Real Therapy Quotes & Sayings

Modern life is, for most of us, a kind of serfdom to mortgage, job and the constant assault to consume. Although we have more time and money than ever before, most of us have little sense of control over our own lives. It is all connected to the apathy that means fewer and fewer people vote. Politicians don't listen to us anyway. Big business has all the power; religious extremism all the fear. But in the garden or allotment we are king or queen. It is our piece of outdoors that lays a real stake to the planet. — Monty Don

Will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Therapists and friends can help you along the way, but the healing - the genuine healing, the actual real-deal, down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change - is entirely and absolutely up to you. — Cheryl Strayed

I seem to get totally wrapped up in teaching and working with students during the school year. During the summer, I try to spend time in the real world, writing code for therapy and perhaps for some useful purpose. — Brian Kernighan

I'm the perfect amount of guarded. I don't reveal too much, and I never reveal who the songs are about. They are real life. People get that. I date a lot of musicians and they do the same thing. People that work with me - who I write about too - they get it. It's my creative outlet, my therapy. — Kelly Clarkson

You might think that treatments like group therapy after breast cancer would now be standard. Guess again. Affiliation is not a drug or an operation, and that makes it nearly invisible to Western medicine. Our doctors are not uninformed; on the contrary, most have read these studies and grant them a grudging intellectual acceptance. But they don't believe in them; they can't bring themselves to base treatment decisions on a rumored phantom like attachment. The prevailing medical paradigm has no capacity to incorporate the concept that a relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure. — Thomas Lewis

When people get into therapy, or when they need healing, their real hope is that they'll come to the secret frontier in themselves, some unknown source of energy and healing in themselves, where the divinity of who-ness is protected. This is a spiritual quest. — John O'Donohue

I have no right to be sad about anything. No right to have therapy from expensive doctors like you for losing children who never existed. There is real grief in the world. There are real mothers losing real children. — Liane Moriarty

The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy, and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experience you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character. — Carl Jung

That's the problem with reality, that's the fallacy of therapy: It assumes that you will have a series of revelations, or even just one little one, and that these various truths will come to you and will change your life completely. It assumes that insight alone is a transformative force. But the truth is, it doesn't work that way. In real life, every day you might come to some new conclusion about yourself and about the reasoning behind your behavior, and you can tell yourself that this knowledge will make all the difference. But in all likelihood, you're going to keep on doing the same old things. You'll still be the same person. You'll still cling to your destructive, debilitating habits because you emotional tie to them is so strong that the stupid things you are really the only things you've got that keep you centered and connected. They are the only things about you that you you. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

The real curriculum is punctuality, obedience and the acceptance of monotony, those skills we shall require later in life. Oblique aversion therapy to cure us of our thirst for information, and condition us so that thereafter we forge an association between indolence and pleasure. We confuse rebellion with a hairstyle — Alan Moore

In 1973, I broke off from the therapy and decided I could go through one of those episodes on my own, in my house. I found there is no real need to be locked up. I found that I was able to use that kind of awake dreaming that you go into during insanity and look at it and live with it and relate to it and become friends with it. — Dory Previn

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

I consider therapy successful when the family members (or individual clients) have discovered ways to get what they need from their relationships with the people in their lives, so that their relationship with me is no longer necessary to sustain them. Like a chemical catalyst that facilitates a reaction between two other substances, the therapeutic relationship catalyzes the transformation of relationships in the lives of clients. But the real healing takes place not in the therapeutic relationship but in the client's relationships with significant others. — Joseph A. Micucci

Perhaps the real therapy occurred at the deathbed scene, when they moved into honesty with the revelation that they were fellow travelers, both simply human, all too human. — Irvin D. Yalom

All I can do in one session is to be real, to leap into the patient's life, to offer observations in the hope that he'll be able to open doors and explore some new parts of himself in his ongoing therapy. — Irvin D. Yalom

Every man's penis is the prettiest thing in the world to him. From the day he's born until the day he dies. It never loses its endless fascination. And, I kid you not, baby, the same is true of every woman and her pussy. It's the closest thing to a real, blind, helpless love and religious adoration that most people ever achieve. But they'd rather die than admit it. Homosexuality, the urge to kill, petty spites and treacheries, fantasies of sadism, masochism, transvestism, any weird thing you can name, they'll confess all that in a group therapy session. But that deep submerged constant narcissism, that perpetual mental masturbation, is the earliest and most powerful block. They'll never admit it. — Robert Shea

Howard: Sometimes a betrayal can be so subtle that it clouds the whole thing.

Nita: It would have to be a real betrayal. Not like canceling an appointment. It would be like you'd end the relationship in the middle.

Howard: Why would I call it off?

Nita: I don't know! — Sarah E. Olson

Trying to tell an authentic, raw and honest story without making it therapy. Separating myself enough to have perspective while putting myself in the emotional hot seat so that I could make this thing real. Asking for help. Delegating responsibility. Standing up for myself. Fighting the impulse to be sweet and likeable 24/7. Being open to all ideas, but staying true to the spine of the story. Knowing when to let go and when to hold on and fight like hell. Getting out of my own way. Shall I go on? — Jessie Kahnweiler

Every patient tends to bury the most important story inside some other story, just the way new writers often 'bury the lede.' 'Burying the lede' is an old journalism term for when you only find out the real point about halfway into the article, but it also applies to therapy. — Gina Barreca

Not everyone is as honest as Freud was when he said that he cured the miseries of the neurotic only to open him up to the normal misery of life. Only angels know unrelieved joy-or are able to stand it. Yet we see the books by the mind-healers with their garish titles: "Joy!" "Awakening," and the like; we see them in person in lecture halls or in groups, beaming their particular brand of inward, confident well-being, so that it communicates its unmistakable message: we can do this for you, too, if you will only let us. I have never seen or heard them communicate the dangers of the total liberation that they claim to offer; say, to put up a small sign next to the one advertising joy, carrying some inscription like "Danger: real probability of the awakening of terror and dread, from which there is no turning back." It would be honest and would also relieve them of some of the guilt of the occasional suicide that takes place in therapy. — Ernest Becker

During my short college stint, every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me - later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish. — Mary Karr

Addiction is more malleable than you know. When people come to me for therapy, they often ask me whether their behavior constitutes a real addiction (or whether they are really alcoholic, etc.). My answer is that this is not the important question. The important questions are how many problems is the involvement causing you, how much do you want to change it, and how can we go about change? — Stanton Peele

I really like Jeff Lewis and 'Flipping Out' and 'Interior Therapy.' I don't know why I'm obsessed with American real estate and renovation. — Chris Lilley

I think there is some real therapy in getting your hands in the dirt and working with food. — Jon Tester

Writing is my therapy. In addition to my real therapy. God knows where I'd be without it. I'd probably still be at my last job, working in HR at a religious organization. I was horribly miscast. — Jenny Lawson

Writing is my own personal therapy. It's cheaper than a real shrink and I get to kill people off when I grow bored of them. — Jack Tate

I don't see anyone walking around with a puppet on his hand in real life. Puppet therapy is very common for children. It's not something that adults take on. — Jodie Foster

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

To learn theory by experimenting and doing.
To learn belonging by participating and self-rule.
Permissiveness in all animal behavior and interpersonal expression.
Emphasis on individual differences.
Unblocking and training feeling by plastic arts, eurythmics and dramatics.
Tolerance of races, classes, and cultures.
Group therapy as a means of solidarity, in the staff meeting and community meeting.
Taking youth seriously as an age in itself.
Community of youth and adults, minimizing 'authority.'
Educational use of the actual physical plant (buildings and farms) and the culture of the school community.
Emphasis in the curriculum on real problems and wider society, its geography and history, with actual participation in the neighboring community (village or city).
Trying for functional interrelation of activities. — Paul Goodman

The problem is, I don't think I've got too much to offer at the minute. I'm busy working on myself. This sounds like real therapy talk, but it's like, you've got to be happy with yourself before you can go out and get yourself a girl. — Robbie Williams

Every time I do an interview, it's like serious therapy. But real therapy isn't something that I'd ever have. I feel fortunate that mentally everything is functioning well. — James Blunt

Life is like therapy - real expensive and no guarantees. — Garth Brooks

This is our country. He was rejecting Adrian's offer of help. It was this that had stung so much, the idea he was neither wanted nor needed. It had simply never occurred to him.
Attila. The man is right, of course. People here don't need therapy so much as hope. But the hope has to be real- Attila's warning to Adrian. I fall down, I get up. Westerners Adrian has met despise the fatalism. But perhaps it is the way people have found to survive. — Aminatta Forna

The second trait of narcissism in which asceticism plays a role is blankness. "If only I could feel" - in this formula the self-denial and self-absorption reach a perverse fulfillment. Nothing is real if I cannot feel it, but I can feel nothing. The defense against there being something real outside the self is perfected, because, since I am blank, nothing outside me is alive. In therapy the patient reproaches himself for an inability to care, and yet this reproach, seemingly so laden with self-disgust, is really an accusation against the outside. For the real formula is, nothing suffices to make me feel. Under cover of blankness, there is the more childish plaint that nothing can make me feel if I don't want to, and hidden in the characters of those who truly suffer because they go blank faced with a person or activity they always thought they had desired, there is the secret, unrecognized conviction that other people, or other things as they are, will never be good enough. — Richard Sennett

The observer self, a part of who we really are, is that part of us that is watching both our false self and our True Self. We might say that it even watches us when we watch. It is our Consciousness, it is the core experience of our Child Within. It thus cannot be watched - at least by anything or any being that we know of on this earth. It transcends our five senses, our co-dependent self and all other lower, though necessary parts, of us.
Adult children may confuse their observer self with a kind of defense they may have used to avoid their Real Self and all of its feelings. One might call this defense "false observer self" since its awareness is clouded. It is unfocused as it "spaces" or "numbs out." It denies and distorts our Child Within, and is often judgmental. — Charles L. Whitfield

For some people it's real therapy to talk to journalists about their private lives and inner thoughts. But I would rather keep something to myself. — Mick Jagger

It was regarded as almost outside the proper interest of an analyst to give systematic attention to a person's real experiences. — John Bowlby