Psychology Quotes

In the realm of Greater Understanding, the workshop is dismantled after the work is finished.

~ Idries Shah

Most magick I have experienced can be written off as a stew of psychology and coincidence, and I truly believe this is where magick is best worked.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Pain is always a fanged serpent, but to the fearful it has a hundred heads.

~ Dagobert D. Runes

Memories demand attention, and these memories will have teeth.

~ C. Kennedy

Being in a state of denial is auniversally human response tosituations which threaten tooverwhelm. People who were abusedas children sometimes carry theirdenial like precious cargo without aport of destination. It enabled us tosurvive our childhood experiences, and often we still live in survival mode decades beyond the actual abuse. We protect ourselves to excess because we learned abruptly and painfully that no one else would.

~ Sarah E. Olson

Boundary construction is most evident in three-year-olds. Boundary construction is most evident in three-year-olds. By this time, they should have mastered the following tasks:1. The ability to be emotionally attached to others, yet without giving up a sense of self and one‘s freedom to be apart, 2. The ability to say appropriate no's to others without fear of loss of love, 3. The ability to take appropriate no's from others without withdrawing emotionally. Noting these tasks, a friend said half-joking, They need to learn this by age three? How about by fourty-three? Yes, these are tall orders but boundary development is essential in the early years of life.

~ Henry Cloud

Early relational trauma results from the fact that we are often given more to experience in this life than we can bear to experience consciously. This problem has been around since the beginning of time, but it is especially acute in early childhood where, because of the immaturity of the psyche and/or brain, we are ill-equipped to metabolize our experience. An infant or young child who is abused, violated or seriously neglected by a caretaking adult is overwhelmed by intolerable affects that are impossible for it to metabolize, much less understand or even think about.

~ Donald Kalsched

Thoughts. Thoughts bombard my head, my brain. My psyche

~ Jonathan Harnisch

Switches among identities occur in response to changes in emotional state or to environmental demands, resulting in another identity emerging to assume control. Because different identities have different roles, experiences, emotions, memories, and beliefs, the therapist is constantly contending with their competing points of view. Helping the identities to be aware of one another as legitimate parts of the self and to negotiate and resolve their conflicts is at the very core of the therapeutic process. It is countertherapeutic for the therapist to treat any alternate identity as if it were more “real” or more important than any other.Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision

~ James A. Chu

But it was not only a feeling of guilt which drove him into danger. He detested the pettiness that made life semilife and men semimen. He wished to put his life on one of a pair of scales and death on the other. He wished each of his acts, indeed each day, each hour, each second of his life to be measured against the supreme criterion, which is death. That was why he wanted to march at the head of the column, to walk on a tightrope over an abyss, to have a halo of bullets around his head and thus to grow in everyone's eyes and become unlimited as death is unlimited. . .

~ Milan Kundera

Oh, come on! Nobody's favorite color is BROWN!

~ Lee Blessing

...the higher the expectations about unselected alternatives, the lower the level of satisfaction with the chosen good.

~ Michael R. Solomon

The tongue is the best masseur of furrowed brows.

~ Idries Shah

The primary treatment modality for DID is individual outpatient psychotherapy.Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision

~ James A. Chu

Treatment for DID should adhere to the basic principles of psychotherapy and psychiatric medical management, and therapists should use specialized techniques only as needed to address specific dissociative symptomatology.Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision

~ James A. Chu

Clever deceivers rarely tell outright falsehoods. It’s too risky. The art of deception is closely related to the magician’s craft: it involves knowing how to draw attention to a harmless place, to deflect it away from the action. Deeply entrenched patterns of perceptual, emotional, and cognitive dispositions serve as instruments of deception. A skilled deceiver is an illusionist who knows how to manipulate the normal patterns of what is salient to their audience. He places salient markers—something red, something anomalous, something desirable—in the visual field, to draw attention just where he wants it.

~ Clancy Martin

we live now in circumstances that encourage rather than discourage lying; evidence and activity are more easily concealed, and the need to rely on demeanor as an indicator of a person’s truthfulness is greater. And our evolutionary history has not prepared us to be very sensitive to the behavioral clues relevant to lying.

~ Clancy Martin

In what way did your parents screw up to make you the woman you are today?

~ Nicki Elson

The quest of the alchemists to turn lead into gold is a metaphor for our attempts to turn the base metal of ourselves, that person hooked on consumerism, filled with angst and ambition, into the gold of what we can be and really are.

~ Chloe Thurlow

The barren branches may appear inelegant: They are, to the cook, the means to make his fire.

~ Idries Shah

I think the stigma attached to mental illness will disappear just like it did for cancer years ago.

~ Sally Graham

He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivisible and indissoluble. The presence of the girl was pathetic (a few caresses and a lot of meaningless words), but her absolute absence was infinitely grand; when he imagined a girl buried in a field, he suddenly discovered the nobility of pain and the grandeur of love. But it was not only the absolute but also bliss he was looking for in his dreams of death.

~ Milan Kundera

When it comes to most true bipolars, consider this thought: Genius by birth, bipolar by design.

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

The world is your perception of it. Inside and outside always match - they're reflections of each other. The world is a mirror image of your mind.

~ Byron Katie

Been under treatment for PTSD and bipolar since 1992. I’m not ashamed of my illness. I’ve been shunned by many and I feel for those shunned, too.

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

The moment we refuse to hurt others because of our own pain, is the time we evolve as souls.

~ Aleksandra Ninkovic

Many people say that psychiatrists just want to push drugs. Well I seriously have to say, without medication, I’d be locked up in a VA hospital somewhere.

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

Psychological pseudoscience dies hard, especially when there are commercial interests at stake.

~ Paul Gibbons

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

The best way to overcome depression is to work it to death. Whether it be your body or your mind, just be active and some relief you’ll find.

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

Years ago I had realized I was blaming myself for it. People and doctors would tell me it wasn't my fault, but I couldn't “BELIEVE” it! Then I was talking to my friend Kieran and he explained to me in a way that I could PERCEIVE that I was not at fault. No one else could ever do that before, though many tried. Many, many people had tried to tell me it wasn't my fault, but I was convinced it was my fault because I was trying to cheer up my dad.

~ Robert Anthony

No ideology or psychological theory can possibly do justice to the full range of human experience.

~ Marty Rubin

The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life.

~ Erich Fromm

Most people regarded Psychology as a science. Some called it a soft science, but those making such a distinction grew fewer by the year.

~ Dean Koontz

It's like the commercial, Once you pop you can't stop.  Once you pop a pill, you can't stop.  They have you hooked and they know it.  Like a drug dealer, they are so happy they have won another loyal customer.  Not loyal because you want to be, but loyal because your body is now completely dependent on them and their legal prescription drugs. 

~ Lisa Bedrick

If you do not have enemies on your way to the top, you are already a celebrated failure.

~ Osunsakin Adewale

A Sufi is alive to the value of time, and is given, every moment, to what that moment demands.

~ Idries Shah

But it’s tempting to be Cool Girl. For someone like me, who likes to win, it’s tempting to want to be the girl every guy wants. When I met Nick, I knew immediately that was what he wanted, and for him, I guess I was willing to try. I will accept my portion of blame. The thing is, I was crazy about him at first. I found him perversely exotic, a good ole Missouri boy. He was so damn nice to be around. He teased things out in me that I didn’t know existed: a lightness, a humor, an ease. It was as if he hollowed me out and filled me with feathers. He helped me be Cool Girl – I couldn’t have been Cool Girl with anyone else. I wouldn’t have wanted to. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy some of it: I ate a MoonPie, I walked barefoot, I stopped worrying. I watched dumb movies and ate chemically laced foods. I didn’t think past the first step of anything, that was the key. I drank a Coke and didn’t worry about how to recycle the can or about the acid puddling in my belly, acid so powerful it could strip clean a penny. We went to a dumb movie and I didn’t worry about the offensive sexism or the lack of minorities in meaningful roles. I didn’t even worry whether the movie made sense. I didn’t worry about anything that came next. Nothing had consequence, I was living in the moment, and I could feel myself getting shallower and dumber. But also happy.

~ Gillian Flynn

There is a characteristic INTJ expression which has become popularly termed the death glare. This facial expression is actually not a glare, but the INTJ's neutral face.

~ Anna Moss

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky