"I can't answer you in a nutshell. We wouldn't fit unless we saw the same shrink."

— Brian Spellman 🌸

"The word, 'issues,' is perhaps a misnomer, a gross understatement, or a pale and withered description for very real psychological illnesses and emotional losses. Nevertheless, "post-adoption issues" is a catch-all phrase, and at least it avoid pathologizing adoptees."

— Laura Dennis 🌸

"The mental health system is filled with survivors of prolonged, repeated childhood trauma. This is true even though most people who have been abused in childhood never come to psychiatric attention. To the extent that these people recover, they do so on their own.[21] While only a small minority of survivors, usually those with the most severe abuse histories, eventually become psychiatric patients, many or even most psychiatric patients are survivors of childhood abuse.[22] The data on this point are beyond contention. On careful questioning, 50-60 percent of psychiatric inpatients and 40-60 percent of outpatients report childhood histories of physical or sexual abuse or both.[23] In one study of psychiatric emergency room patients, 70 percent had abuse histories.[24] Thus abuse in childhood appears to be one of the main factors that lead a person to seek psychiatric treatment as an adult.[25]"

— Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror 🌸

"Didnt you find it all rather unsatisfying?Yes, but I couldnt seem to see a way out. It was like being three different people, and they all wanted to go different ways.A slight smile. The result was I went nowhere."

— Pat Barker, Regeneration 🌸

"My own studies on the natural history of DID indicate only 20% of DID patients have an overt DID adaption on a chronic basis, and 14% of them deliberately disguise their manifestations of DID. Only 6% make their DID obvious on an ongoing basis. Eighty percent have windows of diagnosability when stressed or triggered by some significant event, interaction, situation or date. Therefore, 94% of DID patients show only mild or suggestive evidence of their conditions most of the time. Yet DID patients often will acknowledge that their personality systems are actively switching and/or far more active than it would appear on the surface (Loewenstein et al., 1987).R.P. Kluft (2009) A clinician's understanding of dissociation. pp 599-623."

— Paul F. Dell 🌸

"Relaxation and anxiety are incompatible responses that cannot coexist."

— Randy Kamen, Behind the Therapy Door: Simple Strategies to Transform Your Life 🌸

"It is perhaps fortunate that Sylvia was oblivious to the commotion behind the scenes. Apparently, Henry O. Teltscher had written a letter to Betsy Talbot Blackwell, warning her that one of her guest editors was on the brink of a nervous breakdown."

— Elizabeth Winder, Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 🌸

"Here's a thought to help ease the stress: "Good enough is the new perfect."

— Randy Kamen, Behind the Therapy Door: Simple Strategies to Transform Your Life 🌸