Matthew McKay > Quotes

“When a person is in emotional pain, it’s hard to be rational and to think of a good solution. Nevertheless, many of the coping strategies used by people with overwhelming emotions only serve to make their problems worse.”
― Matthew McKay, The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, And Distress Tolerance

“You hope friends and family will be sensitive or clairvoyant enough to know what you want. “If you loved me, you’d know what’s wrong” is a common assumption.”
― Matthew McKay, Messages: The Communication Skills Book

“Strong self-esteem depends on two things. The first is what most of this book has been about: learning to think in healthy ways about yourself. The second key to self-esteem is the ability to make things happen, to see what you want and go for it: literally to create your own life.”
― Matthew McKay, Self-Esteem: A Proven Program of Cognitive Techniques for Assessing, Improving, and Maintaining Your Self-Esteem

“Criticizing yourself all the time or being overly judgmental of a situation is like wearing dark sunglasses indoors.”
― Matthew McKay, The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, And Distress Tolerance

“The truth is that your value is your consciousness, your ability to perceive and experience. The value of a human life is that it exists. You are a complex miracle of creation. You are a person who is trying to live, and that makes you as worthwhile as every other person who is doing the very same thing. Achievement has nothing to do with it. Whatever you do, whatever you contribute should come not from the need to prove your value, but from the natural flow of your aliveness. What you do should come from the drive to fully live, rather than the fight to justify yourself.”
― Matthew McKay, Self-Esteem: A Proven Program of Cognitive Techniques for Assessing, Improving, and Maintaining Your Self-Esteem

“Remember, sometimes pain can’t be avoided, but many times suffering can. Take,”
― Matthew McKay, The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, And Distress Tolerance

“However, do not confuse distraction with avoidance. When you avoid a distressing situation, you choose not to deal with it. But when you distract yourself from a distressing situation, you still intend to deal with it in the future, when your emotions have calmed down to a tolerable level. The”
― Matthew McKay, The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, And Distress Tolerance

“People who struggle with overwhelming emotions often feel vulnerable. At any point, the smallest trigger can lead to a tidal wave of emotions that leaves them feeling confused, angry, alone, hopeless, and in pain.”
― Matthew McKay, The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Diary: Monitoring Your Emotional Regulation Day by Day

“The word dialectic (in dialectical behavior therapy) means to balance and compare two things that appear very different or even contradictory. In dialectical behavior therapy, the balance is between change and acceptance (Linehan, 1993a). You need to change the behaviors in your life that are creating more suffering for yourself and others while simultaneously also accepting yourself the way you are. This might sound contradictory, but it’s a key part of this treatment. Dialectical behavior therapy depends on acceptance and change, not acceptance or change.”
― Matthew McKay, The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, and Distress Tolerance

“Rather than building your self-esteem on being right, you might reform your picture of yourself into that of one who, above all, wants to find the truth. Listening”
― Matthew McKay, Messages: The Communication Skills Book

“Do your best to remind yourself that you have an opportunity to behave differently.”
― Matthew McKay, The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Card Deck: 52 Practices to Balance Your Emotions Every Day

“You’ll then use your responses to the Valued Living Questionnaire in the following exercise, which will help you move toward engaging in what you value.”
― Matthew McKay, The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, And Distress Tolerance

“There are two kinds of pain: pain you can avoid and pain you can’t. Schema pain can’t be avoided. ... The deepest kind of suffering in life derives from trying not to feel pain that has to be felt.”
― Matthew McKay

“Being passive sometimes seems safe because you just go along with what the other person wants and expects. Long term, however, passivity is the royal road to interpersonal disaster because when you frequently give in to others and abandon your own needs, it creates frustration and resentment that builds inside of you. Eventually, the relationship becomes so painful that you blow up, collapse into depression, or run away. The paradox of being passive is that in the short term, giving in seems to protect the relationship. Long term, however, the relationship takes a shape you can’t stand—and you have to destroy it to stop the pain.”
― Matthew McKay, The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, and ...

“The human brain is a wonderful thought-producing machine. It turns out millions of thoughts every day. Most of the time, this makes our lives much easier. But unfortunately, we can’t fully control what our brain thinks about.”
― Matthew McKay, The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, and ...

“It’s almost as if the harder you try to forget something, the harder your brain tries to remember it. This is why forcing yourself to forget about something that happened to you is impossible. It’s also why you can’t simply force yourself to get rid of emotions that you don’t want.”
― Matthew McKay, The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, and ...

“The individual struggling with overwhelming emotions and DBT therapists will benefit significantly from this workbook.”
― Matthew McKay, The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, And Distress Tolerance

“The fact is that you don't know strangers well enough to reject them. if you don't want to go on the lunch date, it probably has more to do with you-your schedule, your unwillingness to meet someone new, your mood.”
― Matthew McKay, How To Communicate: The Ultimate Guide To Improving Your Personal and Professional Relationships

“Rather, it’s your thoughts about these events, the ways you interpret them, and your physical reactions to these thoughts that produce an anxious emotional state.”
― Matthew McKay, Thirty-Minute Therapy for Anxiety: Everything You Need To Know in the Least Amount of Time

“أنت لا تقوم بتغيير الظروف، ولكنك تغير من كيفية تفسيرك لها وتعاملك معها.”
― Matthew McKay, Self-Esteem: A proven program of cognitive techniques for assessing, improving and maintaining your self-esteem

“This is the tyranny of shoulds: the absolute nature of belief, the unbending sense of right and wrong. If you don’t live up to your shoulds, you judge yourself to be a bad and unworthy person. This is why people torture themselves with guilt and self-blame; this is why they are willing to die in wars; this is why they become paralyzed when forced to choose between unbending rules and genuine desire.”
― Matthew McKay, Self-Esteem: A Proven Program of Cognitive Techniques for Assessing, Improving, and Maintaining Your Self-Esteem

“using the “infallible” tools offered by the culture.”
― Matthew McKay, Why?: What Your Life Is Telling You about Who You Are and Why You're Here