“Talking to a therapist, I thought, was like taking your clothes off and then taking your skin off, and then having the other person say, "Would you mind opening up your rib cage so that we can start?”
― Black Box
― Black Box
“The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse. These people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development; they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. That’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.”
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―
“You survived by seizing every tiny drop of love you could find anywhere, and milking it, relishing it, for all it was worth. And as you grew up, you sought love, anywhere you could find it, whether it was a teacher or a coach or a friend or a friend's parents. You sought those tiny droplets of love, basking in them when you found them. They sustained you. For all these years, you've lived under the illusion that somehow, you made it because you were tough enough to overpower the abuse, the hatred, the hard knocks of life. But really you made it because love is so powerful that tiny little doses of it are enough to overcome the pain of the worst things life can dish out. Toughness was a faulty coping mechanism you devised to get by. But, in reality, it has been your ability to never give up, to keep seeking love, and your resourcefulness to make that love last long enough to sustain you. That is what has gotten you by.”
― Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder
― Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder
“To love means to be actively concerned for the life and the growth of another.”
― Existential Psychotherapy
― Existential Psychotherapy
“Mature love is loving, not being loved.”
― Existential Psychotherapy
― Existential Psychotherapy
Nature Literature
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Whether it be an in-depth look at our natural world through essays written by past and present authors such as H.D. Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Cars ...more
Whether it be an in-depth look at our natural world through essays written by past and present authors such as H.D. Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Cars ...more
Kelly’s 2023 Year in Books
Take a look at Kelly’s Year in Books. The good, the bad, the long, the short—it’s all here.
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