Top 35 Psychotherapy Quotes

They show that roughly two-thirds of a group of neurotic patients will recover or improve to a marked extent within about two years of the onset of their illness, whether they are treated by means of psychotherapy or not.

‘Psychotherapy’ is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing.

I don’t know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.

I found myself very lost after ‘The Partridge Family,’ and I lost my dad and I lost my manager, and I lived in a bubble, and it took me 15 years to get through that and a lot of psychotherapy, and I’m laughing about it now!

Most psychiatrists assume that mental illnesses such as depression are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, which can be treated by drugs. But most psychotherapy doesn’t address the social causation of mental illness either.

Depression comes back over time in about 90 percent of people on antidepressants. Studies show that relapses are far less common when people are treated with psychotherapy.

Lithium prevents my seductive but disastrous highs, diminishes my depressions, clears out the wool and webbing from my disordered thinking, slows me down, gentles me out, keeps me from ruining my career and relationships, keeps me out of a hospital, alive, and makes psychotherapy possible.

There thus appears to be an inverse correlation between recovery and psychotherapy; the more psychotherapy, the smaller the recovery rate.

I’m not a ‘suffer in silence’ type; I’m a ‘let’s throw money at the problem’ type – I’ve done reflexology, reiki, psychotherapy, counselling. I’ve never actually had analysis, but I’d like to try that sometime.

Lyrically and thematically, the title ‘Doctor Faith’, that song is about therapy, psychotherapy, and that song is about emotions and personal insight. I think all the songs on the record sort of go along with that.

I wrote my first textbook in 1970. It was called ‘The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy,’ and over the years, many students told me that they enjoyed reading it because there were so many stories in there; often just a paragraph or a page of something that happened in a group session.

In my experience, psychotherapy at its best is like dual meditation – it’s like a container in which you can be compassionate and mindful toward yourself.

Everybody wants a robot that will do psychotherapy. But If you don’t have empathy, you don’t have psychotherapy. The robot doesn’t know about life.

In top-down processing, which is normally what we do in psychotherapy, we talk about our problems, our symptoms, or our relationships. And then the therapist often tries to get the client to feel what they’re feeling when they talk about those kinds of things.

Psychotherapy is what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, he searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed – the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds.

There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.

You don’t attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It’s the same thing with psychotherapy.

At their peak, religion and psychotherapy become one.

I hate the analyzing thing. People say, ‘Why do you think your character did that? I don’t know. I’m not an analyst, and they’re not in psychotherapy. Unless it’s a film where they’re in therapy.

I spent a lot of time listening to people. But it’s also true that I liked details and listening to people when I was a bartender and when I was a waitress and probably when I was a babysitter as well. I suspect that’s part of what drew me to psychotherapy rather than the other way around.

No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both.

To someone who is not currently on anti-depressants, I would suggest trying other treatments first – for example, psychotherapy.

I was not treated like a serious young actress, and that was very hard. It sent me into psychotherapy, which is one of the smartest things I ever did. It taught me that I had to find value in myself.

What the Ellison Foundation and I are hoping to encourage is a more holistic approach to psychiatry, in which psychotherapy is put on as rigorous a level as psychopharmacology.

Lithium remains the gold standard, but many drugs now treat bipolar disorder. Medication is critical and should be combined with psychotherapy. Compliance is a major problem. Patients believe that once they’re better, they no longer need the medication. It doesn’t work that way.

I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn’t change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others.

When I first got back from the war, I said, ‘I’m gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.’ So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.

The stereotype of psychotherapy portrayed in popular books and movies is lying on the couch and saying whatever comes into your mind, while a kindly psychoanalyst listens and nods knowingly from time to time. After years and years, something wonderful is supposed to happen.

What took some time for me to figure out was how to have a life outside my career, to find a way to be inclusive rather than exclusive. It came only after years of psychotherapy and deep soul-searching.

My background is in social work and psychotherapy.

It took years of psychotherapy before I even considered dating. I lost weight, replaced my glasses with contact lenses and felt a lot more confident. But I find it really hard to hold down a relationship.

In general, certain conclusions are possible from these data. They fail to prove that psychotherapy, Freudian or otherwise, facilitates the recovery of neurotic patients.

I went into acting as psychotherapy, and it’s still a work in progress.

It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one’s own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy.

I was going to university to study psychology and my big ambition in life was to open treatment rooms for psychotherapy.