Relationship Therapy Quotes & Sayings

Family therapists view the therapeutic relationship as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself. Family therapists see beyond the problematic patterns in the family to the potential healing power of family relationships. — Joseph A. Micucci

That's one of therapy's cruel aspects: the therapist is unique to you, but not the other way around. How unfair. It's the most unequal relationship you could imagine. — Marcela Serrano

Using no control and using humor will build a relationship and make a dent to where the client puts the counselor in their quality world and then begins to relate and seek out the counselor. Effective therapy begins with the acceptance of the therapist into the client's quality world. — William Glasser

Dr Sue Johnson is the most original contributor to couples therapy to
come along in the last thirty years. This book will touch your heart,
stimulate your mind and give you practical strategies for improving
your relationship. — William J Doherty

No short-cut that tries to bypass the patient unfolding of the true character of God, and our relationship to him as his children, can ever succeed in providing long-term spiritual therapy. — Sinclair B. Ferguson

Client-therapist disagreement about the goals and tasks of therapy may impair the therapeutic alliance. This issue is not restricted to group therapy. Client-therapist discrepancies on therapeutic factors also occur in individual psychotherapy. A large study of psychoanalytically oriented therapy found that clients attributed their successful therapy to relationship factors, whereas their therapists gave precedence to technical skills and techniques.84 In general, analytic therapists value the coming to consciousness of unconscious factors and the subsequent linkage between childhood experiences and present symptoms far more than do their clients, who deny the importance or even the existence of these elements in therapy; instead they emphasize the personal elements of the relationship and the encounter with a new, accepting type of authority figure. — Irvin D. Yalom

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

There is no evidence of spontaneous remission or integration of personality alters without mental health treatment. Therapy is long-term and requires the establishment of a strong therapeutic relationship with the individual. — Danny Wedding

If someone doesn't like what you bring to the table in a relationship, let them eat alone. — Karen Salmansohn

Therapy is not to 'talk about' things, but to change the person's life, and to relieve suffering, such as depression, anxiety, or relationship problems. — David D. Burns

There is no worse parent than an unhappy parent! — Rossana Condoleo

As part of his life-saving therapy with suicidal patients and his own experience in a Nazi concentration camp, Frankl learned there are three things that give meaning to life: first, a project; second, a significant relationship; and third, a redemptive view of suffering. — Jeff Goins

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

It's not ideas, nor vision, nor tools that truly matter in therapy. If you debrief patients at the end of therapy about the process, what do they remember? Never the ideas - it's always the relationship. — Irvin D. Yalom

Lack of communication can drive a spike between two people wider than any physical distance. — Mark W. Boyer

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

I have more than thirty thousand hours of family and relationship counseling experience under my belt. Over the years, I have seen changes in relationship trends walk through my therapy office doors. My richest gifts are translating the complexities of love and desire in modern relationships into something simple and accessible. I can offer informed advice that makes people feel comfortable, knowledgeable, and confident. — Esther Perel

Even though we were still waiting for Don, therapy was well begun. We were engaged in a subtle, often predictable, and very important contest with the family about who was going to be present at the meetings. Carl and I had revealed some of what our relationship had to offer: a good-humored liking for each other, an ability to cooperate, and an insistence on remaining ourselves. I was clearly not going to be the reverential assistant to the older man. And perhaps most important, Carl had intuitively modeled some of the process of therapy for the family. By sharing insight into his own personality, he was saying by demonstration, It's important to search for you own unconscious agenda. — Augustus Y. Napier

The very first picture that came up on the camera's little view screen was of him.
What did that mean that she'd kept this picture of him?
Was it because she still cared?
Or had she saved it as a warning? Like, "Never forget how completely screwed up your relationship was with this loser ... "
It wasn't a particularly good picture. In fact, it was pretty embarrassing.
Sitting up in his bed, Max was in his room at Sheffield. It was the photo Gina had taken the day after he'd arrived there. He looked like crap warmed over after his very first physical therapy session, and he was glowering into the camera because he goddamn didn't want his picture taken. — Suzanne Brockmann

It has been fashionable in some psychiatric and lay circles to blame the mother for whatever goes wrong in development. [...]

If blame must be assessed it should be placed on the human condition which requires such prolonged dependence on one individual for development to take place. This makes the child extraordinarily vulnerable to the idiosyncrasies of that person (the mother). On the other hand, the prolonged dependence on this relationship also provides the potential for the richness of the human personality.

It is a mistake, in my judgment, in psychotherapy to encourage or side with the patient's hostility to the mother. The patient has to become aware of and express it in therapy in order to grow but whatever the source of this hostility is in the past -- be it an actual memory or a fantasy to rationalize a feeling state -- the problem is now the patient's responsibility and he must work it out. — James F. Masterson

Learning how to do psychotherapy is a complex process, much of which is transacted in the relationship between the beginning therapists and experienced supervisors. When the beginning therapists encounter problems that are beyond their range of experience, the supervisors usually assist in several ways. First, the supervisors offer an intellectual
framework in which to understand the problem. References to the professional literature are often suggested. Second, the supervisors offer practical, problem-solving help with the strategies of therapy. Third and most important, the supervisors help the less experienced therapists to deal with feelings of their own that have been evoked by the patients. With the support of competent supervisors, the therapists are usually able to master their own troubled feelings and put them in perspective.
This done, the therapists are better able to attend to patients with empathy, and with a confidence in their ability to offer help. — Judith Lewis Herman

You can't tell a little kid that you swear to God over something and then not do it. You may effectively ruin my childhood." He looks off into nothing, a wistful expression on his face. "Gosh, think of the therapy bills. Not to mention how I'll probably never be able to have a normal relationship when I'm an adult. I'll live with you forever and become a cat lady."
I cock an eyebrow at him. "You hate cats." He rolls his eyes. "Well, yeah, now I do. But I won't have a choice. It'll be inevitable. And I'll probably have to throw birthday parties for my feline companions where I bake them cakes out of
Fancy Feast. All because you went back on your God swear. — T.J. Klune

I'm now unemployed. It's a weird feeling with no work, but at least there's still golf. Standup comedy is like my core, it's what I do. But I want to be a pro golfer. It's a love/hate relationship with golf. I can come away feeling so serene, and yet, it's the thing that I can let get to me to throw a club and say curses that don't even exist. I'm obsessed with something that won't let me master it. I don't know. I need therapy. — Ray Romano

In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth? — Carl R. Rogers

Absence of that knowledge has rendered us a nation of wary label-readers, oddly uneasy in our obligate relationship with the things we eat ... Our words for unhealthy contamination
"soiled" or "dirty"
suggest that if we really knew the number-one ingredient of a garden, we'd all head straight into therapy. I used to take my children's friends out to the garden to warm them up to the idea of eating vegetables, but this strategy sometimes backfired: they'd back away slowly saying, "Oh man, those things touched dirt!" Adults do the same by pretending it all comes from the clean, well-lighted grocery store. We're like petulant teenagers rejecting our mother. We know we came out of her, but ee-ew. — Barbara Kingsolver

Love is at the heart of the world, just as it is at the heart of your life. Your relationships with your lover, your family, your friends, and the world around you define the quality of your emotional wholeness and reflect your relationship with yourself. — Sebastian Pole