Quotes about therapy

A collection of quotes on the topic of therapy, doing, people, use.

Quotes about therapy

Tim Burton photo
Grace Kelly photo

“I love walking in the woods, on the trails, along the beaches. I love being part of nature. I love walking alone. It is therapy. One needs to be alone, to recharge one's batteries.”

Grace Kelly (1929–1982) American actress and Princess consort of Monaco

The Milwaukee Sentinel Princess Grace finds relaxation in her gardens Jan. 1, 1981

Edgar Cayce photo
Graham Greene photo
Dean Karnazes photo

“Some seek the comfort of their therapist's office, other head to the corner pub and dive into a pint, but I chose running as my therapy.”

Dean Karnazes (1962) American distance runner

Source: Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner

Alexis Carrel photo
Matthew Perry (actor) photo
John Scalzi photo
Jonathan Franzen photo
Aaron T. Beck photo
Jordan Peterson photo

“There's an insistence that the Being that's spoken into being through Truth is Good. This is the most profound ever. It is also the most believable idea ever. What cures in therapy is Truth. Of course, you must encounter the things that you're afraid of, but this is enacted Truth, because if you know that there's something you need to do by your own set of rules and you're avoiding it, then you're enacting a lie. You're not speaking the lie, but you're enacting it, and that's the same thing: untruth. If you can confront If I can get you to face what it is that you know you shouldn't be avoiding, then what's happening is that we're both partaking in the process of you attempting to act out your deepest truth. That improves people's lives radically. The clinical evidence for that is overwhelming. We know that if you expose people to the things that they're afraid of and are avoiding, they get better. You have to do it carefully, cautiously, and with their approval and participation. Of all the things that clinicians have established that's credible, that's #1. It's redemptive insofar as both people are telling the truth. The difference between deception and repression is very small. People can handle earthquakes and cancer and even death, but they can't handle deception. They can't handle the rug being pulled out from underneath them by people who they love and trust. This does them in. It makes them ill, it hurts them psycho-physiologically, and worse than that it makes them cynical, bitter, vicious, and resentful. And then they also start to act all that out in the world, and that makes it worse.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Karl Kraus photo

“Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

Rollo May photo

“Therapy isn't curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

As quoted in Marriage Today : Problems, Issues, and Alternatives (1977) by James E. De Burger, p. 444
Variant: I think Dostoevsky was right, that every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.
As quoted in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations (1998) by Connie Robertson, p. 270
Context: 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.

Suzanne Collins photo
Woody Allen photo

“My films are therapy for my debilitating depression. In institutions people weave baskets. I make films.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician
Richelle Mead photo
Marilyn Manson photo

“I walked away exhilarated by my success, because there's nothing like making a difference in someone's life, even if that difference is a lifetime of nightmares and a fortune in therapy bills.”

Marilyn Manson (1969) American rock musician and actor

Variant: There's nothing like the feeling of knowing that you've made a difference in someone's life, even if that difference is a lifetime of nightmares and a fortune in therapy bills.
Source: The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

“Two years? That's entirely too long. If you want, we can take care of that. After two years it's pure therapy.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Burns

Jeffrey Eugenides photo

“The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely he will be to recover from trauma and thrive. Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love.”

Bruce D. Perry (1955) American psychiatrist

Source: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Carrie Fisher photo
Garth Brooks photo
Jim Butcher photo

“My imagination needs therapy.”

Source: Skin Game

Lisa Lutz photo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo

“We tend to use knowledge as therapy.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 69

Eoin Colfer photo
Sophie Kinsella photo
Neal Shusterman photo
Augusten Burroughs photo
Virginia Satir photo

“Why Family Therapy…because it deals with family pain. you”

Virginia Satir (1916–1988) American psychologist

Conjoint Family Therapy: A Guide to theory and technique (1967)

Gloria Estefan photo
Lawrence Kudlow photo
Benjamin R. Barber photo
Karl Rove photo
Camille Paglia photo
Jordan Peterson photo
Naomi Klein photo
Elizabeth Loftus photo
Ann Coulter photo

“In order to get the funding through for the wall, it was being held up by conservatives – or I would of thought you know sane humans – in the Senate who don’t want taxpayers like you and me paying for these lengthy transgender operations, years of therapy.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

Trump's transgender ban tweets were a good distraction from his Sessions tweets: Ann Coulter
2017-07-27
Fox News Business
http://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/2017/07/27/trumps-transgender-ban-tweets-were-good-distraction-from-his-sessions-tweets-ann-coulter.html
2017

Haruki Murakami photo
Michael Crichton photo
David Brin photo

“Anyone who loves nature, as I do, cries out at the havoc being spread by humans, all over the globe. The pressures of city life can be appalling, as are the moral ambiguities that plague us, both at home and via yammering media. The temptation to seek uncomplicated certainty sends some rushing off to ashrams and crystal therapy, while many dive into the shelter of fundamentalism, and other folk yearn for better, “simpler” times. Certain popular writers urgently prescribe returning to ancient, nobler ways.
Ancient, nobler ways. It is a lovely image... and pretty much a lie. John Perlin, in his book A Forest Journey, tells how each prior culture, from tribal to pastoral to urban, wreaked calamities upon its own people and environment. I have been to Easter Island and seen the desert its native peoples wrought there. The greater harm we do today is due to our vast power and numbers, not something intrinsically vile about modern humankind.
Technology produces more food and comfort and lets fewer babies die. “Returning to older ways” would restore some balance all right, but entail a holocaust of untold proportion, followed by resumption of a kind of grinding misery never experienced by those who now wistfully toss off medieval fantasies and neolithic romances. A way of life that was nasty, brutish, and nearly always catastrophic for women.
That is not to say the pastoral image doesn’t offer hope. By extolling nature and a lifestyle closer to the Earth, some writers may be helping to create the very sort of wisdom they imagine to have existed in the past. Someday, truly idyllic pastoral cultures may be deliberately designed with the goal of providing placid and just happiness for all, while retaining enough technology to keep existence decent.
But to get there the path lies forward, not by diving into a dark, dank, miserable past. There is but one path to the gracious, ecologically sound, serene pastoralism sought by so many. That route passes, ironically, through successful consummation of this, our first and last chance, our scientific age.”

Afterword (p. 563)
Glory Season (1993)

Masiela Lusha photo
Sienna Guillory photo

“Schizophrenia--its nature, etiology, and the kind of therapy to use for it--remains one of the most puzzling of the mental illnesses. The theory of schizophrenia presented here is based on communications analysis, and specifically on the Theory of Logical Types. From this theory and from observations of schizophrenic patients is derived a description, and the necessary conditions for, a situation called the "double bind"--a situation in which no matter what a person does, he "can't win."”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

It is hypothesized that a person caught in the double bind may develop schizophrenic symptoms.
Gregory Bateson, Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland (1956) " Towards a theory of Schizophrenia http://www.psychodyssey.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/TOWARD-A-THEORY-OF-SCHIZOPHRENIA-2.pdf" In: Behavioral Science (1956) Vol 1, nr.4, pp.251-254

Amy Lee photo

“Music is therapy for me. It's my outlet for every negative thing I've ever been through. It lets me turn something bad into something beautiful.”

Amy Lee (1981) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Explaining her song "Call Me When You're Sober" in "Evanescence: Amy Lee Explains the New Songs" at VH1 News (18 September 2006) http://www.vh1.com/news/articles/1540914/story.jhtml

Umberto Eco photo
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. photo

“The use of history as therapy means the corruption of history as history.”

The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W W Norton, 1993) p. 93

Virginia Satir photo

“A growing body of clinical observation has pointed to the conclusion that the family therapy must be oriented to the family as a whole.”

Virginia Satir (1916–1988) American psychologist

Conjoint Family Therapy: A Guide to theory and technique (1967)

Karen Horney photo
Tracey Ullman photo
Alison Bechdel photo

“Raffi: Okay, it's time to make another deposit to my therapy fund.”

#458, "Below the Law" (2005), collected in The Essential DTWOF (2008).
Dykes to Watch Out For

James Braid photo
Tracey Ullman photo

“From an early age. I used to dress up and impersonate our next-door neighbor, Miss Cox. She wore rubber boots, a wool hat, and her nose always dripped. My father died when I was 6 and we were really sad, so I put on a show for my mum. [In a mocking American accent] Looking back now, it was a kind of therapy.”

Tracey Ullman (1959) English-born actress, comedian, singer, dancer, screenwriter, producer, director, author and businesswoman

"Q&A: Tracey Ullman" http://www.newsweek.com/newsmakers-127011 (Newsweek, 19 September 2004)

John Gray photo
Johnny Depp photo

“Things have to be done fast in America, and therefore therapy has to be brief.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, 1951, p. 148 as cited in: C.H. Patterson (1958) "Two approaches to human relations". in: American Journal of Psychotherapy. Vol 7.

James K. Morrow photo
James Braid photo

“…during a period in history psychology was still a branch of academic philosophy. The psychological concepts developed by philosophers of mind, such as “dominant ideas” (akin to the automatic thoughts of Beck’s cognitive therapy) “habit and association” (a subjective precursor of Pavlovian conditioning), and “imitation and sympathy” (which we now call “role-modelling” and “empathy”), are repeatedly mentioned by Braid as the theoretical framework upon which his science of hypnotism, “neuro-hypnology”, was built. Braid’s friend and collaborator, Prof. William B. Carpenter, discusses the theoretical principles of this in his Principles of Mental Physiology (1889), especially in the chapter ‘Of Common Sense’ which concludes by quoting an approving letter from the philosopher John Stuart Mill sent to Carpenter in 1872. Mill agrees with Carpenter’s contention that “common sense”, by which he means a kind of intellectual intuition analogous to the ancient Greek concept of nous, is a combination of innate and acquired judgements, which have a “reflexive” or “automatic” quality and appear to consciousness as “self-evident” truths.”

James Braid (1795–1860) Scottish surgeon, hypnotist, and hypnotherapist

James Braid, in The Original Philosophy of Hypnotherapy (from The Discovery of Hypnosis) http://ukhypnosis.wordpress.com/category/james-braid-the-founder-of-hypnotherapy/page/2/.

Fiona Apple photo

“Interviewer: I read a post on the Internet from a young girl who had been victimized by someone and her position was like, "I can talk about this now because Fiona Apple can talk about what happened to her." Do you look at yourself as a role model for women and girls who've had this experience?
Fiona: That's the only reason I ever brought the whole rape thing up. It's a terrible thing, but it happens to so many people. I mean, 80 percent of the people I've told have said right back to me, "That happened to me too." It's so common, and so ridiculous that it's a hard thing to talk about. It angers me so much because something like that happens to you and you carry it around for the rest of your life. No matter how much therapy you go through, no matter how much healing you go through, it's part of you. I just feel that it's such a tragedy that so many people have to bear the extra burden of having to keep it secret from everyone else. As if it's too icky a subject to burden other people with and everyone's going to think you're a victim forever. Then you've labeled yourself a victim, and you've been taken advantage of, and you're ruined, and you're soiled, and you're not pure, you know.If I'm in a position where people are looking up to me in any way, then it's absolutely my responsibility to be open and honest about this, because if I'm not, what does that say to people? It doesn't change a person -- well, it does change a person but it doesn't take anything away from you. It can only strengthen you. It has made me so angry in the past. Like I wanted to say it to somebody. I really wanted somebody to connect with, somebody to understand me, somebody to comfort me. But I felt like I couldn't say anything about because it was taboo to talk about.”

Fiona Apple (1977) singer-songwriter, musician

Nuvo, "Fiona Apple: The NUVO Interview" April [1997]

Gary Oldman photo
Leo Igwe photo

“For too long, African societies have been identified as superstitious, consisting of people who cannot question, reason or think critically. Dogma and blind faith in superstition, divinity and tradition are said to be the mainstay of popular thought and culture. African science is often equated with witchcraft and the occult; African philosophy with magical thinking, myth-making and mysticism, African religion with stone-age spiritual abracadabra, African medicine with folk therapies often involving pseudoscientific concoctions inspired by magical thinking. Science, critical thinking and technological intelligence are portrayed as Western — as opposed to universal — values, and as alien to Africa and to the African mindset. An African who thinks critically or seeks evidence and demands proofs for extraordinary claims is accused of taking a “white” or Western approach. An African questioning local superstitions and traditions is portrayed as having abandoned or betrayed the essence of African identity. Skepticism and rationalism are regarded as Western, un-African, philosophies. Although there is a risk of overgeneralizing, there are clear indicators that the continent is still socially, politically and culturally trapped by undue credulity. Many irrational beliefs exist and hold sway across the region. These are beliefs informed by fear and ignorance, misrepresentations of nature and how nature works. These misconceptions are often instrumental in causing many absurd incidents, harmful traditional practices and atrocious acts.”

Leo Igwe (1970) Nigerian human rights activist

A Manifesto for a Skeptical Africa (2012)

Thomas Szasz photo

“Once launched into some activity, conceiving of himself as an instrument of God’s will, the ascetic did not stop to ask about the meaning of it all. On the contrary, the more furious his activity, the more the problem of what his activity meant receded from his mind. … To meet the demands of the day was as near as one could come to doing the pious thing, in this—God’s—world. To trouble about meaning was really an impiety and, of course, frivolous, because futile. For the question of meaning, therefore, neither the ascetic nor the therapeutic type feels responsible, if his spiritual discipline has been successful. The recently fashionable religious talk of “ultimate concern” makes no sense either in the ascetic or in the therapeutic mode. To try to relate “ultimate concern” to everyday behavior would be exhausting and nerve-shattering work; indeed, it could effectively inhibit less grandiose kinds of work. Neither the ascetic nor the therapeutic bothers his head about “ultimate concern.” Such a concern is for mystics who cannot otherwise enjoy their leisure. In the workaday world, there are no ultimate concerns, only present ones. Therapy is the respite of every day, during which the importance of the present is learned, and the existence of what in the ascetic tradition came to be called the “ultimate” or “divine” is unlearned.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

Emo Philips photo
Desmond de Silva photo
Dawn Butler photo

“We must finally see an end to cruel and inhumane conversion therapies, which have been allowed to spread fear and hatred in our society for far too long.”

Dawn Butler (1969) British politician

As quoted in Gay conversion therapy should be made illegal in LGBT action plan, Labour tells Theresa May https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-theresa-may-gay-conversion-therapy-lgbt-action-plan-theresa-may-a8425581.html (2 July 2018) by Ashley Cowburn, The Independent.

Fausto Cercignani photo
Hugh Laurie photo

“I know a lot of people think therapy is about sitting around staring at your own navel - but it's staring at your own navel with a goal. And the goal is to one day to see the world in a better way and treat your loved ones with more kindness and have more to give.”

Hugh Laurie (1959) British actor, comedian, writer, musician and director

Source: [2002-06-13, http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-920254-details/A+brighter+life+for+Hugh+Laurie/article.do;jsessionid=KnM3FNTSkpv0R3P22WrQBPZQ00jxPTkDtG2htfqq0LvwTtnLx4by!-81402767, A brighter life for Hugh Laurie, thisislondon.co.uk from the Evening Standard, 2006-08-21]

Joan Rivers photo

“My routines come out of total unhappiness. My audiences are my group therapy.”

Joan Rivers (1933–2014) American comedian, actress, and television host

Joan Rivers on BBC 2 (23 February 1990), as reported in The Quotable Jewish Woman (2004), by E. Partnow, p. 179

Kent Hovind photo
Billy Corgan photo
Eugene Rotberg photo
Karen Pence photo

“One of the things near and dear to me is art therapy. Even as an art teacher and someone very involved in the arts, I never knew what art therapy even was. These men and women go to graduate school and they actually are therapists that use art, especially at Riley, they’re making such a difference, so I’m looking forward to that.”

Karen Pence (1958) First Lady of Indiana, schoolteacher

Karen Pence focuses on moving family forward amid hoopla http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/20/karen-pence-focuses-moving-family-forward-amid-hoopla/96828962/ (January 20, 2017)

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