Therapists Quotes

“Sensitive people care when the world doesn't because we understand waiting to be rescued and no one shows up. We have rescued ourselves, so many times that we have become self taught in the art of compassion for those forgotten.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“If you were born with the ability to change someone’s perspective or emotions, never waste that gift. It is one of the most powerful gifts God can give—the ability to influence.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Now here's Amy Pond, standing in the freezing ocean, holding the body of her imaginary friend, and shouting at the sea to make him better.
Yeah. If only my therapists could see me now.”
― James Goss, Doctor Who: Dead of Winter

“The process is important, regardless of the outcome, just ask Schacter.

(...)mental health... is not a destination but a process. It's about how you drive, not where you're going. The therapist is like a driving instuctor, not a chauffeur.”
― Noam Shpancer, The Good Psychologist

“Because the problem of ritual abuse and mind control has not gone away - the survivors are still there - many more therapists have learnt about it. Survivors have spoken out and written their stories, and therapists have learnt a great deal from those brave survivors who have discovered what was done to them. There is a large special interest group on Ritual Abuse and Mind Control within the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. Those therapists who have learnt in isolation or in small private online forums are once again sharing their knowledge widely, and books such as this one are beginning to be published again. The work is still very difficult and challenging, but we now know so much more than we did. We know that there is not one massive Satanic cult, but many different interrelated groups, including religious, military/political, and organized crime, using mind control on children and adult survivors. We know that there are effective treatments. We know that many of the paralyzing beliefs our clients lived by are the results of lies and tricks perpetrated by their abusers. And we know that, as therapists, we can combat this evil with wise and compassionate therapy.”
― Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

“Malevolence takes a bite out off your spirit. Just sitting with it, just talking with people who consciously and deliberately exploit others, feels like being beaten. Over the years, l have seen many therapists burn out and leave the field entirely. [Refers to treating sex offenders, p6]”
― Anna Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders

“I do not mean to mock or ridicule your life's work, for in one way at least it mimics my own: We have dedicated our lives to the pursuit of phantoms. The difference is the nature of those phantoms. Mine exist between other men's ears; yours live solely between your own.”
― Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“A refusal on the part of psychiatrists and therapists to validate the horrors of their patients' tortured past implies a refusal to take seriously the unconscious psychological mechanisms that individuals need to use to protect themselves from the unspeakable. Such a denial is, however, no longer ethical, for it is in the human capacity to dissociate that lies part of the secret of both childhood abuse and the horrors of the Nazi genocide, both forms of human violence so often carried out by 'respectable' men and women.”
― Felicity De Zulueta, From Pain to Violence: The Traumatic Roots of Destructiveness

“Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214).
Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation.
Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offending have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of ‘paedophilia’ or particular psychological categories that have limited utility for the study of the cultures of sexual abuse that emerge in the families or institutions in which organised abuse takes pace. For those clinicians and researchers who take organised abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emergence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi—perpetrator sexual abuse in a range of contexts around the world.”
― Michael Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse

“You cannot do any more for me," I said. "Since I have begun to depend on you I feel weaker than ever before. I have disappointed you by acting neurotically at the very moment when I should have shown the wisdom of your guidance. I don't want to ever come back to you. I feel that I must go and work and live and forget about all this.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932

“Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavour to craft a criminological model of organised abuse based on the testimony of survivors. One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may lie or fantasise in interview, it has been suggested that adults who report severe child sexual abuse are particularly prone to such confabulation. Whilst all forms of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be impacted upon by memory error or false reporting. there is no evidence that qualitative research is particularly vulnerable to this, nor is there any evidence that a fantasy— or lie—prone individual would be particularly likely to volunteer for research into child sexual abuse. Research has consistently found that child abuse histories, including severe and sadistic abuse, are accurate and can be corroborated (Ross 2009, Otnow et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may struggle with amnesia and other forms of memory disturbance but the notion that they are particularly prone to suggestion and confabulation has yet to find a scientific basis. It is interesting to note that questions about the veracity of eyewitness evidence appear to be asked far more frequently in relation to sexual abuse and rape than in relation to other crimes. The research on which this book is based has been conducted with an ethical commitment to taking the lives and voices of survivors of organised abuse seriously.”
― Michael Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse

“Our work calls on us to confront, with our patients and within ourselves, extraordinary human experiences. This confrontation is profoundly humbling in that at all times these experiences challenge the limits of our humanity and our view of the world...”
― John P. Wilson, Countertransference in the Treatment of PTSD

“As therapists our job is to see our clients, even at those times when we would rather look away. It is though our mutual fierce vision that clients discover choice and meaning.”
― Louis Hoffman, Existential Psychology East-west

“Research on organised abuse emphasises the diversity of organised abuse cases, and the ways in which serious forms of child maltreatment cluster in the lives of children subject to organised victimisation (eg Bibby 1996b, Itziti 1997, Kelly and Regan 2000). Most attempts to examine organised abuse have been undertaken by therapists and social workers who have focused primarily on the role of psychological processes in the organised victimisation of children and adults. Dissociation, amnesia and attachment, in particular, have been identified as important factors that compel victims to obey their abusers whilst inhibiting them from disclosing their abuse or seeking help (see Epstein et al. 2011, Sachs and Galton 2008). Therapists and social workers have surmised that these psychological effects are purposively induced by perpetrators of organised abuse through the use of sadistic and ritualistic abuse. In this literature, perpetrators are characterised either as dissociated automatons mindlessly perpetuating the abuse that they, too, were subjected to as children, or else as cruel and manipulative criminals with expert foreknowledge of the psychological consequences of their abuses. The therapist is positioned in this discourse at the very heart of the solution to organised abuse, wielding their expertise in a struggle against the coercive strategies of the perpetrators.
Whilst it cannot be denied that abusive groups undertake calculated strategies designed to terrorise children into silence and obedience, the emphasis of this literature on psychological factors in explaining organised abuse has overlooked the social contexts of such abuse and the significance of abuse and violence as social practices.”
― Michael Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse

“I think more people would stay active in church, if they didn't get so offended by the actions of members. Sometimes, you have to view places of worship as free mental health clinics, in order to deal with the piety or hypocrisy. Parishioners are a wounded souls in various stages of healing, who are being treated by angels, with credentials from the University of Hard Knocks. Some take their therapy seriously and try to practice what they learned. Yet, others down the sacrament like a healing dose of Prozac, with no other effort required. When you keep this in mind, you won't feel so annoyed by the personalities you encounter.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“In her book claiming that allegations of ritualistic abuse are mostly confabulations, La Fontaine’s (1998) comparison of social workers to ‘nazis’ shows the depth of feeling evident amongst many sceptics. However, this raises an important question: Why did academics and journalists feel so strongly about allegations of ritualistic abuse, to the point of pervasively misrepresenting the available evidence and treating women disclosing ritualistic abuse, and those workers who support them, with barely concealed contempt? It is of course true that there are fringe practitioners in the field of organised abuse, just as there are fringe practitioners in many other health-related fields. However, the contrast between the measured tone of the majority of therapists and social workers writing on ritualistic abuse, and the over-blown sensationalism of their critics, could not be starker. Indeed, Scott (2001) notes with irony that the writings of those who claimed that ‘satanic ritual abuse’ is a ‘moral panic’ had many of the features of a moral panic: scapegoating therapists, social workers and sexual abuse victims whilst warning of an impending social catastrophe brought on by an epidemic of false allegations of sexual abuse. It is perhaps unsurprising that social movements for people accused of sexual abuse would engage in such hyperbole, but why did this rhetoric find so many champions in academia and the media?”
― Michael Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse

“Bowlby's conviction that attachment needs continue throughout life and are not outgrown has important implications for psychotherapy. It means that the therapist inevitably becomes an important attachment figure for the patient, and that this is not necessarily best seen as a 'regression' to infantile dependence (the developmental 'train' going into reverse), but rather the activation of attachment needs that have been previously suppressed. Heinz Kohut (1977) has based his 'self psychology' on a similar perspective. He describes 'selfobject needs' that continue from infancy throughout life and comprise an individual's need for empathic responsiveness from parents, friends, lovers, spouses (and therapists). This responsiveness brings a sense of aliveness and meaning, security and self-esteem to a person's existence. Its lack leads to narcissistic disturbances of personality characterised by the desperate search for selfobjects - for example, idealisation of the therapist or the development of an erotic transference. When, as they inevitably will, these prove inadequate (as did the original environment), the person responds with 'narcissistic rage' and disappointment, which, in the absence of an adequate 'selfobject' cannot be dealt with in a productive way.”
― Jeremy Holmes, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory

“Basic misunderstandings about DID encountered in the therapeuric community include the following;

• The expectation that all clients with DID will present in a Sybil-like manner, with obvious switching and extreme changes in personality.

• That therapists create DID in their clients.

• That DID clients have very little control over their internal systems and can be expected to stay in the mental health systein indefinitely.

• That alter personalities, especially child alters, are simply regressive states associated with anxiety or that switching represents a psychotic episode.”
― Deborah Bray Haddock

“In a flash, I remember why I don't care for therapists and why I didn't want to do this in the first place. They judge. Even if they don't mean to, they do. They think they know best and, sorse yet, they can convince you it's true.”
― Kara Lee Corthron, The Truth of Right Now

“He was not her therapist now but her lover, and if you couldn't make your lover angry, then what kind of lover was he? She saw the awful bind that one was put in when one's lover was also one's therapist-- how their objective eye and soothing voice could become the distancing device of a professional manner. A man doing his job--it was intolerable to be judged by such an eye, as if he were somehow above it all, and did not have any problems himself, any emotions that he could not control.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“People speak of therapy as if it is some failsafe ordeal with a 100% success rate when it clearly isn't.

Its a really strange, childish and reductive way to see the world”
― stained hanes, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“Women who see a therapist who is also a woman is destined to be unhappy and will have endless jargon that can easily be warped and restructured to keep them walking circles in the desert thinking they've crossed the horizon every session.”
― stained hanes, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“If you feel comfortable enough to spill your guts to a stranger you pay per hour to do that with, then you'll be receptive to the idea of taking pharmaceutical dry ice with side effects that range from egregious to deadly.”
― stained hanes, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“Therapists have an interesting job. We’re taught that the most crucial component of the therapeutic process is the relationship. The relationship is professional; there are boundaries to maintain, and yet, we’re not machines; we are all human, and we come to truly care about our clients.”
― Brittany Nelson

“Jesus commanded, 'Take up your cross and follow me.' That doesn't accord well with an evening spent on the therapist's couch.
Americans do not ask for help--physically or psychologically--because the more we suffer, the more we are convinced we're doing the right thing. When our words and actions are hated, we think we must be speaking the truth. 'For thus they persecuted the prophets.”
― Israel Morrow, Gods of the Flesh: A Skeptic's Journey Through Sex, Politics and Religion

“She did not want to be one of those people who went to therapy for the rest of their lives, blathering on about what "my therapist said" or "what we uncovered in therapy." It struck Marjorie that those people never got any better; they just used longer and more complicated phrases to say things.”
― Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Heads of the Colored People

“Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in 'changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them'; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“I personally think the world's greatest hack is hacking the people not the system.”
― De philosopher DJ Kyos

“I regard couples therapists as incompetents!”
― Steven Magee

“I know people often think that psychoanalysts are analysing them in social situations but that is not the case. Psychoanalytic understanding comes from the special conditions of the consulting room and the analytic relationship. That is when it is at its strongest and most convincing.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies