1,781 Quotes About Mental-health

Part of the shelter for these wounded ones involves the emergence of what we are calling protectors, aspects of ourselves that actively engage an inner and outer worlds to keep more hurt coming to those already injured. They also support the seawall that keeps the pain, fear, rage, sorrow and other inner experiences from continually welling up to threaten daily functioning.

In various paradigms of practice, we have called these protectors "defenses" or "resistances", as though they were objects that needed to be moved out of the way. This is understandable, because we see that these parts of ourselves sometimes cause injury if we view them only from the outer perspective, without opening to the ways they are sheltering our inner world.

Only if we are able to widen the lens to take in the bigger picture that includes both the outer challenges and the inner distress do we begin to sense that the protectors are in proportion to what is in need of shelter. It is our system's sense that moving the safeguard aside and allowing the implicit to emerge would be more harmful than whatever the protector is doing in this moment.

the implicit is awakening in search of healing rather than trying to harm us

The Nashes pushed Johnny as hard socially as they did academically. At first, it was Boy Scout camp and Sunday Bible classes; later on, lessons at the Floyd Ward dancing school and membership in the John Aldens Society, a youth organization devoted to improving the manners of its members.

Beauty or meaning is not intrinsic too suffering. But if you can take the suffering and find the parts that are funny or profound, you can curate your world into something that might be entertaining for someone for a while. Eventually, maybe, that time will have been useful. More useful than, like, working in a bank.

I didn't want to be in a relationship that required me to erase parts of who I was

But the question always snuck up on her whenever it could, between comfortable, drawn-out moments of silence, through the breaking of dawn when they were gallantly trying to stay up to catch a glimpse of the sunrise, or through their watered down smiles and hands clutching wine glasses, yearning desperately for a quick abandonment of their too-sharp, too-stark minds.

True emotional healing doesn't happen without feeling. The only way out is through.