#psychotherapy

It wasn't a sign of weakness to tell what happened to me. I feel guilt no longer, only regret. The other emotions are coming around too. How much further do I need to go? I'm not sure, but there is comfort in the fact that I am in the hands of expert guides, both in the doctor's office and at home with Sue. ↗

— Charles L. Bailey Jr.

#guilt #healing #journey #onion #painful

I say, thirteen is too many dogs for good mental health. Five is pretty much the limit. More than five dogs and you forfeit your right to call yourself entirely sane. Even if the dogs are small. ↗

— E. Lockhart

#humor #psychotherapy #sanity #humor

Humans need their lives to make sense and to have meaning and purpose. Lack of meaning and purpose can override both the natural pace of progression to death and the instinctive struggle for life. People may sacrifice their lives in order to achieve meaning and purpose, or they may commit suicide in order to avoid meaninglessness. The role of medicine here is to expose false beliefs for which people may sacrifice themselves, and to help find realistic meanings that make life worthwhile. ↗

— Paul Valent

#psychotherapy #death

The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life. ↗

— Wilhelm Reich

#fear-of-life #orgasm #pleasure #psychoanalysis #psychology

Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up ↗

— Flora Rheta Schreiber

#amnesia #dissociation #dissociative-amnesia #dissociative-identity-disorder #fugue

Macbeth: How does your patient, doctor? Doctor: Not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from rest. Macbeth: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart. Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#depression #heartbreak #mental-health #psychiatry #psychotherapy

They show that roughly two-thirds of a group of neurotic patients will recover or improve to a marked extent within about two years of the onset of their illness, whether they are treated by means of psychotherapy or not. ↗

— Hans Eysenck

#extent #group #illness #improve #marked

There thus appears to be an inverse correlation between recovery and psychotherapy; the more psychotherapy, the smaller the recovery rate. ↗

— Hans Eysenck

#between #correlation #inverse #more #psychotherapy

This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world’s first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths. Elliott’s raw, naked, LSD-fueled sessions lasted for epic eleven day stretches. The psychopaths spent every waking moment journeying to their darkest corners in an attempt to get better. There were no distractions—no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least one hundred hours every week) of their feelings. When they got hungry, they sucked food through straws that protruded through the walls. As during Paul Bindrim’s own nude psychotherapy sessions, the patients were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for one another... ↗

— Jon Ronson

#experimental #lsd #nudity #psychopath #psychotherapy

Even you, the professional helper, often mistaken for the enlightened Guru or Staretz, can become lost in your thoughts that you must be competent without fault. You may become enthralled with your identity as a professional, even the pressures of the culture of mastery that expects you to heal your clients without fail. Never mind all of the variables over which you have no control, it is up to you, according to the canons of mastery, to control the health and well-being of those for whom you provide professional care. This potentiates a furthering alienation between you and your clients. You are at risk to become, if you have not already, the one who does to your clients; to be the one the active subject acting upon the passive and receptive objects, your clients; to be the one in possession of special knowledge, technique and mastery. All of this conspires to coax or coerce you into treating your client as reduced, a mere case. Unawareness to these influences gives you little chance to consider their influence on your practice in the clinical setting, much less give attentive efforts to resist or change them. ↗

— Scott E. Spradlin

#dbt #dialectical-behavior-therapy #luce-irigaray #mastery #mental-health