Quotes About Introspection

Is this something that's being done to me or am I doing it to myself?

Fitzgerald put it, "In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day"),

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls." But he also said this: "Who looks inside, awakes.

I know how affirming it feels to blame the outside world for my frustrations, to deny ownership of whatever role I might have in the existential play called My Incredibly Important Life.

One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current predicaments,

That's right - sometimes hell is us. Sometimes we are the cause of our own difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

Wendell once pointed out that we talk to ourselves more than we'll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren't always kind or true or helpful—or even respectful. Most of what we say to ourselves we'd never say to people we love or care about, like our friends or children. In therapy, we learn to pay close attention to those voices in our heads so that we can learn a better way to communicate with ourselves.

The eminent Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said this: "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

We may want others' forgiveness, but that comes from a place of self-gratification; we are asking forgiveness of others to avoid the harder work of forgiving ourselves.

Feeling your sadness or anxiety can also give you essential information about yourself and your world.

In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

I particularly liked this quote from Frankl's book: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

It's not that she's hiding her feelings; it's that she can't access them. There's a words for this kind of emotional blindness: alexithymia. She doesn't know what she's feeling of doesn't have the words to express it.

What makes therapy challenging is that it requires people to see themselves in ways they normally choose not to. A therapist will hold up the mirror in the most compassionate way possible, but it's up to the patient to take a good look at that reflection

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.

doorknob disclosures.

the most powerful truths—the ones people take the most seriously—are those they come to, little by little, on their own.

A therapist will hold up a mirror to patients, but patients will also hold up a mirror to their therapists.

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

When you stop tossing junk into the void—words, words, and more words—something important rises to the surface.

I particularly liked this line from Frankl's book: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we'll never know why.

I wonder why I seem to be more curious about you than you are about yourself?

I've noticed that dreams can be a precursor to self-confession – a kind of pre-confession.