Quotes About Psychology

Most traumatizing parents are especially contemptuous towards the child's expression of emotional pain.

Drasticizing becomes obsessive to help the child foresee and avoid punishment and worsening abandonment. At the same time, it continuously fills her psyche with stories and images of catastrophe.

I once heard renowned traumatologist, John Briere, quip that if Cptsd were ever given its due, the DSM [The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] used by all mental health professionals would shrink from its dictionary like size to the size of a thin pamphlet.

Resentment that should have been directed toward my parents often boomeranged onto me and spoiled or thwarted my efforts at self-nurturance.

Here we will also see how verbal and emotional abuse alone can cause Cptsd, and how profound emotional abandonment is typically at the core of most Cptsd.

Although humans rarely die from trauma, if we do not resolve it, our lives can be severely diminished by its effects. Some people have even described this situation as a "living death.

Trauma is the great masquerader and participant in many maladies and "dis-eases" that afflict sufferers. It can perhaps be conjectured that unresolved trauma is responsible for a majority of the illnesses of modern mankind.

Some things must be dealt with at the roots. Trauma is one of these things.

The other important focus is to realize that pain in and of itself becomes traumatizing.

When people have been traumatized, they are stuck in paralysis—the immobility reaction or abrupt explosions of rage. Because of this, they lack the healthy aggression that they need to carry out their lives effectively.

Traumatized adults often re-enact an event that in some way represents, at least to their unconscious, the original trauma.

Cognitive psychologists have confirmed what we already knew: that readers of complex novels show a greater capacity for understanding the complexities of human interaction.8

Through fictions, we accommodate ourselves to a world that is not ours, much less ourselves. As psychoanalysts and child psychologists confirm, we cannot cope with reality without made-up stories

L. L. Jacoby, C. N. Wahlheim, & J. H. Coane, Test-enhanced learning of natural concepts: effects on recognition memory, classification, and metacognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 36 (2010), 1441

It seemed that everyone else could mate, could fit their parts together in pleasant and productive ways, but that some almost indistinguishable difference in my anatomy and psyche set me slightly, yet irrevocably, apart.

Depression, in its insidious way, acts as a degenerative disease, harming nerve cells. Like

We have, all of us, less control over our emotional states than we imagine, and not much more over our moral sensibilities.

Grandiose patients often imagine that we know more about them than we do.

We undervalue irrationality, I believe. It can protect us in hostile settings.

Christ, chief, what do they do to these people? Are we working for psychopaths

The balance is the penalty of being human: the danger of allowing yourself to feel. For this we walk a narrow path high above rocky ground. On one side we have the descent into animalism, on the other a godhead delusion. Both pulling at us, both tempting. But without these forces tugging at your psyche, stirring it into conflict, you can never love. They awaken us, you see, these warring sides, they arouse our passion.

The term "reflective function" (RF) refers to the operationalization of the psychological processes underlying the capacity to mentalize—

attachment relationship between infant and caregiver is itself an affective bond.

we see the self as originally an extension of experience of the other.