Quotes on Therapy

[Daniel E.]

Supershrinks without exception possess a keen "situational awareness": they're observant, alert, and attentive. They constantly compare new information with what they already know.

~ Supershrinks - What's the secret of their success?

 

[Daniel E.]

"The ultimate goal of psychotherapy is to help people overcome their personal limitations and to maintain the healthy balance between feeling and rationality that reflects their basic humanness and supports the development of the true self."

~ Robert Firestone

 

[Daniel E.]

"If therapists don’t set goals, it’s often because they and their patients understand that the goal is to find love, work engagingly, enjoy life, or feel their lives have meaning. I prefer to make these goals explicit, even if they never come up again."

~ Michael Karson

 

[Daniel E.]

"Finding a solution to a problem is easy, finding the right problem to solve is hard. To discover the real problems is the goal of therapy."

~ Rune Moelbak

 

[Daniel E.]

"We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them."

~ Jung

 

[Daniel E.]

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

~ Wayne Dyer

 

[Daniel E.]

“One of the reasons we have so many mental health issues in our society is that mental health hygiene isn’t normalized. We grow up learning about physical hygiene: Brushing our teeth, taking showers […] so in that sense, we take preventative measures to take care of our physical bodies. So why are we not doing that for our mental health?”

~ Janine Kreft, Psy.D

 

[Daniel E.]

"Becoming a therapist may be a logical extension of experiencing distress, talking with another in an effort to cope, feeling relief through talking, and ultimately using this experience to help others."

~ Barry Farber

 

[David Baxter PhD]

"Becoming a therapist may be a logical extension of experiencing distress, talking with another in an effort to cope, feeling relief through talking, and ultimately using this experience to help others."

~ Barry Farber

Indeed. That's the origin of the phrase "the wounded healer". Many of the best therapists have struggled with their own mental health issues or trauma and that's what leads them into training for mental health professionals in the first place.

 

[Daniel E.]

Psychiatry Online

Studies indicate that the most effective therapists see 70% of their clients through the completion of their work; however, the rest do so in far fewer cases, for an average national premature termination rate of 47%...

Unilaterally determined termination, though often painful and humiliating, offer therapists an opportunity for personal and professional growth in ways not usually prompted by mutually determined termination.

 

[Daniel E.]

“The job of the autonomic nervous system is to ensure we survive in moments of danger and thrive in times of safety. Survival requires threat detection and the activation of a survival response. Thriving demands the opposite—the inhibition of a survival response so that social engagement can happen. Without the capacity for activation, inhibition, and flexibility of response, we suffer.”

― Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation

 

[Daniel E.]

"The attitude of unconditional self-acceptance is probably the most important variable in their long-term recovery."

~ Albert Ellis

 

[Daniel E.]

From an evolutionary perspective, all emotions are appropriate in certain circumstances when experienced at an optimal degree, providing the resources to effectively operate toward a desired goal. For example, certain levels of stress and anxiety push us to perform at a high level. Sadness can be cathartic, filling us with appreciation for what we have lost while signaling to others we need support to recover and heal. Similarly, mild to moderate anger can help us positively move forward.

~ Moshe Ratson

 

[Daniel E.]

"Silence in therapy is not uncommon and is nothing to fear -- if you and your therapist can handle just being quiet, you may find yourself relaxing and eventually the words will come. Some people have such a strong need to perform and achieve that doing nothing for a few minutes may be the hardest (and most enriching) work they do in therapy."

~ Ryan Howes, Therapy Constipation

 

[Daniel E.]

"I prefer the word ‘care’ to ‘treatment,’ because ‘treatment’ is too clinical. At the extreme end of the spectrum, people with serious mental disabilities need more than drugs and psychological therapies. They need social interventions: housing and social support, friends, peers, etc. That is genuine ‘care.’"

– Madeline Drexler, editor of Harvard Public Health

 

[Daniel E.]

“Our therapeutic goal must be to teach the person how to bear their difficulties. Not to eliminate them for him, but to train the person to cope with special challenges with special strategies; to make the person aware not that they are ill, but that they are responsible for their lives.”

― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

 

[Daniel E.]

In the consulting room, it seems to me that there is a lot of “no-things” which can’t be contained and are perhaps searching and waiting for a container...What happens when the uncontained “no-things” meet an unreceptive container/human? Do they remain uncontained? Do they disappear?...Meeting a non-receptive other...leaves one alone with one’s uncontainable “no-things”. As the commercial says, “Can you hear me now?”

~ Barry Brody

 

[Daniel E.]

“It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves.”

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

[Daniel E.]

https://kungfupsychiatry.com/articles/supportive-psychotherapy-treatment-as-usual

In my community, I can find 10 therapists who primarily provide supportive psychotherapy for every 1 therapist trained in and willing to provide CBT. Most community therapists, even if they are excellent at delivering CBT, Interpersonal Therapy (IPT) or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), drift away from rigidly adhering to those models and end up performing a blended therapy. Some of these blended therapies would best be described as supportive psychotherapy, especially if no homework is given to the patient between sessions.

 

[Daniel E.]

Why Therapy Often Sucks | Portland Mindfulness Therapy

Therapists, while they may have fancy credentials, often do not take the time to become expert at any particular technique. The result is they slosh around with you a little bit in a number of unfocused ways, and you go noplace, slowly.