c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Those of us who work in the field of trauma and abuse, whether psychologists, psychoanalysts, social workers, doctors, counselors, or psychotherapists, have been provided with beautiful tools for understanding the impact of trauma. We become adept at understanding the dynamic of why the messenger is always shot and broadcast the Bionic insight of why the visionary is not bearable to the group.However, when it comes to military mind control, abuse within religious belief groups or cults, and deliberately created dissociative identity disorder, we enter the least resourced field of all.
— Valerie Sinason, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control
Authentic inspiration endows individuals with mental or spiritual energy which they are then able to transform into positive action. It can make all the difference between a man, woman, or child allowing despair to permanently paralyze any dreams they may have for their lives, or, exercising sufficient strength of will to make those dreams a reality.
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.
— Paul Valéry
There's one problem with all psychological knowledge - nobody can apply it to themselves. People can be incredibly astute about the shortcomings of their friends, spouses, children. But they have no insight into themselves at all. The same people who are coldly clear-eyed about the world around them have nothing but fantasies about themselves. Psychological knowledge doesn't work if you look in a mirror. This bizarre fact is, as far as I know, unexplained.
— Michael Crichton, Prey
Dissociation, in a general sense, refers to a rigid separation of parts of experiences, including somatic experiences, consciousness, affects, perception, identity, and memory. When there is a structural dissociation, each of the dissociated self-states has at least a rudimentary sense of "I" (Van der Hart et al., 2004). In my view, all of the environmentally based "psychopathology" or problems in living can be seen through this lens.
— Elizabeth F. Howell, The Dissociative Mind
A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
And my experience in the music scene had shown me that there were places for places in the world where misfits were welcome.
— John Elder Robison, Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's
In India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it.
— Tahir Shah, Beyond The Devil's Teeth
SELFHOOD AND DISSOCIATIONThe patient with DID or dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS) has used their capacity to psychologically remove themselves from repetitive and inescapable traumas in order to survive that which could easily lead to suicide or psychosis, and in order to eke some growth in what is an unsafe, frequently contradictory and emotionally barren environment.For a child dependent on a caregiver who also abuses her, the only way to maintain the attachment is to block information about the abuse from the mental mechanisms that control attachment and attachment behaviour.10 Thus, childhood abuse is more likely to be forgotten or otherwise made inaccessible if the abuse is perpetuated by a parent or other trusted caregiver.In the dissociative individual, ‘there is no uniting self which can remember to forget’. Rather than use repression to avoid traumatizing memories, he/she resorts to alterations in the self ‘as a central and coherent organization of experience. . . DID involves not just an alteration in content but, crucially, a change in the very structure of consciousness and the self’ (p. 187).29 There may be multiple representations of the self and of others.Middleton, Warwick. "Owning the past, claiming the present: perspectives on the treatment of dissociative patients." Australasian Psychiatry 13.1 (2005): 40-49.
— Warwick Middleton
Only when we learn to value the differences among us can we achieve the true spirit of humanity.
— Charles S. Weinblatt
It takes two to tango” isn’t even true on the dance floor. One person can do a lot of evil all on his or her own. But the Theory of Mutual Blame arose sometime before Doc was even born. Perhaps it was a takeoff on Freud’s seduction theory or the more generic practice of blaming victims for being alive. Its origins were unclear, but no one had ever had to take full responsibility for their own actions since.
— Sarah Schulman, Empathy
Our practice rather than being about killing the ego is about simply discovering our true nature.
— Sharon Salzberg, A Heart as Wide as the World: Stories on the Path of Lovingkindness
I lay there for three whole days, totally paralyzed. My friends helped me to the bathroom and anywhere else I needed to move; but I have very vague impressions of those days because it was a time of complete darkness for me. Somebody told me later that what I had was a form of hysteria: my body and my mid fled into paralysis. There was nothing wrong with me organically, but somewhere inside I suffered a complete breakdown.
— Diet Eman, Things We Couldn't Say
Color is powerful. It is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you're wearing bright red pants.
— Jessi Arrington
Death releases the energy into air. If a true catastrophe is looming, the disturbance becomes such that a sensitive individual may become highly troubled by it. He may be aware exactly when and where it will occur. He may see an aura around people who are soon to die. Or he may see images of the disaster beforehand...
— Jed Rubenfeld, The Death Instinct
When you consider the superstitions and the imaginings of the old Cornish country-folk up to my grandmother's day, how their lives were swaddled in them from the cradle to the grave, their daily actions in large part determined by them - so many things you would not think of doing, like starting a journey on a Friday, or looking at the moon through a pane of glass, or failing to wear something new on Whitsunday - their minds haunted by ghosts and fears, you have a fair idea of what the minds of these people in the sixteenth century were like. It was a life full of shadows that frightened them and dangers that might come home to them; how much more so in those days when their fears had the sanction, and even the corroboration, of the elect and the intelligent: when a uniform religion existed to enforce its lessons and draw the moral. However, no doubt it filled up life for them, made it more interesting and exciting, more mysterious and incalculable; it added a dimension to it, where the modern uneducated, rid of their fears and ghosts, are apt to find life empty and void of meaning.
— A.L. Rowse
Speaker says psychology has commandeered "everything hard" and partitioned it from Scripture with the assumption that its causes are biological
— Edward T. Welch
Although the client-centered approach had its origin purely within the limits of the psychological clinic, it is proving to have implications, often of a startling nature, for very diverse fields of effort.
— Carl Rogers, Significant Aspects of Client-Centered Therapy
You tell them one real thing and then the doctor thinks he knows you. He starts getting arrogant and overfamiliar, making insulting suggestions left and right. You have to protest constantly just to set the record straight. Finally he makes offensive assumptions and throws them in your face. A stranger in a bar could do the same…
— Sarah Schulman, Empathy
Should you operate upon your clients as objects, you risk reducing them to less than human. Following the culture of appropriation and mastery your clients become a kind of extension of yourself, of your ego. In the appropriation and objectification mode, your clients’ well-being and success in treatment reflect well upon you. You “did” something to them, you made them well. You acted upon them and can take the credit for successful therapy or treatment. Conversely, if your clients flounder or regress, that reflects poorly on you. On this side of things the culture of appropriation and mastery says that you are not doing enough. You are not exerting enough influence, technique or therapeutic force. What anxiety this can breed for some clinicians! DBT offers a framework and tools for a treatment that allows clients to retain their full humanity. Through the practice of mindfulness, you can learn to cultivate a fuller presence to the moments of your life, and even with your clients and your work with them. This presence potentiates an encounter between two irreducible human beings, meeting professionally, of course, and meeting humanly. The dialectical framework, which embraces contradictions and gives you a way of seeing that life is pregnant with creative tensions, allows for your discovery of your limits and possibilities, gives you a way of seeing the dynamic nature of reality that is anything but sitting still; shows you that your identity grows from relationship with others, including those you help, that you are an irreducible human being encountering other irreducible human beings who exert influence upon you, even as you exert your own upon them. Even without clinical contrivance.
— Scott E. Spradlin
...the only way out consists of using a social mask.This is why those under depression will smile more as well as make efforts to please and entertain compared to anyone else....If they could hide in public, and they do hide in other ways, both psychological and physical.The psychological feeling of being trapped comes afterwards from the need to have social life, and that's when the anti-social personality starts developing furthermore.
— Mark Brightlife, Overcoming Depression: Pragmatic Solutions to Deal with Suicidal Thoughts
The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.
— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Oh! This'll impress you - I'm actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I'm a PEZ dispenser and I'm in the abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can't have it all?
— Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary
— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
One percent of people will always be honest and never steal," the locksmith said. "Another one percent will always be dishonest and always try to pick your lock and steal your television. And the rest will be honest as long as the conditions are right - but if they are tempted enough, they'll be dishonest too. Locks won't protect you from the thieves, who can get in your house if they really want to. They will only protect you from the mostly honest people who might be tempted to try your door if it had no lock".
— Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves
He who knows how to wait need make no concessions.
— Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
Maybe we choose to stay in a constant state of ignorance as a protective instinct — maybe I was just in denial. I just don’t get how you can be completely in love with someone one day, and then all of a sudden you just aren’t. I will never forget that day...the day where I became numb.
— Piper Caleb, Shattered Perfection: The Diary of an Eating Disordered Mind
A truly intelligent person is not one who can simply spout wordsand numbers; it is someone who can react ‘intelligently’ to all theopportunities, simulations and problems provided by the environment.Real intelligence means engaging your brain with every aspect of life –you play sport with you brain; you relate to others brain-to-brain;
— Tony Buzan, The Power of Social Intelligence: 10 ways to tap into your social genius
Change your mind and change your whole life experience.
— C.G. Rousing, Thoughts To Die For
In sum, doubling is the psychological means by which one invokes the evil potential of the self. That evil is neither inherent in the self nor foreign to it. To live out the doubling and call forth the evil is a moral choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of consciousness involved.
— Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'Brainwashing' in China
She looks like the type that might freak out. It's something in the eyes, Frannie. It says if you shoot my sacred cows, I'll shoot yours.
— Stephen King, The Stand
...trying to use willpower to overcome the apathetic sort of sadness that accompanies depression is like a person with no arms trying to punch themselves until their hands grow back. A fundamental component of the plan is missing and it isn't going to work.
— Allie Hyperbole and a Half
Experiences that we remember intrusively, despite desperately wanting to banish them from our minds, are closely linked to, and sometimes threaten, our perceptions of who we are and who we would like to be.
— Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers
As a special branch of general philosophy, pathogenesis had never been explored. In my opinion it had never been approached in a strictly scientific fashion--that is to say, objectively, amorally, intellectually.All those who have written on the subject are filled with prejudice. Before searching out and examining the mechanism of causes of disease, they treat of 'disease as such', condemn it as an exceptional and harmful condition, and start out by detailing the thousand and one ways of combating it, disturbing it, destroying it; they define health, for this purpose, as a 'normal' condition that is absolute and immutable.Diseases ARE. We do not make or unmake them at will. We are not their masters. They make us, they form us. They may even have created us. They belong to this state of activity which we call life. They may be its main activity. They are one of the many manifestations of universal matter. They may be the principal manifestation of that matter which we will never be able to study except through the phenomena of relationships and analogies. Diseases are a transitory, intermediary, future state of health. It may be that they are health itself.Coming to a diagnosis is, in a way, casting a physiological horoscope.What convention calls health is, after all, no more than this or that passing aspect of a morbid condition, frozen into an abstraction, a special case already experienced, recognized, defined, finite, extracted and generalized for everybody's use. Just as a word only finds its way into the Dictionary Of The French Academy when it is well worn stripped of the freshness of its popular origin or of the elegance of its poetic value, often more than fifty years after its creation (the last edition of the learned Dictionary is dated 1878), just as the definition given preserves a word, embalms it in its decrepitude, but in a pose which is noble, hypocritical and arbitrary--a pose it never assumed in the days of its vogue, while it was still topical, living and meaningful--so it is that health, recognized as a public Good, is only the sad mimic of some illness which has grown unfashionable, ridiculous and static, a solemnly doddering phenomenon which manages somehow to stand on its feet between the helping hands of its admirers, smiling at them with its false teeth. A commonplace, a physiological cliche, it is a dead thing. And it may be that health is death itself.Epidemics, and even more diseases of the will or collective neuroses, mark off the different epochs of human evolution, just as tellurian cataclysms mark the history of our planet.
— Blaise Cendrars, Moravagine
Wisdom is not guaranteed with age but is realized through one's sensitivity to humanity and the universe
— I. Alan Appt, The Strength in Knowing
I need to make myself strong on the inside instead of what is on the outside. I know all of this, but why can’t I put any of it into action? I guess that’s why I am in this place.
— Piper Caleb, Shattered Perfection: The Diary of an Eating Disordered Mind
Love is the great intangible. In our nightmares, we can create beasts out of pure emotion. Hate stalks the streets with dripping fangs, fear flies down narrow alleyways on leather wings, and jealousy spins sticky webs across the sky. In daydreams, we can maneuver with poise, foiling an opponent, scoring high on fields of glory while crowds cheer, cutting fast to the heart of an adventure. But what dream state is love? Frantic and serene, vigilant and calm, wrung-out and fortified, explosive and sedate –love commands a vast army of moods. Hoping for victory, limping from the latest skirmish, lovers enter the arena once again. Sitting still, we are as daring as gladiators.
— Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love
Political prisoners describe:- extreme physical and emotional torture- distortion of language, truth, meaning and reality- sham killings- begin repeatedly taken to the point of death or threatened with death- being forced to witness abusive acts on others- being forced to make impossible "choices"- boundaries smashed i.e. by the use of forced nakedness, shame, embarrassment- hoaxes, 'set ups', testing and tricks- being forced to hurt othersRitual abuse survivors often describe much the same things.
— Laurie Matthew, Who Dares Wins
Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.
— Antonin Scalia
Once you get into your thirties, you stop giving a fuck what people think about your opinions. You're more confident.
— Aaron B. Powell
The Loguidice Fitness Equation: Eating Right + Knowing How to Workout + Consistency = Success
— Bill Loguidice
Identity confusion is defined by the SCID-D as a subjective feeling of uncertainty, puzzlement, or conflict about one's own identity. Patients who report histories of childhood trauma characteristically describe themes of ongoing inner struggle regarding their identity; of inner battles for survival; or other images of anger, conflict, and violence. P13
— Marlene Steinberg, Interviewer's Guide to the Structured Clinical Interview for Dsm-IV (R) Dissociative Disorders (Scid-D)
Humans are easy to read, because what they’re not saying speaks volumes.
— Joel T. McGrath
The researchers found that nearly every change they made was followed by a temporary uptick in performance, even when it involved simply undoing a previous change. They concluded that the increases in worker productivity were not due to better lighting or better pay or longer breaks per se. They were just temporary improvements caused by a change in routine.
— Hal Herzog, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals
Will there never be an end that also has a beginning? Will there never be continuity bridging the awful void between now and some other time, a time in the future, a time in the past?
— Flora Rheta Schreiber
There is another Brain Principle to go with ‘First Things First’: that of‘Last Things Too’. This states that, all other things being equal, you willrecall more easily the ‘last’ things. Check your own memory banks andsee if this principle holds for the following.You will probably recall:� -The last new person you met� -The last time you saw the person you love the most� -The last social event you attended
— Tony Buzan, The Power of Social Intelligence: 10 ways to tap into your social genius
It is a difference of opinion which does not admit of proof. We each begin probably with a little bias towards our own sex, and upon that bias build every circumstance in favour of it which has occurred within our own circle;
— Jane Austen, Persuasion
But I was beginning to feel like it all fit together, the same way everything in the bowl ends up in the bisquits, as Amma would say.
— Kami Garcia
Jenny slowly awoke on the sacrificial altar to an Ethereal Light that flamed through the east wall, a radiant aura of love dispersing the frightful scene. A glow pulsating from Angeletta's body still burning in the fire pit slowly rose to join the Light. A Heavenly peace infused Jenny as she realized, "There's a man standing in the air straight above me!
— Judy Byington, Twenty-Two Faces
The Element is about discovering your self, and you can't do this if you're trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can't be yourself in a swarm.
— Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything
Sometimes the world is so much sicker than the inmates of its institutions.
— Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
I think it was Lessing who once said, 'There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose'. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour".
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the 'size' of human suffering is absolutely relative".
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Other men are unaware of what they do when they are awake just as they are forgetful of what they do when they are asleep.
— Heraclitus
We know the meaning so long as no one asks us to define it.
— William James
Families can also be divided into subgroups with different values, perspectives, and and communication styles, even if a subgroup consists of only one individual.
— David Bedrick, Talking Back to Dr. Phil: Alternatives to Mainstream Psychology
As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
— Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
My mother, my psychiatrist and an assortment of sedatives eventually convinced me I was delusional.
— Wayne Gerard Trotman, Veterans of the Psychic Wars
Quotations from ‘“THE STRENGTH IN KNOWING”***Convey to others more compassion, sensitivity, understanding rather than judgementalism”To find pity shall enable forgiveness to surfaceThere are good bones in everyone’s body, what varies are the numberCause and effect from the very smallest act by one individual can change mankind for all timeDevastation can be a reward, and a path to regenerationEmotions May Inhibit our Ability to Find PeaceOne must conquer One’s insensitivity to sensitivityTrue peace maintains strength and calm in the face of discord and tensionWisdom is not guranteed to be achieved with age but rather realized with ones sensitiviy to man and the universeOpposites create duality. The ego creates opposites. Therefore, the ego creates dualityOne should not permit his or her life path to be influenced by the expectations of others. Doubt is the archenemy of the purity of thought and it inhibits the essence of all that is Our, emotions and perceptions determine our attitudes and ultimately our choicesDon’t do it later; do it now.True love is unconditional and everlasting and it cannot cease.Reframing from negative speech is a path to reduction of negative thoughtUncontaminated understanding and awareness is the purity of essence and the essence of purity
— I. Alan Appt
People today will have you believing life is a blank slate upon which you can write anything at all--this is poetic, even romantic. Unfortunately, it's also a lie, because life exists in, is bound by, shaped by, controlled by, and functions within a construct. Attempt to function outside that construct, or bend it to our will, or remove it completely, and you throw all of society into chaos. We're seeing that now.Like it or not, birds don't fly upside down...and neither can we.
— Northern Adams, Mickey and the Gargoyle
No one gets out of this life alive.So leave a footprint of your choice.You are writing your epitaph.You are writing it now!Life is a process, not a goal.Live it now, or you will miss it!We have time to spend and no time to waste.
— Charles   Franklin, Create the Life You Need!
Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.
— Jeanette Winterson
In reality, though, most of the time we don’t choose the best option—we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing.
— Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
People sometimes imagine that without desire there would be no enjoyment. The opposite is true. When you're caught up in craving, you never really enjoy anything very much because your mind is always pulling you on to the next desire and the next after that. When you let go of desire, then you're free to enjoy whatever is right in front of you.
— Lorne Ladner, The Lost Art of Compassion: Discovering the Practice of Happiness in the Meeting of Buddhism and Psychology
Our outer relationships are a mirror of the relationship and communication between our own inner male and female sides. Our outer relationships with a man or a woman are a possibility to understand our own inner man or woman.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, The Silent Whisperings of the Heart - An Introduction to Giten's Approach to Life
We find what's in our own heads.
— T. Scott McLeod
Steve [sports psychiatrist] had already taught me to try and stop worrying so much about pleasing everyone. We knew that this was one of my most draining flaws and he again used three groups to clarify my thinking. There would always be some people, Steve said, who would care about me and love me. In contrast there would also be a select group of people who would never warm to me - no matter what I did. And in the middle came the overwhelming mass who were largely indifferent to any of my failures or triumphs. I needed to understand that most people didn't really care what I did or said. All my anguish about how they might perceive me was redundant. Steve helped me realize that I spent too much time trying to please those oblivious people in the middle or, more problematically, the small group who would never change their critical opinion of me. I should concentrate on the people who really did show concern for me.
— Victoria Pendleton, Between the Lines: The Autobiography
Prospective research looks forward in time to see how a group of individual change over time while retrospective research looks backward in time and attempts to reconstruct the conditions that led to the current situation.
— Shelley E. Taylor
Philosophy is to religion as psychoanalysis is to pseudoscience
— Christopher Marshall
The human tendency toward confirmatory thinking - all of us are bias to seek information that fits what we already believe.
— Valerie Tarico
The old joke is that psychiatrists are doctors who can't stand the sight of blood. Maybe they can't stand it, but if they work where I work, they damn well better get used to it.At least surgeons and prizefighters get to wear gloves
— Mike Bartos, BASH
People can learn to be more optimistic by acting as if they were more optimistic.
— Suzanne C. Segerstrom, Breaking Murphy's Law: How Optimists Get What They Want from Life - and Pessimists Can Too
If you feel unwanted or unappreciated where you are or by those you're with, it only means you're in the wrong place or with the wrong people. Hang in there. Someone else will see you for the true gift you are.
— LK Hunsaker
The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness. Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware."Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.I know how they make up my thoughts.These thoughts.
— Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
I admit I have Mental Illness so please no more 'Fruit Cakes' for Christmas Please
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Return to Stantasyland
Just to let you know I don't post my books and things on the net in hopes of being rich. The reason is. "I am a person with Bipolar Disorder" and they're are a lot of great minds on the "Famous Bipolar" list that died penniless. If I do the same it's no big deal but having a form of mental Illness I would love to get my name on the Bipolar list also one day. Preferably while I'm still living so I can make sure they spelled it right
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Return to Stantasyland
J. E. Littlewood, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote about the law of truly large numbers in his 1986 book, "Littlewood's Miscellany." He said the average person is alert for about eight hours every day, and something happens to the average person about once a second. At this rate, you will experience 1 million events every thirty-five days. This means when you say the chances of something happening are one in a million, it also means about once a month. The monthly miracle is called Littlewood's Law.
— David McRaney, You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself
All writers are insecure, the male ones especially. It's well known. Why else would they spend so much time on make-believe? They're only happy in their imaginary worlds, because that's where they're in charge - where they're God. Did you know that Hemingway's mother dressed him as a girl until he was six years old?"I was not offended by Claudia's glib psychological theory. Like many glib psychological theories, it struck me as fundamentally correct.
— Philip Sington, The Valley of Unknowing
The presence of the inner feeling of emptiness directs our attention to a past experience of guilt and to our inner feeling awareness of the cause in the past. We must be sensitive to that feeling and accept it in order to chase down the cause, ferret it out, reassess the value of the experience to us in order not to further project the blame in anger outward to an external cause.
— Martha Char Love, What's Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct
It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.
— Judith Herman
empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.
— Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty
Behavioral science is not for sissies.
— Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
I remember sitting in the Beth Shalom synagogue in Cambridge on the night of Kol Nidre. Peter Lipton, a friend and an atheist philosopher, was giving a sermon on the theme of “atonement:” “If we treat another person as essentially bad, we dehumanize him or her. If we take the view that every human being has some good in them, even if it is only 0.1 percent of their makeup, then by focusing on their good part, we humanize them. By acknowledging and attending to and rewarding their good part, we allow it to grow, like a small flower in a desert.
— Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty
Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trendis statism. Philosophically, the goal is theobliteration of reason;psychologically, it is theerosion of ambition.
— Ayn Rand, Letters of Ayn Rand
When we are authentic, when we act out of presence and awareness, it also gives nourishment to the inner being of people around us.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being
Spontaneity in the therapeutic work arises when the therapist can allow creative and authentic impulses to arise from moment to moment from the inner being, from the meditative quality within, from the inner emptiness, from the capacity to surrender to life. Then the therapist becomes less of a technician and more of an artist in the therapeutic work. It is then when the therapist and client meets in awareness without any barrier between.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being
Consciousness is not about information but about its opposite: order. Consciousness is not a complex phenomenon
—  it is what consciousness is _about_ that is complex. It is presumably this fact that is the reason many scientists over the decades have tended to perceive information as something involving order and organization. Because consciousness is about an experience of order and organization. Because consciousness is a state that does not process much information - consciously. Consciousness consists of information no more than a person who consumes large amounts of food can be said to consist of food. Consciousness is nourished by information the same way the body is nourished by food. But human beings do not consist of hot dogs
When you get kicked in the teeth, chew on it: don't bite back.
— K.C. Rhoads
Have you ever felt love?Did you need scientific proof of this? How would you have definitively and scientifically proved your love existed? If you could not prove it, would that mean your love didn't exist? What would you trust: your own feelings, or science?
— Derrick Jensen
In situations where I feel unclear or I do not know what to say or do, I turn my attention within myself. Then I listen to what my intuition and to what Existence within myself wants in this moment. Through listening within in this way, an answer often comes in the form of a creative and authentic impulse to say or do something or simply being silent until Existence is ready to respond.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being
In the therapeutic process based on awareness, there exists no ”I" – it just exists a presence, a light, a love and a silence.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being
Our immune system is evolving through trials of use in fighting illnesses and the bombardment of our modern world toxins and that this evolution not only engages the strengthening of the body and it’s T-Cell use but also our emotional intelligence and a higher awareness of our human nature and its original DNA coding as a highly self-reflective and intelligence evolving entity.
— Martha Char Love, What's Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct
Presence is not a question of judging or evaluating a client or a client’s situation. Presence is to see the client’s situation in a positive and creative light with a vision for how the present situation of the client relates to his further spiritual development. It is to accept a person as he is. It is to understand that the person is exactly where he needs to be in order to take the next step in his spiritual development. It is not about fighting with problems, darkness, drama and defences on the personality level, it is about becoming aware. It is about lighting the light in the inner being of another person.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being
Presence is to meet another person in meditation. Presence is to invite another person in meditation. It is a meeting in love, joy, acceptance, sincerity, truth, silence and oneness.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being
Presence is about how every action can arise from the quality, which we call awareness – the presence of our inner being, the presence of our soul. It is a large difference between working with people from the inner being and working with people from duty or a specific technique. Through working from the inner being, we can touch the soul of the other person, while we can only touch the personality of the other person, his surface and periphery, if we just work from a technique.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being
Emptiness and the not-“I” is the quality that arises when the therapist consciously moves out of his own way without hindering the therapeutic process through his own ideas, attitudes, expectations and concepts. He is present, available and responds with the truth in the moment.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being
Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.
— Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant.
— Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
Our love of being right is best understood as our fear of being wrong
— Kathryn Schulz
Christianity, unlike any other religion in the world, begins with catastrophe and defeat. Sunshine religions and psychological inspirations collapse in calamity and wither in adversity. But the Life of the Founder of Christianity, having begun with the Cross, ends with the empty tomb and victory.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ
The world is mere change, and this life, opinion.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
You cannot fix a problem that you refuse to acknowledge.
— Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril
All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
— Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
The borderline Queen experiences what therapists call "oral greediness". The desperate hunger of the borderline Queen is akin to the behavior of an infant who had gone too long between feelings. Starved, frustrated, and beyond the ability to calm of soothe herself, she grabs, flails, and wails until at last the nipple is planted securely and perhaps too deeply in her mouth. She coughs, gags, chokes, and spits, eyeing the elusive breast like a wolf guarding her food. Similarity, the Queen holds on to what is hers, taking more than she could use, in case it might be taken away prematurely.
— Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship
My God, these Feeling types! ... Sensitive people are just tyrannical people - everybody else has to adapt to them.
— Marie-Louise von Franz
For far too long, the female gender has been plagued with stereotypes, typecasting, as well as, subtle and blatant discrimination.
— Asa Don Brown
But we live on the cusp of a Renaissance in consciousness of who we truly are and, thus, we can now begin to thrive in this exciting age of our humanity’s journey toward a greater life and a more fundamentally intelligent evolution of our species.
— Martha Char Love, What's Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct
Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.
— John Irving, In One Person
It looked as though you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way, but rather you thought in a certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to do with it.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
You want to be happy? You want to be well? Then put your boots on.
— Norah Vincent, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin
The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us - these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road - aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and calls consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world." -Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
— Robert M. Pirsig
I don't assign myself to the names of any religious or non religious groups I prefer my actions and beliefs to be manic or marvelous just like me
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
He said sometimes when you're young you have to think about things, because you're forming your value-sets and you keep coming up with Data Insufficient and finding holes in your programs. So you keep trying to do a fix on your sets. And the more powerful your mind is and the more intense your concentration is, the worse damage you can do to yourself, which is why, Justin says, Alphas always have trouble and some of them go way off and out-there, and why almost all Alphas are eccentric. But he says the best thing you can do if you're too bright for your own good is what the Testers do, be aware where you got which idea, keep a tab on everything, know how your ideas link up with each other and with your deep-sets and value-sets, so when you're forty or fifty or a hundred forty and you find something that doesn't work, you can still find all the threads and pull them.But that's not real easy unless you know what your value-sets are, and most CITs don't. CITs have a trouble with not wanting to know that kind of thing. Because some of them are real eetee once you get to thinking about how they link. Especially about sex and ego-nets.Justin says inflexibility is a trap and most Alpha types are inward-turned because they process so fast they're gone and thinking before a Gamma gets a sentence out. Then they get in the habit of thinking they thought of everything, but they don't remember everything stems from input. You may have a new idea, but it stems from input somebody gave you, and that could be wrong or your senses could have been lying to you. He says it can be an equipment-quality problem or a program-quality problem, but once an Alpha takes a falsehood for true, it's a personal problem.
— C.J. Cherryh, Cyteen
What, then, was the new strategy he proposed? More troops and more money. For him, any other option was unthinkable. It would mean he had made a colossal mistake.
— Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn't mean that you can easily rebuild it.
— Dean Koontz
The combination of the Main brain with its central nervous system, and the ancient Animal Brain with its somatic, enteric nervous system in the inner body—in the gut—and the constant dialog between them provides a self-correcting feedback system, which regulates the behavioral qualities of the organism when consciously cultivated—preferably in early youth.
— Martha Char Love, What's Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct
People only accept change in necessity and see necessity only in crisis.
— Jean Monnet
A therapist who rushes to help forgets to listen.
— Noam Shpancer, The Good Psychologist
A wealth of research confirms the importance of face-to-face contact. One experiment performed by two researchers at the University of Michigan challenged groups of six students to play a game in which everyone could earn money by cooperating. One set of groups met for ten minutes face-to-face to discuss strategy before playing. Another set of groups had thirty minutes for electronic interaction. The groups that met in person cooperated well and earned more money. The groups that had only connected electronically fell apart, as members put their personal gains ahead of the group’s needs. This finding resonates well with many other experiments, which have shown that face-to-face contact leads to more trust, generosity, and cooperation than any other sort of interaction.The very first experiment in social psychology was conducted by a University of Indiana psychologist who was also an avid bicyclist. He noted that “racing men” believe that “the value of a pace,” or competitor, shaves twenty to thirty seconds off the time of a mile. To rigorously test the value of human proximity, he got forty children to compete at spinning fishing reels to pull a cable. In all cases, the kids were supposed to go as fast as they could, but most of them, especially the slower ones, were much quicker when they were paired with another child. Modern statistical evidence finds that young professionals today work longer hours if they live in a metropolitan area with plenty of competitors in their own occupational niche.Supermarket checkouts provide a particularly striking example of the power of proximity. As anyone who has been to a grocery store knows, checkout clerks differ wildly in their speed and competence. In one major chain, clerks with differing abilities are more or less randomly shuffled across shifts, which enabled two economists to look at the impact of productive peers. It turns out that the productivity of average clerks rises substantially when there is a star clerk working on their shift, and those same average clerks get worse when their shift is filled with below-average clerks.Statistical evidence also suggests that electronic interactions and face-to-face interactions support one another; in the language of economics, they’re complements rather than substitutes. Telephone calls are disproportionately made among people who are geographically close, presumably because face-to-face relationships increase the demand for talking over the phone. And when countries become more urban, they engage in more electronic communications.
— Edward L. Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier
Fears don't exist in isolation. They tend to rise and fall depending on what people think they can do about them.
— Peter Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris
The choice in this life is not between easy and hard, but between kinds of hardship, between a hardship that gives birth to wisdom, compassion and mercy, and the hardship that keeps on replicating itself to no end.
— Noam Shpancer