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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #therapy
The most effective weapon a parent has to control a child is the withdrawal of love or its threat. A young child between the ages of three and six is too dependent on parental love and approval to resist this pressure. Robert's mother, as we saw earlier, controlled him by "cutting him out." Margaret's mother beat her into submission, but it was the loss of her father's love that devastated her. Whatever the means parents use, the result is that the child is forced to give up his instinctual longing, to suppress his sexual desires for one parent and his hostility toward the other. In their place he will develop feelings of guilt about his sexuality and fear of authority figures. This surrender constitutes an acceptance of parental power and authority and a submission to the parents' values and demands. The child becomes "good", which means that he gives up his sexual orientation in favor of one directed toward achievement. Parental authority is introjected in the form of a superego, ensuring that the child will follow his parents' wishes in the acculturation process. In effect, the child now identifies with the threatening parent. Freud says, "The whole process, on the one hand, preserves the genital organ wards off the danger of losing it; on the other hand, it paralyzes it, takes its function away from it. ↗
#fear #freud #guilt #life #psychotherapy
Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian would have left little more than lipstick stains in their passing had it not been for the sex videos that lofted them into reality-TV notoriety. Once notoriety has warmed into familiarity, celebrity itself becomes one big 'Brady Bunch' reunion, or a therapy session with Dr. Drew. ↗
Of course, I should have known the kids would pop out in the atmosphere of Roberta's office. That's what they do when Alice is under stress. They see a gap in the space-time continuum and slip through like beams of light through a prism changing form and direction. We had got into the habit in recent weeks of starting our sessions with that marble and stick game called Ker-Plunk, which Billy liked. There were times when I caught myself entering the office with a teddy that Samuel had taken from the toy cupboard outside. Roberta told me that on a couple of occasions I had shot her with the plastic gun and once, as Samuel, I had climbed down from the high-tech chairs, rolled into a ball in the corner and just cried. 'This is embarrassing,' I admitted. 'It doesn't have to be.' 'It doesn't have to be, but it is,' I said. The thing is. I never knew when the 'others' were going to come out. I only discovered that one had been out when I lost time or found myself in the midst of some wacky occupation — finger-painting like a five-year-old, cutting my arms, wandering from shops with unwanted, unpaid-for clutter. In her reserved way, Roberta described the kids as an elaborate defence mechanism. As a child, I had blocked out my memories in order not to dwell on anything painful or uncertain. Even as a teenager, I had allowed the bizarre and terrifying to seem normal because the alternative would have upset the fiction of my loving little nuclear family. I made a mental note to look up defence mechanisms, something we had touched on in psychology. ↗
#alters #dissociation #dissociative #dissociative-identity-disorder #embarrassment
After a while Mary said, “Zsadist?” “Yeah?” “What are those markings?” His frowned and flicked his eyes over to her, thinking, as if she didn’t know? But then . . . well, she had been a human. Maybe she didn’t. “They’re slave bands. I was . . . a slave.” “Did it hurt when they were put on you?” “Yes.” “Did the same person who cut your face give them to you?” “No, my owner’s hellren did that. My owner . . . she put the bands on me. He was the one who cut my face.” “How long were you a slave?” “A hundred years.” “How did you get free?” “Phury. Phury got me out. That’s how he lost his leg.” “Were you hurt while you were a slave?” Z swallowed hard. “Yes.” “Do you still think about it?” “Yes.” He looked down at his hands, which suddenly were in pain for some reason. Oh, right. He’d made two fists and was squeezing them so tightly his fingers were about to snap off at the knuckles. “Does slavery still happen?” “No. Wrath outlawed it. As a mating gift to me and Bella.” “What kind of slave were you?” Zsadist shut his eyes. Ah, yes, the question he didn’t want to answer. For a while it was all he could do to force himself to stay in the chair. But then, in a falsely level voice, he said, “I was a blood slave. I was used by a female for blood.” The quiet after he spoke bore down on him, a tangible weight. “Zsadist? Can I put my hand on your back?” His head did something that was evidently a nod, because Mary’s gentle palm came down lightly on his shoulder blade. She moved it in a slow, easy circle. “Those are the right answers,” she said. “All of them.” He had to blink fast as the fire in the furnace’s window became blurry. “You think?” he said hoarsely. “No. I know. ↗
The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. ↗
