Quotes About Therapy

They recount their earliest memories without any sympathy for the child they once were

The aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it.

My conviction is that therapy is only successful if it can change this perspective and the thought patterns connected with it. If people genuinely succeed in feeling how they suffered from their parents' behavior as children, they will usually lose their empathy for those parents with hardly any inner conflict at all.

This is an astounding statement, because I know of literally no one who suffers from psychic symptoms and seeks treatment for them without having at least been beaten and humiliated in childhood.

It is not only the "beautiful," "good," and pleasant feelings that make us really alive, deepen our existence, and give us crucial insight, but often precisely the unacceptable and unadapted ones from which we would prefer to escape: helplessness, shame, envy, jealousy, confusion, rage, and grief. These feelings can be experienced in therapy. When they are understood

To recognize and integrate something monstrous from our collective past as a society requires considerable time, just as it does on the individual level, in therapy. To rush the process may mean that the mechanisms of denial are further strengthened. We still need our illusions, our crutches, as we confront a new and painful aspect of the truth on our journey toward a complete perception of the child's situation.

In therapy Katya realized how much her relationship with her son had been burdened by the shadows of her childhood, and memories of her mother came back to her more and more clearly, memories of the way she had refused to relate to her eldest daughter. Katya was now able to feel her infant needs and express them in a diary, from which her friend sent me an excerpt after Katya's death:

Throughout their later life, these people will have to deal with situations in which these rudimentary feelings may awaken, but without the original connection ever becoming clear. The connection can be deciphered only when the intense emotions have been experienced in therapy and successfully linked with their original situation.*

Frequently, parents withhold such communication from the child, not because they are in any way malevolent but because they themselves never experienced such a token of affection in childhood and consequently do not know that such a thing exists. They can learn to communicate meaningfully with their children, but only if those children have the full support of a therapist who has shaken off the influence of poisonous pedagogy and is totally and unreservedly on the children's side.

There are secret rooms inside us," I had said to my therapist. "A relatively benign construct," he said, and so I did not bother with the rest of it. That in my house we never left them, that in my house my mother and father preferred them to everywhere else.

You think you can avoid [pain,] but you actually can't. If you do, you just get sicker, or you feel more pain. But if you can speak it, if you can write it, if you can paint it, it is very healing.

Healing begins where the wound was made.

The great unspoken paradox of the arduous process of psychoanalysis is that the best patients are the ones who never really needed it in the first place. Abnormal

Taking a pill is passive. In contrast, psychotherapy puts the patient in charge by instilling new coping skills and attitudes toward life.

3. Paul Enright, "A Homeopathic Remedy for Early COPD," Respiratory Medicine 105 (2011): 1573–75.

My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.

Could it be that many drugs or even surgeries actually work better because we're repeatedly primed, educated, and conditioned to believe in their effects—when if it weren't for the placebo effect, those drugs might not work as well or at all?

Arson is almost as good as Prozac.

As a therapist, in doing no harm, we need to honor where the client is at.

A wise friend describes therapy as an encounter that takes us out of our misery and places us into our pain.

Countertransference is described as the therapist's reaction to the patient's transference. Like transference, countertransference is a reflection of earlier events and unresolved conflicts in the therapist's own life that are now "projected" onto the therapy situation.

Because of the nature of sexual exploitation by therapists and the consequences of transference phenomena, it is entirely possible that a victim may not realize that she has been victimized or recognize the extent of the harm within the prescribed period. It is often not until many years later, perhaps after reentering therapy with another therapist, that she comes to understand that she was a victim of exploitation.

Fasting and natural diet, though essentially unknown as a therapy, should be the first treatment when someone discovers that he or she has a medical problem.

treatment based on drugs alone allows patients to take a passive role toward their treatment.