Best 148 quotes in «counseling quotes» category

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Survivors of trauma may have difficulty initiating relationships ...

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

The benefits of forgiveness are limitless.

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

The bond of love must be kept strong.

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

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.

their anxiety, justified or not, was genuine,

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 main priority of everyone surrounding a highly narcissistic person is to ensure that they are looking after themselves, maintaining their own mental and physical health and wellbeing, before looking after the narcissist.

The most reliable predictor of whether students liked a course, it turned out, was their answer to the question ‘‘Did the professor respect you?

The one trying to have the last word is rarely walking in the Word.

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

The loss of my child broke my spirit.

There is no debating that the effects of trauma experienced in childhood may have grave consequences.

There is no greater grief, than when a parent losses a child.

The principle that characters do not want to change applies to more than just fiction.

The separation of truth from reason is a dangerous game. I think ideas have to sink very deeply into a person's soul, into their being, before they can effect change.

There are times by you saying nothing, you tell me everything I need to know.

To take such a complex creature, on who was meant for God and is destroyed by sin, and attempt to understand how the development of that creature can be affected by hideous trauma is to attempt the impossible.

This is one of the difficulties and pleasures of studying the Inklings; Christians all, they offer, along with the expected 20th-century psychological explanations for behavior, unexpected spiritual ones.

Understanding what the narcissist finds threatening, entertaining and complimentary can be extremely helpful when deciding how best to “repackage” yourself- if this is what you want to do.

This is how God saved my marriage and I trust that He can work in your life too. Would you allow Him to?

Toxic relationships are like a good pasta that has been overcooked.

Trauma may be endured through a physiological or psychological threat to life or overall wellbeing.

Use fear as a counselor not a captor.

We do not have to have the correct answers to listen well. In fact, often the correct answers are a hindrance to listening well, for we become more anxious to give the correct answer than to hear.

Treat this crisis as practice for the next crisis.

We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—hourly and daily. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the task which it constantly sets for each individual.

We have been together for 40 years, married for 36. There have been three times in our relationship when we were unable to resolve an issue on our own. We used all the skill that we have and yet it was still unresolved. In those three times we sought professional help because there was a blind spot for each of us. The therapist was able to listen to both of us and help us come to a place of resolution that we both felt good about. I feel very grateful for that help. Most times we have been able to work things through on our own. Sometimes we can clear the issue in a matter of a few minutes, sometimes an hour and sometimes it can take several days. But we still keep working on it until we both say that we feel complete, we understand our own part and responsibility in the issue rather than simply blaming each other, are willing to go on, and there is an even deeper connection and sometimes even humor to the situation. In working each issue through to completion we have been able to retain a beautiful lightness in our relationship that we both cherish.

When a person in your life continuously displays to you they do not care, there comes a point where you may want to start believing them.

When Carl asked the Brices to bring their whole family to therapy, everyone in the family knew intuitively what that meant. Their whole world would be exposed: all its caring, its history, its anger, its anxiety. All in one place at once time, subject to the scrutiny and invasion of a stranger. And that was too much vulnerability. With its own unconscious wisdom, the family elected Don to stay home and test the therapists. Did we really mean everybody? Would we weaken and capitulate if they didn't bring Don? They had something to gain by the strategy. If we were hesitant and unconfident in our approach to their defiance, they would know that they could not trust us with the boiling cauldron of feeling which their family contained. If we were decisive and firm, they would guess that maybe we could handle the stresses which they intuitively knew had to be brought out into the open. One way or another, they had to find out how much power we had. In the meantime, they postponed facing that mysterious electricity, that critical mass, the whole family. Perhaps they thought they could be spared what Zorba called the full catastrophe.

Where were Christians before Freud? Up a tree? Were the bereft of all crucial knowledge about man's relationship to God and his neighbor? Was the church's counseling a hopeless, primitive, stone-age activity that should have disappeared with flint knives? Were Christians shut up to sinful, harmful living before the advent of psychotherapy? Did God withhold truth for living until our present age?

You cannot contain evil by shaming it, or making people feel guilty, but only by revealing it toward it is, and then seeing the good as better.

You have the chief spark of your health's fire, for you have true knowledge of the hand that guides the universe.

Unfortunately, there is no expiration date on grief

When emotions turn and stay sour, when thoughts become cynical and judgmental, good and compassionate treatment is on the line. Helpers who become sour and cynical tend to begrudge their high need clients for their neediness. There is a risk that helpers become too well-practiced at taking a bleak view of those they have avowed to assist. There is a temptation to begin to blame clients for their failure to improve. If treatment ends pre-maturely, with either a client never returning to treatment or a helper 'firing' them out of frustration, there is a tendency for the client to take the fall. Of course what we are talking about here are signs of burnout.

When you have deep insights about someone, you are being very matured by trying to help this person to fulfill his or her potentials by having a deep understanding about his or her strengths and weaknesses.

According to the norms of the hijras community, it's not necessary that one be castrated. Castration is your choice. If you do it, testosterone doesn't build up, femininity comes, but I have always said that castration is not the right way. A person should go for complete sexual reassignment surgery, hormone therapy, psychological counseling.

A coach, on the other hand [when compared to counseling], helps us assess the present so that we can operate more effectively in the future.