Quotes About Psychotherapy

Indeed, the entire process of neurotic living is directed toward resisting a richer, more fulfilled way of life due to the fear of ultimate loss or separation. Throughout life there is a constant struggle between the drive toward actualizing one's potential and the tendency to be self-denying and self-destructive. A "successful" psychotherapy would be a catalyst for a lifetime process of growing.

The current plethora of psychotherapeutic approaches can offer temporary relief from emotional pain, but they can never meet the deepest need of the human heart. Therefore, all secular counseling approaches fall short of truly meeting a hurting person at the deepest level of their need for God. Secular approaches cannot meet sacred needs.

What the Ellison Foundation and I are hoping to encourage is a more holistic approach to psychiatry, in which psychotherapy is put on as rigorous a level as psychopharmacology.

I went into acting as psychotherapy, and it's still a work in progress.

Most psychiatrists assume that mental illnesses such as depression are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, which can be treated by drugs. But most psychotherapy doesn't address the social causation of mental illness either.

I don't know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.

'Psychotherapy' is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing.

Everybody wants a robot that will do psychotherapy. But If you don't have empathy, you don't have psychotherapy. The robot doesn't know about life.

What took some time for me to figure out was how to have a life outside my career, to find a way to be inclusive rather than exclusive. It came only after years of psychotherapy and deep soul-searching.

Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief.

I became a psychotherapist because that's where people will unburden themselves, where they will show what is in their hearts.

A young man came for psychotherapy because, though he was intellectually very competent and seemed superficially to be very successful, his spontaneity was almost completely blocked.

This book is not a substitute for psychotherapy. Nor is it a self-help book in the sense that it promises cheap and easy cures overnight. But in another worthy and profound sense every good book is a self-help book—it helps the reader, through seeing himself and his own experiences reflected in the book, to gain new light on his own problems of personal integration.

I have said that the attempt to avoid legitimate suffering lies at the root of all emotional illness. Not surprisingly, most psychotherapy patients (and probably most non-patients, since neurosis is the norm rather than the exception) have a problem, whether they are young or old, in facing the reality of death squarely and clearly. What

It has been further suggested that the absence of love is the major cause of mental illness and that the presence of love is consequently the essential healing element in psychotherapy. This

The essential ingredient of successful deep and meaningful psychotherapy is love. ... Intensive psychotherapy in many ways is a process of reparenting.

As the wicked flee when none pursueth, so does the middle-class wrestle when none contendeth. They cried out for freedom, it came down on them in a flood. Nothing remains but a few floating timbers of psychotherapy.

Fourth, we're able to create treatments—drugs, psychotherapy—and do random-assignment placebo-control studies to find out which ones really worked and which ones were inert.

The therapist must become active and directive in helping the patient reorganize his life. Contrary to the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapists, the ADD therapist must offer concrete suggestions concerning ways of getting organized, staying focused, making

Psychotherapy in its broadest sense is a collection of paths toward wisdom and wholeness.

There may still be people who think of Carl Gustav Jung only as a distinguished psychiatrist who enlarged our understanding of the mind and who also made important contributions to psychotherapy. He did both, but his variety of analysis is not simply concerned with the relief of neurotic symptoms; it promises a secular form of salvation. Jung was a spiritual teacher as well as a physician.

With few exceptions, psychotherapists have omitted to consider the fact that the capacity to be alone is also an aspect of emotional maturity.

According to existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom: 'Death … itches all the time; it is always with us, scratching at some inner door, whirring softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness. Hidden and disguised, leaking out in a variety of symptoms, it is the wellspring of many of our worries, stresses, and conflicts'.

Psychotherapy is about an internal process of transformation. Gender therapy is not simply about surgery or hormones or even transition. It is not really about 'becoming' something as much as it is about allowing the false parts of the self to recede so that an authentic self can emerge.