Quotes About Connection

Say what you will about the wonders of technology, but screen-to-screen is, as a colleague once said, "like doing therapy with a condom on.

Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of "feeling felt." This matters more than the therapist's training, the kind of therapy they do, or what type of problem you have.

Will you think about me?" Julie used to ask me before she went in for her various surgeries, and I always told her I would. The assurance soothed her, helped her stay centered in the midst of her anxiety about going under the knife. Later, though, when it became clear that Julie would die, that question took on another meaning: Will a part of me remain alive in you?

There is something likable in everyone. And to my great surprise, I found that she was right. It's impossible to get to know people deeply and not to come to like them.

You know what three words are even more romantic to me than 'I love you'?" "You look beautiful?" he tried. "No," his wife said. "I understand you.")

For many people, going into the depths of their thoughts and feelings is like going into a dark alley—they don't want to go there alone. People come to therapy to have somebody to go there with, and people watch John's show for a similar reason: it makes them feel less alone, allows them to see a version of themselves muddling through life

more real in his life is allowing him to let others be more real too.

If you'd asked me when I started as a therapist what most people came in for, I would have replied that they hoped to feel less anxious or depressed, to have less problematic relationships. But no matter the circumstances, there seemed to be this common element of loneliness, a craving for but a lack of a strong sense of human connection. A want. They rarely expressed it that way, but the more I learned about their lives, the more I could sense it, and I felt it in many ways myself.

During my training, a supervisor once told me, "There's something likable in everyone," and to my great surprise, I found that she was right.

Now I keep in mind that none of us can love and be loved without the possibility of loss but that there's a difference between knowledge and terror.

These were often the same people who later admitted that they also glanced at pinging phones during sex or while sitting on the toilet. Upon learning this, I placed a bottle of Purell in my office.)

but I figured that this comment was just one of John's defenses against getting close to anybody or acknowledging his need for another human being.

anger serves another function—it pushes people away and keeps them from getting close enough to see you.

Everyone should have at least one epic love story in their lives.

Will you see the human in my being?

her first conversation with Matt, one that lasted until dawn and still hasn't ended.

The people who are watching us--the people who really see us--don't care about the false self, about the show we're putting on.

once heard creativity described as being the ability to grasp the essence of one thing and the essence of some very different thing and smash them together to create some entirely new thing. That's what therapists do too.

Years later, when I've done thousands of first sessions, and information-gathering has become second nature, I'll use a different barometer to judge how it went: Did the patient feel understood? It always amazes me that someone can walk into a room as a stranger and then, after fifty minutes, leave feeling understood, but it happens nearly every time. When it doesn't, the patient doesn't return. And because Michelle did, something had gone right.

The therapy room seemed to be one of the only places left where two people sit in a room together for an uninterrupted fifty minutes. Despite its veil of professionalism, this weekly I-thou ritual is often one of the most human encounters that people experience.

the qualities she said she wanted in a partner, she came to therapy and reported: "It's too bad, but there just wasn't any chemistry." To her unconscious, his emotional stability felt too foreign.

It's well documented that touch is important for well-being throughout our lifetimes. Touch can lower blood pressure and stress levels, boost moods and immune systems.

John points to his tears. "See?" he says. "My fucking humanity." "It's magnificent," I say.

It's well documented that touch is important for well-being throughout our lifetimes.