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 want to be on top, you've got to have broad shoulders, because as fast as you get there, the faster they try to knock you down.

Barry Bonds

#3. 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

#4. The United Kingdom and the European Union will remain indispensable partners of the United States even as they begin negotiating their ongoing relationship to ensure continued stability, security and prosperity for Europe, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the world.

Barack Obama

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. The miracles of Christ were studiously performed in the most unostentatious way. He seemed anxious to veil His majesty under the love with which they were wrought.

William Ellery Channing

#8. We do not invest in victims, we invest in survivors.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. The next big thing is the one that makes the last big thing usable.

Blake Ross

#12. Cause I'm Irish, and everyone remembers me.

Niall Horan

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

Irvin D. Yalom

#14. 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

#15. 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

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

Irvin D. Yalom

#17. Not all of us have the control over what we can do. Some struggle with their abilities."
"But you do?"
"I'm just that awesome.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 'Aeric!' Grayson exclaimed, with genuine delight. 'You're not dead yet?'

'Not yet,' Aeric replied, looking pleased with his continued viability. 'But I keep trying. And so do you, I hear!'

L.S. Baird

#23. To be perfectly honest, I was never really aware that I had any special abilities. When you have what you have, you don't really think about what you don't have; you simply work with what you have.

Marc-Andre Hamelin

#24. We are men on a budget. I mean, why go all the way to Amsterdam when you can just go to Harry Hines?

Anthony Langston

#25. 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

#26. For life is a trumpery thing at best, isn't it? A few moments, a few words, between dark and dark. But in true love you keep company with the Gods.

Winston Graham

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

Irvin D. Yalom

#28. 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