Psychotherapy Quotes

“Fui acusado de ser um utópico, de querer eliminar o desprazer do mundo e defender apenas o prazer. Contudo, tenho declarado claramente que a educação tradicional torna as pessoas incapazes para o prazer encouraçando-as contra o desprazer. Prazer e alegria de viver são inconcebíveis sem luta, experiências dolorosas e embates desagradáveis consigo mesmo. A saúde psíquica não se caracteriza pela teoria do nirvana dos iogues e dos budistas, nem pela hedonismo dos epicuristas, nem pela renúncia monástica; caracteriza-se, isso sim, pela alternância entre a luta desprazerosa e a felicidade, o erro e a verdade, o desvio e a correção da rota, a raiva racional e o amor racional; em suma, estar plenamente vivo em todas as situações da vida. A capacidade de suportar o desprazer e a dor sem se tornar amargurado e sem se refugiar na rigidez, anda de mãos dadas com a capacidade de aceitar a felicidade e dar amor.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm

“I believe that the Earth is the most likely place for love to flourish. We are surrounded by life and beauty, and we have the capacity to experience deep connection and intimacy. Of course, there will always be challenges and difficulties, but I believe that the rewards of love far outweigh the risks.”
― Ron Kurtz, Body-Centered Psychotherapy: The Hakomi Method : The Integrated Use of Mindfulness, Nonviolence and the Body

“Persuading people they have more power than they do and ignoring the very real social barriers to attainment primes them for self-blame when reality fails to deliver. The worst extremes of phoney empowerment, argues Frayne, can be found in the trite aphorisms of the self-help industry, where popular psychologists ascribe to us almost magical abilities to alter circumstances despite the harsh realities constraining us. In a world where problems like disadvantage, unemployment and work-related distress are so socially embedded, downplaying the very real obstacles to opportunity is regularly experienced as yet another form of punishment, yet another form of blaming and shaming the individual.”
― James Davies, Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

“What we need is a profound rethinking of the nature of suffering itself, and what it is trying to highlight and ask us to change. We need to repoliticise emotional discontent in the minds of teachers, parents and policy-makers, rather than continue reducing it to dysfunctions that allegedly reside within the self. We need to acknowledge that suffering also reflects family/socio/political dynamics we would do well to better acknowledge and address.”
― James Davies, Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

“Experience has taught me that our childhoods leave in us stories like this – stories we never found a way to voice, because no one helped us to find the words. When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us – we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.”
― Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

“Psychotherapy endeavors to bring instinctual facts to consciousness. Logotherapy, on the other hand, seeks to bring to awareness the spiritual realities. As existential analysis it is particularly concerned with making men conscious of their responsibility-- since being responsible is one of the essential grounds of human existence. If to be human is, as we have said, to be conscious and responsible, then existential analysis is psychotherapy whose starting-point is consciousness of responsibility.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy, Revised and Expanded

“...if people ever knew who walks among us freely, they’d never leave their homes.”
― Pinny Brakeley Bugaeff, Tell Me About It: Memoir of a Psychotherapist

“We reflect each other as mirrors do, but there is no need to look at mirrors that distort our reflection.”
― Elena Y. Goldberg

“The meaning of the field is derived not from objective evidence of effectiveness but from the preferences of the culture - a sociological marvel rather than a clinical one.”
― William M. Epstein, Psychotherapy As Religion: The Civil Divine In America

“The distinction between the strangely novel and psychotherapy is one of familiarity and social acceptance, not of clinically proven effectiveness. Psychotherapy has been institutionalized by citizen satisfaction, but not because of a clinical utility demonstrated through credible science. Alternative medicine is alternative because of its use of pseudoscience. Psychotherapy is mainstream culture, not mainstream clinical science.”
― William M. Epstein, Psychotherapy As Religion: The Civil Divine In America

“As the renowned clinical psychologist Dr Anne Cooke put it to me in conversation: ‘The mental illness narrative encourages us to see mental health problems as nothing to do with life and circumstances, so no wonder we don’t look at structural or social causes; and of course this perspective is a great fit with the current neoliberal approach – where individuals have to reform themselves to fit with existing social structures.’ The trouble with programmes that are blind to the perils of such adaptations is that they essentially neuter political reflection on why distress proliferates in our schools, certainly when compared to schools in most other developed nations.”
― James Davies, Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis

“Psychotherapy's reliance on belief, the power of self-invention through the expectancies of the patient, is so central that illusion has literally become reality in many therapies. The therapist assists the patient to contrive a satisfying series of illusions. [...] Yet the forms of illusion are not innocent and unique inventions of creative minds but rather the prescribed devices of socialization.”
― William M. Epstein, Psychotherapy As Religion: The Civil Divine In America

“The field [of psychotherapy] persists as a popular cultural institution elaborating the cherished habits of the American people. Psychotherapy is one of the culture's socializing institutions, performing a largely symbolic role in promoting the American religion of an impossible and perhaps even cruel individualism.”
― William M. Epstein, Psychotherapy As Religion: The Civil Divine In America

“(psych doctor) "...treated me like a check in a box every morning, like a chore that needed to be briefly handled.”
― Steve Zappa, Pineapple Abyss: A Memoir

“Did you know that our physical health affects our psychological wellbeing?”
― Asa Don Brown

“Living life without opposition, conflict, and strife, is like riding a bicycle without peddling.”
― Asa Don Brown

“Forgiveness has as much to do with the person who has harmed us, as it has to do with our own personhood.”
― Asa Don Brown

“Sincerity is void of dishonestly or hypocrisy.”
― Asa Don Brown

“It’s about the inner dialogue that we choose to entertain.”
― Asa Don Brown

“Buddhism is all about releasing oneself from the unnecessary constraints of the ego. Every aspect of the Eightfold path is a counterweight to selfish preoccupation. But the Buddhist reprieve is accomplished not by leapfrogging over the ego's needs or demands, but by zeroing in on them: acknowledging and accepting them while learning to hold them with a lighter, more questioning, and more forgiving touch.”
― Mark Epstein, Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

“What I try to convey to my patients is that they can meet the challenges life throws at them by changing the way they relate to them. The goal is to meet the challenges with equanimity, not to make them go away. When Suzuki Roshi said not to be bothered by the waves' fluctuations, he meant it. And one thing we can say for sure. Life gives us endless opportunity to practice. Mostly we fail. Who can say they are not bothered by anything, really? But when we make the effort, the results can be astonishing. In an insecure world, we can become our own refuge. Our eon do not have to have the last word.”
― Mark Epstein, Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

“We are already equipped to meet whatever befalls us. Life's challenges are challenging, but there is room for faith, for confidence, even for optimism.”
― Mark Epstein, Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

“Right Mindfulness, and the self-scrutiny it engenders, builds a mental muscle. It is a muscle of nonjudgmental self-observation, but it can become much more than that. It is also a precursor of insight. The form such insight takes is different for everyone, but the flavor is similar. Mindfulness makes use of all of those throwaway thoughts that harken back to our childhoods, the ones we adopted to cope with the pressures of growing up. In asking us to pay attention to their repetitive nature, mindfulness also encourages us to recognize their childish quality. ... stopped in our tracks and made aware of how unnecessary such self-protective responses could be. Given the freedom to act differently, we both made a similar choice. Mindfulness showed us how.”
― Mark Epstein, Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

“[Concentration] is "Right" when it demonstrates the feasibility of training the mind, when it supports the investigation of impermanence, when it erodes selfish preoccupation, and when it reveals the benefits of surrender.”
― Mark Epstein, Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

“While it is true that we spend much of our time needlessly dwelling in thoughts of the past or the future, the ability to stay focused in the present moment, by itself, does not guarantee any kind of personal transformation. Being in the moment is pleasant enough, but it is just a jumping-off place. Right Mindfulness opens up interesting opportunities for honest self-reflection, but there is no built-in guarantee that these openings will be used productively. The self does not give up its grip easily--all of the same defense mechanisms that Freud outlined are still operative even when mindfulness is strong. It is possible to overvalue mindfulness, to remain attached to its form rathe than working directly with what it reveals.”
― Mark Epstein, Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

“Even in therapy, people are stubbornly lost in their thoughts and imprisoned within the stories they repeat to themselves. They try to use therapy the way many people try to use meditation: powering through to get to an imagined place of cure. Right Mindfulness, like a successful psychotherapy, slows people down. It pokes holes in the facades we unwittingly hide behind. When we stand outside and listen, we have a chance to eavesdrop on the ego's endlessly obsessive self-preoccupation. With the senses aroused in a new way--if people are willing-- they can step outside of themselves as well.”
― Mark Epstein, Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

“In Buddhism, there are said to be four "divine" states of mind: kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. The "divine" properties are present to various degrees in all people, but they emerge in accentuated form in meditation, almost as a by-product, as people learn to relate to their egos in a new way. It is here that we can apply the analogy to athletes finding "the flow" when they learn to get out of their own way. When self-centered preoccupations quiet down, these more "selfless" feelings come to the fore.

Ancient texts compare kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity to the feelings a mother has for four sons: "a child, an invalid, one in the flush of youth, and one busy with his own affairs." Kindness is what a mother naturally feels for her young child, compassion is what she feels when her child is ill, sympathetic joy arises when she sees him thriving in the glory of his youth, and equanimity is what she knows when her child is grown and taking care of him- or herself.”
― Mark Epstein, Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

“Therapy is a compelling tool of Right Effort. A skilled therapist can tell when patients are acting out an emotion rather than acknowledging it, or when they are numbing themselves to escape from something that feels overwhelming. Right Effort seeks to create a context in which learned habits of indulging or denying feelings can be divested. These habits are the equivalents of striking the lute too tightly or too loosely. Too tight is like the rigidity of people chronically clamping down on their feelings. Too loose is like giving feelings free rein, assuming that because we feel them they are "true" and must be taken seriously. Right Effort is an attempt to find balance in the midst of all this. From a therapeutic point of view, it means trusting that an inherent wisdom can emerge when we avoid the two extremes. This wisdom, or clear comprehension, is the emotional equivalent of a therapist's evenly suspended attention. Buddha believed this emotional equilibrium was possible for everyone. Feelings are confusing but they also make sense. A therapist's job is to help bring this equilibrium into awareness. There is a wonderful sound when it dawns.”
― Mark Epstein, Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

“Pride, it is often said, is the last fetter to enlightenment. If one can believe the ancient Buddhist psychologists, many other difficult emotions--anger, jealousy, and envy among them--are easier to work with than pride. Even among very accomplished spiritual people, it has long been acknowledged, the tendency to compare self and other remains. If Buddhism can teach us anything useful, it is to loosen the attachments we have to our own indignation.

...letting go even when you know you are right...”
― Mark Epstein, Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself

“There is much self-esteem to be gained from learning how and when to surrender.”
― Mark Epstein, Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself