Pain Therapy Quotes & Sayings

And I always feel so stupid sitting in therapy talking about my problems because, Jesus Christ, so what? I can't equate the amount of pain and misery and despair I have suffered and endured as a depressive with the events of my life, which just seem so common. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

When faced with choosing between attributing their pain to "being crazy" and having had abusive parents, clients will choose "crazy" most of the time. Dora, a 38-year-old, was profoundly abused by multiple family perpetrators and has grappled with cutting and eating disordered behaviors for most of her life. She poignantly echoed this dilemma in her therapy:
I hate it when we talk about my family as "dysfunctional" or "abusive." Think about what you are asking me to accept - that my parents didn't love me, care about me, or protect me. If I have to choose between "being abused" or "being sick and crazy," it's less painful to see myself as nuts than to imagine my parents as evil. — Lisa Ferentz

In my life I have had to work through problems of stigmatization and prejudice. When I discovered the power of the arts to express my pains and joys, it became clear to me that there would be no other way to work through the demons except to fully embrace the process of creation. The work was not personal therapy but had a connection to other peoples' realities. As I grow older and more mature, it becomes clearer to me that personal struggles and conflicts are connected with universal struggles and conflicts. It is this knowledge, ironically, that gives me the freedom to experiment in my work — Reza Abdoh

Throughout our times with Christopher [therapist] we were encouraged to work together at communicating on the inside. He pointed out that it would be good for us all to listen-in when an alter was telling his/her story - that it's now safe, no harm will come to us from telling or from knowing. There was once a time when it was very important that we didn't know what had happened; that knowing meant danger or being so overwhelmed with pain and grief that we wouldn't survive. But now it was different. We're safe and strong, and our goal now are to uncover the grisly truth of what's happened to us, so that it's no longer a powerful secret. We can look at it and face the past for what it is - old memories of old events. Today is now,and we can choose to live a different way and believe different things. We were once powerless and vulnerable, but now we were in a position to make choices. We had control over our life. — Carolyn Bramhall

But when I look at myself squarely, it's not just that I have a few difficulties or unresolved issues. Unlike those lucky people for whom therapy or medication delivers them back to themselves, I've been suffering from something that was unnamable for most of my life. Yes, I've had periods of relative stability, but the whole concept of "recovery" brings up some painful questions. What do I recover? With drug addiction, you hear that you can recover and reclaim your former self, the person you were before you started using. With other psychiatric illnesses, getting rid of symptoms means you're more or less back to "yourself." But what if you simply don't have a solid self to return to - if the way you are is seen as basically broken? And what if you can't conceive of "normal" or "healthy" because pain and loneliness are all you remember? "You were such a happy child," my mother says. But I don't remember that. So what do I recover? — Kiera Van Gelder

The Magician should devise for himself a definite technique for destroying "evil." The essence of such a practice will consist in training the mind and the body to confront things which case fear, pain, disgust, shame and the like. He must learn to endure them, then to become indifferent to them, then to become indifferent to them, then to analyze them until they give pleasure and instruction, and finally to appreciate them for their own sake, as aspects of Truth. When this has been done, he should abandon them, if they are really harmful in relation to health and comfort. — Aleister Crowley

I've learned that if I stay busy, especially by helping others, I don't think about my pain. In an odd way, my pain is its own therapy. I intend to go on until I can't go anymore. — Don Piper

As a child I was not allowed to express my feelings, so I had to go back through therapy and express the child's pain. — John Bradshaw

Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes. — J.M. Coetzee

It's like avoidance behavior in therapy - wanting to share the gossip but not wanting to deal with the real, more painful issues. Of course we want to avoid the pain. But by doing so, we inevitably cause more of it. — Marianne Williamson

Local grandmas came in and out of our clinic bringing homemade cookies and fudge, because nothing soothes phantom limb pain better than a homemade brownie. — Adele Levine

The first thing you need to know if you are a survivor is that parts of you have probably been trained to create a variety of symptoms and behaviours. Abusers actually train child parts to cut the body, to make other parts cut, to attempt suicide, to create flashbacks by releasing pieces of visual or auditory memories, to create body memories of pain or electroshock, and to create depression, terror, anxiety, and despair by releasing the emotional components of memories to the rest of the personality system. The front person and most of the rest of the system do not know that this is the source of these feelings and behaviours. p126 — Alison Miller

There were times when I would sob until I shook, until my eyelids were so swollen that it pained me to open them, and through hiccoughs, trembling, I would hiss, don't touch me! as he moved to place a gentle hand on my shoulder. There were times when we seemed locked into our chairs, discrete, the static between us more eloquent than words. But there was never a moment when I doubted Peter's ability to heal me. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain. — Gabor Mate

For many people, managing pain involves using prescription medicine in combination with complementary techniques like physical therapy, acupuncture, yoga and massage. I appreciate this because I truly believe medical care should address the person as a whole - their mind, body, and spirit. — Naomi Judd

In the absence of any therapy, the mentally ill of the 20th century were chained, shackled, straitjacketed, kept nude, electrocuted, half-frozen, parboiled, violently hosed, wrapped in wet canvas, confined to "mummy bags", subjected to insulin-induced hypoglycemic comas, forced into seizures with massive doses of the stimulant Metrazol, injected with camphor, drugged into three-week comas with barbiturates and tranquilizers, involuntarily sterilized, and surgically mutilated. Rape by hospital staff was common, as was humiliation and verbal abuse. One reporter noted that a state hospital patient had been restrained for so long that his skin was beginning to grow around the leather straps. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

No conventional therapy can release us from a deep and abiding psychic pain. Through prayer we find what we cannot find elsewhere: a peace that is not of this world. — Marianne Williamson

Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us. — David Richo

There is a groan that unites men and women, rich and poor, in any nation. These muscle pains are "explained" in every culture, but the universal fact of this persistence must mean that no adequate therapy exists. — Patrick David Wall

Let me put it this way: You cannot live in the world without being in pain, spiritual and physical pain. We have developed mechanisms to deal with these pains, to overcome them somehow. Therapy, religion and spirituality, relationships, material success. All this can work, but also become a problem itself.
The pursuit of happiness has even been put into the American constitution a couple centuries ago. Today we're so rich, we own much more than we need, we have liberties unknown before, even though they are endangered in the current political climate in the US - and we forget how wonderful it nevertheless is, compared to most other political and economic systems. We have a saying that goes: Give a man enough rope and he hangs himself. — David Foster Wallace

People who need regulation often leave therapy sessions feeling calmer, stronger, safer, more able to handle the world. Often they don't know why. Nothing obviously helpful happened - telling a stranger about your pain sounds nothing like a certain recipe for relief. And the feeling inevitably dwindles, sometimes within minutes, taking the warmth and security with it. But the longer a patient depends, the more his stability swells, expanding infinitesimally with ever session as length is added to a woven cloth with each pass of the shuttle, each contraction of the loom. And after he weaves enough of it, the day comes when the patient will unfurl his independence like a pair of spread wings. Free at last, he catches a wind and rides into other lands. (172) — Thomas Lewis

She listened for the pain in my words, not to the narrative itself. She was intuiting what it meant to me, what was most important, what, in that confused mass of experience and yearning she heard in my voice, she could single out to give back. — Alice Sebold

Several medical professional organizations acknowledge the utility of opioid therapy and many case series and large surveys report satisfactory reductions in pain, improvement in function and minimal risk of addiction. — Andrew Rosenblum

And so we see people who are spiritually disconnected, living in boxes and driving in boxes, perhaps once a year going "out to nature" to get a small touch of what was once the daily experience of humans. These people seek escape. They sit in urban and suburban homes and feel miserable, not knowing why, experiencing anxiety and fear and pain that cannot be softened by drugs or TV or therapy because they are afflicted with a sickness of the soul, not of the mind. — Thom Hartmann

I deal with emotional pain through therapy, writing, therapy in music. I think emotional pain is best dealt with when you use art to express it. — Naturi Naughton

For all the types of pain that can lead to suffering there is a solution. Through opening our hearts with compassion to the pain that life brings, we can truly cure our pain and avoid our suffering. Then we can walk in the valley of love and experience the vast space within our heart. — Sebastian Pole

Music therapy, to me, is music performance without the ego. It's not about entertainment as much as its about empathizing. If you can use music to slip past the pain and gather insight into the workings of someone else's mind, you can begin to fix a problem. — Jodi Picoult

From a distance,' he says, 'my car looks just like every other car on the freeway, and Sarah Byrnes looks just like the rest of us. And if she's going to get help, she'll get it from herself or she'll get it from us. Let me tell you why I brought this up. Because the other day when I saw how hard it was for Mobe to go to the hospital to see her, I was embarrassed that I didn't know her better, that I ever laughed at one joke about her. I was embarrassed that I let some kid go to school with me for twelve years and turned my back on pain that must be unbearable. I was embarrassed that I haven't found a way to include her somehow the way Mobe has.'
Jesus. I feel tears welling up, and I see them running down Ellerby's cheeks. Lemry better get a handle on this class before it turns into some kind of therapy group.
So,' Lemry says quietly, 'your subject will be the juxtaposition of man and God in the universe?'
Ellerby shakes his head. 'My subject will be shame. — Chris Crutcher

Why Family Therapy ... because it deals with family pain. — Virginia Satir

Hopefully we are emerging from an era of fantasy explanations for real phenomena. The authors certainly have to face a community of therapists who are obsessionally committed to explanations for disease and for therapy unsupported by a scrap of evidence except for their claimed therapeutic success. — Patrick David Wall

I had to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life - it's excruciating, you are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. It's the result of your parents and your environment. — John Lennon

And we can seek therapy or religion to provide us relief like balm on chafed skin, but that's denying our own power to heal ourselves and trying to silence old pain with new opiates. — Kevin Hearne

Given the ... multidisciplinary philosophy, I was surprised by the absence of alternative pain approaches - the whole spectrum of cranial-sacral massage, healing-touch therapy, and other hands-on skills that are a lifeline to many people with chronic pain. Alternative therapie are hard to evaluate, but that's no reason not to explore them. — Marni Jackson

For some reason the word "chronic" often has to be explained. It does not mean severe, though many chronic conditions can be exceptionally serious and indeed life-threatening. No, "chronic" means persistent over time, enduring, constant. Diabetes is a chronic condition, but measles is not. With measles, you contract it and then it is gone. It can sometimes be fatal, but is never chronic. Manic depression, in other words, is something you have to learn to live with. There are therapies which may help some people to function and function for the most part happily and well. Sometimes a talking therapy, sometimes pharmaceutical intervention helps. — Stephen Fry

But those eyes, those big green eyes of hers, they bore right into me with crippling force. She wanted it too much; the space Tommy had left in her, she wanted me to fill it. And I couldn't. She looked too young and too scared. almost like she didn't really want it either, she just needed it. I couldn't stick it in and fuck her pain away. I did not know how to fuck at all, let alone as therapy. — Brendan Cowell