Here are words for thought and perhaps inspiration. If any are familiar, I suspect that, like me, you do not tire of them…
“Getting discouraged is a total waste of your time.” John Cleese
“Adopt the pace of Nature. Her secret is patience.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Experience is the teacher of all things.” Julius Caesar
“Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.” D. Elton Trueblood
“Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.” Nikos Kazantzakis
“You are never too old to set another goal or dream a new dream.” Les Brown
“Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the solution.” Gloria Steinem
“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” Vincent Van Gogh
“Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength, move on.” Henry Rollins
“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” Napoleon Hill
“We don’t see things as we they are, we see them as we are.” Anais Nin
“Patience is the companion of wisdom.” Saint Augustine
“Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.” Madeleine L’Engle
“The beauty in life is to fight in a difficult situation.” Shirin Ebadi
“Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.”
~ John McCain, US Senator
“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”
~ Buddha
“Every flood will have an ebb.”
~Scottish proverb
“Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle.”
~Paulo Freire
“The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.”
~Gloria Steinem
“What you get by achieving your goals is not a important as what you become by achieving your goals.”
~Henry David Thoreau
“One isn’t born courageous, one becomes it. ~Marjane Satrapi
“Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.”
“When our families thrive, our community thrives.”
“…the key to healing…understanding how the human organism works.”
“We are more alike than we are unalike.”
Letter to My Daughter
“If nobody can learn from the past,
then there’s no point in raking it up.”
from her autobiography
Lady Sings the Blues
“There are no guarantees in the risky business of loving others, but it is never wasted.”
Letting God
“Preconceived ideas are like searchlights which illumine the path of the experimenter and serve him as a guide to interrogate nature. They become a danger only if he transforms them into fixed ideas—this is why I should like to see these profound words inscribed on the threshold of all the temples of science: ‘The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.’ ”
July 18, 1876 (translation by Rene J. Dubos)
“The impact of our communication on another person depends not so much on what we say as how we say it. And not so much on how we say it as who we are at that moment.”
“When we humans speak, we are not merely communicating information but attempting to make an impression and achieve a goal.”
“…we cannot save our face and our ass at the same time.”
“The first goal is for the clinician to find the patient, and the patient to find the clinician, as both are required for a real alliance.”
“Suffering brings the patient to us…the patient needs to feel heard and seen—that is, met, by another person….”
“We have to have the courage to tell the truth…and the courage to sit with the patient’s truth.”
“Many patients cannot hear until they feel heard.”
“Above all, the clinician must not shake what little faith the patient has in himself.”
“An argument can be made that relationship building is the treatment.”
“Today many medications act across diagnostic groups. Alliance effects also transcend specific psychotherapy methods. Both may be affecting profound psychopathological processes.”
“…the eternal ambiguity of human motives and memory.”
“May your inherent knowing guide you.”
“…the sound of story is the dominant sound in our lives…”
“Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.”
“Stories are people, place, …and trouble.”
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
“Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story.”
“No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.”
“And it helps to also be thoroughly sincere in dealing with others.”
“…openness is the first step toward recovery… addiction remains a secret because of the overwhelming shame associated with it.”
“There is more to who we are and more to why we do the things we do than what meets our own minds… Lower centers of the Central Nervous System can, and routinely do, act independently of higher centers.”
“We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell.”
“God made man because he loves stories.”
“ …the amygdala, along with related areas…, plays a crucial role in coordinating perceptions with memory and behavior. These regions are especially sensitive to social interactions.”
“A feeling of self-respect flows into us when we stand up and say ‘I did something wrong.’ This statement also says, ‘I have the strength to face my responsibilities and repair my mistakes.’ It is surprisingly helpful to our self-esteem, and it improves our relationships.”
Touchstones
“I have to learn to tell on my disease.”
“Honesty is more important than image…as long as you are still alive, talking about your substance use is more important than the fact that you used.”
“May our tears be turned into dancing!”
City of God (hymn)
“Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
“Just be damn careful where you show up.”
“For every human problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
“Happiness cannot be sought directly; it is a by-product of love and service.”
“I get so caught up in the whirl and swirl of tomorrow that I forget to fully enjoy today.”
“My drug of choice is pharmaceutical heroin.”
Washington County, Maine
“I have a passion for alcohol.”
“Any addict knows, you’ll do anything to get it.”
“Our limbic system sets the mind’s emotional tone and stores our highly charged emotional memories.”
“New research shows that emotions have a separate system of nerve pathways, through the limbic system to the cortex, allowing emotional signals to avoid conscious control.”
“…unconscious decisions for action go on constantly inside the head.”
“We’re worse off than Freud thought, because many actions proceed without our knowing anything about them.”
“Addiction is like gravity— governed by laws of nature that never take time off.”
“Neural repatterning comes as we enter into and sustain new types of relationships that allow us to reregulate our sense impressions slowly and over time.”
“Interpersonal experience shapes the mind as it continues to develop throughout the lifespan… Interactions with the environment, especially relationships with other people, directly shape the development of the brain’s structure and function.”
Client: “What can I do when I can’t bear to face the music I’ve created?”
Clinician: “Dance!”
“…what is needed isn’t merely tolerance but acceptance, wholehearted and unconditional.”