Quotes Tagged "psychotherapy"

Dare to love yourself as if you were a rainbow with gold at both ends.

The freedom of an unscheduled afternoon brought confusion rather than joy. Julius had always been focused. When he was not seeing patients, other important projects and activities-writing, teaching, tennis, research-clamored for his attention. But today nothing seemed important. He suspected that nothing had ever been important, that his mind had arbitrarily imbued projects with importance and then cunningly covered its traces. Today he saw through the ruse of a lifetime. Today there was nothing important to do, and he ambled aimlessly down Union Street.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

It is a misconception that a client comes into therapy for happiness. More accurately, they come into therapy for a movement in a direction where life becomes more sustainable, enjoyable, less painful. This is not the same as happiness. It could, for instance, make a client very happy to ritualistically cut their wrists. The definition of happiness is so broad that it is almost meaningless. What has more objective truth to it is that the client comes to therapy for a change.

But many people never discover the folly of such a search and continue to believe that, given enough information, they can define and explain a person. Controversy has always existed among psychiatrists and psychologists about the validity of personality diagnosis. Some believe in the merits of the enterprise and devote their careers to ever greater nosological precision. Others, and among them I include myself, marvel that anyone can take diagnosis seriously, that it can ever be considered more than a simple cluster of symptoms and behavioral traits. Nonetheless, we find ourselves under ever-increasing pressure (from hospitals, insurance companies, governmental agencies) to sum up a person with a diagnostic phrase and a numerical category.

Even the most liberal system of psychiatric nomenclature does violence to the being of another. If we relate to people believing that we can categorize them, we will neither identify nor nurture the parts, the vital parts, of the other that transcend category. The enabling relationship always assumes that the other is never fully knowable.

Life is a purposeful action.

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

There thus appears to be an inverse correlation between recovery and psychotherapy; the more psychotherapy, the smaller the recovery rate.

There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.

At their peak, religion and psychotherapy become one.

My background is in social work and psychotherapy.