#psych

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

#psychology #change

Psychology has a long past, but only a short history ↗

— Herman Ebbinghaus

#psychology #inspirational

As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#religion

A therapist who rushes to help forgets to listen. ↗

— Noam Shpancer

#psychology #inspirational

The choice in this life is not between easy and hard, but between kinds of hardship, between a hardship that gives birth to wisdom, compassion and mercy, and the hardship that keeps on replicating itself to no end. ↗

— Noam Shpancer

#life #psychology #inspirational

Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#change

The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly. ↗

— Sebastian Junger

#combat #psychology #change

The seals stupidly dive off rocks into swirling black water, barking mindlessly. The zookeepers feed them dead fish. A crowd gathers around the tank, mostly adults, a few accompanied by children. On the seals' tank a plaque warns: COINS CAN KILL——IF SWALLOWED, COINS CAN LODGE IN AN ANIMAL'S STOMACH AND CAUSE ULCERS, INFECTIONS AND DEATH. DO NOT THROW COINS IN THE POOL. So what do I do? Toss a handful of change into the tank when none of the zookeepers are watching. It's not the seals I hate——it's the audience's enjoyment of them that bothers me. ↗

— Bret Easton Ellis

#bateman #patrick #psycho #seals #zoo

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243) ↗

— Norman Doidge

#death #ghosts #grief #healing-the-past #loss

Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#dictatorship #kim-il-sung #north-korea #psychology #subordination