David Smail > Quotes

“Suffering is a form of knowledge. It tells us what is wrong with our world.”
― David Smail, Implausible Professions : Arguments for Pluralism and Autonomy in Psychotherapy and Counselling

“The social havoc wreaked by unfettered economic greed comes to be interiorised as the personal weakness and irresponsibility of those principally affected.”
― David Smail, Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress

“Our capacity as human beings for imagination and storytelling makes us exquisitely vulnerable to exploitation by those who understand the properties of ideological power.”
― David Smail, Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress

“Absolutely everybody wants to be liked (law 1).

Everyone feels different inside (less confident, less able, etc.) from how they infer other people to feel (law 2).

Few honest and courageous people who have achieved anything of real value in life do not feel a fraud much of the time (law 3).

Acceptance of these three 'laws' alone would save an awful lot of people an awful lot of grief!”
― David Smail, Power, Responsibility and Freedom

“Just imagine how terrible life would be if we really could be therapeutically engineered into clones of some kind of norm of ‘adjustment’, and how inevitably therapeutic technique would become an instrument of tyrannical repression.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“Much of our waking life is spent in a desperate struggle to persuade others that we are not what we fear ourselves to be, or what they may discover us to be if they see through our pretenses. Most people, most of the time, have a profound and unhappy awareness of the contrast between what they are and what they ought to be.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“Whether or not we are able to realise our desires, put our plans into effect, do what we know to be right, will depend on our access to powers and resources which we need to acquire, or to have acquired, from the world around us.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“Many children, however, are in some or many important respects unable to fulfill the expectations of their parents, and carry round with them, so to speak, raw, painful areas of disconfirmation which leave them exposed to sudden attacks of self-doubt and uncertainty, sudden ebbings of self-confidence which may well be experienced as 'symptoms' of anxiety or depression.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“From the brutal racism of the least privileged, through the proverbial mean resentment of the petit bourgeois to the paranoid secrecy of the very powerful, we are all haunted by the possibility of slipping from our perch.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“The evils of the world hurt us because they impinge upon our embodied existence, and they can be changed only through our embodied intervention in an actual world (not by 'thinking' of them in a different way, or by the 'treatment' of their effects on us through interference either physical or mental-- with the way we perceive them).”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“The notion that we should in all circumstances be able to smile through adversity is one of the mystifications that keep the mental-health industry alive.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“Though the contrast between how we feel inside and how we wish to appear to others is universal and causes most of us many an uneasy moment, the extent to which we suffer in this way depends probably on the degree to which we were allowed as children to develop private lives without the threat of adult censure.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“What caused people distress was not so much their own mistakes, inadequacies and illnesses as the powers and influences that bore down upon them from the world beyond their skin.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“For shy people the Other is everywhere, and it never occurs to them that they could be the Other for others, that anyone could care what they thought about things.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“the hugely unequal distribution of power works against the vast majority of people being able to live a life in which insecurity, anxiety, confusion, ignorance and pain are kept to an unavoidable minimum.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between the way someone experiences their problems and what the causes of those problems are.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“We all of us feel that we have things inside us that would make us unlovable if only people knew.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“People can and often do ignore or deny their common humanity with others, or deny, at least implicitly, that their common humanity commits them to sympathy or compassion for those less advantaged than themselves. Indeed, such an attitude towards one's fellows can be represented as tough, uncompromising, positively heroic: the supermen versus the wimps. But just as this ruthless world may be chosen - as it is chosen by the current rulers of the globalised neo-liberal market - so it may also be rejected.”
― David Smail, Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress

“It is about as sensible to seek the reasons for distress inside the ‘self’ as it would be to see feeling cold as a matter of personal responsibility.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“There can be few people who are not familiar with the state of depression. As with anxiety, it is probably when we can't see the reasons for it that it turns from a painful and unpleasant experience into a malign and threatening form of misery.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“once our privacy has become infected by shame, the powers that be are well on the way to winning.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“To bring about change you need access to power.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“Tinkering, however 'scientifically', with our minds and bodies will never make the world a better place.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“There is, I suggest, a strong positive correlation between a) the height of the rung occupied on the ladder of power, b) the strength of a sense of personal virtue, and c) the firmness of the conviction that those lower down could and certainly should act more responsibly.”
― David Smail, Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress

“The less articulate person may have an awareness that 'something is not quite right', but will not be able to make that awareness concrete without having his or her consciousness 'raised' through the provision of finer and more sensitive (linguistic) concepts. (This is one of the ways in which the more educated exercise dominion over the lesser.)”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“We need to abandon our fixation on the ‘normal’ and consider who we are, and how we came to be so.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“Moral rules, as we have seen, simply do not apply in the realm of feelings, if only because feelings cannot be switched on and off at will.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“We believe what we learn about ourselves, however unjust the lesson.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“A great deal of distress could be avoided, then, if we could learn to withdraw ‘morality’ from the private world of our feelings and to concentrate instead on the rights and wrongs of our conduct.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

“our ideas about ourselves and our satisfaction or otherwise with the way we are will often depend heavily on cultural norms and standards which are far beyond the reach of any individual to change.”
― David Smail, How to Survive Without Psychotherapy