Thought Therapy Quotes & Sayings

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

Talking to a therapist, I thought, was like taking your clothes off and then taking your skin off, and then having the other person say, Would you mind opening up your rib cage so that we can start? — Julie Schumacher

I have not spent years in therapy; I tried therapy in my mid-twenties, and it did not go very well. I just thought, 'This is so not for me. I would rather talk to one of my girlfriends.' — Hope Davis

Frank Farrelly ... must be thought of with respect (perhaps even delight?) by his clients who have so far played the game of therapy with their therapists, but, I am afraid, also a shocking example for those therapists who, in Laing's words, 'are playing at not playing a game'. — Paul Watzlawick

The point about positive thinking, and later cognitive behavioural therapy, was that you could choose how you thought about life, and that how you thought about it changed not only your interpretation of what happened, but also the actual course of events. — Jenny Alexander

Blake filled her world. The sweaty male scent of him was in her nostrils, the slippery texture of his hot skin under her hands; the unbearably erotic taste of his mouth lay sweetly on her tongue. At some unknown point his kisses had slipped past celebration and become intensely male, demanding, giving, thrilling. Perhaps they'd never been celebration kisses at all, she thought fuzzily.
Suddenly he removed his mouth from hers and buried his face in the curve of her neck. When he spoke his voice was shaky, but husky with an undertone of laughter. "Have you noticed how much time we spend rolling around on the floor? — Linda Howard

I thought foolishly that Freudian psychoanalysis was deeper and more intensive than other, more directive forms of therapy, so I was trained in it and practiced it. — Albert Ellis

They say shock therapy is good for some things, but it didn't do me any good. It was a pretty primitive treatment at the time - once they gave it to you, you couldn't remember how long you'd been there. It knocked me back for a long time. I thought I'd never write again. — Don Everly

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

No one has ever thought this: Now that I'm out of therapy and have fixed my mental problems, I think I want to be a ventriloquist. — Dana Gould

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

You don't realise how much you're holding onto until you start to let go of it. I had had loads of therapy and thought I had come to terms with who I am, but there's something in the process of writing that unlocks other experiences, other emotions and you have to be prepared for that. — Damian Barr

Secondly, extroverts often incorrectly assume that introverts are suffering. Introverts internalize problems; we like to take things inside and work on them there. Extroverts prefer to externalize and deal with problems interactively. Because of this difference, introverts may seem psychologically burdened, while extroverts spread the burden around and seem healthier - from an extroverted standpoint. But note that I said introverts like to take problems inside. Sure, an introvert can overdo it, but so can the extrovert who feels compelled to express every unresolved thought or emotion. The former gets depressed or anxious and goes to therapy; the latter sends others to therapy. — Laurie A. Helgoe

I don't have any regrets," a famous movie actor said in an interview I recently witnessed. "I'd live everything over exactly the same way."
"That's really pathetic," the talk show host said. "Are you seeking help?"
"Yeah. My shrink says we're making progress. Before, I wouldn't even admit that I would live it all over," the actor said, starting to choke up. "I thought one life was satisfying enough."
"My God," the host said, cupping his hand to his mouth.
"The first breakthrough was when I said I would live it over, but only in my dreams. Nocturnal recurrence."
"You're like the character in that one movie of yours. What's it called? You know, the one where you eat yourself."
"The Silence of Sam."
"That's it. Can you do the scene?"
The actor lifts up his foot to stick it in his mouth. I reach over from my seat and help him to fit it into his bulging cheeks. The audience goes wild. — Benson Bruno

He thought about going out and buying a Sunday paper but decided not to. Arnold Stockton, Jessica's boss, a many-chinned, self-made caricature of a man, owned all the Sunday papers that Rupert Murdoch had failed to buy. His own papers talked about him, and so did the rest. Reading a Sunday paper would, Richard suspected, probably end up reminding him of the dinner had failed to attend on Friday night. So instead Richard had a long hot bath and a number of sandwiches, and several cups of tea. — Neil Gaiman

I will say that going to these meetings and things, you know, I thought that, you know, be in a room with a bunch of drunk people. Ugh! I can't do that. And the truth is, it is the cheapest therapy that you could ever get. You're in a group of people that are from all walks of life, you know. Some guy that's got, you know, construction stuff on and dust still on, to a person that's the CEO of a company. And it's a common - it's a common abyss that you shared. — Lynda Carter

I thought part of the idea of having therapy was putting one in touch with his or her feelings. And don't give me all that about transference, and counter-transference and all that. I know what I feel. And it has nothing to do with all that. And you also feel for me. And if you don't know that, then maybe it's you who needs to have therapy to gain a better knowledge of yourself. — Olga Nunez Miret

I know in my own marriage I stayed in it to provide my son with what I thought was a stable background and to give him what I thought was the family life a child should have with two parents. But that isn't always the best way, and it took me taking my son to therapy after the divorce to really see it. — Regina King

Writing started out as a kind of therapy for me. I was bullied mercilessly in high school, and I lived vicariously through Kitty. She was everything I wanted to be; strong, smart, witty, and above all else, she didn't care what other people thought about her. But after a while, she started to take on a personality of her own, and I was suddenly more interested in her story than I was in mine. — Caitlin Elyse

Futures can and do change, something as simple as you're supposed to turn right down a street one day ... In your bones u know it, and yet for reasons no one understands, you decide to debunk fate and go left. Now instead of meeting your spouse of your dreams and having a house full of kids, you get flattened by an ice-cream truck and spend the next 5 years in physical therapy recovering from the injuries; or worse you die from it. And all cause you exercised free will and turned the opposite way on a whim. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

We have signed with Artemis Records. Originally they were our distributor for 'Group Therapy'. My former manager (Chip Quigley) started a record label (Recon Records) and had Artemis Records as their distributor. Unfortunately, the way the label was run meant that it didn't turn out the way that we thought it was going to be. We simply got into something that was different to what we initially thought — Brian Ebejer

She thought she brought a gift of compassion for those exhausted souls who had not received a chest portion from the people who raised them. If compassion and therapy did not work, she could always send her patients to the local pharmacy for drugs. — Pat Conroy

By connecting with one's Divine Self, Carol Whitaker has captured the essence of transformation from within. Like a diet for the mind, Ridiculously Happy! guides you on a spiritual journey allowing you to harness the power of the mind, body and spirit to achieve a level of mental and physical wellness one may not have thought possible. I'm a big fan of energy therapy and love that Carol shares the EFT tapping technique which anyone can quickly and easily use to find peace and healing in their lives. This book is a must have! — Laura M. Brotherson

I once met a woman who'd been in therapy ... and it seemed like the big thing she'd learned was to ignore everything she thought in the first hour of the day. That's when the negative stuff will try to bring you down, she said, and she was right about that but not much else. You come back from the night with your head and your soul empty, and bad things try to fill you up. There's a lot to get exercised about, if you let it. But if you've got a task, something to fill your head and move your limbs, by the time you've finished it the day has begun ands you're onto the next thing. You're over the hump, like I said. — Michael Marshall Smith

If you're lucky enough to be able to have therapy
because I know it's very privileged
it gets rid of so much garbage and enables you to focus on what's important. When I first went into analysis, my mother was absolutely horrified. She thought I'd be a loony! — Julie Andrews

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

Therapy to life: Eat with the wise, and drink with the fools! — Anthony Liccione

I have a terrible problem with procrastination ... a friend told me, "Well, you should go to therapy." And I thought about it, but then I said, "Wait a minute. Why should I pay a stranger to listen to me talk when I can get strangers to pay to listen to me talk?" And that's when I got the idea of touring. — Ellen DeGeneres

Watching people run on television was a revelation for me. Never before had I thought of running as a sport. When I ran, I did not think about conditions in the camp or the hunger in my belly. Running was my therapy, my release, my escape from the world around me. — Lopez Lomong

Great music stops the inner turmoil of thought and allows the mind to seek its natural state of joy. Music frees our minds and allows us to soar to heights where we can experience the celestial. Music opens our minds to allow the perception of new thoughts of a higher nature, which gives us a spiritual lift, which produces yet more joy. — Wu Wei

I thought therapy was a sort of magic, that you just kept talking and the very act of talking unlocked some forgotten key. — Sally Brampton

The idea is to help patients more clearly assess the contents of their thought stream, teaching them to note and correct the conceptual errors termed "cognitive distortions" that characterize psychopathological thinking. Somone in the grips of such thinking would, for instance, regard a half-full glass not merely as half-empty but also fatally flawed, forever useless, constitutionally incapable of ever being full, and fit only to be discarded. By the mid-1980s, cognitive therapy was being used more and more in combination with behavioral therapy for OCD, and it seemed naturally compatible with a mindfulness-based perspective. If I could show that a cognitive-behavioral approach, infused with mindful awareness, could be marshaled against the disease, and if successful therapy were accompanied by changes in brain activity, then it would represent a significant step toward demonstrating the causal efficacy of mental activity on neural circuits. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz

It felt increasingly, as I became more whole, that I had made it all up, and that I was a phoney. I had to come to some place of acceptance. If I made it all up, then I am an unspeakably evil person, leading so many wonderful, intelligent people astray. What a scheming mind I must have. I knowledge will be hard too live with. But harder still is the thought that perhaps, just perhaps it is all true; that I really was horribly, ritualistically abused in a satanic setting, over and over again and as a result my mind fragmented. The implications of that are completely overwhelming. It was me, my body, that they did those things to. No, I would rather believe I am an evil and deceitful person. At least the I can change, and say sorry, and live a better life from now on. — Carolyn Bramhall

Iraq." As much as twenty percent of returning veterans from Iraq had post-traumatic stress, some thought even more. Aiden's anxiety was par for the course. Duncan wondered why he hadn't gotten therapy at the VA. — J.M. Madden

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

I wanted to cheer him up, but it felt weird wanting to cheer up someone who was possibly depressed because they didn't murder you correctly, and that's when I thought, "This must be what love is. When you want to make it less difficult for someone to murder you." And that's when I realized that I was far too in love with him for my own good, and also that I probably needed therapy. — Jenny Lawson

I thought if I can do something more playful and light like my play BEYOND THERAPY, it might be a money maker. I think one of the reasons BEYOND THERAPY has legs - it's been very successful for me around the country - is because it's a friendly play, rather sunny. — Christopher Durang

A good therapy helps you develop a sense of irony about your life so that when you start to repeat old and unhelpful patterns, something within you says, "There you go again; let's call this to a halt. You can do something different." Often the first step toward doing something different is developing the capacity to not act, to stay still and reflect. — Sherry Turkle

One school of thought says that the best way to handle an issue like this is exposure therapy," Mad Rogan said. "For example, if you're terrified of snakes, repeated handling of them will cure it."
Aha. "I'm not handling your snake. — Ilona Andrews

You're always searching for the thing to heal you, and I thought therapy would give me that. But it didn't - it just helps you recognize your demons. — Rick Springfield

One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention. — Flannery O'Connor

I have occasionally thought that some [TV] hosts have needed treatment, and some of these hosts have even admitted they could benefit from therapy. Having said that, I think most people can benefit from treatment. Those who need it and refuse to get it generally have the most issues. — Robi Ludwig