Quotes about Therapy

"Like so many of us, I spent a great deal of my life....cataloging all the ways I had been injured and abused...I analyzed and categorized the whos, whats and wheres of my misery.  I was a confirmed pessimist, always able to see the dark side of anything and everything.  My belief was that life was hard and disaster was looming around every corner...Despite life's difficulties, it was my responsibility to do all the good I could and become the best person I could be...I started to notice the dearth of positive emotions in my life...I knew precious little about joy, happiness, optimism, faith and trust....That's when I learned that you don't have to be saddled for life with mental attitudes you adopted in childhood.  All of us are free to change our minds, and as we change our minds, our experiences will also change."

If a therapist doesn't dive down to meet the Wild Man or Wild Woman, he or she will try to heal with words. The healing energy stored in waterfalls, trees, clay, horses, dogs, porcupines, llamas, otters belong to the domain of the Wild People. Therapists will have understood this when they insist on doing therapy with a cow in the room.

Eventually, as we become more fully aware of our problems, another critical point is reached, when insights really have occurred and we try to act upon them. We then discover to our dismay that our attempts to solve them by an effort of will avails us nothing, that our good intentions, as the saying goes, merely pave the way to hell. Good intentions all too readily can foster the illusion that we have settled an issue, when actually it is far from settled and seems to have not the slightest intention of ever being settled. This leads to a deadlock in which we see we need to change but cannot, try as we may. We know we need to renounce our egoistic controlling attempts but we cannot even make ourselves do that. We are up against the paradox that discipline and conscious effort are indispensable but do not get us far enough in our really critical areas. We reach the point where we are tempted to give up in despair because after all, what's the use? We begin to feel that analysis is like deliberate, organized torture; the most problematic things are rubbed in again and again and no matter how we exert ourselves there is no way to change them.

This state has its meaning too. As Dante puts it, the entrance to purgatory is at the deepest point of hell. A resolution of this seemingly hopeless impasse eventually occurs by virtue of the awareness that the ego's claim of a capacity to control rests on an illusion. Without the actual experience of this sort of impasse the ego cannot renounce its claim to the central position. It is only when we have come to our wits' end, and this in the face of our most sincere and extreme efforts, only when we realize that we are hopelessly incapable of changing ourselves, can we begin to accept our real existential position in the life drama. When we are able to say. "this is I, this is my being, and nothing can save me from or free me from being this sort of person," then we have come to the point of acceptance that initiates a fundamental transformation of which we are the object, not the subject. Transformation of our personality occurs in us, upon us but not by us. The unconscious changes itself and us in response to our awareness and acceptance of our station, of our cross.

Therapy is, in essence, the effort to effect an adequate relationship between the ego and the unconscious needs, to bring into awareness their relative positions in respect to each other and to discover the requirements for a continuing cooperative partnership. Therapeutic progress depends upon awareness; in fact the attempt to become more conscious is the therapy.

Our ego freedom lies not in the choice of the cards but in discovering or developing the best possible tactics, in terms of the cards we happen to hold, against our formidable antagonist, the Self, our real hidden and basic being, of which our "I" seems but a temporary and passing structure but is nevertheless a structure which is required and impelled to make the most of itself, to play for keeps, indeed for its very life. Playing for keeps is, interestingly enough, a motif found in primitive rites, for instance in Aztec games, in which the team losing the game was sacrificed, or in the rites of the contest and the sacrificial death of the Year Kings.

Like the priestly cult of the Middle Ages, the modern priestly cult of "scientific" psychotherapists exist overwhelmingly to stultify or blunt a too-acute insight into the powers benumbed in our personalities by our prevailing culture.

Ultimately the most profound problems with psychotherapy have always been that instead of possessing any contrarian or transcendent values to enable it to produce insights countervailing against our dysfunctional and incoherent and humanly destructive culture, its "therapists" have been virtually all shills or agents for this culture, trying to accommodate their patients to a fundamentally unhealthy and insane way of life.

We can all be qualified therapists if just learn how to say -with absolute sincereity, I-Love-You.     

Only create associations with positive affinities. Make this a rule of life and you will benefit more than from all the therapy in the world. 

Words of comfort, skillfully administered, are the oldest therapy known to man.

The best therapy for emotional blocks to math is the realization that the human race took centuries or millennia to see through the mist of difficulties and paradoxes which instructors now invite us to solve in a few minutes.

Emphasis on educational and vocational rehabilitation must not be allowed to overshadow the profound need that will exist for spiritual reorientation. Inevitably there will exist, to a considerable degree, psychological maladjustments manifested in disillusionment, resentment toward civilians, depression, and a sense of guilt. Spiritual therapy available in the resources of the Christian faith can accomplish most in overcoming these problems.

Work is honorable. It is good therapy for most problems. It is the antidote for worry. It is the equalizer for deficiency of native endowment. Work makes it possible for the average to approach genius. What we may lack in aptitude, we can make up for in performance. . . .

The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love.

Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.

A garden is the best alternative therapy.

Prayer is a force as real as terrestrial gravity. As a physician, I have seen men, after all other therapy had failed, lifted out of disease and melancholy by the serene effort of prayer. Only in prayer do we achieve that complete and harmonious assembly of body, mind and spirit which gives the frail human reed its unshakable strength.

Being in therapy is great. I spend an hour just talking about myself. It's kinda like being the guy on a date.

Show business is the best possible therapy for remorse.