Healing Quotes

Feeling bad is not the problem.The problem is that we feel bad about feeling bad.Once you begin to let go of feeling bad about feeling bad,and start feeling better about feeling bad,then pretty soon you'll just feel better.And then you'll feel awesome.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

You are the light of the world. Shine brightly. Smile beautifully! Rejoice daily!

~ Brenda M. Mcgraw

In this week I see such a picture of life, hard and joyful pressed up together and sleeping in the same bed. They come knit together. The lines of pain run through the joy and remind us to go all in, because life is short. The joy edges the pain and gives us a reason to rise.

~ Anna White

All of our relationships and our interactions, the life affirming ones and the challenging ones, show us how far we have come and where we still need to go.

~ Eileen Anglin

When people are broken on the outside, society is taught to never be rude to them. When people are broken on the inside, society is taught to rub happiness in their faces and show them how perfect life should be. When someone has half of an arm, you are not supposed to go up to them and show them how great of an arm wrestler you are. But when someone has a broken mind or a broken soul, you're taught to go up to them and tell them to look for joy in everything. Society has a very long way to go in terms of what it means to heal this world's broken people.

~ C. Joybell C.

As you awaken to the new day, put your hands to your heart, breath in and say: I am loved. I am love. I love, I love, I love.

~ Eileen Anglin

How can a falling dove turn again into a flying dove once again? It really takes the eyes of someone who sees you for the beauty that you really are. And if there are no other eyes there to see you in that way, then you had better be those pair of eyes, for yourself, to see yourself with!

~ C. Joybell C.

Be happy but when sad times come, know that God allow these time for self-realisation.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

You shall not be afraid of the adversary. God will be your strong fortress.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We wait expectantly for what we hope for.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Love is the greatest gift, we can give to one another.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

No one can foretell the details in a day, we can only hope.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Renew energy, revive strength.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

You have a responsibility to keep your homes, surroundings and city clean.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Justified within ourselves that we have suffered more than others, we feel guiltless when we disregard those in front of us, be they our family, our co-workers, strangers we interact with during our daily business, or faceless masses in foreign lands.There are those who transcend the bitter acts done unto them, declaring that the pain shall end with them. And then there are those who use the crimes committed against them as a free pass to commit crimes against others. Wronged as we each have been, nothing gives us the right to disregard the fragility of another. We can and must halt the hate passing throughout this world. A hateful act done unto us can be absorbed and transcended or it can be re-projected, thus allowing its ill force to continue moving throughout the population.We must work to transcend those hateful things already carried out upon each of us and in doing so prevent new acts of hate from being done. We must work to heal from the wounds already received and connect to a sense of consideration, to ensure that we do not pass along any of our pain to the generations as yet unburdened.We must declare a general amnesty; we must forgive each other and in doing so find that we have been forgiven. We must put away our bitterness and extend an open hand.

~ L.m. Browning

The Prayer that is answered is not of many words, but of Oneness.

~ Vivian Amis

Just as verbally and physically abused children internalize blame, so do incest victims. However, in incest, the blame is compounded by the shame. The belief that ‘it’s all my fault’ is never more intense than with the incest victim. This belief fosters strong feelings of self-loathing and shame. In addition to having somehow to cope with the actual incest, the victim must now guard against being caught and exposed as a ‘dirty, disgusting’ person

~ Susan Forward

Growing up is, at heart, the process of learning to take responsibility for whatever happens in your life. To choose growth is to embrace a love that heals.

~ Bell Hooks

Now we are beginning to come to a point where human consciousness is moving back to female energy. The Earth is crying out very loudly, and the herbalists are springing up. Women are becoming healers again. That energy is coming back.

~ Sun Bear

Today’s widespread social disharmony in relation to gender is not inevitable for human society, although it is the inevitable product of thousands of years of systemic gender injustice across the globe. Because we have never known anything else, it is difficult impossible for us to imagine what life would be like if we had grown up in a society that was truly integrated and healthy in relation to gender and sexuality. The entire fabric of human society would be vastly different from what we know today.

~ William Keepin

Society gives the image of sexual violators as weird, ugly, anti-social, alcoholics. Society gives the impression that violators kidnap children are out of their homes and take them to some wooded area and abandon them after the violation. Society gives the impression that everyone hates people who violate children. If all of these myths were true, healing would not be as challenging as it is. Half of our healing is about the actual abuse. The other half is about how survivors fit into society in the face of the myths that people hold in order to make themselves feel safe. The truth is that 80% of childhood sexual abuse is perpetrated by family members. Yet we rarely hear the word “incest”. The word is too ugly and the truth is too scary. Think about what would happen if we ran a campaign to end incest instead of childhood sexual abuse. The number one place that children should know they are safe is in their homes. As it stands, as long as violators keep sexual abuse within the family, the chances of repercussion by anyone is pretty low. Wives won’t leave violating husbands, mothers won’t kick their violating children out of the home, and violating grandparents still get invited to holiday dinners. It is time to start cleaning house. If we stop incest first, then we will strengthen our cause against all sexual abuse.

~ Rosenna Bakari

In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?

~ Carl R. Rogers

It is painful to face the self we know we have never had the integrity to honor and assert.

~ Nathaniel Branden

There is no illness that is not exacerbated by stress.

~ Allan Lokos

A psychologist’s job (if it’s done well) is to get you to seriously laugh at yourself.

~ Clifford Cohen

Admitting the need for help may also compound the survivor's sense of defeat. The therapists Inger Agger and Soren Jensen, who work with political refugees, describe the case of K, a torture survivor with severe post-traumatic symptoms who adamantly insisted that he had no psychological problems: K...did not understand why he was to talk with a therapist. His problems were medical: the reason why he did not sleep at night was due to the pain in his legs and feet. He was asked by the therapist...about his political background, and K told him that he was a Marxist and that he had read about Freud and he did not believe in any of that stuff: how could his pain go away by talking to a therapist?

~ Judith Lewis Herman

The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgement go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. But the moment the patient begins to assimilate contents that were previously unconscious, its danger diminishes. The dissociation of personality, the anxious division of the day-time and the night-time sides of the psyche, cease with progressive assimilation.

~ C.g. Jung

But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but convention forbids!

~ C.g. Jung

In simple, the past is a time gone by and no longer exists in the present moment, but we choose to allow this past to occupy our minds, our bodies and our very existence.

~ Asa Don Brown

Suffering is just about the easiest of all human activities; being happy is just about the hardest. And happiness requires, not surrender to guilt, but emancipation from guilt.

~ Nathaniel Branden

Shame is internalized when one is abandoned. Abandonment is the precise term to describe how one loses one’s authentic self and ceases to exist psychologically.

~ John Bradshaw

There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Anger is the immune system of the soul.

~ Stefan Molyneux

The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse. These people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development; they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. That’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

~ Gabor Maté

Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.

~ Susan Pease Banitt

I recently consulted to a therapist who felt he had accomplished something by getting his dissociative client to remain in her ANP throughout her sessions with him. His view reflects the fundamental mistake that untrained therapists tend to make with DID and DDNOS. Although his client was properly diagnosed, he assumed that the ANP should be encouraged to take charge of the other parts at all times. He also expected her to speak for them—in other words, to do their therapy. This denied the other parts the opportunity to reveal their secrets, heal their pain, or correct their childhood-based beliefs about the world.If you were doing family therapy, would it be a good idea to only meet with the father, especially if he had not talked with his children or his spouse in years? Would the other family members feel as if their experiences and feelings mattered?Would they be able to improve their relationships? You must work with the parts who are inside of the system. Directly.

~ Alison Miller

I want everyone that has been abused by someone in their childhood to know that you can get past it. Having DID is not the end of the world; it's the beginning of your new life. DID allows the victim of exceptional abuse the ability to “forget” the abuse and continue living. Without it, I may have gone crazy as a teen and spent my life in a as a teen and spent my life in a psychiatric hospital.

~ Dauna Cole

Changing yourself changes everything.

~ Bryant Mcgill

I believe the perception of what people think about DID is I might be crazy, unstable, and low functioning. After my diagnosis, I took a risk by sharing my story with a few friends. It was quite upsetting to lose a long term relationship with a friend because she could not accept my diagnosis. But it spurred me to take action. I wanted people to be informed that anyone can have DID and achieve highly functioning lives. I was successful in a career, I was married with children, and very active in numerous activities. I was highly functioning because I could dissociate the trauma from my life through my alters. Essentially, I survived because of DID. That's not to say I didn't fall down along the way. There were long term therapy visits, and plenty of hospitalizations for depression, medication adjustments, and suicide attempts. After a year, it became evident I was truly a patient with the diagnosis of DID from my therapist and psychiatrist. I had two choices. First, I could accept it and make choices about how I was going to deal with it. My therapist told me when faced with DID, a patient can learn to live with the live with the alters and make them part of one's life. Or, perhaps, the patient would like to have the alters integrate into one person, the host, so there are no more alters. Everyone is different.The patient and the therapist need to decide which is best for the patient. Secondly, the other choice was to resist having alters all together and be miserable, stuck in an existence that would continue to be crippling. Most people with DID are cognizant something is not right with themselves even if they are not properly diagnosed. My therapist was trustworthy, honest, and compassionate. Never for a moment did I believe she would steer me in the wrong direction. With her help and guidance, I chose to learn and understand my disorder. It was a turning point.

~ Esmay T. Parker

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