Irvin Yalom Therapy Quotes

#1. [T]he act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.

Irvin D. Yalom

#2. If you make a mistake, admit it. Any attempt at cover-up will ultimately backfire. At some level the patient will sense you are acting in bad faith, and therapy will suffer. Furthermore, an open admission of error is good model-setting for patients and another sign that they matter to you.

Irvin D. Yalom

#3. Three hours ago I was in bed, I thought miserably. I should have stayed there.

Diana Rowland

#4. The ultimate goal of therapy ... it's too hard a question. The words come to me like tranquility, like fulfillment, like realizing your potential.

Irvin D. Yalom

#5. Four givens are particularly relevant for psycho-therapy: the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and, finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life.

Irvin D. Yalom

#6. I don't do meetings.

Karl Lagerfeld

#7. One doesn't do existential therapy as a freestanding separate theory; rather it informs your approach to such issues as death, which many therapists tend to shy away from.

Irvin D. Yalom

#8. If one of the people who'd gone Cold drank human blood, the infection mutated. It killed the host and then raised them back up again, Colder than before. Cold through and through, forever and ever.

Holly Black

#9. I think everybody I've seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably, it's very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They're not really interested in the person; he doesn't relate to the person.

Irvin D. Yalom

#10. If all you can do is judge a person by their appearance, because you don't have the spirit to judge someone from within, you're in trouble.

Dick Gregory

#11. I believe that a different therapy must be constructed for each patient because each has a unique story.

Irvin D. Yalom

#12. The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to produce masterpieces. There is no special trick about writing, or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.

Sherwood Anderson

#13. Keep in mind that therapy is a deep and comprehensive exploration into the course and meaning of one's life; given the centrality of death in our existence, given that life and death are interdependent, how can we possibly ignore it?

Irvin D. Yalom

#14. Perhaps the real therapy occurred at the deathbed scene, when they moved into honesty with the revelation that they were fellow travelers, both simply human, all too human.

Irvin D. Yalom

#15. Therapy uncovered deep roots of these everyday problems - roots stretching down to the bedrock of existence. I

Irvin D. Yalom

#16. Everything related to 'SNL,' that was very sudden - from the time I found out I was joining the cast to the time I could read on a blog that someone watching the show thinks I'm fat, that was about 30 days. That blog part, that could've moved a little more slowly. But hey - it's all material, right?

Casey Wilson

#17. All I can do in one session is to be real, to leap into the patient's life, to offer observations in the hope that he'll be able to open doors and explore some new parts of himself in his ongoing therapy.

Irvin D. Yalom

#18. Therapists need to have a long experience in personal therapy to see what it's like to be on the other side of the couch and see what they find helpful or not helpful.

Irvin D. Yalom

#19. Someone's got to do some more research, but I would really like to know: when a CBT therapist really gets distressed, who does he go see?

Irvin D. Yalom

#20. I've always regarded therapy more as a calling than a profession, a way of life for people who care about others.

Irvin D. Yalom

#21. I'm addicted to women. Believe me, as Shaggy, after every concert, there's drawers that are dropping.

Shaggy

#22. It's not ideas, nor vision, nor tools that truly matter in therapy. If you debrief patients at the end of therapy about the process, what do they remember? Never the ideas - it's always the relationship.

Irvin D. Yalom

#23. And in this community, as in all others, the Golden Rule still applies - we must be act toward other nations as we would have them act towards America.

Adam Schiff

#24. I remain convinced that a therapist's judicious self-disclosure facilitates the course of therapy. Love's

Irvin D. Yalom

#25. I explain to my patients that abused children often find it hard to disentangle themselves from their dysfunctional families, whereas children grow away from good, loving parents with far less conflict. After all, isn't that the task of a good parent, to enable the child to leave home?

Irvin D. Yalom