Quotes on Therapy

[Daniel E.]

"You don’t have to do anything to be a worthwhile person."

"People don't procrastinate just to be ornery or because they're irrational. They procrastinate because it makes sense, given how vulnerable they feel to criticism, failure, and their own perfectionism."

“Procrastination is not the cause of our problems with accomplishing tasks; it is an attempt to resolve a variety of underlying issues.”

― Neil A. Fiore, The Now Habit

 

[Daniel E.]

“Perhaps, I myself am the enemy who needs to be loved.”

"The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown."

"The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it."

– Carl Jung

 

[Daniel E.]

When a course of psychotherapy or counseling doesn't lead to recovery, good therapists work with the patient to figure out what might be standing in the way of significant improvement. If therapy still is not helping, they change their approach or ultimately refer the patient to another provider with different expertise. Unfortunately, some therapists are reluctant to concede that their approach is not working, so it is up to the patient to decide to try something new.

~ Jelena Kecmanovic

 

[Daniel E.]

"When individuals make decisions for their future selves, loss aversion is reduced compared to when they make decisions for their current selves."

~ Qiqi Cheng and Guibing He

 

[Daniel E.]

10 Secrets Your Therapist Wont Tell You

The first thing a young therapist in training learns is that psychotherapy is, Do not give advice to your clients. “If a person needs advice, they should talk to a friend,” one of my professors said in class. And yet, most therapists end up doling out advice as though their client's lives depended upon it. Even cognitive-behavioral therapists will give advice, disguising it in the form of “homework” — “Why don’t you try keeping a journal of your irrational thoughts?” It’s a successful strategy for most to try, but it’s still advice.

 

[Daniel E.]

"Therapy is like being on a teeter-totter, with me at one end, and the patient at the other. Therapy is the process of going up and down, each of us sliding back and forth on the teeter-totter, trying to balance it so we can get to the middle together and climb up to a higher level, so to speak. This higher level, which represents growth and development, can be thought of as a synthesis of the preceding level. Then the process begins again. We are on a new teeter-totter, trying to get to the middle, in an effort to move to the next level, and so on."

~ Marsha Linehan

 

[Daniel E.]

"In therapy, verbal ventilation is the penultimate metabolizer of emotional pain. It is speaking or writing in a manner that airs out and releases painful feelings. When we let our words spring from what we feel, language is imbued with emotion, and pain can be released through what we say or write."

~ Pete Walker

 

[Daniel E.]

It was a challenge for me to find the right counselor a couple of years ago even though I am a therapist myself. I was looking for a therapist who listened, helped me gain perspective, and focus on the positive. I did not want to do worksheets or be given homework. Even though I had the perfect fit on paper, it was still scary to walk into his office for the first time. I am fortunate that I was able to avoid the landmines. There’s no magic formula to find “the one” anything. On the other hand, you have a much better chance of discovering a therapist that doesn’t suck by doing your due diligence.

~ Carol Maderer

 

[Daniel E.]

Somatic psychology--a psychotherapeutic modality that does, in fact, incorporate and include the body, in all of its messy, visceral glory filled with brimming sensations, preconscious imagery, and storms of affect--has risen to the fore in recent years as a potent methodology for working with trauma. It offers an important window into the impact that trauma has on our body--particularly in those domains that CBT tends to neglect. Somatic psychology does not pretend that the body does not exist, that feelings are immaterial, or that unbidden, persistent images have no meaning. It is a way of treating a whole person.

~ Albert Wong, Ph.D., Why You Can't Think Your Way Out of Trauma

 

[Daniel E.]

"Increases in personal agency preceded and predicted improvement in therapy. As patients told stories that increasingly emphasized their ability to control their world and make self-determined decisions, they showed corresponding decreases in symptoms and increases in mental health."

~ McAdams & McLean, Narrative Identity

 

[Daniel E.]

Therapists Spill: When You Have a Bad Therapy Experience


"Just one bad experience can shut a person down, turn them off to a new therapist, and leave them disinterested and even disgusted by the entire mental health system."

~ Deborah Serani, PsyD


“Just because someone is a ‘good therapist’ doesn’t mean they’re necessarily good for you.”

~ Christina Hibbert, PsyD


"Bad experiences are the exception, not the rule, and most people enter this profession with a genuine desire to help people, not to do harm."

~ Ryan Howes, PhD

 

[Daniel E.]

"We yearn for change, but cling to the familiar."

~ Anthony de Mello

 

[Daniel E.]

"It’s not the adult you that needs to be convinced that your feelings might be far afield from reality, it’s the black-and-white thinking child buried deep within yourself—of whom you might have but scant awareness."

~ Leon F Seltzer, Ph.D., What’s “Emotional Reasoning”—And Why Is It Such a Problem?

 

[Daniel E.]

"We all relapse. I relapsed yesterday."

~ David Burns

 

[Daniel E.]

"To me, the difference between therapist and patient is a slim and somewhat artificial distinction."

~ David Burns

 

[Daniel E.]

"Judgment and shame elicit defensiveness. Acceptance fosters safety, which invites honesty and self-exploration."

~ Nir Eyal

 

[Daniel E.]

"Healthy self-disclosure can reduce distress and rumination when it leads to greater insight and understanding about the source of one's problems. Thus, when people share their feelings with others in the context of supportive relationships, they are likely to experience growth. In contrast, when people repetitively ruminate and dwell on the same problem without making progress, they are likely to experience depression."

~ Wikipedia article on rumination

 

[Daniel E.]

"Depressive rumination is the focused attention on the symptoms of one's distress, and on its possible causes and consequences, as opposed to its solutions."

~ Yingkai et al

 

[Daniel E.]

"Remember that for all of us, our fears of what others think of us is often a projection of our own inner critic onto them. In other words, it is really your own negative beliefs about yourself that you are imagining the therapist might think about you."

~ Joyce Marter, LCPC, Tips To Lessen Anxiety Before Your First Therapy Appointment

 

[Daniel E.]

"The point of therapy is not “healing.” It’s exploration—genuinely wanting to learn answers to the question Why am I like this?, so that maybe, through better understanding of what you’re doing, you figure out how to be who you want to become."

~ Susan Matthews