Quotes & Sayings About Therapy

Which he said was the big lie they all bought that made doctors and standard therapy such a waste of time for people like us
they thought that diagnosis was the same as cure. That if you knew why, it would stop. Which is bullshit. You only stop if you stop. — David Foster Wallace

I'm not very close to my parents. My stepfather (in my opinion) was very emotionally abusive when I was growing up and there were a lot of other issues I don't feel comfortable talking about publicly. I spent a lot of time in therapy dealing with these issues though, and I feel i'm finally starting to move past them. — Marie Calloway

In a man, I like funny guys. A guy who doesn't have a lot of therapy, who's mature. A man, not a boy. — Maura Tierney

For whatever reason, I tend to get reporters who are maybe in the middle of intense therapy, and they turn what's supposed to be a professional interview into therapy for themselves. — Douglas Coupland

You may adore Love You Forever, but I hear it as a story about an overbearing and smothering mother who infantilizes her son and can only tell him she loves him when he is fast asleep. I also contend that she drugs his cocoa. And that when the man's baby daughter wakes up sixteen years later and finds him fondling her in her room, she will be calling 911 and going into therapy. — Jane Yolen

The quick ticket to ecstasy is to catch yourself feeling in a very low state of mind
depressed, stupid, hateful
and to love yourself for feeling that way. When you do that you can experience a rocket ride right to the top. Love does not take time; it's possible to transform depression into ecstasy in a flash. But please do not accept my word for it. Try it as an experiment next time you are feeling low.
Something else to consider is that we will always be in the process of remembering how to love ourselves, then forgetting, then remembering again. It does not seem to be our destiny to be any one way all the time. So let's get used to being pendulums and enjoy the ride. — Gay Hendricks

That's the New York thing, isn't it. People who seem absolutely crazy going around telling you how crazy they used to be before they had therapy. — Judith Perelman Rossner

I'm all for 'tools,' not 'schools,' of therapy. To me, the schools of therapy compete much like religions, or even cults, all claiming to know the cause and to have the best method for treating people. — David D. Burns

When emotions turn and stay sour, when thoughts become cynical and judgmental, good and compassionate treatment is on the line. Helpers who become sour and cynical tend to begrudge their high need clients for their neediness. There is a risk that helpers become too well-practiced at taking a bleak view of those they have avowed to assist. There is a temptation to begin to blame clients for their failure to improve. If treatment ends pre-maturely, with either a client never returning to treatment or a helper 'firing' them out of frustration, there is a tendency for the client to take the fall. Of course what we are talking about here are signs of burnout. — Scott E. Spradlin

The three of us had a pact, governed by signals - pinching one another, agreeing to step fiercely on each other's toes when we felt riotous laughter welling up within us. It was not that any of us doubted the efficacy of group therapy for alcoholics (it is probably the only treatment), but, oh, dear heart, alcoholics in the loony bin! — Frederick Exley

If you do finish the book and are still scared of me and people of my ilk, then I recommend you schedule an appointment with a therapist. Either that, or try writing your own book — Maz Jobrani

I think blogging, by and large, is basically therapy. And I'm sure, and I know, that there are some terrific bloggers and some legitimate bloggers. But I think, by and large, a huge percentage of people who are blogging are doing it for self-therapy. — Mike Barnicle

I'd be cheating everyone here, the staff and rest of my teammates, if I wasn't able to stay on top of my work. It was almost like therapy, to come back and get in an environment I'm comfortable with. — Roger Clemens

Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy. — Gordon W. Allport

Something's up,' I say, handing the phone back.
'Not necessarily,' Jack says.
'You think this is the first time Lila's been hot-headed? Seriously, dude, you do remember my sister, right? Short, blonde, impulsive as shock therapy? Stubborn as a mule who won't take no for an answer?'
Does Jack ever listen to himself?
Does he appreciate the irony of this statement? I shake my head at him in wonder.
'Hey, I'm not short or blond,' Jack protests as he catches the look on my face. — Sarah Alderson

I guess I usually write when I'm in a really intense headspace, because it's my form of self-therapy. — Sharon Van Etten

I regard music therapy as a tool of great power in many neurological disorders
Parkinson's and Alzheimer's
because of its unique capacity to organize or reorganize cerebral function when it has been damaged. — Oliver Sacks

I remember a group therapy session when one of the patients was reluctantly turning his corner. He would accept it, he said, but he wouldn't like the idea of having to solve problems every day for the rest of his life. My co-therapist told him that it was not required that he like it. She shared her own displeasure, saying: 'I remember that when I first discovered what life was like, I was furious. I guess I'm still kind of mad sometimes.' (135) — Sheldon B. Kopp

I've always thought of beauty therapy, 'alternative' treatments and the like as the female equivalent of brothels - for essentially self-deceiving people who feel a bit hollow and have to pay to be touched. — Julie Burchill

Depression is a serious problem, but drugs are not the answer. In the long run, psychotherapy is both cheaper and more effective, even for very serious levels of depression. Physical exercise and self-help books based on CBT can also be useful, either alone or in combination with therapy. Reducing social and economic inequality would also reduce the incidence of depression. — Irving Kirsch

Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug. — James Thurber

The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love. — Hubert H. Humphrey

As you may already know, post-traumatic stress disorder is extremely complex. Each client has a unique, perhaps virtually unbelievable, set of experiences, and an almost equally set of reactions to those experiences. — Aphrodite Matsakis

Millions of Americans every year depend upon medical imaging exams to diagnose disease and detect injury, and thousands more rely on radiation therapy to treat and cure their cancers. — Charles W. Pickering

I started running around my 30th birthday. I wanted to lose weight; I didn't anticipate the serenity. Being in motion, suddenly my body was busy and so my head could work out some issues I had swept under a carpet of wine and cheese. Good therapy, that's a good run. — Michael Weatherly

People talked about therapy and change and the power of Christ, but maybe you just had to wake up one day and say you weren't going to do it anymore, you just weren't going to act like someone who felt that way, and you had to begin by saying words that felt strange on your tongue, even if they resonated inside your heart. — Christopher Rice

By marrying to soon, many individuals sacrifice their chance to struggle through this purgatory of solitude and search toward a greater sense of self-confidence. They glance at the world outside the family and with hardly a second thought grasp anxiously for a partner. In marriage they seek a substitute for the security of the family of origin and an escape from aloneness. What they do not realize is that moving so quickly from one family to another, they make it easy to transfer to the new marriage all their difficult experiences in the family of origin. — Augustus Y. Napier

The moment somebody becomes famous, 15 years gets knocked off their life. They're gonna get divorced a few times, they're gonna be addicted to things, they're gonna be in therapy. — Moby

You will stay in therapy as long as you feel it is worth the time, effort and money you invest. — Alexander Lowen

Countless hours of physical therapy - and the talents of the medical community - have brought me new movement in my right arm. It's fractional progress, and it took a long time, but my arm moves when I tell it to. — Gabrielle Giffords

I always had a dissociative disorder. But I healed from it over the course of 14 years of big-time therapy. But, you know, I mean, everybody's kind of loony now. So I was kind of a pioneer in the mental illness thing, too. — Roseanne Barr

We have two tractor-trailer rigs on the Tour. One is a therapy truck, and one is a workout truck. If everything is going well, you're walking in the workout truck, and when things aren't going well, you're walking in the therapy truck. — Fred Funk

The first and second commandments are the only therapy the world has ever needed. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind ... Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" [Matthew 22:37, 39 KJV]. — Billy Graham

It's such a private thing - 'my process' - I can just say that the work that I do is like therapy between me and the character. — Kirsten Dunst

I am willing for the participant to commit or not commit himself to the group. If a person wishes to remain psychologically on the sidelines, he has my implicit permission to do so. The group itself may or may not be willing for him to remain in this stance but personally I am willing. One skeptical college administrator said that the main things he had learned was that he could withdraw from personal participation, be comfortable about it, and realize that he would not be coerced. To me, this seemed a valuable learning and one that would make it much more possible for him actually to participate at the next opportunity. Recent reports on his behavior, a full year later, suggest that he gained and changed from his seeming nonparticipation. — Carl R. Rogers

Fishing's relaxing, man. Most relaxing thing in my life. It's therapy for me. I don't think about business ... sports. All I think about is catching the next fish. — Deion Sanders

A peculiarity of the nature of your mind is that, in contrast to your physical constitution (dosha) that is fixed from birth, it can be altered through discrimination and choice. — Sebastian Pole

In therapy, the therapist acts as a container for what we daren't let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives. — Jeanette Winterson

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

It was like therapy. List-therapy. It's a thing. — Krista Ritchie

I've always just talked to my family and my friends. I've never been a person that's gone through excessive therapy at all. Some people might say that I should. — Vince Vaughn

I especially love 'Web Therapy' and I did 'Eastbound and Down' too. I had a lot of fun doing that. — Lily Tomlin

You see, even after decades of therapy and workshops and retreats and twelve-steps and meditation and even experiencing a very weird session of rebirthings, even after rappeling down mountains and walking over hot coals and jumping out of airplanes and watching elephant races and climbing the Great Wall of China, and even after floating down the Amazon and taking ayahuasca with an ex-husband and a witch doctor and speaking in tongues and fasting (both nutritional and verbal), I remained pelted and plagued by feelings of uncertainty and despair. Yes, even after sleeping with a senator, and waking up next to a dead friend, and celebrating Michael Jackson's last Christmas with him and his kids, I still did not feel - how shall I put this? - mentally sound. — Carrie Fisher

Psychotherapy is a practice that many different professional disciplines engage. Psychiatrists are also medical doctors and increasingly offer medication and do less and less actual therapy. — Jed Diamond

She laughed softly. "Therapy isn't so much about what I think as you do."
"Then why do it at all?"
"Because we don't always know what it is we're thinking or feeling. When you have a guide, it's easier to figure things out. You'll often discover that you already know what to do. I can help you ask questions and go places you mihgt not have on your own."
"Well, you're good at the qujestion part." I noted dryly. — Richelle Mead

I think therapy is a helpful thing. I think everyone knows it. You do it for your life, you do it for yourself, because you want to explore some things, and get at the bottom of some things. It's about your life, the quality of your life. — Philip Seymour Hoffman

Our marriage, like many others, has had its ups and its downs. It took a lot of work and a whole lot of therapy to get to a place where I could forgive Anthony. It was not an easy choice in any way. But I made the decision that it was worth staying in this marriage. That was a decision I made for me, for our son and for our family. — Huma Abedin

When you are a screwed up person, you have a responsibility to keep your normal friends from getting walked on. 'Cos, how bad could you screw that up ? And don't say, Well, you could cause someone six months of physical therapy. 'Cos, hey, lots of times, those exercise take places in pools and nylon tents with little plastic balls. Fun places like that. And, she gets to park up really close for a while. Ha ha, oh, I'm the bad guy. — Christopher Titus

We cannot conduct reforms that affect the people adversely. If therapy drags out for decades and no gleam of light is seen, it is certainly not in the interests of the country, not in the interests of the people. — Yevgeny Primakov

Or perhaps she would be applying her innovative light therapy to the White House staff. — Ayse Kulin

Patients with various other types of movement disorders may also be able to pick up the rhythmic movement or kinetic melody of an animal, so, for example, equestrian therapy may have startling effectiveness for people with parkinsonism, Tourette's syndrome, chorea, or dystonia. — Oliver Sacks

To my mind, every emergency room should have a low-intensity laser for people with stroke or head trauma. This therapy would be especially important for head injuries, because there is no effective drug therapy for traumatic brain injury. Uri Oron has also shown that low-intensity laser light can reduce scar formation in animals that have had heart attacks; perhaps lasers should be used in emergency rooms for cardiac — Norman Doidge

If a child stays quiet in the context of extroverted friends, or even prefers time alone, a parent may worry and even send her to therapy. She might be thrilled - she'll finally get to talk about the stuff she cares about, and without interruption! But if the therapist concludes that the child has a social phobia, the treatment of choice is to increasingly expose her to the situations she fears. This behavioral treatment is effective for treating phobias - if that is truly the problem. If it's not the problem, and the child just likes hanging out inside better than chatting, she'll have a problem soon. Her "illness" now will be an internalized self-reproach: "Why don't I enjoy this like everyone else?" The otherwise carefree child learns that something is wrong with her. She not only is pulled away from her home, she is supposed to like it. Now she is anxious and unhappy, confirming the suspicion that she has a problem. — Laurie A. Helgoe

If you have trouble with finding things you should get into some kind of therapy with a good therapist if you need, I mean I just believe in therapy for everybody. I really do. I don't think any body can escape it. — Joy Behar

When pressed to tell people how I got myself into my current nepotism-gone-bad situation, I like to describe it as a mini-breakdown. The prefix makes all the difference. It makes it sound more like a vacation than a condition best treated with medication and art therapy. — Jill A. Davis

Among its many uses, dance/movement therapy aims to help people overcome trauma, often by nonverbally bringing the elements of the experience to the fore. — Judith Lynne Hanna

If you are not happy with something, you should change it. So I went to a lot of therapy, and finally, I am able to speak up for myself: You are going to hear me roar! — Katy Perry

I won't say that writing tamed the Black Beast. It soothed him, though, enough so he agreed simply to occupy a corner of my mind ... Gradually, I redirected my focus and skills towards causes much closer to my own heart: writing and mental health advocacy.
[ ... ]
I felt so good at times that I even wondered, was I still bipolar? In my community work, I saw so many people who were much worse off than I was - deep in their disease in a way I no longer seemed to be. I knew that this often happens to manic-depressives: the brain forgets the ravages of the illness they way a woman forgets the pains of childbirth. You have to, to survive. But it's always a dangerous place to be, because you inevitably start to question the need for medication, therapy, and all the other rigorous stopgaps of sanity so carefully put into place to prevent another episode. — Terri Cheney

My belief and career has been emblazoned with the conviction that we are all individual and, as such, not one therapy, diet, strategy or lifestyle will fit all of us. — Emma James

There are people who have benefited from therapy without being confronted with the past at all. — Alice Miller

The mind-body clash has disguised the truth that psychotherapy is physiology. When a person starts therapy, he isn't beginning a pale conversation; he is stepping into a somatic state of relatedness. (168) — Thomas Lewis

I just realized he was phrasing all of his questions as statements. Wasn't there a character in Alice in Wonderland who did that? Did Alice punch him in the face? — David Wong

Specificity refers to the ability of any medicine to discriminate between its intended target and its host. Killing a cancer cell in a test tube is not a particularly difficult task: the chemical world is packed with malevolent poisons that, even in infinitesimal quantities, can dispatch a cancer cell within minutes. The trouble lies in finding a selective poison - a drug that will kill cancer without annihilating the patient. Systemic therapy without specificity is an indiscriminate bomb. For an anticancer poison to become a useful drug, Meyer knew, it needed to be a fantastically nimble knife: sharp enough to kill cancer yet selective enough to spare the patient. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Therapy isn't curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human. Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, "This is me and the world be damned!" Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society Socrates , Christ , Freud , all the way down the line. — Rollo May

Sometimes toxic people are so resistant to change that therapy does not really help them - but they send everybody else into therapy to find ways to cope. — Amy Dickinson

therapy and its medications are a luxury. — Marcela Serrano

Gastronomy is the greatest form of therapy that anyone can be exposed to. — Marco Pierre White

Acceptance and commitment therapy, a variant on cognitive therapy, attempts to teach people to accept rather than change their emotions and make decisions within the context of what they value, as opposed to letting negative feelings control their behavior. — Joseph E. Ledoux

You know why Foo Fighters have been a band for 20 years? Because I've never really told anybody what I think of them. The last thing you ever want to do is go to therapy with your band. — Dave Grohl

I started in the late 70s, beginning of the 80s, and I think I started to sing and make music as a therapy for myself; I never planned to be an artist; sometimes when I think about it it's crazy that I'm here, and I'm touring, and I'm doing what I'm doing. — Mari Boine

From the beginning, of course, I had known that the pure forcefulness of my argument would not penetrate deep enough to effect any change. It almost never does. It's never worked for me when I've been in therapy. Only when one feels an insight in one's bones does one own it. Only then can one act on it and change. Pop psychologists forever talk about "responsibility assumption," but it's all words: it is extraordinarily hard, even terrifying, to own the insight that you and only you construct your own life design. Thus, the problem in therapy is always how to move from an ineffectual intellectual appreciation of a truth about oneself to some emotional experience of it. It is only when therapy enlists deep emotions that it becomes a powerful force for change. And powerlessness was — Irvin D. Yalom

(Mutt, a mentally ill brother who is setting fire to a load of expensive things from the house he grew up in and was physically abused and neglected in)
"Tuck (mutt's brother is being asked), aren't you going to stop him?"
'Why?'
'Well' - she waved her hand across the house - 'couldn't you two do something good with all this?" ...
"Yeah, but the money we earned wouldn't buy as much therapy as that fire ... — Charles Martin

One of the things that therapists do if you are suicidal, like a trick, is ask you about the future. They want to know what your plans are. Do you want to be the president? Do you want to be a rock star? They want to know if you want to live later even if you want to die now. — Albert Borris

I would like to stop worrying so much, because I worry all the time. And to learn how to be happier, just in general. I have to learn to take things not so seriously. And to stop biting my nails! ... Recording music has helped take my mind off certain things. For me, my music is therapy. — Britney Spears

We therapists often make inaccurate assumptions about people living with DID and DDNOS. They often appear to be "just like us," so we often assume their experience of life reflects our own. But this is profoundly untrue. It results in a communication gap, and, as a consequence, treatment errors. Because the dominant culture is one of persons with a single sense of self, most with multiple "selves" have learned to hide their multiplicity and imitate those who are singletons (that is, have a single, non-fragmented personality). Therapists who do not understand this sometimes describe their clients' alters without acknowledging their dissociation, saying only that they have different "moods." In overlooking dissociation, this description fails to recognize the essential truth of such disorders, and of the alters. It was difficult for me to comprehend what life was like for my first few dissociative clients. — Alison Miller

The man was reportedly allowed to bring the turkey onboard as a therapy pet because it was an emotional support animal. It's so cute. It had one of those vests saying support animal, do not pet or baste. — Mike Pesca

In therapy I have learned the importance of keeping spiritual life and professional life balanced. I need to regain my balance. — Tiger Woods

Travel is similar to therapy. You can go to the best psychologist in the world for ten years. If you don't feel like actively shifting anything in your life, there is nothing that person can do to change you. — Elizabeth Gilbert

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

When I grew up in Ireland in the seventies there was no such thing as therapy ... I mean we didn't even have cappuccinos until 1998! So for me music was therapy, it was also the place where one could speak about himself, where he was allowed to speak about his traumatic experiences. — Sinead O'Connor

brain and other nerve-related problems such as headaches from concussions, vascular dementia (dementia caused by blood vessel problems in the brain), migraines, Bell's palsy (a paralysis of the facial nerve), and tinnitus (ringing of the ears). He emphasized he was influenced by research that had been done in Israel on light therapy and the brain. Dr. Shimon Rochkind, a neurosurgeon at Tel Aviv University, originally pioneered work using lasers to treat injuries in the peripheral nervous system, that is, all the nerves in the body except those in the brain and spinal cord. Injury to peripheral nerves can lead to problems sensing or moving. — Norman Doidge

Unlike a typical professional, I can't quit my job to become a full-time author; I don't have that luxury. For me, writing is therapy; if I choose to write full-time, it might start feeling like work. — Ashwin Sanghi

Emily just knew that the grocery store clerk's cousin had slipped on a bath mat and fallen out a second-story open window only to be saved because the woman landed on a discarded mattress.
But what interested Emily most about the incident was how the cousin had subsequently met a man in physical therapy who introduced her to his half brother who she ended up marrying and then running over with her car a year later after a heated argument. And that man, it was discovered, had been the one to dump the mattress in her yard.
He'd saved her so that she could later cripple him.
Emily found that not ironic but intriguing.
Because everything, she believed, was connected. — Holly Goldberg Sloan

Gage appears beneath me. 'Jump, and I'll catch you.'
'No.'
I strengthen my death grip on the trunk of the tree. 'I'm very afraid of heights. I'll need hours of therapy to repair the damage done here today.' — Addison Moore

The overarching goal of occupation therapy is simple: Help patients live life to the fullest. — Holly Goodman

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

You know, a lot of actors I think go into acting for therapy from whatever trauma has affected them as children. But for me, I think I sought out the drama. That's why I like doing what I do. — Michael Ealy

I know the one time I tried therapy, I did after a month or two, and I only lasted a few months, because I started to worry about being entertaining. I kept driving there once a week for an hour and I'm thinking 'What am I going to talk about today?' — Justin Kirk

Well, [bluntness in songwriting]'s a lot cheaper than therapy ... There's been a lot of things going on for the past 10 years that I just never really confronted, or used metaphors to do so. This time out I wanted to make sure that everyone knows what I'm talking about and where I'm coming from. — Brent Smith

After a couple hours with a difficult and noncompliant patient, I sometimes felt a buzzing in my ear. Was my job sucking the life out of me? How did this person get on my schedule? — Adele Levine

But I find God to be an ineffectual shrink. He adopts the "do nothing" method of therapy. You tell him your problems and he, ah, does nothing. — Ned Vizzini

I would say 70 percent of people who are in therapy are in therapy not because of their upbringing, not because of their mean sister or obsessions, but because of anxiety brought about by lack of financial security. — John Hodgman

The cerebral processing of that visceral input as a signal of death was accurate. Without the kinds of therapy that had been developed over the decades, this cancer would have been fatal. Hope, then, is constructed not just from rational deliberation, from the conscious weighing of information; it arises as an amalgam of thought and feeling, the feelings created in part by neural input from the organs and tissues. — Jerome Groopman

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 believe that a different therapy must be constructed for each patient because each has a unique story. — Irvin D. Yalom

That we were made in his image. This is the next stage: after clones and gene therapy: we are changing what that image is. — James Smythe

It doesn't matter how many years go by, how much therapy I embark on, how much I try to achieve that elusive thing known as perspective, which is supposed to put all past wrongs into their rightful and diminished place, that happy place where all the talk is of lessons learned and inner peace. No one will ever understand the potency of my memories, which are so solid and vivid that I don't need a psychiatrist to tell me they are driving me crazy. My subconscious has not buried them, my superego has not restrained them. They are front and center, they are going on right now. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

At your absolute best, you still won't be good enough for the wrong person. At your worst, you'll still be worth it to the right person. — Karen Salmansohn

The person of the therapist is the converting catalyst, not his order or credo, not his spatial location in the room, not his exquisitely chosen words or denominational silences. So long as the rules of a therapeutic system do not hinder limbic transmission - a critical caveat - they remain inconsequential, neocortical distractions. The dispensable trappings of dogma may determine what a therapist thinks he is doing, what he talks about when he talks about therapy, but the agent of change is who he is. (187) — Thomas Lewis

In magic we have a variety of "uses" for our art beyond magic itself, which reminds me of the notion of art therapy. The rendering of art inferior to therapy is an interesting one: interesting in the sense that it makes me want to vomit angrily. — Derren Brown