#presence

Should you operate upon your clients as objects, you risk reducing them to less than human. Following the culture of appropriation and mastery your clients become a kind of extension of yourself, of your ego. In the appropriation and objectification mode, your clients’ well-being and success in treatment reflect well upon you. You “did” something to them, you made them well. You acted upon them and can take the credit for successful therapy or treatment. Conversely, if your clients flounder or regress, that reflects poorly on you. On this side of things the culture of appropriation and mastery says that you are not doing enough. You are not exerting enough influence, technique or therapeutic force. What anxiety this can breed for some clinicians! DBT offers a framework and tools for a treatment that allows clients to retain their full humanity. Through the practice of mindfulness, you can learn to cultivate a fuller presence to the moments of your life, and even with your clients and your work with them. This presence potentiates an encounter between two irreducible human beings, meeting professionally, of course, and meeting humanly. The dialectical framework, which embraces contradictions and gives you a way of seeing that life is pregnant with creative tensions, allows for your discovery of your limits and possibilities, gives you a way of seeing the dynamic nature of reality that is anything but sitting still; shows you that your identity grows from relationship with others, including those you help, that you are an irreducible human being encountering other irreducible human beings who exert influence upon you, even as you exert your own upon them. Even without clinical contrivance. ↗

— Scott E. Spradlin

#being #counseling #dbt #humanity #kindness

Pagan paths, of which there are many, more often than not, are based upon an acknowledgement of a Divine presence within nature, as acknowledged by the pre-Christian peoples of these Islands and Northern Europe more than 1500 years ago. ↗

— Carole Carlton

#carole-carlton #divine-presence #imbolc #irish-celts #lughnasadh

To feel the presence of the Lord is an amazing thing. ↗

— Lisa Leslie

#amazing thing #feel #lord #presence #thing

The most superficial student of Roman history must be struck by the extraordinary degree in which the fortunes of the republic were affected by the presence of foreigners, under different names, on her soil. ↗

— Henry James Sumner Maine

#degree #different #different names #extraordinary #foreigners

Television, they say, will permit a person to be entertained at home, without the effort of going to a picture house, without the trouble of booking seats, without the presence of other people. ↗

— Ivor Novello

#effort #entertained #going #home #house

The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can't do, shouldn't do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known. ↗

— P. J. O'Rourke

#body #forever #get #had #known

The government would have preferred not to take a stand, but the constant presence of the Israeli-Arab conflict on our television screens made it an issue that could no longer be avoided. ↗

— Jean-Marie Le Pen

#conflict #constant #could #government #issue

You've got to work hard for your success and you've got to have a steady presence. That's the secret. ↗

— Kid Rock

#hard #presence #secret #steady #success

Impeachment is not a remedy for private wrongs; it's a method of removing someone whose continued presence in office would cause grave danger to the nation. ↗

— Charles Ruff

#continued #danger #grave #grave danger #impeachment

Artists have really never had any representation on Capitol Hill, because it's not the nature of the artist to join together and make a unified presence. Those days kind of died in the '60s. ↗

— Sheryl Crow

#artist #artists #because #capitol #capitol hill