How to Survive without Psychotherapy Quotes

“Just imagine how terrible life would be if we really could be therapeutically engineered into clones of some kind of norm of ‘adjustment’, and how inevitably therapeutic technique would become an instrument of tyrannical repression.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“Whether or not we are able to realise our desires, put our plans into effect, do what we know to be right, will depend on our access to powers and resources which we need to acquire, or to have acquired, from the world around us.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between the way someone experiences their problems and what the causes of those problems are.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“Though the contrast between how we feel inside and how we wish to appear to others is universal and causes most of us many an uneasy moment, the extent to which we suffer in this way depends probably on the degree to which we were allowed as children to develop private lives without the threat of adult censure.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“We all of us feel that we have things inside us that would make us unlovable if only people knew.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“What caused people distress was not so much their own mistakes, inadequacies and illnesses as the powers and influences that bore down upon them from the world beyond their skin.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“The notion that we should in all circumstances be able to smile through adversity is one of the mystifications that keep the mental-health industry alive.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“It is about as sensible to seek the reasons for distress inside the ‘self’ as it would be to see feeling cold as a matter of personal responsibility.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“the hugely unequal distribution of power works against the vast majority of people being able to live a life in which insecurity, anxiety, confusion, ignorance and pain are kept to an unavoidable minimum.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“From the brutal racism of the least privileged, through the proverbial mean resentment of the petit bourgeois to the paranoid secrecy of the very powerful, we are all haunted by the possibility of slipping from our perch.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“A great deal of distress could be avoided, then, if we could learn to withdraw ‘morality’ from the private world of our feelings and to concentrate instead on the rights and wrongs of our conduct.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“Moral rules, as we have seen, simply do not apply in the realm of feelings, if only because feelings cannot be switched on and off at will.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“Whatever may once have been society's reasons for reinforcing family loyalties at all costs, there can surely no longer be any justification for people being forced to maintain within them such deep emotional schisms.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“once our privacy has become infected by shame, the powers that be are well on the way to winning.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“But in the end the first step has to be taken in fear and trembling, with no guarantee that there will be a positive outcome.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“our struggle should be directed at other targets than our ‘selves’.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“our ideas about ourselves and our satisfaction or otherwise with the way we are will often depend heavily on cultural norms and standards which are far beyond the reach of any individual to change.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“We need to abandon our fixation on the ‘normal’ and consider who we are, and how we came to be so.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“We believe what we learn about ourselves, however unjust the lesson.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“There can be few people who are not familiar with the state of depression. As with anxiety, it is probably when we can't see the reasons for it that it turns from a painful and unpleasant experience into a malign and threatening form of misery.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“from the process of psychotherapy, and patients become equal partners in the conduct of an analysis not of their ‘psyches’ but of the predicaments that cause them distress.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“To bring about change you need access to power.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“You can no more banish hatred from your heart than you can summon love into it, and the wisest course is to accept that, whatever you feel, you probably have good reasons for it.”
― David Smail, How to Survive without Psychotherapy

“seeing that something needs to be done is fine if you have the wherewithal to do it but may be cruelly frustrating if you haven't.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“Our wishfulness, it seems, is detached from our intelligence so that each in its own way threatens to run out of control.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“If you want to know why you are unhappy, look to the world around you, and if you want to change how you feel, look to see if the world can be changed. As an individual, this is just about all you can do.”
― David Smail, How to Survive without Psychotherapy

“the emotional, ‘psychological’ or ‘spiritual’ qualities that are supposed to sustain us in times of trouble are often fatally weakened by the very material conditions that they are supposed to buttress us against.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“It may certainly be true that I seem to have acquired that knowledge without even trying, but that doesn't mean that I also know how to do things differently.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“the theoretical background (such as it is) and practical toolkit of ‘behavioural’ and ‘cognitive’ approaches in clinical psychology, apart from having a kind of deadening banality about them, just didn't seem to work.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“not all the confident pronouncements and scientific demonstrations in the literature could be right, because many of them contradicted each other. There must be another factor at work, and the most likely was professional self-interest.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy