Best 3064 quotes in «psychology quotes» category

In studying the psychological significance of a religious or political doctrine, we must first bear in mind that the psychological analysis does not imply a judgement concerning the truth of the doctrine one analyzes. This latter question can be decided only in terms of the logical structure of the problem itself.

Intelligence rarely trumps human nature.

Interest - a ruling beast. Therein lies the key to convincing man.

In terms of monetary behavior, there are two types of people in this Earth: those who save and those who spend.

Internal affairs is largely a government cover up department for badly behaved police officers.

In the 1980s, research on post traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans was regarded as important, noble, and useful. When the same researchers looked at the same problem in children who had been sexually abused, a tremendous controversy ensued a controversy that persists to this day. There were those who disputed the extent and severity of the sexual abuse that had been uncovered.

In the area of linguistics, there are major language groups: Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, English, Portuguese, Greek, German, French, and so on. Most of us grow up learning the language of our parents and siblings, which becomes our primary or native tongue. Later, we may learn additional languages but usually with much more effort. These become our secondary languages. We speak and understand best our native language. We feel most comfortable speaking that language. The more we use a secondary language, the more comfortable we become conversing in it. If we speak only our primary language and encounter someone else who speaks only his or her primary language, which is different from ours, our communication will be limited. We must rely on pointing, grunting, drawing pictures, or acting out our ideas. We can communicate, but it is awkward. Language differences are part and parcel of human culture. If we are to communicate effectively across cultural lines, we must learn the language of those with whom we wish to communicate. In the area of love, it is similar. Your emotional love language and the language of your spouse may be as different as Chinese from English. No matter how hard you try to express love in English, if your spouse understands only Chinese, you will never understand how to love each other. My friend on the plane was speaking the language of “Affirming Words” to his third wife when he said, “I told her how beautiful she was. I told her I loved her. I told her how proud I was to be her husband.” He was speaking love, and he was sincere, but she did not understand his language. Perhaps she was looking for love in his behavior and didn’t see it. Being sincere is not enough. We must be willing to learn our spouse’s primary love language if we are to be effective communicators of love.

In the Christian view, sex was an unclean act. Ask Christians, "Did Jesus have sex?" and watch their nonverbal response. Or ask, "Did Peter enjoy sex with his wife?" or "Did Mary and Martha, 'whom Jesus loved,' ever enjoy a good orgasm?" Such questions do not compute in the Christian mind. The Christian founders are seen as asexual.

In the distorting mirror of your mind, an angel can seem to have a devil's face.

In their early thirties, the most career-invested women and men in the Illinois Valedictorian Project are those who have found deep personal meaning in vocations. Those qualities and conditions that keep students centered on work are different than those that made them high school valedictorian.

In the realm of Greater Understanding, the workshop is dismantled after the work is finished.

In the Reintegration System, a problem or unwanted state of mind is viewed as a distinct part of the personality and reintegrated as such into the unity of one’s being. Every seemingly challenging part of our personality was initially part of the highest intention for our being. It is over time that it degraded and became a lower state of delusion. Our aim is to target such parts and work them back into the wholeness of our being.

In the sphere of human relations, faith is an indispensable quality of any significant friendship or love. "Having faith" in another person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes, of the core of his personality, of his love. By this I do not mean that a person may not change his opinions, but that his basic motivations remain the same; that, for instance, his respect for life and human dignity is part of himself, not subject to change.

In the therapeutic process based on awareness, there exists no ”I" – it just exists a presence, a light, a love and a silence.

In the USA, when government funded research becomes inconvenient it gets shut down by the corporate controlled government.

In the terms of 'Mental Illness' Isn't stable a place they put horses that wish to run free?

In today’s society, the animals known as Homo sapiens have become conditioned to elicit the same kind of fearful response whenever the bell of Islam is rung.

Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.

Introverts living under the Extroversion Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform

In trying to determine where that breaking point was, they actually toughened me up for anything they could dish out and I learned to loosen up and take it. I learned to ease up and laugh. ... They taught me to truly throw my head back, laugh, and enjoy life.

Inventions we hope for: auto.closing zipper

Invalidating someone else is not merely disagreeing with something that the other person said. It is a process in which individuals communicate to another that the opinions and emotions of the target are invalid, irrational, selfish, uncaring, stupid, most likely insane, and wrong, wrong, wrong. Invalidators let it be known directly or indirectly that their targets views and feelings do not count for anything to anybody at any time or in any way.

In what way did your parents screw up to make you the woman you are today?

Invisibility can be good as a superpower. But psychiatry reveals people don't like it very much.

In your face I see your love for me.

Io non posso abituarmi a vivere in un mondo dove l'ascolto ha un prezzo, non posso delegarlo a una categoria professionale.

I passed by your place, but I didn't get in.

I pray for wisdom because I lack understanding. I pray for strength because I am weak. I pray for guidance because I am lost. I pray for comfort because I am hurting. God I pray to you because I know you are always listening.

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.

I remember dying a slow, painful death, the kind that leaves you hating the world. I was like a worm. I wove myself a cocoon of dragon scales and there I stayed. ... I shunned emotion, hated all, and embraced logic. I was cold and callous. I had given up. While the trees withered and died, so did I. I turned my heart to stone that autumn.

I refuse to give away my time and my beautiful mind to those who will not yield a return on my investment.

I remembered. I had thrown it away all those years ago when I closed the lid of my piano and walked away. Music had been the largest line that tethered me to my pain and the first of the lines I killed to ease the hurt.

I regard President Trump as an international terrorist.

I see the last two millennia as laid out in columns, like a reverse ledger sheet. It's as if I'm standing at the top of the twenty-first century looking downwards to 2000. Future centuries float as a gauzy sheet stretching over to the left. I also see people, architecture and events laid out chronologically in the columns. When I think of the year 1805, I see Trafalgar, women in the clothes of that era, famous people who lived then, the building, etc. The sixth to tenth centuries are very green, the Middle Ages are dark with vibrant splashes of red and blue and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are brown with rich, lush colours in the furniture and clothing.

Irrational expectations are at the root of most human suffering.

I sacrifice my life to make you love me.

I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully & as carefully as you can—in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal—but then you need to do that—then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church—your cathedral—the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them—then you will lose your soul—for in that book is your soul.

I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.

I smiled to hide the hell I lived. I smiled to hide the darkness. On the surface, I smiled and grinned and laughed. I had mastered my emotions. What emotions I feel, I allow. No one suspected my wars.

I resolved to come right to the point. "Hello," I said as coldly as possible, "we've got to talk." "Yes, Bob," he said quietly, "what's on your mind?" I shut my eyes for a moment, letting the raging frustration well up inside, then stared angrily at the psychiatrist. "Look, I've been religious about this recovery business. I go to AA meetings daily and to your sessions twice a week. I know it's good that I've stopped drinking. But every other aspect of my life feels the same as it did before. No, it's worse. I hate my life. I hate myself." Suddenly I felt a slight warmth in my face, blinked my eyes a bit, and then stared at him. "Bob, I'm afraid our time's up," Smith said in a matter-of-fact style. "Time's up?" I exclaimed. "I just got here." "No." He shook his head, glancing at his clock. "It's been fifty minutes. You don't remember anything?" "I remember everything. I was just telling you that these sessions don't seem to be working for me." Smith paused to choose his words very carefully. "Do you know a very angry boy named 'Tommy'?" "No," I said in bewilderment, "except for my cousin Tommy whom I haven't seen in twenty years..." "No." He stopped me short. "This Tommy's not your cousin. I spent this last fifty minutes talking with another Tommy. He's full of anger. And he's inside of you." "You're kidding?" "No, I'm not. Look. I want to take a little time to think over what happened today. And don't worry about this. I'll set up an emergency session with you tomorrow. We'll deal with it then." Robert This is Robert speaking. Today I'm the only personality who is strongly visible inside and outside. My own term for such an MPD role is dominant personality. Fifteen years ago, I rarely appeared on the outside, though I had considerable influence on the inside; back then, I was what one might call a "recessive personality." My passage from "recessive" to "dominant" is a key part of our story; be patient, you'll learn lots more about me later on. Indeed, since you will meet all eleven personalities who once roamed about, it gets a bit complex in the first half of this book; but don't worry, you don't have to remember them all, and it gets sorted out in the last half of the book. You may be wondering -- if not "Robert," who, then, was the dominant MPD personality back in the 1980s and earlier? His name was "Bob," and his dominance amounted to a long reign, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Since "Robert B. Oxnam" was born in 1942, you can see that "Bob" was in command from early to middle adulthood. Although he was the dominant MPD personality for thirty years, Bob did not have a clue that he was afflicted by multiple personality disorder until 1990, the very last year of his dominance. That was the fateful moment when Bob first heard that he had an "angry boy named Tommy" inside of him. How, you might ask, can someone have MPD for half a lifetime without knowing it? And even if he didn't know it, didn't others around him spot it? To outsiders, this is one of the most perplexing aspects of MPD. Multiple personality is an extreme disorder, and yet it can go undetected for decades, by the patient, by family and close friends, even by trained therapists. Part of the explanation is the very nature of the disorder itself: MPD thrives on secrecy because the dissociative individual is repressing a terrible inner secret. The MPD individual becomes so skilled in hiding from himself that he becomes a specialist, often unknowingly, in hiding from others. Part of the explanation is rooted in outside observers: MPD often manifests itself in other behaviors, frequently addiction and emotional outbursts, which are wrongly seen as the "real problem." The fact of the matter is that Bob did not see himself as the dominant personality inside Robert B. Oxnam. Instead, he saw himself as a whole person. In his mind, Bob was merely a nickname for Bob Oxnam, Robert Oxnam, Dr. Robert B. Oxnam, PhD.

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. ” —Psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung in a 1919 address to the Society for Psychical Research in England

I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal. College transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself. Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over I made the same mistake, hurt other people, and hurt myself in the bargain. Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed—maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being. I'd hit rock bottom, and I knew it.

Is it an accident that astronomy is the oldest science and psychology is the youngest? To some people, exploring the external universe seems far safer than exploring our own inner universe.

I slid back into my mind and slid once more to my worlds. The wind and the green of Ireland flooded back to me and the clouds moved in from the sea. I threw my head back to the skies and smiled. I could hear the stream nearby and wasted no time seeking it out. She called to me and I listened. I found the stream and I followed through the wood. How I missed my forest, my cottage, my realm. How I wished for nothing else, but to stay there until I died.

I slipped in and out of worlds that weren’t there. I wrote letters to fictitious characters. I was passing into catatonic states more times than not. It required a concerted amount of effort to keep myself here in this world. I was a runaway. I tried to slit my wrists. I was clinical, and I knew how to hide my condition.

Isolation of catastrophic experiences. Dissociation may function to seal off overwhelming trauma into a compartmentalized area of conscious until the person is better able to integrate it into mainstream consciousness. The function of dissociation is particularly common in survivors of combat, political torture, or natural or transportation disasters.

I stare past her at the inspirational kitten posters. There's one of a soaking-wet kitten climbing out of a toilet with the caption "it could be worse!" "Just tell me whatever it is you're thinking," Mrs. Paulsen says. "Whatever is going through your mind right now." "I hope they didn't actually drop a cat in the toilet to get that picture," I choke out. "...Pardon?" "Nothing. Sorry.

Is that the ultimate need? To secure some agent to act as a salve, a bandage, a cover-up, concealer over the black eye, as opposed to facing the issue head on. Nobody wants to address the fist. We’d all much rather take something for the pain and make it all go away.

I study humans, I serve humans, I make humans.

It appears that one lifetime is not enough to master the tools required for a lifetime.