Best 126 quotes in «psychotherapy quotes» category

In simple, the past is a time gone by and no longer exists in the present moment, but we choose to allow this past to occupy our minds, our bodies and our very existence.

Maybe I needed that somebody else could cry over my pain, to become able to cry over it myself. Nobody ever cried or was moved when I suffered as a child. (Lisa)

In bottom-up approaches [to processing trauma], the body's sensation and movement are the entry points and changes in sensorimotor experience are used to support self-regulation, memory processing, and success in daily life. Meaning and understanding emerge from new experiences rather than the other way around. Through bottom-up interventions, a shift in the somatic sense of self in turn affects the linguistic sense of self.

In one sense, all causes of a problem are 'current', although many of them represent the residue of earlier learning or unprocessed memories.

I must assume that knowing is better than not know, venturing better than not venturing; and that magic and illusion, however rich, however alluring, ultimately weaken the human spirit. I take with deep seriousness Thomas Hardy's words, 'If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

Indeed, analyst Robert Bak calls orgasm "the perfect promise between love and death," the means by which we repatriate separation of mother and child through the momentary extinction of the self. It is true that few of us consciously climb into a lover's bed in the hope of finding our mommy between the sheets. But the sexual loss of our separateness (which may scare people so badly they cannot have orgasm) brings us pleasure, in part, because it unconsciously repeats our first connection.

In such a self-centered society, many people have gone to the extreme of narcissism—being solely concerned about their own personal well-being and agendas while excluding and exploiting others. Narcissism is not only epidemic but is also a pandemic of our times that has been normalized and accepted. Self-serving, narcissistic people are incapable and unwilling to love due to a lack of authentic self and love for one’s self and others.” — Sepideh Irvani, PsyD

In the cult, the people in power dictate what cult members are to do. Children raised in cults are systematically stripped of their own autonomous power and forced to feel powerful only in the destructive context allowed by the cult, and always under the power of the leader. Ritual abuse survivors have had to learn to be outer oriented - to perceive what is expected of them and do that, whether it is healthy for them or not. When a therapist creates a context in which he or she is the leader, and the client is to listen, learn, and follow what the therapist says, the therapist has inadvertently replicated the power system of the cult. That is not to say that the therapist has no power; the therapist has a lot of power, but the power the therapist has resides in authority based upon his or her expertise, knowledge, training and sensitivity. The point is to use this authority in a way in which the client can also begin to feel his or her own authority, and begin to develop a healthy feeling of power. The word used quite often now is "empowerment." How do you empower a client?

I recently consulted to a therapist who felt he had accomplished something by getting his dissociative client to remain in her ANP throughout her sessions with him. His view reflects the fundamental mistake that untrained therapists tend to make with DID and DDNOS. Although his client was properly diagnosed, he assumed that the ANP should be encouraged to take charge of the other parts at all times. He also expected her to speak for them—in other words, to do their therapy. This denied the other parts the opportunity to reveal their secrets, heal their pain, or correct their childhood-based beliefs about the world. If you were doing family therapy, would it be a good idea to only meet with the father, especially if he had not talked with his children or his spouse in years? Would the other family members feel as if their experiences and feelings mattered? Would they be able to improve their relationships? You must work with the parts who are inside of the system. Directly.

Ironically your greatest spiritual asset is what appears to be your greatest obstacle: your obsession with yourself. Today we live in the age of individualism. – Richard Harvey

Is suffering in a dream real? Within the dream it sure as hell is! Dukkha is real, seemingly the only reality, while I am dreaming. Once I wake up, however, where is dukkha? What happens when I wake up? I awaken to the fact that the whole complex—for example, in a nightmare, the scary figure chasing me and myself scared—was all just a dream. Everything in the dream, including myself in the dream, was just a dream. The entire dream world was just a dream, including rivers and mountains, space-time, life-death, health-illness. Now awake, it is all gone without remainder.

It has been fashionable in some psychiatric and lay circles to blame the mother for whatever goes wrong in development. [...] If blame must be assessed it should be placed on the human condition which requires such prolonged dependence on one individual for development to take place. This makes the child extraordinarily vulnerable to the idiosyncrasies of that person (the mother). On the other hand, the prolonged dependence on this relationship also provides the potential for the richness of the human personality. It is a mistake, in my judgment, in psychotherapy to encourage or side with the patient's hostility to the mother. The patient has to become aware of and express it in therapy in order to grow but whatever the source of this hostility is in the past -- be it an actual memory or a fantasy to rationalize a feeling state -- the problem is now the patient's responsibility and he must work it out.

It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say "This foolishness") any time I need to. When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true but just put on, I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would have been easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I'm guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days. Three weeks later Sybil reaffirmed her belief in the existence of her other selves in a letter to Miss Updyke, the school nurse of undergraduate days.

It seems like someone new is here?" I nodded. "Is it okay to talk to you?" I nodded again. "Are you the one who doesn't like the grocery store? "Yes," came the same soft voice. "What is it about the grocery store?" "It's not the store; it's the people. We get scared that some big person is going to hurt us. So we don't let her go places where there are lots of people." I felt dizziness in my head and then a different voice—a little stronger but still young—came out: "And then there's all that noise. We won't let her go in places with too much noise." "Is there someone new here?" "Yes." Is it okay if we talk together?" "Yes." "What's the problem with the noise?" "It was always noisy. A lot of yelling and crying. There was too much going on." "Is that the same kind of problem, the other part has?" "Yes. It's too hard for her to watch everyone to figure out who is going to hurt us next." "Don't you think Olga can take care of you?" "We want to think that, but we aren't sure." "Why is that?" "Because she couldn't take care of us before." "Do you all know what year it is?" "1968?" "Oh, I see. No, it's 1996, and Olga is big now. You all live inside her, and she has learned about you. She is also learning how to stop people from hurting you. She is strong and powerful. Were you there when she stopped the woman in the office from yelling at you?" It's 1996? She's big?" I paused to let the information sink in to all the parts that were listening. "She stopped people from yelling at us?" "Yes." Dr. Summer watched and waited. Home had been so chaotic. I had to watch Popi, Mike, Alex, and my mom very carefully. But I don't live there anymore. I'm grown up now.

It's not ideas, nor vision, nor tools that truly matter in therapy. If you debrief patients at the end of therapy about the process, what do they remember? Never the ideas—it's always the relationship.

It wasn't a sign of weakness to tell what happened to me. I feel guilt no longer, only regret. The other emotions are coming around too. How much further do I need to go? I'm not sure, but there is comfort in the fact that I am in the hands of expert guides, both in the doctor's office and at home with Sue.

I wanted to go to a few therapy sessions and be back to normal. As I saw it, the panic attacks were the problem. What I really wanted was to stop having them. I genuinely thought I could do that. I didn't want to think about the past.

I wish I had a magic wand to make things better, but therapy doesn't work that way.

One of my teachers at the psychoanalytic institute where I trained used to say, only half humorously, that 'the most important prerequisite for a vocation as a psychotherapist is a depressed mother'; based on my history, I think that a suffering but inaccessible father and a damaged sibling should be added to the list of qualifications.

Perfectionism is adaptive if you are mindful of your humanhood.

Psychotherapy is the cornerstone of a multidisciplinary treatment plan for dissociative disorders and other trauma-related disorders and must be incorporated into the interventional strategy; whether the mode of psychotherapy is supportive or psychodynamic in nature, or some combination of various approaches, the treatment must be based on the quality and acuity of the patient’s symptoms.

¿Sabe lo que es saber que, cuando muera, pueden pasar días o semanas sin que se descubra mi cuerpo, antes de que el olor fétido atraiga a algún extraño? Intento consolarme. A veces, cuando me siento más solo, hablo conmigo mismo.No demasiado alto, porque temo mi propio eco vacío.

Scientism proposes that scientific investigation is nothing more than the accumulation of ‘facts’. The question thus arises: what actually are ‘facts’? They are not simply existing there, waiting for scientific investigation. Only a little phenomenological reflection reveals that they show themselves as facts because of the construction of, or at least the correlation with, what is usually called mind. Mind thus is a fundamental fact. It is psychology that reveals this truth.

Sigmund Freud founded virtually all of psychotherapy on introspection, so one would expect him to be able to explain his own feelings, no matter how primitive. In one area, however, he baffled himself: He could not explain group loyalty. He wrote that he was “irresistibly” bonded to Jews and Jewishness, by “many obscure and emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as by a clear consciousness of inner identity, a deep realization of sharing the same psychic structure.” Freud was writing about powerful feelings of kinship to an entire people. These are the feelings of nationalists and fanatics—and of ordinary people—and do not lend themselves to precise analysis. By refusing to take seriously that which they cannot analyze, social scientists misunderstand how real societies work.

Someone's got to do some more research, but I would really like to know: when a CBT therapist really gets distressed, who does he go see?

...some patients resist the diagnosis of a post-traumatic disorder. They may feel stigmatized by any psychiatric diagnosis or wish to deny their condition out of a sense of pride. Some people feel that acknowledging psychological harm grants a moral victory to the perpetrator, in a way that acknowledging physical harm does not.

Somewhere here I want to bring in a learning which has been most rewarding, because it makes me feel so deeply akin to others. I can word it this way. What is most personal is most general. There have been times when in talking with students or staff, or in my writing, I have expressed myself in ways so personal that I have felt I was expressing an attitude which it was probable no one else could understand, because it was so uniquely my own…. In these instances I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. This has helped me to understand artists and poets as people who have dared to express the unique in themselves.

The "apparently normal personality" - the alter you view as "the client" You should not assume that the adult who function in the world, or who presents to you, week after week, is the "real" person, and the other personalities are less real. The client who comes to therapy is not "the" person; there are other personalities to meet and work with. When DID was still officially called MPD, the "person" who lived life on the outside was known as the "host" personality, and the other parts were known as alters. These terms, unfortunately, implied that all the parts other than the host were guests, and therefore of less importance than the host. They were somehow secondary. The currently favored theory of structural dissociation (Nijenhuis & Den Boer, 2009; van der Hart, Nijenhuis, & Steele, 2006), which more accurately describes the way personality systems operate, instead distinguishes between two kinds of states: the apparently normal personality, or ANP, and the emotional personality, or EP, both of which could include a number of parts. p21

The first thing you need to know if you are a survivor is that parts of you have probably been trained to create a variety of symptoms and behaviours. Abusers actually train child parts to cut the body, to make other parts cut, to attempt suicide, to create flashbacks by releasing pieces of visual or auditory memories, to create body memories of pain or electroshock, and to create depression, terror, anxiety, and despair by releasing the emotional components of memories to the rest of the personality system. The front person and most of the rest of the system do not know that this is the source of these feelings and behaviours. p126

The loss of my child broke my spirit.

The mental health system is filled with survivors of prolonged, repeated childhood trauma. This is true even though most people who have been abused in childhood never come to psychiatric attention. To the extent that these people recover, they do so on their own.[21] While only a small minority of survivors, usually those with the most severe abuse histories, eventually become psychiatric patients, many or even most psychiatric patients are survivors of childhood abuse.[22] The data on this point are beyond contention. On careful questioning, 50-60 percent of psychiatric inpatients and 40-60 percent of outpatients report childhood histories of physical or sexual abuse or both.[23] In one study of psychiatric emergency room patients, 70 percent had abuse histories.[24] Thus abuse in childhood appears to be one of the main factors that lead a person to seek psychiatric treatment as an adult.[25]

The most important study is the practical and sincere study of one’s self: Know Thyself. It is more important to know the truth about one's self than trying to find out the truth about heaven and hell." —Sepideh Irvani, PsyD

There are a great number of ego defenses, and the combinations and circumstances in which we use them reflect on our personality. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum of its ego defenses, which are constantly shaping, upholding, protecting, and repairing it. The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home.

[T]here are more and more Western scholars who [...] strive to experience Buddhism directly in the Eastern countries where it has long been a central element of cultural tradition. They must be clearly distinguished from those Westerners who, unable or unwilling to confront themselves with their own Western tradition, frivolously escape to any different world.

The redirection of orientation and attention can be as simple as asking clients to become aware of a "good" or "safe" feeling in the body instead of focusing on their physical pain or elevated heart rate. Or the therapist can ask clients to experiment with focusing attention away from the traumatic activation in their body and toward thoughts or images related to their positive experiences and competencies, such as success in their job. This shift is often difficult for clients who have habituated to feeling pulled back repetitively into the most negative somatic reminders of their traumatic experiences. However, if the therapist guides them to practice deeply immersing themselves in a positive somatic experience (i.e., noting the changes in posture, breath, and muscular tone that emerge as they remember their competence), clients will gain the ability to reorient toward their competencies. They experience their ability to choose to what they pay attention and discover that it really is possible to resist the somatic claims of the past.

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

To be aware is to be responsible. In Gestalt therapy, this word is used in two ways. First, we are responsible if we are aware of what is happening to us. To take responsibility means, in part, to embrace our existence as it occurs. The other and related meaning of responsibility is that we own up to our acts, impulses, and feelings. We identify with them, accepting all of what we do as ours. These are distinct and different meanings. We are responsible for things we clearly do - for being angry, or obstinate, or irresponsible; for breaking dishes and giving gifts. We are responsible as well for the injuries inflicted on us, and the presents we receive, for what is done to us. Here we are responsible for our part in the event - for the pain we feel and the taking of the gift. When it rains, we get wet. While we didn't make it rain, we are responsible for being wet. We are also responsible for our middle mode experiences, for the things we participate in and give ourselves to. We do not make ourselves love, or hate, but they are the feelings we have. We are responsible for having those feelings, not because we caused them to be, but because they are our existence at this moment.

To psychotherapists, I say, don't just leave us abandoned because you think you don't know enough to help us, or because the world doesn't believe in what we went through, or because our trauma is too awful to hear about.

...two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on getting people to stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the other based on getting people to practice gratitude.

We are all the product of our past and have to live with our memories and personality they cannot be erased.

We therapists often make inaccurate assumptions about people living with DID and DDNOS. They often appear to be “just like us,” so we often assume their experience of life reflects our own. But this is profoundly untrue. It results in a communication gap, and, as a consequence, treatment errors. Because the dominant culture is one of persons with a single sense of self, most with multiple “selves” have learned to hide their multiplicity and imitate those who are singletons (that is, have a single, non-fragmented personality). Therapists who do not understand this sometimes describe their clients' alters without acknowledging their dissociation, saying only that they have different “moods.” In overlooking dissociation, this description fails to recognize the essential truth of such disorders, and of the alters. It was difficult for me to comprehend what life was like for my first few dissociative clients.

What people don't understand about depression is how much it hurts. It's like your brain is convinced that it's dying and produces an acid that eats away at you from the inside, until all that's less is a scary hollowness. Your mind fills with dark thoughts; you become convinced that your friends secretly hate you, you're worthless, and then there's no hope. I never got so low as to consider ending it all, but I understand how that can happen to some people. Depression simply hurts too much.

When Clients say they're wrestling with depression, what I choose to hear is that they're in a state of decompression -- in a deserved limbo, taking a little time to recover from a something that set them back... I don't see the hopelessness of the here-and-now. I see the hope in what's to come.

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?

While professionals and patients can be blamed for 'believing' in an illness or having one, patients also report problems when they are believed. Some professionals, they commented, have worryingly simplistic ideas of 'integration'. Ignoring the separately named alters in effect offers a psychic death sentence rather than aiding integration. If anything it can create a compliant false-self 'main person' who answers to [his or] her name and keeps all other 'states' in silent terror internally.

With the subject of work off limits, they lapsed into a silence they couldn't recover from, leaving Joanna to wonder how she could feel so lonely in the company of the man she loved.

In our normal, everyday forms of consciousness, we suffer form what [William] James calls a 'lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self.' Insofar as the self that encases the seed of a wider consciousness like a husk is seen as 'conventionally healthy,' cracking it open to uncover the higher part leaves the individual exposed to neurosis; but then, as James reminds us and as Jung himself knew, this may well be the chief condition for receptivity to these higher realms.

Nita: I think I overdid the vulnerability stuff in this last letter. and that’s why I’m having an anxiety attack. Howard: With the vulnerability comes the possibility that you’ll be betrayed. Now that you’ve laid yourself wide open, I am the agent of this betrayal? It’s not my style. Nita: I’ve thought it wasn't other people’s style, too.

One of the most frightening aspects of this alleged technology is the possibility of mind control by “remote control,” that is, through such technology as microwaves and radio waves. There are many stories about this, coming primarily from survivors, although we do know from a variety of reliable websites and mainstream news that such technology is being developed, or at least the technological groundwork laid. Once again, however, we do not know whether this was in place when today's survivors were programmed. It is difficult at this point to determine how much of this is genuine, and how much comes from false beliefs deliberately induced to make survivors feel powerless, much like the “one huge and invincible cult” of whose existence survivors convinced therapists twenty years ago. I know that one of my mind control survivor clients was convinced of technological monitoring during a psychotic period several years ago, but as he healed he discarded such beliefs, along with many other bizarre ones in favor of recognizing that he had been abused by real human beings whose identity he knew. If some of this remote control it is genuine, we may need to develop technological means to combat it. However, we should not be intimidated. Even if “voices” are induced in the head by remote control rather than through alters doing jobs, survivors can learn to disobey such voices just as they do those of alters. Competent and compassionate therapy for the dissociation can help survivors to heal. Meanwhile, there are numerous survivors whose mind control is of the kind that can be treated through psychotherapy. p205-206

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