Sep 022012
 

I will be forever grateful that Professor Michael Hakeem helped me to see the scientific limitations and the social and political dangers of practicing psychology in the way I had been trained: with a pathology-based understanding of human beings.  Seeing the limitations of this model stimulated me to search for ways of practicing a different psychology, one based on a growing clarity about how we human beings were meant to live.

– Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, page xvii

(So, ain’t no good guy, ain’t no bad guy, there’s only you and me, and we just disagree – Dave Mason??), http://youtu.be/HeiVBA1hCkM

Sep 012012
 

All psychiatric diagnoses occur within a cultural context. We know there is a whole community of people out there who are not seeking medical attention and live between the two binary categories (of male and female.) We wanted to send the message that the therapist’s job isn’t to pathologize.

– New York psychiatrist Jack Drescher, as quoted by Lisa Leff of the Associated Press in her article Transgender advocates seek new diagnostic terms July 21, 2012

Aug 302012
 

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Just as the stone of the fruit must break, so that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And if you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy. If you accept the seasons of your heart, as you have always accepted the four seasons, you would watch with serenity the winters of your grief. Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility. For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen.

– Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
http://www.rozanehmagazine.com/allarticles/HomaLyaghat.htm

Aug 292012
 

Once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

– Haruki Murakami from Kafka on the Shore
http://littleaugury.blogspot.com/2011/03/tsunami.html