Life is a purposeful action.

There is no greater grief, than when a parent losses a child.

Dr. Asa Don Brown has successfully managed to amalgamate his own profound insights with centuries old wisdom and contemporary psychology to produce an unique, lucid and pragmatic work. His book will undoubtedly inspire those seeking...

In simple, the past is a time gone by and no longer exists in the present moment, but we choose to allow this past to occupy our minds, our bodies and our very existence.

Allow yourself to be an anchor and anchored by others.

The loss of my child broke my spirit.

Perfectionism is adaptive if you are mindful of your humanhood.

Perfectionists are not all negative, miserable, unhappy and over controlling individuals

Secondary structural dissociation involves one ANP and more than one EP. Examples of secondary structural dissociation are complex PTSD, complex forms of acute stress disorder, complex dissociative amnesia, complex somatoform disorders, some forms of trauma-relayed...

Howard: Sometimes a betrayal can be so subtle that it clouds the whole thing.Nita: It would have to be a real betrayal. Not like canceling an appointment. It would be like you’d end the relationship...

I recently consulted to a therapist who felt he had accomplished something by getting his dissociative client to remain in her ANP throughout her sessions with him. His view reflects the fundamental mistake that untrained...

A man shrinks or expands into the degree and nature of his ambition. Ambition needs to be cultivated and refined, and yet has no teachers.

It wasn’t a sign of weakness to tell what happened to me. I feel guilt no longer, only regret. The other emotions are coming around too. How much further do I need to go? I’m...

Human emotions have deep evolutionary roots, a fact that may explain their complexity and provide tools for clinical practice.The Nature of Emotions (2001)

First, psychotherapy is an art. It is not a science (the human-beings-are-laboratory-rats mentality of the behaviorist notwithstanding). A friend of mine, a philosopher of esthetics, defines art as: anything that people treat as art. So...

Dissociation is the ultimate form of human response to chronic developmental stress, because patients with dissociative disorders report the highest frequency of childhood abuse and/or neglect among all psychiatric disorders. The cardinal feature of dissociation...

Maybe I made it up.”p55

It is better for us to see the destination we wish to reach, than the point of departure

As I let it out, layer by layer, Dr. Driscoll helped with the bumps and valleys. He knew just how much to draw out of me and how much I could handle. He is such...

What people don’t understand about depression is how much it hurts. It’s like your brain is convinced that it’s dying and produces an acid that eats away at you from the inside, until all that’s...

Respect your needs and limitations as you work through your grief and begin to heal

The freedom of an unscheduled afternoon brought confusion rather than joy. Julius had always been focused. When he was not seeing patients, other important projects and activities-writing, teaching, tennis, research-clamored for his attention. But today...

The United States alone sports an inventive spectrum of psychotherapeutic sects and schools: Freudians, Jungians, Kleinians; narrative, interpersonal, transpersonal therapists; cognitive, behavioral, cognitive-behavioral practitioners; Kohutians Rogerians, Kernbergians; aficionados of control mastery, hypnotherapy, neurolingustic programming, eye...

Punishment symptoms Many of the other types of programming produce psychiatric symptoms, usually administered as punishments by insiders who are trained to administer them, if the survivor has breached security or disobeyed the abusers’ instructions...

false memory” implantations.

Someone’s got to do some more research, but I would really like to know: when a CBT therapist really gets distressed, who does he go see?

As Louis Cozolino Ph. D., observes, a consistent theme of adult psychotherapy clients is that they had parents who were not curious about who they were but, instead, told them who they should be. What...

Healing doesn’t mean forgetting or making the memories insignificant. Healing means refocusing

We are all the product of our past and have to live with our memories and personality they cannot be erased.

The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally...

The first thing you need to know if you are a survivor is that parts of you have probably been trained to create a variety of symptoms and behaviours. Abusers actually train child parts to...

All you need is one safe anchor to keep you grounded when the rest of your life spins out of control

Psychotherapy works for the treatment of depression, and the benefits are substantial. In head-to-head comparisons, in which the short-term effects of psychotherapy and antidepressants are pitted against each other, psychotherapy works as well as medication....

Even you, the professional helper, often mistaken for the enlightened Guru or Staretz, can become lost in your thoughts that you must be competent without fault. You may become enthralled with your identity as a...

I say, thirteen is too many dogs for good mental health. Five is pretty much the limit. More than five dogs and you forfeit your right to call yourself entirely sane.Even if the dogs are...

Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.

The “apparently normal personality” – the alter you view as “the client”You should not assume that the adult who function in the world, or who presents to you, week after week, is the “real” person,...

He’s mean and crazy, and he’ll never change. All he wants is to hurt you. Leave him now before he does something even worse.” All of these people are trying to help, and they are...

Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up

When emotions turn and stay sour, when thoughts become cynical and judgmental, good and compassionate treatment is on the line. Helpers who become sour and cynical tend to begrudge their high need clients for their...

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.

bombs” in the stomach, a trick to convince survivors that their abusers monitor them continuously. The presence of an object does not mean it is capable of collecting complex information and sending it back to...

Tempting as it may be to draw one conclusion or another from my story and universalize it to apply to another’s experience, it is not my intention for my book to be seen as some...

For example, in order to identify these schemas or clarify faulty relational expectations, therapists working from an object relations, attachment, or cognitive behavioral framework often ask themselves (and their clients) questions like these: 1. What...

When psychotherapy began, it was about the practitioner listening to a patient and interpreting what the patient said, in order to afford the patient insights about his or her psyche. But now we understand that...

Underlying the attack on psychotherapy, I believe, is a recognition of the potential power of any relationship of witnessing. The consulting room is a privileged space dedicated to memory. Within that space, survivors gain the...

Fui acusado de ser um utópico, de querer eliminar o desprazer do mundo e defender apenas o prazer. Contudo, tenho declarado claramente que a educação tradicional torna as pessoas incapazes para o prazer encouraçando-as contra...

The most effective weapon a parent has to control a child is the withdrawal of love or its threat. A young child between the ages of three and six is too dependent on parental love...

In Hollywood if you don’t have a shrink, people think you’re crazy.