Jon Frederickson > Quotes

“What you run from is where you need to rest. What you fear you need to face. What you ignore you need to hear.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“Embracing life on its own terms can be difficult. As we embrace life as it is, our illusions collapse. We need emotional courage to bear the pain without running, explaining, or justifying.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“We never break, although we imagine we are breaking. Our illusions break, and all our denial and all our demands cannot put our fantasies together again. And when our denial breaks, the grief and rage start to flow. In this outpouring, the fire of feelings doesn’t burn us; it burns up our illusions.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“In therapy we discover that we heal through relating, for the wounds that occurred in relationships must be healed in a relationship, a relationship where the therapist doesn’t talk at us but with us.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“The therapist reveals to us the depths we feared and supports us while we bear them.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“Anxiety is a sign of the unspoken.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“To heal, together we must embrace the formerly unbearable: reality and our feelings about it.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“We become well by relating to what is here; we become ill by relating to our fantasies. The therapist stops us from running away from ourselves so we can rest in r”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“Anxiety never makes sense until we face the facts and put them together.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“Defenses reject reality and our feelings. The defenses do not observe the truth. They reject it, distorting the patient’s awareness. The patient, enacting an identification, looks at himself through dismissive eyes. This identification does not protect him or give him a realistic appraisal. That is why we say: “This mechanism probably saved your life in the past, and we should thank it for how it protected you then. But what protected you in the past is destroying your life today.”
― Jon Frederickson, Co-Creating Change: Effective Dynamic Therapy Techniques

“When we do not see how we create our suffering, we assume others cause it. As a result, we pay attention to other people instead of the defenses creating our suffering.”
― Jon Frederickson, Co-Creating Change: Effective Dynamic Therapy Techniques

“Everyone who needs healing has a story of heartbreak, loss, and feelings so painful that we can’t finish our journey. To finish this journey, we seek a person to help us go the rest of the way.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“After we surrender our denial, our illusions fall off and the feelings rush in, allowing the person we are, whom we have yet to meet, to emerge. Feelings are forms of love, invitations to embrace what is, so the false can drop, revealing the real in you.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“To stop running, we need a partner to help us sit, bear, and feel. For what was unbearable when alone becomes bearable when shared.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“Never explore defensive affects.”
― Jon Frederickson, Co-Creating Change: Effective Dynamic Therapy Techniques

“To see only pathology in the patient requires no genius on the part of the therapist, only projection.”
― Jon Frederickson, Co-Creating Change: Effective Dynamic Therapy Techniques

“To know what to say, we need to know what is going on. To know what is going on, we need to assess each patient’s response moment by moment. That assessment, known as psychodiagnosis (H. Davanloo, supervision 2002–2004), determines every intervention by the therapist.”
― Jon Frederickson, Co-Creating Change: Effective Dynamic Therapy Techniques

“All those who seek healing had to bear a pain that they couldn’t bear by themselves”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“The point of compassion is not to eliminate suffering, but to lead a person to the truth so he will be able to lead a life of truth” (Almaas 1987, 92). Compassion merely on the side of feeling good is pseudocompassion.”
― Jon Frederickson, Co-Creating Change: Effective Dynamic Therapy Techniques

“Remaining in this moment, we feel our feelings, which always reach out to us through anxiety. Anxiety, strangely enough, invites us to dive inside to the places from which we always run, the places we are afraid to descend into a”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“The moment we are stunned, we can either let the truth in or keep it out with our lies.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“Those of us who consider the admission of sin and wrongdoing an intolerable insult to our narcissism and find conscious guilt unbearable, are forced to resort to symptom formation. The suffering entailed in our symptoms gratifies the superego need for punishment and, at the same time, evades unbearable conscious guilt” (D. Carveth and J. Carveth 2003, 2).”
― Jon Frederickson, Co-Creating Change: Effective Dynamic Therapy Techniques

“on the feelings the patient avoids. When anxiety and”
― Jon Frederickson, Co-Creating Change: Effective Dynamic Therapy Techniques

“As the author Jeff Foster says, “Breakdown can always point to the break-through of a deeper truth, since only that which is false in you can break down. Truth does not break. Some call this recognition ‘waking up,’ some call it ‘self-realization.’”2”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“become emotionally close again, after a life in which closeness led to pain. These feelings trigger anxiety and defenses. Defenses prevent the patient from being aware of his feelings, interfering with his sense of self, relationships, motivation, development, and even the meaning of his life. Thus, the therapist focuses on the feelings the patient avoids. When anxiety and”
― Jon Frederickson, Co-Creating Change: Effective Dynamic Therapy Techniques

“learning any treatment method, we make mistakes. Patients will nearly always forgive a mistake of the head, just not one of the heart.”
― Jon Frederickson, Co-Creating Change: Effective Dynamic Therapy Techniques

“By definition, life always includes us: our grief, our rage, our guilt, and our illusions. Our suffering points toward the truths we fear to embrace inside ourselves.”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life

“To be on good terms with ourselves, we must learn to listen to who we are under the words, the excuses, and the explanations we u”
― Jon Frederickson, The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life