Many people avoid trying for what they really want in life because it’s more painful to get close to the goal but not achieve it than not to have taken the chance in the first place.

"Almost" Is Always The Hardest

To people, going into the depths of their thoughts and feelings it’s like going into a dark alley and they don’t want to go there alone.People come to therapy to have someone to go there with.

A Metaphor For Therapy

"Avoidance is a simple way of coping by not having to cope."

Numbness is in the absence of feelings.It’s a response to being overwhelmed with too many feelings.

Numbness

"The inability to say no is largely about approval-seeking. The inability to say yes is more about lack of trust in oneself."

"Follow your envy - it shows you what you want."

<ul><li>Counseling is getting advice. </li><li>Therapy is acquiring more self-understanding.</li></ul>

Counseling Vs Therapy

"The nature of life is change. The nature of people is to resist change."

"The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at."

This is the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.

Ultracrepidarianism

It refers to the part of the mind that holds ancestral memory, or experience that is common to all humankind.

Collective Unconscious 

"The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, but vitality."

"But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life."

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

"Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them."

There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked because pain isn’t a contest.You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it, you get through it by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it.You can’t change what you’re denying or diminishing.

On Pain

Privacy is good, but secrets are toxic.

Privacy Vs Secrecy

<ul><li>A therapeutic alliance is a trust that is needed before work can be done. Patients need to feel heard and understood. </li><li>But therapy work is an intricate dance between support and confrontation.</li><li>Therapists help patients see themselves better and ask the right questions until something happens internally or externally.</li></ul>

On Therapy

“We tend to think that the future happens later, but we're creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists. But if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place, in perpetual regret."

Freedom involves responsibility.And there’s a part in most of us that finds responsibility frightening.

You Are Your Own Jailer 

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! Now being developed as a television series with Eva Longoria and ABC! "Rarely have I read a book that challenged me to see myself in an entirely new light, and was at the same time laugh-out-loud funny and utterly absorbing."--Katie Couric "This is a daring, delightful, and transformative book."--Arianna Huffington, Founder, Huffington Post and Founder & CEO, Thrive Global "Wise, warm, smart, and funny. You must read this book."--Susan Cain, New York Times best-selling author of Quiet From a New York Times best-selling author, psychotherapist, and national advice columnist, a hilarious, thought-provoking, and surprising new book that takes us behind the scenes of a therapist's world--where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she). One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose of-fice she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but. As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives -- a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can't stop hooking up with the wrong guys -- she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell. With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is rev-olutionary in its candor, offering a deeply per-sonal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly reveal-ing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Similar ideas

Different frames

Feelings of worthlessness

Instilling kindness