therapy Quotes

You didn’t expect these notes to turn into my therapy session, did you?

“You don’t like anything. You are the most depressed person I’ve ever met, and excuse me for saying this, but you are no fun to be around and I think you need professional help.”

“Therapists had nothing to do with our everyday lives. ‘Don’t talk about the hospital,’ my therapist said if I complained about Daisy or a stupid nurse. ‘We’re not here to talk about the hospital.’ They couldn’t grant or rescind privileges, help us get rid of smelly roommates, stop aides from pestering us. The only power they had was the power to dope us up. Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium, the therapists’ friends. Once we were on it, it was hard to get off. A bit like heroin, except it was the staff who got addicted to our taking it. ‘You’re doing so well,’ they would say. That was because those things knocked the heart out of us.”

“He started asking me, ‘What are you thinking?’ I never knew what to say. My head was empty and I liked it that way. Then he began to tell me what I might be thinking. ‘You seem sad today,’ he’d say, or ‘Today, you seem puzzled about something.’ Of course I was sad and puzzled. I was eighteen, it was spring, and I was behind bars.”

“Hollowness: that I understand. I’m starting to believe that there isn’t anything you can do to fix it. That’s what I’ve taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps.”

“Whenever I start to doubt if I’m worth the eternal trouble of medication and therapy, I remember those people who let the fog win. And I push myself to stay healthy. I remind myself that I’m not fighting against me … I’m fighting against a chemical imbalance.”

“What worries me is, what if this guy is really the one for me and I just haven’t had enough therapy yet for me to be comfortable with having found him.”

“Choosing a lover is a lot like choosing a therapist. We need to ask ourselves, is this someone who will be honest with me, listen to criticism, admit making mistakes, and not promise the impossible?”

“No conventional therapy can release us from a deep and abiding psychic pain. Through prayer we find what we cannot find elsewhere: a peace that is not of this world.”

“In my own therapy, my therapist said to me that as long as I believe that I am the problem, I will harbor a hope that things in the relationship with my toxic family members can change because I have the power to change myself. We erroneously believe that if we try to be good enough, successful, or perfect, maybe our toxic family members will change their minds about us. But they don’t and they won’t. Now if the problem isn’t within us, then that creates a horribly scary feeling. That means we’re powerless to make any positive changes in how our toxic family members treat us. I certainly know that I can do nothing to change anything in myself that would ever make a difference in my relationships with my family members. At one time, this rocked my world. But now, I just feel relief. I am no longer brainwashed by them into believing that I am the bad kid, the problem child, the difficult one. I know the truth about my family and have accepted it.”

If parents would only take the time to think about that and communicate more before having kids, there would be less of a need for therapy for adults.