Therapy Quotes

“Families come into therapy with their own structure, and tone, and rules. Their organization, their pattern, has been established over years of living, and it is extremely meaningful and very painful for them. They would not be in therapy if they were happy with it. But however faulty, the family counts on the familiarity and predictability of their world. If they are going to turn loose this painful predictability and attempt to reorganize themselves, they need firm external support. The family crucible must has a shape, a form, a discipline of sorts, and the therapist has to provide it. The family has to know whether we can provide it, and so they test us.”

“I consider therapy successful when the family members (or individual clients) have discovered ways to get what they need from their relationships with the people in their lives, so that their relationship with me is no longer necessary to sustain them. Like a chemical catalyst that facilitates a reaction between two other substances, the therapeutic relationship catalyzes the transformation of relationships in the lives of clients. But the real healing takes place not in the therapeutic relationship but in the client's relationships with significant others.”

“The individual psychotherapy patient comes to the therapist with an almost automatic deference, a sense of dependence and compliance. The role pattern is old and established: the dependent child seeking guidance from a parent figure. There is no such traditional image for the family, no established pattern in which an entire family submits to the guidance of an individual. And the family structure is simply too powerful and too crucial for the members to go trustingly into an experience that threatens to change the entire matrix of their relationships. If the family therapist is to acquire that initial "authority figure" or "parent" role that is so necessary if therapy is to be more powerful than an ordinary social experience, he has to earn it.”

“When Carl asked the Brices to bring their whole family to therapy, everyone in the family knew intuitively what that meant. Their whole world would be exposed: all its caring, its history, its anger, its anxiety. All in one place at once time, subject to the scrutiny and invasion of a stranger. And that was too much vulnerability. With its own unconscious wisdom, the family elected Don to stay home and test the therapists. Did we really mean everybody? Would we weaken and capitulate if they didn't bring Don?They had something to gain by the strategy. If we were hesitant and unconfident in our approach to their defiance, they would know that they could not trust us with the boiling cauldron of feeling which their family contained. If we were decisive and firm, they would guess that maybe we could handle the stresses which they intuitively knew had to be brought out into the open. One way or another, they had to find out how much power we had. In the meantime, they postponed facing that mysterious electricity, that critical mass, the whole family. Perhaps they thought they could be spared what Zorba called the full catastrophe.”

“The Tanzanian told her that all fiction was therapy, some sort of therapy, no matter what anybody said.”

“Avoidance therapy does not work. One major reason for that is because Avoidance Therapy (diversion, think yourself happy, positive affirmations) is predicated on the validity of 'Failure of Will.' Depression is not a choice.”

“I thought part of the idea of having therapy was putting one in touch with his or her feelings. And don’t give me all that about transference, and counter-transference and all that. I know what I feel. And it has nothing to do with all that. And you also feel for me. And if you don’t know that, then maybe it’s you who needs to have therapy to gain a better knowledge of yourself.”

“I've always had this feeling," Henry says, "that all dogs are really therapy dogs.”

“Smile, it's free therapy.”

“Imagination is tapping into the subconscious in a form of open play. That is why art or music therapy, which encourages a person to take up brushes and paint or an instrument, and just express themselves, is so powerful.”