"I've realized therapy is incredibly therapeutic."
— Lisa Schroeder (I Heart You, You Haunt Me)

"[Children] just cannot be sad too long, it is not in them, as children mourn in little bits here and there like patchwork in their lives."
— Nancy E. Turner (These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901 : A Novel)

"Carrie: First they want you to come there two times a week, then three times a week, and eventually you're starting every sentence with 'my therapist says... '

Miranda: My therapist says that's a very common fear. "
— Sex and the City

"No therapy is comfortable, because it involves dealing with pain. But there's one comfortable thought: that two people sharing pain can bear it easier than one. - Elvin Semrad, M.D."
— Erica Kates (On the Couch: Great American Stories About Therapy)

"We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth. "
— Jeffrey Eugenides

"Some seek the comfort of their therapist's office, other head to the corner pub and dive into a pint, but I chose running as my therapy."
— Dean Karnazes (Ultramarathon Man)

"I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about."
— Frederick Buechner (Telling Secrets)

"Marriage is going to be that happy state in which we get all of the nurturance and care and love and empathy and even good advice that we didn't receive from our families."
— Augustus Y. Napier (The Family Crucible)

"Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment."
— James Hillman and Michael Ventura (We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse)

"Art can permeate the very deepest part of us, where no words exist.”"
— Eileen Miller

"Autism: Where the "randomness of life" collides and clashes with an individual"s need for the sameness~ "
— Eileen Miller

"A comedian is simply a different kind of therapist. A comedian is a psychologist and a psychiatrist rolled into one. Except I can't prescribe medicine. (You still need a doctorate, which is bullshit.) Okay, so I'm not like a psychiatrist. Fine. But I'm still like a psychologist (except I can't diagnose or treat mental illness)."
— Eugene Mirman (The Will to Whatevs: A Guide to Modern Life)

"... once you were in, they put a note in your file that said you were in therapy, and all your teachers saw that file. They might as well have tattooed CRAZY on your forehead. The next year every teacher would be watching you for the first weird thing you did—and has there ever been a kid who never does anything an adult considers weird?
"
— John Barnes (Tales of the Madman Underground: An Historical Romance 1973)

"In the 1970's and in early 1980's, a startling discovery was made that almost every problem contains an element of solutions."
— Insoo Kim Berg (Children's Solutions Work)

"He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts"
— Stephen King (It)

"The field of psychotherapy is based on the premise that people can change, yet since the origins of psychology, the prevailing view has been that human beings are predetermined by forces outside of their control."
— Cloe Madanes from The Violence of Men

"By marrying to soon, many individuals sacrifice their chance to struggle through this purgatory of solitude and search toward a greater sense of self-confidence. They glance at the world outside the family and with hardly a second thought grasp anxiously for a partner. In marriage they seek a substitute for the security of the family of origin and an escape from aloneness. What they do not realize is that moving so quickly from one family to another, they make it easy to transfer to the new marriage all their difficult experiences in the family of origin. "
— Augustus Y. Napier (The Family Crucible)

"Debriefing-style counseling after a trauma often aggravates a victim's stress-related symptoms, for example, and 4 in 10 bereaved people do better without grief therapy."
— Winifred Gallagher

"In reference to Einstein's definition of insanity...
"No Mr. Einstein, that is not insanity, that is autism." "
— Eileen Miller

"People who are diagnosed as having "generalized anxiety disorder" are afflicted by three major problems that many of us experience to a lesser extent from time to time. First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural human inclination to focus on threats and bad news is strongly amplified in them, so that even significant positive events get suppressed. An inflexible mentality and tendency toward excessive verbalizing make therapeutic intervention a further challenge."
— Winifred Gallagher (Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life)

"The "stiff, dead, retracted pelvis" is one of man's most frequent vegetative disturbances. It is responsible for lumbago as well as for hemorrhoidal disturbances. Elsewhere, we shall demonstrate an important connection between these disturbances and genital cancer in women, which is so common.
Thus, the "deadning of the pelvis" has the same function as the deadening of the abdomen, i.e., to avoid feelings, particularly those of pleasure and anxiety."
— Wilhelm Reich (The Function of the Orgasm)

"Imbalanced systems,whether internal or external, will tend to polarize."
— Richard C. Schwartz (Internal Family Systems Therapy)

"It's a safe Universe."
— James Nemec (Touch the Ocean: The Power of Our Collective Emotions)

""Happy group therapy sessions are all alike; every unhappy group therapy session is unhappy in its own way.” "
— Sergei Bogdaniev