Psychotherapy Quotes

“Sometimes I simply remind patients that sooner or later they will have to relinquish the goal of having a better past.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“We humans appear to be meaning-seeking creatures who have had the misfortune of being thrown into a world devoid of intrinsic meaning. One of our major tasks is to invent a meaning sturdy enough to support a life and to perform the tricky maneuver of denying our personal authorship of this meaning. Thus we conclude instead that it was "out there" waiting for us. Our ongoing search for substantial meaning systems often throws us into crises of meaning.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“The therapist's worldview is in itself isolating. Seasoned therapists view relationships differently, they sometimes lose patience with social ritual and bureaucracy, they cannot abide the fleeting shallow encounters and small talk of many social gatherings.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“Friendship between therapist and patients is a necessary condition in the process of therapy - necessary, but not, however, sufficient. Psychotherapy is not a substitute for life but a dress rehearsal for life, In other words, though psychotherapy requires a close relationship, the relationship is not an end - it is a means to an end.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“Beginning therapists must learn that there are times to sit in silence, sometimes in silent communion, sometimes simply while waiting for patients' thoughts to appear in a form that they may be expressed.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“The psychotherapist must not allow his vision to be coloured by the glasses of pathology; he must never allow himself to forget that the ailing mind is a human mind, and that, for all its ailments, it shares in the whole of the psychic life of man. The psychotherapist must even be able to admit that the ego is ill for the very reason that it is cut off from the whole, and has lost its connection with mankind as well as with the spirit.”
― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

“When you're sick, who does the shopping or takes you to the doctor? Who do you talk to when you are upset?" In other words, who provides you with emotional and practical support? Some patients gave us surprising answers: "my dog" or "my therapist" – or "nobody".”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“I believe "technique" is facilitative when it emanates from the therapist's unique encounter with the patient. [E]very course of therapy consists of small and large spontaneously generated responses or techniques that are impossible to program in advance.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“[T]echnique has a different meaning for the novice than for the expert. One needs technique in learning to play the piano but eventually, if one is to make music, one must transcend learned technique and trust one's spontaneous moves.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“Heidegger spoke of two modes of existence: the everyday mode and the ontological mode. In the everyday mode we are consumed with and distracted by material surroundings - we are filled with wonderment about how things are in the world. In the ontological mode we are focused on being per se - that is, we are filled with wonderment that things are in the world.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“A great many of our patients have conflicts in the realm of intimacy, and obtain help in therapy sheerly through experiencing an intimate relationship with the therapist. Some fear intimacy because they believe there is something basically unacceptable about them, something repugnant and unforgivable, Given this, the act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“I often urge patients to project themselves into the future and to consider how they can live now so that five years hence they will be able to look back upon life without regret sweeping over them anew.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“There needs to be a nationwide awareness programme for all NHS staff, to educate them about dissociative disorders. Diagnoses need to be more obtainable within the NHS; people's lives should be placed ahead of funding restraints and bureaucratic red tape. We need minimum standards of care and treatment agreed and implemented within the NHS to end the current nightmare of the postcode lottery—not just guidelines that can be ignored but actual regulations.”
― carol broad , Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“Ironically your greatest spiritual asset is what appears to be your greatest obstacle: your obsession with yourself. Today we live in the age of individualism. – Richard Harvey”
― Richard Harvey

“If you criticize others, they don't dare to hurt you. If you are perfect, nobody can criticize you.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“{B]eware of empty compliments - make your support as incisive as your feedback or interpretations.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“The idea of using current distortions to re-create the past was part of an old, now abandoned, vision of the therapist as archaeologist, patiently scraping off the dust of decades to understand (and thus, in some mysterious manner, undo) the original trauma. It is a far better model to think of understanding the past in order to apprehend the present therapist-patient relationship.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“I have always found quite useful Freud's formulation that the dream borrows building blocks from the day residue, but that for images to be important enough to become incorporated into it, they must be reinforced by older, meaningful, affect-laden concerns.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“There is one true property of romantic love: it never stays - evanescence is a part of the nature of an infatuated love state. But be careful trying to rush its demise. Don't try to joust with love any more than you would with powerful religious beliefs - those are duels you cannot win.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

“I wish I had a magic wand to make things better, but therapy doesn't work that way.”
― Lynn I. Wilson, The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality

“I must assume that knowing is better than not know, venturing better than not venturing; and that magic and illusion, however rich, however alluring, ultimately weaken the human spirit. I take with deep seriousness Thomas Hardy's words, 'If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

“In such a self-centered society, many people have gone to the extreme of narcissism—being solely concerned about their own personal well-being and agendas while excluding and exploiting others. Narcissism is not only epidemic but is also a pandemic of our times that has been normalized and accepted. Self-serving, narcissistic people are incapable and unwilling to love due to a lack of authentic self and love for one’s self and others.” — Sepideh Irvani, PsyD”
― Sepideh Irvani, Authentic Self-Love: A Path to Healing the Self and Relationships

“Expunction of pain, deviant, or oppositional behaviors does not indicate healing, but it can signify successful conditioning.”
― Kierra C.T. Banks

“Like meditation, psychotherapy has the potential to reveal how much of our thinking is an artificial construaction designed to help us cope with an unpredictable world.”
― Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness

“With the subject of work off limits, they lapsed into a silence they couldn't recover from, leaving Joanna to wonder how she could feel so lonely in the company of the man she loved.”
― Diana Stevan, The Rubber Fence

“Can a therapist make me not want to get pregnant? Can a therapist undo the trouble with my eggs, my hormones, and whatever else isn't working? I can't help it, but it feels like an insult for the doctor to send me there. Like telling people with cancer they can think themselves healthy if they try hard enough to visualize their immune cells as little sharks gobbling up the tumor. It's just blaming the victim.”
― Monica Starkman, The End of Miracles

“The most important study is the practical and sincere study of one’s self: Know Thyself. It is more important to know the truth about one's self than trying to find out the truth about heaven and hell." —Sepideh Irvani, PsyD”
― Sepideh Irvani, Authentic Self-Love: A Path to Healing the Self and Relationships

“[T]here are more and more Western scholars who [...] strive to experience Buddhism directly in the Eastern countries where it has long been a central element of cultural tradition. They must be clearly distinguished from those Westerners who, unable or unwilling to confront themselves with their own Western tradition, frivolously escape to any different world.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“[W]hat would be more reliable than the East and the West? Perhaps a concept of the world, the universe, or the cosmos. Our age can be characterized by the growing consciousness of the world as a whole. Our historical era is in essence cosmological.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath, Awakening and Insight: Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy

“Everything in the cosmos now proves to be relative. Nothing is autonomous in itself. All things in the world betray their interdependence with each other. Metaphysics ceases to be an abstract system of thought and becomes an experiential reality. Not beings in the world but the world itself comes to be questioned.”
― Polly Young-Eisendrath