Quotes from Jeffrey A. Kottler

We are playwrights in that we spontaneously compose and direct dialogue, acting out various roles of a nurturer, an authority, or a character from a client's life.

I also think that human behavior is so mysterious and unpredictable that if you are not humble about it you are bound to be insensitive to a lot of the dilemmas and predicaments that people are facing.

What the client brings to us in a session is so overwhelming and so full of content and feeling that we can't hold it all. So we have to find ways to live with that—to live with all this uncertainty, all this mystery, all this ambiguity. At the same time, our clients are demanding answers and solutions.

human beings have an intense craving, often unfulfilled, to be understood by someone else.

The therapist's job is to do everything in her power not just to promote self-understanding but to encourage experimentation.

Change usually begins with someone feeling a level of desperation that leads him or her to take constructive risks and experiment with alternative ways of being that previously felt inaccessible.

But what he meant is that we must always keep one foot in the client's world.

We thought back to previous research we'd been involved in with so-called difficult clients. One conclusion was that there really are no such things—all clients are really doing the best they can—just doing their jobs coping in the only way they know how.

The most influential author for me is Teilhard de Chardin, the French anthropologist and theologian. He believed, as I do, that the world is evolving toward a pleroma or fullness. Each human act contributes to this grand evolution and therefore does not cease to exist when it is completed.

In the absence of certainty about what is best, in the presence of someone who is needy and vulnerable, there is a compelling urge for us to do something.