Influence and Wisdom
Many of my clients have asked about the influences that shape my worldview and, consequently, my work. Whilst far from exhaustive, my work is aligned to the thinking which is found below.
“Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.” Sigmund Freud
“Not the world, not what’s outside of us, but what we hold inside traps us. We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.” Gabor Mate
“We think sometimes we're only drawn to the good, but we're actually drawn to the authentic. We like people who are real more than those who hide their true selves under layers of artificial niceties”
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
“Each of us harbors in our inner universe unconscious parts of ourselves that play out in our thinking and behavior. We are relatively unacquainted with these hidden players and their roles, many of whose scripts and solutions are written in the past, and are naive to our current situation. Until we become aware of this, whether we will it or not, many of our decisions and actions are driven by the unconscious.” Joyce McDougall
“Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one's being, but by the integration of the contraries.” Carl Jung
“Our painful experiences are not a liability; They are a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.” Edith Eiger
"True belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are. It requires us to be who we are" Brené Brown
“The more we can connect with our true self, the more we can find peace, joy, and fulfillment in life.” Richard Schwartz
"Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways." Sigmund Freud
"Courage is not an absence of fear, it is fear walking" Susan David
"The past influences everything and dictates nothing" Adam Phillips
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Viktor Frankl
"Letting there be room for not knowing is very important.
When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure.
Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know." Pema Chödrön
“Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.” Abraham Maslow
“Fire can warm or consume, water can quench or drown, wind can caress or cut. And so it is with human relationships: we can both create and destroy, nurture and terrorize, traumatize and heal each other.” Bessel van der Kolk
“Healing involves discomfort but so does refusing to heal. Over time, refusing to heal is always more painful.” Resmaa Menakem
“It is always easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.” Alfred Adler
“An intellectual understanding by itself is rarely enough for a lasting shift to occur. Intellectual awareness needs to be accompanied by a deeply felt visceral experience” Mark Wolynn
“The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.” Marcus Aurelius