Nicole > Nicole's Quotes

“Yet I also recognize this: Even if everyone in the world were to accept me and my illness and validate my pain, unless I can abide myself and be compassionate toward my own distress, I will probably always feel alone and neglected by others.”
― Kiera Van Gelder

“We need this help from the outside because we don't know how to to do this for ourselves. We start with a deep deficit—a chasm really—when it comes to understanding and being tolerant of ourselves, and that's even before we go forth to do battle with the rest of the world. As soon as someone judges, criticizes, dismisses, or ignores, the cycle of pain and reactivity ramps up, compounded by shame, remorse, and rejection. The act of validation, simply saying, 'I can see things from your perspective,' can short-circuit that emotional detour.”
― Kiera Van Gelder, The Buddha and the Borderline

“In the life cycle of an intense emotion, if it isn't acted upon, it eventually peaks and then decreases. But as Dr. Linehan explains, people with BPD have a different physiological experience with this process because of three key biological vulnerabilities (1993a): First, we're highly sensitive to emotional stimuli (meaning we experience social dynamics, the environment, and our own inner states with an acuteness similar to having exposed nerve endings). Second, we respond more intensely and much more quickly, than other people. And third, we don't 'come down' from our emotions for a long time. One the nerves have been touched, the sensations keep peaking. Shock waves of emotion that might pass through others in minutes keep cresting in us for hours, sometimes days.”
― Kiera Van Gelder

“Borderlines create the vicious circles they fear most. They become angry and drive the relationship to the breaking point, then switch to a posture of helplessness and contrition, beg for reconciliation. If both parties are equally enmeshed, chaos and conflict become the soul of the relationship.”
― Theodore Millon

“I need them to be aware and present with me in the midst of the storm, not just tell me what to do.”
― Kiera Van Gelder, The Buddha and the Borderline

“In some ways, com­ing to terms with my­self and work­ing to­ward re­cov­ery has been like say­ing “I love you” to some­one but keep­ing a loaded gun hid­den in your back pocket, just in case that per­son pisses you off enough.”
― Kiera Van Gelder

“Parentified children learn to take responsibility for themselves and others early on. They tend to fade into the woodwork and let others take center stage. This extends into adulthood - adult children may put others' needs before their own. They may have difficulty accepting care and attention.”
― Kimberlee Roth, Surviving a Borderline Parent: How to Heal Your Childhood Wounds and Build Trust, Boundaries, and Self-Esteem

“Dissociative symptoms—primarily depersonalization and derealization—are elements in other DSM-IV disorders, including schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder, and in the neurologic syndrome of temporal lobe epilepsy, also called complex partial seizures. In this latter disorder, there are often florid symptoms of depersonalization and realization, but most amnesia symptoms derive from difficulties with focused attention rather than forgetting previously learned information.”
― James A. Chu, Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders

“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.”
― Rachel Reiland, Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder

“Certainly, it's important to acknowledge and identify the effects of BPD on your life. It's equally important to realize that it neither dictates who you are nor fixes your destiny.”
― Kimberlee Roth, Surviving a Borderline Parent: How to Heal Your Childhood Wounds and Build Trust, Boundaries, and Self-Esteem

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner." I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”
― Carl R. Rogers, A Way of Being

“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.”
― Carl R. Rogers

“The degree to which I can create relationships, which facilitate the growth of others as separate persons, is a measure of the growth I have achieved in myself.”
― Carl R Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“When a person realizes he has been deeply heard, his eyes moisten. I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy. It is as though he were saying, "Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what it's like to be me”
― Carl R. Rogers

“a person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View on Psychotherapy, Humanistic Psychology, and the Path to Personal Growth

“You know that I don't believe that anyone has ever taught anything to anyone. I question that efficacy of teaching. The only thing that I know is that anyone who wants to learn will learn. And maybe a teacher is a facilitator, a person who puts things down and shows people how exciting and wonderful it is and asks them to eat.”
― Carl R. Rogers

“When the other person is hurting, confused, troubled, anxious, alienated, terrified; or when he or she is doubtful of self-worth, uncertain as to identity, then understanding is called for. The gentle and sensitive companionship of an empathic stance… provides illumination and healing. In such situations deep understanding is, I believe, the most precious gift one can give to another.”
― Carl R. Rogers

“we cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person

“The kind of caring that the client-centered therapist desires to achieve is a gullible caring, in which clients are accepted as they say they are, not with a lurking suspicion in the therapist's mind that they may, in fact, be otherwise. This attitude is not stupidity on the therapist's part; it is the kind of attitude that is most likely to lead to trust...”
― Carl R. Rogers

“I hear the words, the thoughts, the feeling tones, the personal meaning, even the meaning that is below the conscious intent of the speaker. Sometimes too, in a message which superficially is not very important, I hear a deep human cry that lies buried and unknown far below the surface of the person.
So I have learned to ask myself, can I hear the sounds and sense the shape of this other person's inner world? Can I resonate to what he is saying so deeply that I sense the meanings he is afraid of, yet would like to communicate, as well as those he knows?”
― Carl R. Rogers

“If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual,”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View on Psychotherapy, Humanistic Psychology, and the Path to Personal Growth

“Growth occurs when individuals confront problems, struggle to master them, and through that struggle develop new aspects of their skills, capacities, views about life.”
― Carl Rogers

“I have come to realize that being trustworthy does not demand that I be rigidly consistent but that I be dependably real.”
― Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person

“So while I still hate to readjust my thinking, still hate to give up old ways of perceiving and conceptualizing, yet at some deeper level I have, to a considerable degree, come to realize that these painful reorganizations are what is known as learning,”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View on Psychotherapy, Humanistic Psychology, and the Path to Personal Growth

“evaluation by others is not a guide for me. The judgments of others, while they are to be listened to, and taken into account for what they are, can never be a guide for me. This has been a hard thing to learn.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View on Psychotherapy, Humanistic Psychology, and the Path to Personal Growth

“When I can relax, and be close to the transcendental core of me, then I may behave in strange and impulsive ways in the relationship, ways I cannot justify rationally, which have nothing to do with my thought processes. But these strange behaviors turn out to be right in some odd way. At these moments it seems that my inner spirit has reached out and touched the inner spirit of the other. Our relationship transcends itself and has become something larger.”
― Carl R. Rogers

“When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and to go on. It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard. I have deeply appreciated the times that I have experienced this sensitive, empathic, concentrated listening.”
― Carl R. Rogers

“once an experience is fully in awareness, fully accepted, then it can be coped with effectively, like any other clear reality.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View on Psychotherapy, Humanistic Psychology, and the Path to Personal Growth

“I’ve always felt I had to do things because they were expected of me, or more important, to make people like me. The hell with it! I think from now on I’m going to just be me—rich or poor, good or bad, rational or irrational, logical or illogical, famous or infamous.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View on Psychotherapy, Humanistic Psychology, and the Path to Personal Growth