Fully Human Fully Alive Quotes

“Emotions are only indicators. Habitual patterns of negative emotions are always a signal of some underlying misconception.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“Wherever you are in your development, whatever you are doing, with a strong affirmation of all your goodness and good deeds, with a gentle understanding of your weakness, God is forever loving you. You do not have to change, grow, or be good in order to be loved. Rather you are loved so that you can change, grow, and be good.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“True health resides principally in one's vision, in one's deepest attitudes; it is not merely the absence of symptoms. Likewise, true freedom has its roots in one's basic vision of reality; it is not merely the absence of coercion from external forces.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“If you were to take the sum total of all the authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified of psychologists and psychiatrists on the subject of mental hygiene--if you were to combine them and refine them and cleave out the excess verbiage--if you were to...have these unadulterated bits of pure scientific knowledge concisely expressed by the most capable of living poets, you would have an awkward and incomplete summation of the Sermon on the Mount."

- Psychiatrist James T. Fisher”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“I must act against my phobias. Only in doing it will I learn that I CAN do it and thereby dispatch another delusion. Every day we should all do something that will extend us; we should win little victories over our fears that will widen the world and our lives.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“Having a friend who provides the needed atmosphere for free emotional communication is an invaluable help to vision therapy and personal growth.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“In every change there is a death and a rebirth. Dying to the old and being born into the new is a frightening prospect. And there is always that terrible moment between death and rebirth when I will have nothing.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“The God I know would say to the person striving to earn or be worthy of his love: "You have it backwards. You are trying to change so that you can win my love. It just doesn't and cannot work that way. I have given you my love so that you can change.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“What we have to do is work with our vision. We must become more and more aware of its contents, discover its distortions, and replace faulty perceptions with those which are true. The truth alone can make us free.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“All change in the quality of a person's life must grow out of a change in his vision of reality.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“All negative emotions, but especially anxiety and hostility, are signals of a malignant misconception somwhere in our total vision.

All negative feelings, from the mildest discomfort to the deepest depression, will lead us to a moment of insight if only we will follow.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“Every activating event has to flow through the filter system of your own uniquely rational/irrational belief system. The consequent emotions are not determined by the activating event but by the belief system.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“Albert Ellis system of Rational Emotive Therapy ... the ABC system.

In every human reaction there is an Activating event, a Belief system through which the event is interpreted and evaluated, and a Consequent set of emotional reactions.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“Success at therapy can be measured by growth in positive, life-giving attitudes towards self, others, life, the world, and God. The composite of all these attitudes is a person's vision, the way he or she sees reality. It is this vision that determines the emotional patterns of one's life. Only if this vision is sound and healthy can a person enjoy a truly happy and a fully human life.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“The rational person knows that happiness is not determined by outside forces and events. It is rather a matter of attitudes, and these cannot be coerced by outside forces, which at most can be physically afflicting. Happiness or unhappiness is ultimately derived from the way events are perceived, eveluated, and internally verbalized.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“Jackson-Salisbury Diagram for Maladjusted and Unhappy Living

Lack of adaptation to social environment
caused by
Lack of harmony within the personality
caused by
Inappropriate emotions
caused by
Wrong ideas or ignorance

Working backward, the cure naturally would be:

Right ideas
resulting in
Appropriate emotions
resulting in
Harmony within the personality
resulting in
Readjustment to the social environment

Health and wholeness begin in the head, with healthy ideas, energizing attitudes, a vision of vitality. When perceptions get twisted, one's emotional life also gets twisted, and these discordant emotions cause disharmony in the total personality.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“After discharging painful emotions, verbally or nonverbally, we can usually think more clearly. Heavy emotions tend to bend the mind out of shape. This emotional clearance is like clearing the air or silencing a deafening noise. An overload of emotions almost always obscures one's vision beyond recognition.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision

“It now seems obvious to me that our emotional reactions ... grow out of the way we see ourselves, other people, life, the world, and God.

Our ideas and attitudes generate our emotional responses. Persistently negative emotions are an indication that there is a distortion or delusion in our thinking, an astigmatism in our vision.”
― John Joseph Powell, Fully Human Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision