Quotes on Therapy

[Daniel E.]

“In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”

“There is no doubt that I am selective in my listening, hence "directive" if people wish to accuse me of this. I am centered in the group member who is speaking, and am unquestionably much less interested in the details of his quarrel with his wife, or of his difficulties on the job, or his disagreement with what has just been said, than in the meaning these experience have for him now and the feeling they arouse in him. It is to these meanings and feelings that I try to respond.”

― Carl R. Rogers


“I honestly didn’t realize at the time that I was dealing with myself. But I suppose it’s true that I developed a therapy that provides the things I needed for so many years and never got.”

“A patient's passivity must not be unilaterally interpreted as lack of motivation, resistance, lack of confidence, or the like. Many times, passivity is a function of inadequate knowledge and/or skills.”

― Marsha Linehan

 

[Daniel E.]

"Fritz Perls (the father of Gestalt Psychotherapy) was right: Most people enter therapy simply to become comfortable with their neuroses. A few, however, come to learn how to fulfill their potential."

"Sometimes a client of mine bemoans the fact that they're 25 or 35 or 45 and have not yet 'made it' or figured out what to do with their lives. I then tell them the story of how I became a therapist..."

~ Charley Wininger, "Confessions of a Therapist"

 

[Daniel E.]

"Research has generally found a positive relationship between treatment length and clinical outcomes such that more individuals will show significant change or recovery with increasing treatment length. It is therefore important that you have a sufficient amount of treatment and reasonable expectations for treatment length before deciding treatment is not working."

~ American Psychological Association, How Long Will It Take for Treatment to Work?

 

[Daniel E.]

People seek out therapy not for information, but for novel experiences that lead to novel change.

- Dr. Jacques Legault

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[Daniel E.]

 

[Daniel E.]

Asking why I am a therapist is kind of like asking “What are relationships good for anyway?” We all face questions about the meaning of life. There is a lot of loneliness in the world and at times things can seem dark. To be able to accompany people on their journey of self-understanding and change and shine some light into their life is a privilege.

– Nicole Amesbury

 

[Daniel E.]

"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change."

~ Carl Rogers

 

[Daniel E.]

In my experience, psychotherapy at its best is like dual meditation - it's like a container in which you can be compassionate and mindful toward yourself.

Jack Kornfield

 

[Daniel E.]

“A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself. A mentor is someone who allows you to know that no matter how dark the night, in the morning, joy will come. A mentor is someone who allows you to see the higher part of yourself when sometimes it becomes hidden to your own view.” —Oprah Winfrey

 

[Daniel E.]

The things most people need to learn in therapy are related to attachment, abandonment, love, and fear. We are trying to access basic emotional processes that are organized in primitive and early-developing parts of the brain. The language of these emotions is also very basic; it is the language of childhood.

- Louis Cozolino

 

[Daniel E.]

"The interesting thing about therapy is that none of us really knows what we’re getting into. Not really. Even if we think we have an idea, the actual process of therapy is often different than we expected and what you uncover about yourself is often times very surprising. My advice is to be open to being surprised.”

- Danni Biondini

 

[Daniel E.]

“The impulse to heal is real and powerful and lies within the client. Our job is to evoke that healing power, to meet its tests and needs and to support it in its expression and development. We are not the healers. We are the context in which healing is inspired.”

– Ron Kurtz

 

[Daniel E.]

 

[Daniel E.]

“We teach people that they upset themselves. We can’t change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today."

- Albert Ellis

 

[Daniel E.]

 

[Daniel E.]

“Instead of wondering when our next vacation is we should set up a life we don't need to escape from."

- Seth Godin

 

[Daniel E.]

From a therapist who practices Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT):

We are Human beings, perfect as we are, flawed yes, but not machines to be fixed... By looking together at what our minds tell us, by contrasting that with our actual EXPERIENCE of life, and by contacting what is most important to us - our values - we can peel away from the pernicious agenda to perform an “anxiety-ectomy” or “depression-ectomy,” abandon this stupid and futile project of removing what you don’t like, and get to work on aligning your life with your values. Get to work on changing behaviors to match what we are most deeply committed to in our lives, what we want to be able to write about in our memoirs. That is NOT usually “She never was depressed” or “she defeated her anxiety.” Those never make it into the top 3 bullet points people want in their memoirs. Psychology needs to be about what we care about most: the people, principles and activities that are most worthwhile to us.

- Joseph Rhinewine

 

[Daniel E.]

 

[Daniel E.]

"I went to the early seminars on cognitive therapy to satisfy myself that it was another approach that wouldn’t work. But I passed the techniques to my patients – and people who’d seemed hopeless and stuck for years began to recover."

- David Burns

Therapy wars: the revenge of Freud | The Guardian

 

[Daniel E.]

“I left psych nursing because I wanted to be able to participate more in treatment and to see more of a focus on therapy, but that isn't the healthcare climate now...Instead of working with patients and exploring proven therapies like DBT or even group therapy work, the focus is on unit safety and "managing" the more disruptive patients...”

- Carolyn Mallon, RN

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