Quotes About Psychology

asking the fundamental question "What happened to you?" can help each of us know a little more about how experiences—both good and bad—shape

Yes! How were you loved—it makes all the difference. In all the conversations I've had, my experience has been that dysfunction shows up in direct proportion to how you were or were not loved.

The stronger stress response system in the present is the one that has had moderate, patterned stress in the past.

when you experience trauma in the first years of life, meaning from birth through age two—before you've developed the ability to explain the event—it can have a deeper impact on your brain than when you actually do have the words to explain it.

The most destabilizing thing for anyone is to have their core beliefs challenged. As psychologist Virginia Satir puts it, we feel better with the certainty of misery than the misery of uncertainty. Good or bad, we are attracted to things that are familiar.

often follows is a complicated, frustrating pattern of self-sabotage, violence, promiscuity, or addiction.

have used the term "complex trauma" to try to capture developmental neglect and maltreatment, but I believe that lumps too many things into one box.

Over the years, I've found that seemingly senseless behavior makes sense once you look at what is behind it. And since the brain is the part of us that allows us to think, feel, and act, whenever I'm trying

to understand someone, I wonder about that person's brain. Why did they do that? What would make them act that way? Something happened that influenced how their brain works.

Though we all ''perform'' for others to some extent, the mask slips easily for those who have sufferd early neglect.

It's important to clarify that most people who are abused don't go on to abuse others in the same way. On the other hand, it is becoming clear that it's the very rare person who has been abused who doesn't have some form of adaptation that impacts how they deal with people. It doesn't have to be a "pathology," but it can influence the ways in which you form and maintain relationships.

Here is the confusing part: James felt most comfortable when the world was in line with his worldview. Being rejected or treated poorly validated this view. The most destabilizing thing for anyone is to have their core beliefs challenged. As psychologist Virginia Satir puts it, we feel better with the certainty of misery than the misery of uncertainty. Good or bad, we are attracted to things that are familiar.

Emotional memory converts the past into an expectation of the future, without our awareness, and that is both a blessing and a curse.

Desire is a remedy for anxiety," as Lacan says in Seminar VIII, 430).

Most folks think they married because they "fell in love." There's an argument to be made that "falling" in love is actually an unstable condition -- maybe even an emotional illness! Oftentimes it has to do with the way the partners are unbalanced, rather than having anything to do with love. Some of us marry our disowned or disused personality parts and call it "falling in love.

PSYCH-K can change long-standing, limiting beliefs in a matter of minutes.

Free" is a special price, and there has been all sorts of psychological research showing that people don't act rationally around it. We overestimate the value of free. We consume more of something than we should when it's free. We pressure others to consume it. Free warps our normal sense of cost vs. benefit, and people end up trading their personal data for less than its worth.

Psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, novelists, and technologists have all written about the effects of constant surveillance. Studies show that we are less healthy, both physically and emotionally. We have feelings of low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. Surveillance strips us of our dignity. It threatens our very selves as individuals. It's a dehumanizing tactic employed in prisons and detention camps around the world.

I think politics come out of psychology.

Mankind's a dead issue now, cousin. There are no more souls. Only states of mind.

Relentless criticism in childhood can internalize a parental scorn that no amount of success will silence.

The unrealistic nature of these tales (which narrowminded rationalists object to) is an important device, because it makes obvious that the fairy tales' concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner process taking place in an individual.

Freud's prescription is that only by struggling courageously against what seem like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence.

Schaeffer called upon all Christians studying sociology, psychology, or ethics to resist the modern concept that all sin can be explained merely on the basis of conditioning.