Counseling Quotes

If you have a dream, don’t just sit there. Gather courage to believe that you can succeed and leave no stone unturned to make it a reality.

~ Roopleen

Don’t let mental blocks control you. Set yourself free. Confront your fear and turn the mental blocks into building blocks.

~ Roopleen

The world’s greatest achievers have been those who have always stayed focussed on their goals and have been consistent in their efforts.

~ Roopleen

Author says her father was so diplomatic that when people came to him for solutions, people not only accepted them, but they believed they thought of them.

~ Immaculée Ilibagiza

Being divorced does not necessarily make one’s advice on marriage useless … or useful.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

If you possess the character that you have in your daily lives, nobody can't forcefully change your personality unless you embrace their influence.

~ Saaif Alam

There’s nothing wrong with victims of any kind of abuse; they are perfectly normal. It is the ones that abuse others, who are not normal. It is they who have twisted minds and need to be corrected or counselled. Unfortunately people look down upon the abused victims as if they’ve done something wrong and make them feel ashamed as well as guilty- which is not fair and absolutely incorrect. Victims must be shown kindness, encouraged and rehabilitated at the earliest and those who abused them must be ostracized. If you have been the victim of any kind of abuse, take down those walls of guilt, don’t hide behind dark doors, face the light and take charge of your life. Seek support- if required. You must understand that you have done nothing wrong and must not feel guilty or have low self esteem of yourself; it is the one who has abused you who should be running for cover. All you need at this point of time is love, self love and lots of self confidence. Believe in yourself and have faith in your ability to bounce back.

~ Latika Teotia

Life is a purposeful action.

~ Asa Don Brown

Perfectionists are not all negative, miserable, unhappy and over controlling individuals

~ Asa Don Brown

Use fear as a counselor not a captor.

~ Todd Stocker

All children should be taught to unconditionally accept, approve, admire, appreciate, forgive, trust, and ultimately, love their own person.

~ Asa Don Brown

All change comes from deepening your understanding of the salvation of Christ and living out the changes that understanding creates in your heart.

~ Timothy J. Keller

Real comfort is found when I understand that I am held in the hollow of the hand of the One who created and rules all things. The most valuable thing in my life is God's love, a love that no one can take away. When my identity is rooted in him, the storms of trouble will not blow me away. This is the comfort we offer people. We don't comfort them by saying things will work out. They may not. The people around them may change, but they may not. The Bible tells us again and again that everything around us is in the process of being taken away. God and his love are all that remain as cultures and kingdoms rise and fall. Comfort is found by sinking our roots into the unseen reality of God's ever-faithful love.

~ Paul David Tripp

Discovering an inner history requires listening – and often not to the first story told.

~ Sherry Turkle

Jefferson determined the lodestar that lay hidden in the motivations of others

~ John Ferling

Good… Bad? I’m not here to judge where you’re at or where you’ve been. I’m simply here to encourage you in where you would like to go. You have the map; I’ll shine the light on it so you can better read it. And eventually, the sun will rise again in your life and you’ll no longer need my light to assist you.

~ Alaric Hutchinson

We do not have to have the correct answers to listen well. In fact, often the correct answers are a hindrance to listening well, for we become more anxious to give the correct answer than to hear.

~ Richard J. Foster

The one trying to have the last word is rarely walking in the Word.

~ Hollisa Alewine

The fact that you do not trust your spouse or lover doesn’t necessarily mean that they are cheating on you, and the fact that you do doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The bond of love must be kept strong.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

One last “happy” thought: Your marriage will end either in death or divorce. (Think about it!) So well before the “I do’s” (and the eventual tears), why not give both of yourselves a chance for a marriage that can be the best it can be?

~ J. Thomas Steele

An unresolved issue will be like a cancer with the potential to spread into other areas of your relationship, eroding the joy, lightness, love and beauty.

~ Joyce Vissell

Family therapists view the therapeutic relationship as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself. Family therapists see beyond the problematic patterns in the family to the potential healing power of family relationships.

~ Joseph A. Micucci

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.

~ Augustus Y. Napier

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.

~ Augustus Y. Napier

Even though we were still waiting for Don, therapy was well begun. We were engaged in a subtle, often predictable, and very important contest with the family about who was going to be present at the meetings. Carl and I had revealed some of what our relationship had to offer: a good-humored liking for each other, an ability to cooperate, and an insistence on remaining ourselves. I was clearly not going to be the reverential assistant to the older man. And perhaps most important, Carl had intuitively modeled some of the process of therapy for the family. By sharing insight into his own personality, he was saying by demonstration, It's important to search for you own unconscious agenda.

~ Augustus Y. Napier

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.

~ Augustus Y. Napier

It has been a long road for us as family therapists to reach an understanding of just this phenomenon-the sense of the whole, the family system. While we could have explained the theory of meeting with the whole family to the Brices, at that anxious moment it would not have touched them. There are situations where, in the words of Franz Alexander, the woice of the intellent is too soft. The family needed to test us. They needed the experience of our being firm. As unpleasant as it was, our response must have reassured them. They knew, and we sensed, how difficult their situation was and how tumultuous it could become. They simply has to know that we could withstand the stress if they dared open it up.

~ Augustus Y. Napier

Love is divine force of existence.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Infusing the cultural war with love, respect and empathy is the responsibility of every one who cares about the health and wellbeing of women, our families and communities, and our democracy.

~ Aspen Baker

Have you ever noticed that fear affects your physical mind and body?

~ Asa Don Brown

Often, our misunderstandings about love are born in disruptive family relationships, where someone was either one-up or one-down to an extreme. There is an appropriate and necessary difference in the balance of power between parents and young children, but in the best situations, there should be no power struggles by the time those children have become adults - just deep connection, trust, and respect between people who sincerely care about each other.In disruptive families, children are taught to remain one-up or one-down into adulthood. And this produces immature adults who either seek to dominate others (one-up) or who allow themselves to be dominated (one-down) in their relationships - one powerful and one needy, one enabling and one addicted, one decisive and one confused.In relationships with these people, manipulation abounds. Especially when they start to feel out of control.

~ Tim Clinton

Teams that spend a lot of time learning the tricks of the trade will probably never really learn the trade.

~ Yuri Boganov

Courage doesn’t happen when you have all the answers. It happens when you are ready to face the questions you have been avoiding your whole life.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Real loved one's aren't afraid, and will suggest to you, what's in your best interest because they wouldn't want too see you suffer the consequences of, sideways, emotional impulse(s). To see you crash and burn, time after time, is the gratification of 'yes folk' lurking in your corner. You may not agree, but always consider the voice(s) that have consistently kept it real.

~ T.f. Hodge

A child's attachment process begins within the first year of life...

~ Asa Don Brown

There is no debating that the effects of trauma experienced in childhood may have grave consequences.

~ Asa Don Brown

Attachments that are not fostered may lend to the child's inability to properly attach or have no attachment at all.

~ Asa Don Brown

Perception is a vice with which each person is capable of perceiving his or her reality.

~ Asa Don Brown

Loss has no friend, no allies, no benefit to the human spirit.

~ Asa Don Brown