the Iraq war, the destruction in Syria, the Rwandan massacres, the AIDS crisis, the poverty of our inner cities, and the abused and trafficked children. He was wounded for the sins of those who perpetrated such horrors. He has carried the griefs and sorrows of the multitudes who have suffered the natural disasters of this world--the earthquakes, cyclones, and tsunamis. And he has borne our selfishness, our complacency, our love of success, and our pride. He has been in the darkness. He has known the loss of all things. He has been abandoned by his Father. He has been to hell. There is no part of any tragedy that he has not known or carried. He has done this so that none of us need face tragedy alone because he has been there before us and will go with u. and what he has done for us in Gethsemane and at Calvary he ask us to do as well. We are called to enter into relationships centered on suffering so that we might reveal in flesh and blood the nature of the Crucified One.

(The historian) "was able to disapprove without being astonished. She could reject and still understand.

The individual psychotherapy patient comes to the therapist with an almost automatic deference, a sense of dependence and compliance. The role pattern is old and established: the dependent child seeking guidance from a parent figure. There is no such traditional image for the family, no established pattern in which an entire family submits to the guidance of an individual. And the family structure is simply too powerful and too crucial for the members to go trustingly into an experience that threatens to change the entire matrix of their relationships. If the family therapist is to acquire that initial "authority figure" or "parent" role that is so necessary if therapy is to be more powerful than an ordinary social experience, he has to earn it.

The life of an "out-of-control" addict often resembles an amusement ride.

The loss of a child exploits the emotions of each individual it encounters.

The loss of my child broke my spirit.