Quotes on Therapy

[Daniel E.]

"There are substantial differences in therapists’ performance. Fortunately, most therapists produce results comparable to what we would expect from well-conducted clinical trials."

- Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy

 

[Daniel E.]

"There are no OCD thoughts. There are instead OCD reactions to intrusive thoughts."

- Shala Nicely

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-the-doubt/201804/why-there-s-no-cure-ocd

 

[Daniel E.]

If you have been to see a therapist lately, I’d bet good money I can guess the therapist’s gender based on their licensure. You saw a psychiatrist? Probably male (75 percent as of 1996, though declining since). Anything else? Probably female. The shift among psychologists has been most overwhelming: 72 percent of 2005 doctorates were women, compared to just over 20 percent in 1970. Clinical social workers, professional counselors, and family therapists are all likely to be women.

Does it matter that 80% of MFT interns are women? - Psychotherapy Notes (2009)

 

[Daniel E.]

We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment
By Martin E. P. Seligman and John Tierney

...While most people tend to be optimistic, those suffering from depression and anxiety have a bleak view of the future — and that in fact seems to be the chief cause of their problems, not their past traumas nor their view of the present. While traumas do have a lasting impact, most people actually emerge stronger afterward. Others continue struggling because they over-predict failure and rejection. Studies have shown depressed people are distinguished from the norm by their tendency to imagine fewer positive scenarios while overestimating future risks.

They withdraw socially and become paralyzed by exaggerated self-doubt. A bright and accomplished student imagines: If I flunk the next test, then I’ll let everyone down and show what a failure I really am. Researchers have begun successfully testing therapies designed to break this pattern by training sufferers to envision positive outcomes (imagine passing the test) and to see future risks more realistically (think of the possibilities remaining even if you flunk the test)...

 

[Daniel E.]

“Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known.”

“Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more completely. Perhaps the best way to phrase it is to say that meditation showed me that the other side of anxiety is desire. They exist in relationship to each other, not independently.”

“We reduce, concretize, or substantialize experiences or feelings, which are, in their very nature, fleeting or evanescent. In so doing, we define ourselves by our moods and by our thoughts. We do not just let ourselves be happy or sad, for instance; we must become a happy person or a sad one. This is the chronic tendency of the ignorant or deluded mind, to make “things” out of that which is no thing.”

“We are all haunted by the lost perfection of the ego that contained everything, and we measure ourselves and our lovers against this standard. We search for a replica in external satisfactions, in food, comfort, sex, or success, but gradually learn, through the process of sublimation, that the best approximation of that lost feeling comes from creative acts that evoke states of being in which self-consciousness is temporarily relinquished. These are the states in which the artist, writer, scientist, or musician, like Freud’s da Vinci, dissolves into the act of creation.”

“The early parent-child environment, the balance between being and doing, lives on in the mind. Mindfulness offers an opportunity to see these patterns clearly. In seeing them, in bringing them into the domain of reflective self-awareness, there is a possibility of emerging from their constraints. Choice emerges where before there was only blind and conditioned behavior.”

― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

 

[Daniel E.]

“You can’t make positive choices for the rest of your life without an environment that makes those choices easy, natural, and enjoyable.”

— Deepak Chopra

 

[Daniel E.]

"This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life."

"When someone really hears you without passing judgment on you, without trying to take responsibility for you, without trying to mold you, it feels damn good."

– Carl Rogers

 

[Daniel E.]

“We create the depression and anger we feel by demanding that the universe not be as rotten as it is. The reality is that the whole universe is not rotten nor is all of life rotten. Only certain elements of it are. Accept that along with many good things, bad things exist, change them if you can, and accept what you can’t change. Remember it’s your thoughts that create the way you feel. It’s practically never hopeless. Acceptance is the key.”

– Albert Ellis

 

[Daniel E.]

​We cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose.

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

 

[Daniel E.]

“Perhaps the beginning of gaining strength is becoming aware of the bad choices you make. Just knowing that you choose much of your misery yourself will help you get the idea that it may be worth trying to make a better choice. If you believe your misery just happens to you and you have no control over it, then you will never get much more than what you are getting now from life.”

― William Glasser, Positive Addiction

 

[Daniel E.]

"The primitive part of your brain that responds to anxiety and discomfort doesn't know that these are short-term solutions that don't work in the long term. That part of your brain thinks they work just fine. So every time you engage in avoidance and escape, you strengthen those brain circuits."

Heal-Your-OCD Workbook: New Techniques to Improve Your Daily Life and Take Back Your Peace of Mind

 

[Daniel E.]

"Rumination tries to prepare you for every bad thing that might happen. In the form of good-bad evaluations, it tries to perfect a flawed self and a flawed world. But these efforts never work. Ultimately, rumination keeps you focused on what's bothering you, so its net effect is that you feel more anxious, more angry, or a greater sense of loss and disappointment."

How Emotional Problems Arise: 7 Maladaptive Coping Behaviors

 

[Daniel E.]

Sometimes, questioning and searching for an answer, is just a way to avoid moving on. The eternal search for the “why”, which can become a way to retreat from the bridge to the other side.

~ Barry Brody

 

[Daniel E.]

Don't get into 'better' or 'worse' talk, regarding the future. What will be different, what will be noticed, how will that be helpful or useful? It may indeed be better, but better or worse is polarizing, difference is observational and inviting.

-- Paul Hanton (@SFBT1) | Twitter

 

[Daniel E.]

 

[Daniel E.]

Much mental suffering results from being stuck in a story about ourselves. When we take the story at face value, we risk reifying and reinforcing it, when what heals and transforms is anything that allows us to shift our perspective and transcend the narrow, ego-bound experience of ourselves.

~ Lisa Marchiano

 

[Daniel E.]

How Clients Make Therapy Work

The self-healing tendency of the client usually overrides differences in technique or theoretical approach, which is why research continually finds different approaches to therapy to be equally as effective. If the client is the driver of change, how can therapists help? Often therapists can help their clients by simply providing an empathic workspace that allows the client's capacity for generative thinking to thrive.

 

[Daniel E.]

You're not "to blame" for your anxiety any more than you are "to blame" for your hair color or eye color.

But depending on how you react to anxiety triggers, you can either make the anxiety better or worse -- that in fact is the basis for cognitive behavior therapy (CBT).

~ David Baxter

 

[GaryQ]

Thanks Daniel, it's really nice to see quotes reposted from people we actually know

 

[Daniel E.]

"I don't use Distraction very often because it's an avoidance strategy that may convey the idea that anxiety is dangerous. Instead, I encourage my patients to surrender to the anxiety and try to make it as intense as possible. This paradoxical approach is often more effective."

~ David Burns, When Panic Attacks