"Betty, what's the danger in letting me matter to you? I am not sure. It feels scary, like I'll need you too much. I'm not sure you'll be there for me. I'm going to have to leave California in a year, remember?" A year's a long time. So you avoid me now because you won't always have me? I know it doe"
"I DO NOT LIKE to work with patients who are in love. Perhaps it is because of envy——I, too, crave enchantment. Perhaps it is because love and psychotherapy are fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumb"
"My primary clinical assumption- an assumption on which I based my technique- is that basic anxiety emerges from a person's endeavors, conscious and unconscious, to cope with the harsh facts of life, the "givens" of existence. I have found that four givens are particularly relevant to psychtherapy: t"
"Two beliefs/delusions can afford a sense of safety: the belief in personal specialness; the other, the belief in an ultimate rescuer. The human being either asserts autonomy by heroic self-assertionor seeks safety through fusing with a superior force: that is, one either emerges or merges, separates"
"in bonded to anxiety, it means that one is responsible for one's own choices, actions, one's own life situation. The crucial first step in therapy is the patient's assumption of responsibility for his or her life predicament."
"Dave could resist assuming responsibility for his marital problems, he could not resist the immediate data he himself was generating in group therapy."
"Freedom not only requires us to bear responsibility for our life choices but also posits that change requires an act of will. It is through willing, the mainspring of action, that our freedom is enacted. I see willing as having two stages: a person initiates through wishing and then enacts through d"
"it refers to the unbridgeable gap between self and others—— note: both interpersonal and intrapersonal. There's no solution to exitential isolation, many friendship or marriage has failed because, instead of relating to, and caring for, one another, one person uses other as a shield against isolatio"