Positive Psychotherapy Quotes

Dare to love yourself as if you were a rainbow with gold at both ends.

In my deepest contacts with individuals in therapy, even those whose troubles are most disturbing, whose behavior has been most anti-social, whose feelings seem most abnormal, I find this to be true. When I can sensitively understand the feelings which they are expressing, when I am able to accept them as separate persons in their own right, then I find that they tend to move in certain directions. And what are these directions in which they tend to move? The words which I believe are most truly descriptive are words such as positive, constructive, moving toward self-actualization, growing toward maturity, growing toward socialization.

If she learned anything in school she learned this, courtesy of Albert Ellis, father of the cognitive-behavioral paradigm shift in psychotherapy. Other people are not here to fulfill our needs or meet our expectations, nor will they always treat us well. Failure to accept this will generate feelings of anger and resentment. Peace of mind comes with taking people as they are and emphasizing the positive.

Terence McKenna pointed out that "the profundity of [hallucinogenic inebriation] and its potential for a positive feedback into the process of reorganizing the personality should have long ago made psychedelics an indispensable tool for psychotherapy.

Terence McKenna pointed out that "the profundity of [halluncinogenic inebriation] and its potential for a positive feedback into the process of reorganizing the personality should have long ago made psychedelics an indispensable tool for psychotherapy.

Somehow the disorder hooks into all kinds of fears and insecurities in many clinicians. The flamboyance of the multiple, her intelligence and ability to conceptualize the disorder, coupled with suicidal impulses of various orders of seriousness, all seem to mask for many therapists the underlying pain, dependency, and need that are very much part of the process. In many ways, a professional dealing with a multiple in crisis is in the same position as a parent dealing with a two-year-old or with an adolescent's acting-out behavior. (236)

When those you love die, the best you can do is honor their spirit for as long as you live. You make a commitment that you’re going to take whatever lesson that person or animal was trying to teach you, and you make it true in your own life… it’s a positive way to keep their spirit alive in the world, by keeping it alive in yourself.

The fact that a patient is classified as mentally or emotionally sick prevents the psychotherapist from enquiring into the possibility of whether, or to what extent, his patient may be cognitively right. It is perfectly possible that a person with 'existential frustration', 'ontological despair', or simply 'sub-clinical depression' may, because of his abnormal condition, be in a better position to look through the camouflage of life that still is deceiving the 'healthy' psychotherapists.

During a period in which women and children’s testimony of incest and sexual abuse were gaining an increasingly sympathetic hearing, lobby groups of people accused of child abuse construed and positioned “ritual abuse” as the new frontier of disbelief. The term “ritual abuse” arose from child protection and psychotherapy practice with adults and children disclosing organized abuse, only to be discursively encircled by backlash groups with the rhetoric of “recovered memories”, “false allegations” and “moral panic”. Salter, M. (2011), Organized abuse and the politics of disbelief.

To discover that it is not devastating to accept the positive feeling from another, that it does not necessarily end in hurt, that it actually “feels good” to have another person with you in your struggles to meet life —this may be one of the most profound learnings encountered by the individual whether in therapy or not.

If you have ever felt slightly nauseous walking through an aged care facility, puckered your face against a smell, observed a grown woman clutching a dolly with desperation, felt a flood of melancholy as death fills your view – then you are in a perfect position to be a supportive psychotherapist for those whose lives are peppered with this everyday.

But in the end the first step has to be taken in fear and trembling, with no guarantee that there will be a positive outcome.

Freedom is part of the story and half of the truth. Being free is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is being responsible. Freedom may degenerate into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.

The I Ching insists upon self-knowledge throughout. The method by which this is to be achieved is open to every kind of misuse, and is therefore not for the frivolous-minded and immature; nor is it for intellectualists and rationalists. It is appropriate only for thoughtful and reflective people who like to think about what they do and what happens to them -- a predilection not to be confused with the morbid brooding of the hypochondriac. As I have indicated above, I have no answer to the multitude of problems that arise when we seek to harmonize the oracle of the I Ching with our accepted scientific canons. But needless to say, nothing "occult" is to be inferred. My position in these matters is pragmatic, and the great disciplines that have taught me the practical usefulness of this viewpoint are psychotherapy and medical psychology. Probably in no other field do we have to reckon with so many unknown quantities, and nowhere else do we become more accustomed to adopting methods that work even though for a long time we may not know why they work. Unexpected cures may arise from questionable therapies and unexpected failures from allegedly reliable methods. In the exploration of the unconscious we come upon very strange things, from which a rationalist turns away with horror, claiming afterward that he did not see anything. The irrational fullness of life has taught me never to discard anything, even when it goes against all our theories (so short-lived at best) or otherwise admits of no immediate explanation. It is of course disquieting, and one is not certain whether the compass is pointing true or not; but security, certitude, and peace do not lead to discoveries.

Self-acceptance should not be confused with an over-vaulting aggrandisement of self over others. That individual's exaggerated positive view of self relies upon a comparison with others - they sustain their own positive self-view, relatively, by maintaining a negative view of others.

This reorienting is not an attempt to avoid or discount clients' pain and ongoing suffering. Rather, it is a means to help them observe, firsthand, how their chronic orienting tendencies toward reminders of the past recreate the trauma-related experience of danger and powerlessness, whereas choosing to orient to a good feeling can result in an experience of safety and mastery. As clients become able to do so the new objects of orientation often become more defined and & Goodman 1951). Rather than attention being drawn repeatedly to physical pain or traumatic activation, the good feeling becomes more prominent in the client's awareness. This exercise of reorienting toward a positive stimulus can surprise and reassure clients that they are not imprisoned indefinitely in an inner world of chronic traumatic reexperiencing, and that they have more possibilities and control than they had imagined. These orienting exercises need to be practiced again and again for mastery.

The redirection of orientation and attention can be as simple as asking clients to become aware of a "good" or "safe" feeling in the body instead of focusing on their physical pain or elevated heart rate. Or the therapist can ask clients to experiment with focusing attention away from the traumatic activation in their body and toward thoughts or images related to their positive experiences and competencies, such as success in their job. This shift is often difficult for clients who have habituated to feeling pulled back repetitively into the most negative somatic reminders of their traumatic experiences. However, if the therapist guides them to practice deeply immersing themselves in a positive somatic experience (i.e., noting the changes in posture, breath, and muscular tone that emerge as they remember their competence), clients will gain the ability to reorient toward their competencies. They experience their ability to choose to what they pay attention and discover that it really is possible to resist the somatic claims of the past.

His approach to psychotherapy stressed the importance of helping people to reach new heights of personal meaning through self-transcendence: the application of positive effort, technique, acceptance of limitations, and wise decisions. His goal was to provoke people into realizing that they could and should exercise their capacity for choice to achieve their own goals.

Among the factors that the schema of the differing severity of mental illness fails to take into account is an ephemeral something in the individual patient which might be called 'a will to grow.' It is possible for an individual to be extremely ill and yet at the same time possess an equally strong 'will to grow,' in which case healing will occur. On the other hand, a person who is only mildly ill, as best as we can define psychiatric illness, but who lacks the will to grow, will not budge an inch from an unhealthy position. I therefore believe that a patient's will to grow is one crucial determinant of success or failure of psychotherapy. Yet it is a factor that is not at all understood or even recognized by contemporary psychiatric theory.

A person’s average or typical level of happiness is that person’s “affective style.” (“Affect” refers to the felt or experienced part of emotion.) Your affective style reflects the everyday balance of power between your approach system and your withdrawal system, and this balance can be read right from your forehead. It has long been known from studies of brainwaves that most people show an asymmetry: more activity either in the right frontal cortex or in the left frontal cortex. In the late 1980s, Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin discovered that these asymmetries correlated with a person’s general tendencies to experience positive and negative emotions. People showing more of a certain kind of brainwave coming through the left side of the forehead reported feeling more happiness in their daily lives and less fear, anxiety, and shame than people exhibiting higher activity on the right side. Later research showed that these cortical “lefties” are less subject to depression and recover more quickly from negative experiences.29 The difference between cortical righties and lefties can be seen even in infants: Ten-month-old babies showing more activity on the right side are more likely to cry when separated briefly from their mothers.30 And this difference in infancy appears to reflect an aspect of personality that is stable, for most people, all the way through adulthood. 31 Babies who show a lot more activity on the right side of the forehead become toddlers who are more anxious about novel situations; as teenagers, they are more likely to be fearful about dating and social activities; and, finally, as adults, they are more likely to need psychotherapy to loosen up.

The argument that normal adaptive functioning in a sick world can itself be considered pathological is an old one (Fromm, 2001), but not well made and still not taken seriously. We do not have a good antonym for depression, mania being one of the closest but not conveying any sense that a widespread upbeat mentality might be considered pathological; or that delusional denial of widespread malaise might be taken as something less jocular than Pollyannaism. It is inconceivable that the psychotherapy and psychiatric professionals themselves would in effect declare, ‘the baseline for human beings including ourselves is one of pathological self-deceit and illusion serving to keep us functional in an insane world’. Nor are we likely to read the corollary of this – ‘individuals experiencing chronic dysthymia who hold a negative worldview and who are known as depressive realists, might be considered less pathological and more mentally healthy than others’.

I believe that all learning is relational. Teachers who try to teach without first having created a positive relationship with their students may only be wasting much of their great knowledge. Establish an encouraging relationship with a child, and you can teach him or her almost anything. Establish a strong therapeutic alliance with your client, and he or she might even be willing to build new neuronal pathways that indicate that trust, love, and unconditional worth are possible for him or her too.

The existential psychotherapy approach posits that the inner conflict bedeviling us issues not only from our struggle with suppressed instinctual strivings or internalized significant adults or shards of forgotten traumatic memories, but also from our confrontation with the “givens” of existence. And what are these “givens” of existence? If we permit our-selves to screen out or “bracket” the everyday concerns of life and reflect deeply upon our situation in the world, we inevitably arrive at the deep structures of existence (the “ultimate concerns,” to use theologian Paul Tillich’s term).

The predominant thoughts and feelings of a pregnant woman are lodged in some of the major chakras of the unborn baby. They will therefore affect the character of the unborn baby. To produce better babies, it is very important for a pregnant woman to see and hear things that are beautiful, inspiring, and strong. The feelings and thoughts should be harmonious and progressive or positive. Anger, pessimism, hopelessness, injurious words, negative feelings and thoughts should be avoided. It is advisable for a pregnant mother to read books that are inspirational like the biographies of great yogis or great people, books on spiritual teachings, mathematics, sciences, business and languages. All of these will have beneficial effects on the unborn baby and will tend to make the baby not only spiritual, but also sharp-minded and practical.

This book deals with four ultimate concerns: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. The individual's confrontation with each of these facts of life constitutes the content of the existential dynamic conflict. Death. The most obvious, the most easily apprehended ultimate concern is death. We exist now, but one day we shall cease to be. Death will come, and there is no escape from it. It is a terrible truth, and we respond to it with mortal terror. "Everything," in Spinoza's words, "endeavors to persist in its own being";3 and a core existential conflict is the tension between the awareness of the inevitability of death and the wish to continue to be. Freedom. Another ultimate concern, a far less accessible one, is freedom. Ordinarily we think of freedom as an unequivocally positive concept. Throughout recorded history has not the human being yearned and striven for freedom? Yet freedom viewed from the perspective of ultimate ground is riveted to dread. In its existential sense "freedom" refers to the absence of external structure. Contrary to everyday experience, the human being does not enter (and leave) a well-structured universe that has an inherent design. Rather, the individual is entirely responsible for-that is, is the author of-his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions. "Freedom" in this sense, has a terrifying implication: it means that beneath us there is no ground-nothing, a void, an abyss. A key existential dynamic, then, is the clash between' our confrontation with groundlessness and our wish for ground and structure. Existential Isolation. A third ultimate concern is isolation-not interpersonal isolation with its attendant loneliness, or intrapersonal isolation (isolation from parts of oneself), but a fundamental isolation-an isolation both from creatures and from world-which cuts beneath other isolation. No matter how close each of us becomes to another, there remains a final, unbridgeable gap; each of us enters existence alone and must depart from it alone. The existential conflict is thus the tension between our awareness of our absolute isolation and our wish for contact, for protection, our wish to be part of a larger whole. Meaninglessness. A fourth ultimate concern or given of existence is meaninglessness. If we must die, if we constitute our own world, if each is ultimately alone in an indifferent universe, then what meaning does life have? Why do we live? How shall we live? If there is no preordained design for us, then each of us must construct' our own meanings in life. Yet can a meaning of one's own creation be sturdy enough to bear one's life? This existential dynamic conflict stems from the dilemma of a meaning-seeking creature who is thrown into a universe that has no meaning.

Indeed, we recognize that a deep treatment may not be required for all patients. Much of the success of behavioral therapy is thought to reside in its focus on symptoms and in its parsimonious and directed use of therapeutic resources to decrease symptoms. It does not aim to be a therapy of depth, and this is one of its strengths. In contrast dynamic psychotherapy, which facilitates a patient's rewriting of his life narrative, his picture of himself, his past, present, and future, seems uniquely positioned to address the depth of a individual's experience.

It is quite obvious from dreams that when one faces a shadow which one has denied or run from it diminishes in power, and size, and ultimately becomes a positive force. Our Friends show us what we can do, our enemies teach us what we must do. (Goethe) The first view of any monster is apt to be the most unnerving. When we finally bring ourselves to see the shadow we project as our own, we are literally appalled and overwhelmed by the shadow, the evil out there so plain to see. At the moment of taking it back within ourselves we are apt to be filled with self-recrimination, guilt, and depression. Little wonder we want to leave it out there hanging on someone or something or some other whatever. We perceive the shadow as if it belongs to the other. We withdraw our projection and our own shadow becomes enormous. After prolonged negotiation we are able to befriend the shadow. But even then it is not over because the shadow will always be there, always be a part of our psyche. We had best make a truce with it, for the shadow alerts us to particular kinds of danger or evil.

Our manifesting mission is a White Op, a term based on the military black op, or black operation, a clandestine plot usually involving highly trained government spies or mercenaries who infiltrate an adversary‘s position, behind enemy lines and unbeknownst to them. White Op, coined by my best friend Bunny, stands for what I see needing to happen on the planet: a group of well-intentioned, highly trained Bodhisattva warriors (appearing like ordinary folk), armed with the six paramitas and restrained by ethical vows, begin to infiltrate their relationships, social institutions, and industries across all sectors of society and culture. Ordinary Bodhisattvas infusing the world with sacred view and transforming one mind at a time from the inside out until a new paradigm based on wisdom and compassion has totally replaced materialism and nihilism. The White Op is in large part how I envision the work and intention of my colleagues and me at the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science; we aspire to fulfill it by offering a Buddhist-inspired contemplative psychotherapy training program, infused with the latest neuroscience, to therapists, health-care workers, educators, and savvy business leaders. (p. 225)

Traditional psychotherapy gives “problems” great reality. An enormous amount of time and energy is frequently expended trying to get rid of emotions that would simply pass through, like changing weather, if we weren’t judging them to be a problem to be solved, or a statement about a “me” rather than about a moment. Years can be spent trying to change a negative self-image into a positive one without ever questioning whether an image is really who we are. Clients want to feel better, and they come to a therapist in order to effect that change. That is fine. But while a positive self-image may feel better, it is just as limiting, untrue, and temporary as any other image. What is here beneath the image? “What is actually true?” becomes a much more interesting question than “How can I manipulate life, ‘me,’ ‘you,’ or ‘them’ to feel/be a certain way?

Religion allies itself with auto-suggestion and psychotherapy to help man in his business activities. In the twenties one had not yet called upon God for purposes of “improving one's personality.” The best-seller in the year 1938, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, remained on a strictly secular level. What was the function of Carnegie's book at that time is the function of our greatest bestseller today, The Power of Positive Thinking by the Reverend N. V. Peale. In this religious book it is not even questioned whether our dominant concern with success is in itself in accordance with the spirit of monotheistic religion. On the contrary, this supreme aim is never doubted, but belief in God and prayer is recommended as a means to increase one's ability to be successful. Just as modern psychiatrists recommend happiness of the employee, in order to be more appealing to the customers, some ministers recommend love of God in order to be more successful. “Make God your partner”, means to make God a partner in business, rather than to become one with Him in love, justice and truth. Just as brotherly love has been replaced by impersonal fairness, God has been transformed into a remote General Director of Universe, Inc.; you know that he is there, he runs the show (although it would probably run without him too), you never see him, but you acknowledge his leadership while you are “doing your part.

Can I let myself experience positive attitudes toward this other person—attitudes of warmth, caring, liking, interest, respect? It is not easy. I find in myself, and feel that I often see in others, a certain amount of fear of these feelings. We are afraid that if we let ourselves freely experience these positive feelings toward another we may be trapped by them. They may lead to demands on us or we may be disappointed in our trust, and these outcomes we fear. So as a reaction we tend to build up distance between ourselves and others—aloofness, a “professional” attitude, an impersonal relationship.

One of the most revolutionary concepts to grow out of our clinical experience is the growing recognition that the innermost core of man’s nature, the deepest layers of his personality, the base of his “animal nature,” is positive in nature—is basically socialized, forward-moving, rational and realistic.

Hilde Bruch (1904–1984) is probably the most influential and important figure in the field of eating disorders (Skårderud 2013). Immensely productive, she was a prolific author, both for scientific and popular audiences (Lidz 1994; Bruch 1996). She wrote extensively on various topics in psychiatry and psychotherapy, on obesity and eating disorders in general, but is probably best known for her work on anorexia nervosa. She developed new vistas in the understanding and conceptualization of this particular psychopathology. Hilde Bruch was also a pioneer in developing the psychotherapeutic approach towards such disorders, with emphasis on curiosity and a not-knowing stance (Bruch 1970). Her ways of proposing psychotherapeutic enterprises and stances for eating disorders are highly coincident with a mentalizing stance. Her concepts of “naïve stance” and “constructive use of ignorance” are synonymous to the not-knowing position so central in mentalization-based treatments. And,

Erickson represented a radically experiential focus: Evocative experiences promote and enrich conceptual realizations, adaptive states, and positive identities.

There are a number of techniques we can use in this construction project. Analysis of dreams, the re-entering and changing of our dreams, active imagination (in which the Ego, among other things, dialogues with the energy patterns within, thereby achieving both differentiation from and access to them), psychotherapy in a variety of forms, meditation on the positive aspects of the archetypes, prayer, magical ritual process with a spiritual elder, various forms of spiritual discipline, and other methods are all important to the difficult process of turning boys into men.

Children requiring primary somatosensory interventions are likely are to display frequent sensory misperceptions, appetite, feeding, or metabolism problems, persistent somatic or visceral dysregulation, fine or gross motor movement or balance impairment, sleep problems, or endocrine issues. Such anomalies will be in excess of normal for the developmental age. The treatment protocol will emphasize somatosensory experiences, self-regulation, and movement interventions, all of which provide the appropriate nature and pattern of activation to help these lower networks change. Language, reasoning, logic, and understanding are de-emphasized in favor of core regulatory functions. The somatosensory activities must be carried out in a richly positive relational context (Core Element 3) as the activity itself is insufficient for positive developmental growth and neural organization. Sensory activities must be planned and scheduled at specific times each day for short periods of about 10 to 15 minutes. Pick activities the child will enjoy, as children will not repeat those that are unrewarding. The activity, environment, and method may need to modified periodically to keep them fresh, attractive, and fun. Never force the child into an activity if he or she is uncomfortable with it. Take baby steps if the child is uncomfortable. Find safe ways for the child to engage in and experience the activity.

The primary focus is empathy, attachment, attunement, and positive emotions related to interpersonal relationships. The therapist must emphasize face-to-face gaze, eye-to-eye contact, matching facial expression, matching tone of voice, and using reflective responses. Also effective are play and play activities, such as singing, music, enjoyable social activities, playing with a pet, telling stories, special handshakes, playing with stacking blocks, Legos, or manipulatives, games that allow taking turns, playing with a cardboard box maze, playing social games (Red Light, Green Light; Mother,

10 minutes, dozens of “doses” of therapeutic repetition are possible. This reality suggests that progress will be quicker if parents, teachers, and therapists all work together to form a consistent therapeutic web supporting positive change.

Displaying positive social emotions, especially smiling and laughter, are consistently interpreted as trustworthy, familiar, and attractive (Nelson, & Jeste, 2008; Niedenthal,

Negative emotions (frowns or scowls), on the other hand, lead to protective responses in observers, suppressing neurogenesis, possibly an attempt to limit the impact of negative stimuli. Human beings require relational reward and safety to make positive developmental gains, both socially and intellectually.

Cuando sentimos que no tenemos control sobre nuestras circunstancias, cuando creemos que nada de lo que hagamos puede aliviar nuestro sufrimiento o mejorar nuestras vidas, dejamos de tomar iniciativas por que consideramos que no tiene sentido.

The existential psychotherapy approach posits that the inner conflict bedeviling us issues not only from our struggle with suppressed instinctual strivings or internalized significant adults or shards of forgotten traumatic memories, but also from our confrontation with the "givens" of existence. And what are these "givens" of existence? [...] Four ultimate concerns, to my view, are highly salient to psychotherapy: death, isolation, meaning in life, and freedom.

If those emotions cannot yet be tolerated by the client, access to the underlying schema is also blocked. Therefore, making those emotions workable for the client to feel is necessary in order to then access the underlying schema, bring conscious awareness to it, and subject it to disconfirmation and unlearning. Facilitating direct experience of previously blocked emotion tends, in itself, to alleviate certain symptoms, and has been shown to correlate strongly with positive therapeutic outcome (e.g., Elliott et al., 2003; Missirlian et al., 2005), but will not by itself achieve transformational change unless, in addition, the underlying schema undergoes disconfirmation.

It is not neglecting or underestimating the therapist's expertise to say that often he and his patient find themselves in the position of two mountain climbers. Roped to each other and dependent on each other, they struggle to scale the peak. Either one can slip, and each must be able to count on the other to take those steps that will save the situation. If one loses ground, they lose ground together, then regain their footing and go forward, much closer for having been in danger and helped each other out of it.