Therapy Inspirational Quotes

Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us.

The truth is I didn’t need therapy; I just needed to feel loved and know that someone out there craved my attention.

At your absolute best, you still won't be good enough for the wrong person. At your worst, you'll still be worth it to the right person.

Music isn’t just heard, it is felt.

After a year in therapy, my psychiatrist said to me, 'Maybe life isn't or everyone.

Loss is only temporary when you believe in God!

Art is my cure to all this madness, sadness and loss of belonging in the world & through it I'll walk myself home.

becoming your own savior sometimes means knowing when you need to ask for help. - therapy session no. 1

I create beautiful art, so I can look back on the life my body fell short of in such a way that it brings me peace.

Most parents try really hard to give their kids the best possible life. They give them the best food and clothes they can afford, take their own kind of take on training kids to be honest and polite. But what they don't realize is no matter how much they try, their kids will get out there. Out to this complicated little world. If they are lucky they will survive, through backstabbers, broken hearts, failures and all the kinds of invisible insane pressures out there. But most kids get lost in them. They will get caught up in all kinds of bubbles. Trouble bubbles. Bubbles that continuously tell them that they are not good enough. Bubbles that get them carried away with what they think is love, give them broken hearts. Bubbles that will blur the rest of the world to them, make them feel like that is it, that they've reached the end. Sometimes, even the really smart kids, make stupid decisions. They lose control. Parents need to realize that the world is getting complicated every second of every day. With new problems, new diseases, new habits. They have to realize the vast probability of their kids being victims of this age, this complicated era. Your kids could be exposed to problems that no kind of therapy can help. Your kids could be brainwashed by themselves to believe in insane theories that drive them crazy. Most kids will go through this stage. The lucky ones will understand. They will grow out of them. The unlucky ones will live in these problems. Grow in them and never move forward. They will cut themselves, overdose on drugs, take up excessive drinking and smoking, for the slightest problems in their lives. You can't blame these kids for not being thankful or satisfied with what they have. Their mentality eludes them from the reality.

But I don't want you to keep pretending you're okay. I don't want you to keep downplaying the hurt you feel like you're not even human. You keep it up - all these lies to yourself, to other people, and soon you're not going to know who you are.

If you examine your motive for doing anything, you'll soon discover that your reason is that you believe it will make you happy.

My reality isn't as gracious as it use to be, so I create things that are.

I came to therapy thinking that my sexuality didn’t matter, but it turned out that every part of my personality was intimately connected. Cutting one piece damaged the rest.

You can resist the seductions of grandiosity, blame, and shame. You can support other people in their creative efforts, acknowledging the truth that there’s plenty of room for everyone. You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures. You can battle your demons (through therapy, recovery, prayer, or humility) instead of battling your gifts—in part by realizing that your demons were never the ones doing the work, anyhow. You can believe that you are neither a slave to inspiration nor its master, but something far more interesting—its partner—and that the two of you are working together toward something intriguing and worthwhile. You can live a long life, making and doing really cool things the entire time. You might earn a living with your pursuits or you might not, but you can recognize that this is not really the point. And at the end of your days, you can thank creativity for having blessed you with a charmed, interesting, passionate existence.

You are not sick You are injured

Change your focus, give power to the positive and starve the negative. We reduce our inner wisdom to think with logic that's been instilled in us whilst expecting miraculous results. Retrain the core issue and the pathway will build itself.

Therapists are never “done” with growth, they are simply people who should be dedicated to learning as much about themselves and others as they possibly can. The best therapists are fully human and engage in the struggles of life. Our own failures help us to remain open to the struggles of others; our personal victories give us the optimism and courage to inspire those struggling with their lives.

One of the biggest obstacles to finding real love can be hanging on to a rigid story about how it's supposed to be.

I, also, decided to get rid of the need of approval. That is a strong addiction, the need of approval, isn't it? That---I'm on the patch right now, actually. It releases small doses of approval until I no longer crave it. And, I'm going to rip it off!

Times are a’changing, my man. Welcome to the new real world where fat people don’t have to hate themselves anymore. Thank God for women like Melissa McCarthy and Adele so we can all start really believing that now.

will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Therapists and friends can help you along the way, but the healing—the genuine healing, the actual real-deal, down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change—is entirely and absolutely up to you.

When the expected occurred, never panic, by keep calming, you gain control over the situation.

Happiness is a state of mental,physical and spiritual well-being. Think pleasantly,engaged sport and read daily to enhance your well-being.

If you’re living in the present...you only have to deal with what’s actually going on in that moment.

Suffering is so real & I walk amongst so many who have no idea how much my soul is aching to be healed.

All the repressed emotions and subconscious desires in time lead to some kind of psychological or physiological breakdown, if kept unchecked.

You are not here to live a what if life. You are here to live a what is life.

these negative emotions are not simply something to endure and erase. They are purposeful. Beneficial. They tell us what we need. Anger inspires action. Sadness is necessary to process grief. Fear helps keep us safe. Completely eradicating these emotions is not just impossible—it’s unhealthy. These negative emotions only become toxic when they block out all the other emotions. When we feel so much sadness that we can’t let any joy in. When we feel so much anger that we cannot soften around others. True mental health looks like a balance of these good and bad feelings. As Lori Gottlieb says in her book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, “Many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You’ll also mute the joy.

If Mike convinces a woman to date him because he is dominant, the resulting relationship will be entirely different than if he had inspired this same woman to date him by convincing her that, through dating him, she could improve herself (though such dynamics might be ameliorated through therapy). One of the core reasons why people either end up in one bad relationship after another—or come to believe that all members of a certain gender have very constrained behavior patterns—is that they do not understand how different lures function (in male communities, this often manifests in the saying “AWALT,” which stands for “all women are like that”). These people do not realize that the lure they are using is creating those relationship dynamics and/or constrained behavior patterns. Talking with individuals who say guys or girls always act like X or Y feels like talking to a fisherman who insists that all fish have whiskers. When you point out that all the lures in his tackle box are designed specifically to only catch catfish, he just turns and gives you a quizzical look saying, “what's your point?

The story that you wanted to write will never be pen down that way, The chapters of incidences will variate, The entrance and exit of characters will alter, The starting of pages might be different, The ending of pages might be unclear, The attractive introduction, The charming ending, Considering the facts in your mind, Concluding with ideas in your heart, The end product will be something else, The same goes with your life, This person is going to be my lover, friend, helper, and well-wisher, or in case some of you decide an enemy, We’re breathing humans, Our thoughts, our minds, our hearts, and our souls, everything works according to our moods, likes, dislikes, etc., There’s a problem with us, There’s a fault in ourselves, When we think that they’ll be there for us, No, they wouldn’t be, Why should they be? They have a different story to live, It’s not their duty to make your story happening, So be delighted with your tale, And enjoy whatever comes your way.

Parents need to realize that the world is getting complicated every second. With new problems, new diseases, new habits. They have to realize the vast probability of their kids being victims of this age, this complicated era. Your kids could be exposed to problems that no kind of therapy can help. Your kids could be brainwashed by themselves to believe in insane theories that drive them crazy. Most kids will go through this stage. The lucky ones will understand. They will grow out of them. The most unlucky ones will live in these problems. Grow in them and never move forward. They will cut themselves, overdose on drugs, take up excessive drinking and smoking, for the slightest problems in their lives. You can't blame these kids for not being thankful or satisfied with what they have. Their mentality eludes them from the reality.

In residency, I studied in a bookstore’s coffee shop, which was where a clutch of women gathered monthly for book club. They would set their library books and blueberry scones on the table. I started eavesdropping and realized that the books they read were just an excuse to talk about their own lives. Every character, every broken heart, every twist of fate inspired a story about an unruly mother-in-law, a philandering father, or the cousin who came out to his unforgiving parents. Sometimes it sounded more like a therapy session than a book discussion. I could never join a book club.

To feel understood is the one pain medicine that soothes the deepest wounds. Sitting eye to eye, heart to heart, with someone who gets your pain is worth one thousand hours of therapy. We need at least one person to understand us.

Beck’s three principles of cognitive therapy were: All our emotions are generated by our “cognitions,” or thoughts. How we feel at any given moment is due to what we are thinking about. Depression is the constant thinking of negative thoughts. The majority of negative thoughts that cause us emotional turmoil are plain wrong or at least distortions of the truth, but we accept them without question.

We, who had no designated safe havens where we could carry our vomit for other people to clean up for us — who were too urgently needed to afford to pause for occasional maintenance, too dignified to succumb to emotional fatigue — not for us the overpaid charlatans disguised as therapists, who would only poke at our scabs and suck our money. No. We, the unbreakable ones, we ourselves were all the therapy that we needed.

no matter what we do, the kids are going to blame us for all the stuff that goes wrong in their lives anyway. Nobody’s ever in therapy in thirty years going, “Hey, by the way, my mother has nothing to do with why I’m here. She’s blameless. Nothing but inspirational.

Keep dreaming, Keep hoping, Keep loving Keep giving, keep motivating, Keep forgiving, Keep praying, Keep tithing, Keep sharing your testimony.

He notes that it remains the cancer of the mental health world: We are close to finding a cure, but not close enough for those who do not respond quickly to drugs or therapy.

Spring time is nature at its best.

Therapy dogs visit people in nursing homes, hospitals, and wherever else they are needed. They cheer people up who are sad or lonesome and just need a furry friend to hug.

-Have a Glass of wine & over time it will be fine.

Smile coz its therapy for your heart that cleanses your soul; reflecting in your eyes!

Cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy need only one hour of animal-assisted therapy a week to see their depression and anxiety reduced by half.

The world doesn't need our airbrushed stories or curated, scripted, boring, conforming selves. It needs our truths, messiness, weirdness, creative energy, and resistance.

The benefit of personal growth and self-discovery is that we become better human beings with the strength to endure and carry on, and then we may experience something magical when we begin to reach out to others. We discover a feeling that is so rewarding and fulfilling: that fact that we can make a difference. Here is to your willingness to begin with making a difference with yourself! Michael James

My parents are in many ways embodiments of the American Dream. They came to this country with basically nothing but the clothes on their backs, and after twenty years of hard work, sweat, and sacrifice, they were getting divorced, totally broke, and deep in therapy.

Writing is therapy with the Soul!

Trying to skirt risk is how we squeeze out all the fun and stunt the most wondrous gift: imagination.

When we microdose bravery strategically and intentionally, we can experience the therapeutic benefits: fun, growth, freedom, and connection that makes discomfort worthwhile.

Microdosing bravery is a way to keep nourishing your indomitable spirit.

I hit rock bottom and found something solid there.

Self-love isn't pretension or arrogance for that matter. It's a therapy.

You have divine grace to forgive.

Without struggle there is no progress.

Hold fast to the love of your life

While Sigmund famously focused on the unconscious (the id), Anna made the ego seem more important, particularly in respect of therapy and psychoanalysis. Her

Burns helped to establish a new method of treatment, cognitive therapy, and Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy is his attempt to explain how it works and why it is different. The

You can find hope in despair. Dwell on positive thoughts.

Marriage is a Bond so Strong, yet it gets weak if the knitters (the couples) do not weave the threads carefully, lovingly.

He's a unique dog, Mr. Bell had said. There is no other in the world that looks or acts just like him.

You can reach maximum performance by engaging in physical activities.

Words are powerful. They can hurt or they can heal.

Writing is therapy for soul!

Silence is a beautiful healing therapy - allowing your soul to be at peace with your thoughts.

Tip #4 Skinny-dip at will! (Idea) When single boast about finding your inner most happy place and hold on to it Odds are once married you can kiss personal space Good-Bye.

Meditation and reflection became tools to build resilience, allowing him to face challenges with a calm and centered mindset.

Sharing experiences with others facing similar challenges provided not only practical insights but also emotional support, reinforcing the idea that change could be a shared journey.

Cognitive therapy’s revolutionary idea is that depression is not an emotional disorder. The bad feelings we have in depression all stem from negative thoughts, therefore treatment must be about challenging and changing those thoughts.

It's OK to be not OK. It's OK to cry. It's OK to be angry. It's OK to ask for help. It's OK to stay in bed. It's OK to find it funny. It's OK to not want to talk about it. It's OK to go to therapy. It's OK to take medication. It's OK to be human.

Forgiveness calls on deep reserves of moral courage: the courage to break out of the spiral of self-pity; the courage to set aside resentment; the courage to rise above biterness; the courage to act well, when all our instincts call on us to act badly. p112

I've been a storyteller since I was six years old when my mother had her first series of electroshock therapy treatments. I made up stories to keep my sisters quiet while mom slept." Dear Deb "I didn't know how it felt to have cancer, but I knew about fear." Dear Deb "Two people have tried to kill me. The first person was my mother." Dear Deb "I used to believe there were big miracles and little miracles. But, I'm not so sure God measures miracles." Dear Deb "I was raised to believe forgiveness was a gift I was supposed to give the person who hurt me, but that felt like giving a bully an ice cream cone after he pushed me down on the playground." Dear Deb "Miracles are one of God's ways of getting our attention. I know he got mine. It's a miracle I'm here." Dear Deb

Frankl’s brand of therapy is sometimes considered, after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology, to be the third school of Viennese psychotherapy, and The Will to Meaning clearly points out the differences between his ideas and those of his compatriots. It

Burns points out that the basic idea of cognitive therapy—that our thoughts affect our emotions and mood, not the other way around—goes back a long way: The ancient philosopher Epictetus rested his career on the idea that it is not events that determine your state of mind, but how you decide to feel about the events. This

Ironically, many of the institutions that run the economy, such as medicine, education, law and even psychology are largely dependent upon failing health. If you add up the amounts of money exchanged in the control, anticipation and reaction to failing health (insurance, pharmaceutical research and products, reactive or compensatory medicine, related legal issues, consultation and therapy for those who are unwilling to improve their physical health and claim or believe the problem is elsewhere, etc.), you end up with an enormous chunk. To keep that moving, we need people to be sick. Then we have the extreme social emphasis placed on the pursuit and maintenance of a lifestyle based on making money at any cost, often at the sacrifice of health, sanity and well-being.

Life on the Mat “I roll it out and step inside a world of self-discovery, mine. Here is where I challenge myself, to learn just how to be myself… to grow and reach and stretch and sweat, I push my boundaries, no regrets. For this is where I seem to be, a stronger, better newer me. And when my body’s fully spent, my spirit takes a forward step, I contemplate the wisdom’s known, relinquished now, in Child’s pose.

Do you know what kind of a world we live in? We live in a world where, if a man came up with a sure cure for cancer, and if that man were found to be married to his sister, his neighbors would righteously burn down his house and all his notes. If a man built the most beautiful tower in the country, and that man later begins to believe that Satan should be worshipped, they’ll blow up his tower. I know a great and moving book written by a woman who later went quite crazy and wrote crazy books, and nobody will read her great one any more. I can name three kinds of mental therapy that could have changed the face of the earth, and in each case the men who found it went on to insane Institutes and so-called religions and made fools of themselves—dangerous fools at that—and now no one will look at their really great early discoveries. Great politicians have been prevented from being great statesmen because they were divorced. And I wasn’t going to have the Mensch machine stolen or buried or laughed at and forgotten just because I had long hair and played the lute. You know, it’s easy to have long hair and play the lute and be kind to people when everyone else around you is doing it. It’s a much harder thing to be the one who does it first, because then you have to pay a price, you get jeered at and they throw stones and shut you out.

In 1934, Bill W., cofounder of AA [Alcoholics Anonymous], was treated for his alcoholism with a hallucinogenic belladonna alkaloid. The resulting mystical experience led him to become sober and inspired him to write the book and cofound the organization that have changed the lives of so many millions around the world. In the 1950's Bill W underwent LSD therapy, and found his experience so inspiring that the sought to have the drug made part of the AA program.

You can resist the seductions of grandiosity, blame, and shame. You can support other people in their creative efforts, acknowledging the truth that there’s plenty of room for everyone. You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures. You can battle your demons (through therapy, recovery, prayer, or humility) instead of battling your gifts—in part by realizing that your demons were never the ones doing the work, anyhow. You can believe that you are neither a slave to inspiration nor its master, but something far more interesting—its partner—and that the two of you are working together toward something intriguing and worthwhile.

Working with people is basically not a question of formal education; working with people is a question of energy and awareness. Everyone can basically work with people. It is a question of developing a presence and a quality to work from. It is also about discovering our own unique way to be and work with people from our authentic inner being. The most important healing- and therapeutic ability is the capacity to be present. To be present means to develop a presence and a quality to work from. It means to be present with an open and relaxed heart, and to be grounded in our inner being, in the meditative quality within. Presence means to work from a meditative quality, from an inner "yes"-quality, from a state of non-doing. It is to be present for another person as a supporting light, as a supporting presence. Meditation is the way to deepen our capacity to be present, and explore how to bring the meditative presence into the healing- and therapeutic process. It is about developing a meditative presence and quality, to develop the inner "yes"-quality, the silence and emptiness within ourselves, the inner source of healing and wholeness, the capacity to surrender to life.

Life Path # 11: You are highly intuitive and you are gifted with amazing psychic abilities. Without any effort you become a source of inspiration for other people. You have this innate ability to connect the subconscious and the conscious and the higher and the lower realms. You are a natural psychic. Eleven is the life path of many prophets, inventors, historical leaders, religious leaders and artists. They usually don’t progress early in life but they are destined to accomplish more than other life paths. When they reach the age of maturity (35-45) their success starts to bloom. Confidence is the key to success for the Eleven. Your tremendous potential needs equally tremendous confidence for you to realize your dreams. Without confidence, you are reduced to nothing. As a higher vibration of the number 2, you have many characteristics, talents and tendencies inherent to the Twos. You have to guard your nervous system from stress. Seek out peace and harmony and you will find it in nature. Exercise and diet is necessary for you. Just like the number 2, you love harmony and peace and you possess a refined taste for beauty. You are best suited to anything that requires healing like physical therapy, acupuncture, massage and counseling. As a partner, you know what your partner needs and desires.

Light up your Diwali With great pleasure and wonderful happiness Because it's come at least one in a year!!

Post-Rehab Advice: 5 Things to Do After Getting Out of Rehab Getting yourself into rehab is not the easiest thing to do, but it is certainly one of the most important things you can ever do for your well-being. However, your journey to self-healing does not simply end on your last day at rehab. Now that you have committed your self to sobriety and wellness, the next step is maintaining the new life you have built. To make sure that you are on the right track, here are some tips on what you should do as soon as you get back home from treatment. 1. Have a Game Plan Most people are encouraged to leave rehab with a proper recovery plan. What’s next for you? Envision how you want yourself to be after the inpatient treatment. This is a crucial part of the entire recovery process since it will be easier to determine the next phase of treatment you need. 2. Build Your New Social Life Finishing rehab opens endless opportunities for you. Use it to put yourself out in the world and maybe even pursue a new passion in life. Keep in mind that there are a lot of alcohol- and drug-free activities that offer a social and mental outlet. Meet new friends by playing sports, taking a class or volunteering. It is also a good opportunity for you to have sober friends who can help you through your recovery. 3. Keep Yourself Busy One of the struggles after rehab is finding purpose. Your life in recovery will obviously center on trying to stay sober. To remain sober in the long term, you must have a life that’s worth living. What drives you? Begin finding your purpose by trying out things that make you productive and satisfied at the same time. Get a new job, do volunteer work or go back to school. Try whatever is interesting for you. 4. Pay It Forward As a person who has gone through rehab, you are in the perfect place to help those who are in the early stages of recovery. Join a support group and do not be afraid to tell your story. Reaching out to other recovering individuals will also help keep your mind off your own struggles, while being an inspiration to others. 5. Get Help If You’re Still Struggling Research proves that about half of those in recovery will relapse, usually within the treatment’s first few months. However, these numbers do not necessarily mean that rehab is a waste of time. Similar to those with physical disabilities who need continuous therapy, individuals recovering from addiction also require ongoing support to stay clean and sober. Are you slipping back to your old ways? Do not let pride or shame take control of your mind. Life throws you a curveball sometimes, and slipping back to old patterns does not mean you are hopeless. Be sure to have a sober friend, family, therapist or sponsor you could trust and call in case you are struggling. Remember that building a drug- and alcohol-free life is no walk in the park, but you will likely get through it with the help of those who are dear to you.

In so doing, he encouraged people to bring their unmet childhood wishes and needs into the therapy-bond, transferring them onto the person of the therapist. The challenge of the therapist is to respond to these with greater insight and empathic awareness than the parents, helping the client to overcome childhood traumas and to model a more mature way of being in the world. The way psychotherapy does this is by combining emotional support through the healing bond with two factors that open and challenge the mind: a shared, contemplative state that expands and heightens awareness; and the empathic analysis and insights of the therapist, which challenge the client’s self-limiting thoughts, emotions, and actions.

Inspired in part by the uncanny ability of viruses to splice new genetic information into the DNA of bacterial cells, the pioneers of this early gene therapy realized they could use viruses to deliver therapeutic genes to humans. The first reported attempts came in the late 1960s from Stanfield Rogers, an American physician who had been studying a wart-causing virus in rabbits, Shope papillomavirus. Rogers was particularly interested in one aspect of the Shope virus: It caused rabbits to overproduce arginase, an enzyme their bodies used to neutralize arginine, a harmful amino acid. The sick rabbits had much more arginase in their systems, and much less arginine, than healthy rabbits. What’s more, Rogers found that researchers who had worked with the virus also had lower-than-normal levels of arginine in their blood. Apparently these scientists had contracted the infections from the rabbits, and these infections had led to lasting changes in the researchers’ bodies as well. Rogers suspected that the Shope virus was ferrying a gene for heightened arginase production into cells. As he marveled at the virus’s ability to transfer its genetic information so effectively, he began to wonder if an engineered version could deliver other, useful genes. Many years later, Rogers would recall: “It was clear that we had uncovered a therapeutic agent in search of a disease!” Rogers didn’t have to wait long for a disease

In an ideal world, no one would need a therapy. In this world, many people did but didn’t get it for a variety of reasons. Liam believed some of them turned to the world of doms and subs.

The more we try to control the things outside of us the more we lose control of our mind.

Writing makes sense when nothing else does. Our thoughts need an outlet, jettisoning off to some place. Could it be to a parallel universe or to outer space? Do aliens also write their thoughts in their diaries?

Resilience is generated when we move from "me" to "we." Hiding only erodes resilience and weakens our bonds with one another, the very thing that can cement our indomitable spirit and keep us from total ruin. Pretending we are "fine" is not an act of courage, nor will it truly protect us from the gnawing pangs of thinking that we're the only ones. The biggest lie our minds can tell us is that we are the only ones when the only way to break free is to tell our truths.

Fighting injustice can have a way of turning people against each other instead of being able to clap back at the origins of the problems. Tackling the deep and complex work of combating racial, social, economic, and environmental injustice and working for access, equity, equality, eradicating ism's, peace, and ensuring human sustainability requires boldness, humility, hyper-vigilance, and relentless commitment to accountability...

Courage is not always found in grand and dramatic gestures or jaw-dropping feats. It is the grassrootsy, unassuming brand of bravery that should not be underestimated.

We need a revolution in mental health awareness to help us grasp the wonder and complexity of human behavior, health and functioning, and the nuances and intersections of brilliance and madness. This starts with dismantling myopic myths that prevent us from seeing the simultaneous wonder and complexity of our fullest selves. It involves providing access to the tools that mitigate being overtaken by the ravages of burnout and mental decompensation: the very risks of living in the modern world. Our sense-making approaches need to be comprehensive- grounded both scientifically and medically, steeped in love, and in ways that account for the multidimensionality of emotional and spiritual essence. Those that go beyond what the mind can first conceive of. This new mental health imperative relies upon universal precautions and a vehement resistance to linear checklists and binary labels that frame our gorgeous spirits solely as either complex and fraught or indomitable and wondrous. It also relies not on good will and best practices but the moral courage of policy makers to treat human beings like human beings. Dogs are often treated better than people. This is our new imperative: to radically change the way we care for ourselves and one another. We cannot extricate ourselves from the fact that the lines we walk are incredibly thin and blurry, and our only hope is to rewrite and navigate them together in solidarity, with every measure of creative reason and conscious community that can be mustered...

Real risk isn't always grandiose. The act of swallowing bravery is often so miniscule, it goes completely unrecognized by the outside world. In due time our psyches and souls are primed to adapt, integrate, and digest even the rustiest, clankiest, most bitterly jarring parts of life; to become more comfortable with the uncomfortable so much so that it becomes lifeforce. Microdoses help us build the fortitude to absorb, integrate, expand, contribute, and construct the new matrix of presence and inter-beingness. The cumulative effect of such actions cannot be overstated. Consistent microdoses of bravery have powerful, palpable effects. Vitality emerges through the nourishment of real droplets of risk, sustained over time; not impulsive grand gestures and binges disguised as noble and big.

Silence is a beautiful healing therapy – allowing your soul to be at peace with your thoughts.

What is mine will never leave. What leave was never mine.

Never feel guilty or ashamed for the mistakes of others.

Crying is immensely therapeutic; whether it's joyful or sad tears. Release the pent-up emotions that are swelling up within you.

As deep as that epiphany is, it’s not like progress in therapy was steady. I’d be up and down like crazy. Particularly when it came to my dad. As time went on, I got more and more angry at him, even while I missed him. Or, at least, I missed who I thought he was. What I was missing wasn’t him, it was my thought of him, a version of reality I carried around in my own head. Today, when I tell myself talk to yourself, don’t listen to yourself, that’s what I’m talking about: the tendency all of us have to believe that voice in our head, rather than step back and hold the myths we tell ourselves up to inspection.

For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic. He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bona-fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America. The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell. The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years. Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffen Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possible. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts. In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised. “Which proves, I think,” Little Mister Kissy Lips had explained one day after school to his friend Jack, “that a murder doesn’t have to be of someone famous to be a form of idealism.” But of course idealism was only half the story: the other half was curiosity. And beyond idealism and curiosity there was probably even another half, the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone.

I hope my readers feel inspired to embrace their LGBTQ+ loved ones even tighter and become their champion, even if that loved one is themself—especially if that loved one is themself,