Quotes About Psychology

the goal is to bring unconscious material forward into the conscious mind so that patients no longer act on their powerful but unconscious needs.

Shame is a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by behaviour that is somehow taboo in our society. Freud says shame makes you feel you won't be loved. Shame is much more pernicious than guilt. While guilt is a painful feeling about your actions, shame is much more psychologically destructive because it's a bad feeling about yourself as a person.

she had her own boundaries, she'd no longer need the alternate personalities.

One of the ways unconscious drives sneak into the conscious mind is through dreams, with the unconscious material camouflaged by symbols. But Freud argues that if you interpret and free-associate to these symbols, it's possible to figure out what the unconscious is trying to impart. If the dream is too well camouflaged, the meaning may be lost; if it's not camouflaged enough, it will be a nightmare.

Almost all abusive parenting is based on generations of the same; those who are abusive were likely themselves abused. That's why there are no villains in these cases, but rather layers of dysfunction to unravel.

Obsessions are unwanted, intrusive thoughts that trigger anxiety

Compulsions are behaviours a person engages in to get rid of the obsessions and reduce anxiety

True insights happen only when the therapist gets out of the way so that the patient is able to gain his or her own psychological knowledge.

Multiple personality disorder was redefined in 1994, when the name was changed to dissociative identity disorder (DID) so as to reflect a better understanding of the condition. Whereas the term multiple personality means that the person has developed several different personalities, dissociative identity means that a fragmentation of the main personality has occurred.

She was using a psychological technique called reframing: taking a concept and relabelling it so as to alter its meaning. She reframed what I perceived as neglect and labelled my concerns "overprotective.

the unconscious never cares for the facts. "It only knows what abandonment feels like.

the unconscious doesn't acknowledge the reality

obsessions: they're essentially defence mechanisms that protect patients from looking at what really terrifies them.

Shaming and teasing as an alternative to loss of privileges and parental anger can serve to erode self-esteem and give rise to an overwhelming sense of humiliation when encountered later in life.

One of the big risks in treating depersonalization—the condition where one loses all sense of identity—is what happens when that person regains a sense of self.

When you can't acknowledge your true feelings because they're too excruciating, you defend against them with anger.

IN MANY WAYS, psychology is like archaeology. As you dig down to uncover each layer and carefully dust off the artifacts that emerge, you eventually find a whole buried world that seems stranger than fiction.

World is full of people so troubled they don't even understand themselves. You could offer them a thousand dollars to explain their motivations, but they can't tell you what they don't know.

After all, you can't know what's happening inside a person while they stare. You can only imagine. And imagination can be a highly fear-based phenomenon.

Feelings are a funny thing, he realized. They're always more tangled and contradictory and complex than we want them to be. Than we care to admit.

Why do we do work we hate all our lives? Somewhere earlier on the road somebody must have made us feel that we didn't have an option to do otherwise. I'm sure it gets psychologically complex

A human brain is a very odd place to have to live your life. And that's really all I have to say about that.

Highly anxious children or severely traumatized children don't play.

The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them. Or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess (and thus which possesses them).