Therapy Quotes

“I think that therapy is great and can be incredibly helpful.”

“Someone's therapist knows all about you.”

“I injured my neck in training, but did physical therapy and thought everything was fine, but when I fell against the cage everything went numb, I couldn't feel my body.”

“Well, my brother says Hello. So, hooray for speech therapy.”

“My work is often a therapy for myself - a working out of these issues as a black woman. And a way of allowing other black women to work through this kind of stigmatization as they look through the images and feel how distorted or contorted they might be in the public eye.”

“Tapping therapy is absolutely brilliant. Stephen Gately from Boyzone, God rest his soul, told me about it. It's just a little tap that focuses the mind away from that wave of panic and adrenalin that shoots into your body.”

“I've found that a combination of therapy and medication, along with lifestyle choices like eating better and exercising regularly, helps me cope well with my anxiety.”

“I've never had therapy. Maybe the work is the therapy.”

“I have not spent years in therapy; I tried therapy in my mid-twenties, and it did not go very well. I just thought, 'This is so not for me. I would rather talk to one of my girlfriends.' I'm not at a point in my life when I'm analyzing too much. I have young children, and I'm just pretty much crazed.”

“You can be broken into a dozen shattered pieces and still heal the world because service has its own medicine--hope.”

“Standup is a form of therapy. It is OK to tell problems to your audience as long as you are being honest and not boring them. I tell them that I am saving $75 an hour when I talk to them instead of a therapist.”

“Sondheim informs us, more than any other composer, about the joys, passion and pain of being a woman living in various social conditions through the ages with frightening accuracy. Playing a variety of his characters has always made me feel like I'm having a free therapy session through his words and music!”

“I'd heard about rehab, where you send people with drug problems, but I soon learned that there's no standard definition of it; instead it's a generic word for a wide variety of treatments, including some that are outrageous. Past-life therapy? Exorcism?”

“Our sin is our resistance to going along with God's initiative in making suffering reparative. We are deeply drawn towards God, but we also sense how following him will dislocate and transform beyond recognition the forms which have made life tolerable for us. We often react with fear, dismay, hostility. We are at war with ourselves, and responding differently to this inner conflict, we end up at war with each other. So it is undoubtedly true that the result of sin is much suffering. But this is by no means distributed according to desert. Many who are relatively innocent are swept up in this suffering, and some of the worse offenders get off lightly. The proper response to all this is not retrospective book-keeping, but making ourselves capable of responding to God's initiative. But now if that's what sin is, then one can sympathize with a lot of the modern critique of a religion which focuses on the evil tendencies of human nature, and the need for renunciation and sacrifice. This is not because humans are in fact angelic, or there is no point to sacrifice. It's just that focusing on how bad human beings can be, even if it's to refute the often over-rosy views of secular humanists with their reliance on human malleability and therapy, can only strengthen misanthropy, which certainly won’t bring you closer to God; and propounding sacrifice and renunciation for themselves takes you away from the main points, which is following God's initiative. That this can involve sacrifice, we well know from the charter act in this initiative, but renunciation is not is point.”

“My therapy has come from paying attention to my life.”

“I was in Puerto Rico going to school, and it was very jarring for me. 'Traumatic' is the only way that I can say it. Kids were making fun of me: 'Oh, you're a Yankee.' And I acted out a lot. A lot. But looking back, and through a little bit of therapy, everything I am has to do with that time.”

“It eats you up. It eats you up. And you have to - I had a lot of help. I had a lot of therapy. And I was able to - because it was hard, you know, to - you can't just lay it on friends and children.”

“The role of the therapist is to reflect the being/accepting self that was never allowed to be in the borderline.”

“The "stiff, dead, retracted pelvis" is one of man's most frequent vegetative disturbances. It is responsible for lumbago as well as for hemorrhoidal disturbances. Elsewhere, we shall demonstrate an important connection between these disturbances and genital cancer in women, which is so common.Thus, the "deadning of the pelvis" has the same function as the deadening of the abdomen, i.e., to avoid feelings, particularly those of pleasure and anxiety.”

“I began to see that the stronger a therapy emphasized feelings, self-esteem, and self-confidence, the more dependent the therapist was upon his providing for the patient ongoing, unconditional, positive regard. The more self-esteem was the end, the more the means, in the form of the patient’s efforts, had to appear blameless in the face of failure. In this paradigm, accuracy and comparison must continually be sacrificed to acceptance and compassion; which often results in the escalation of bizarre behavior and bizarre diagnoses.The bizarre behavior results from us taking credit for everything that is positive and assigning blame elsewhere for anything negative. Because of this skewed positive-feedback loop between our judged actions and our beliefs, we systematically become more and more adapted to ourselves, our feelings, and our inaccurate solitary thinking; and less and less adapted to the environment that we share with our fellows. The resultant behavior, such as crying, depression, displays of temper, high-risk behavior, or romantic ventures, or abandonment of personal responsibilities, which seem either compulsory, necessary, or intelligent to us, will begin to appear more and more irrational to others.The bizarre diagnoses occur because, in some cases, if a ‘cause disease’ (excuse from blame) does not exist, it has to be 'discovered’ (invented). Psychiatry has expanded its diagnoses of mental disease every year to include 'illnesses’ like kleptomania and frotteurism [now frotteuristic disorder in the DSM-V]. (Do you know what frotteurism is? It is a mental disorder that causes people, usually men, to surreptitiously fondle women’s breasts or genitals in crowded situations such as elevators and subways.)The problem with the escalation of these kinds of diagnoses is that either we can become so adapted to our thinking and feelings instead of our environment that we will become dissociated from the whole idea that we have a problem at all; or at least, the more we become blameless, the more we become helpless in the face of our problems, thinking our problems need to be 'fixed’ by outside help before we can move forward on our own.For 2,000 years of Western culture our problems existed in the human power struggle constantly being waged between our principles and our primal impulses. In the last fifty years we have unprincipled ourselves and become what I call 'psychologized.’ Now the power struggle is between the 'expert’ and the 'disorder.’ Since the rise of psychiatry and psychology as the moral compass, we don’t talk about moral imperatives anymore, we talk about coping mechanisms. We are not living our lives by principles so much as we are living our lives by mental health diagnoses. This is not working because it very subtly undermines our solid sense of self.”