Evan

“You can no more banish hatred from your heart than you can summon love into it, and the wisest course is to accept that, whatever you feel, you probably have good reasons for it.”
― David Smail, How to Survive without Psychotherapy

“... we are for the most part utterly impervious to the moral intention or significance of our conduct, and on the whole what we do is evaluated mainly in terms of what it achieves for the enhancement of our image and the augmentation of our power, status, and material advantage.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“It is also true, however, that many patients experience psychotropic medication as in itself a further source of confusion and discomfort, since it may alter their perception of the world in an idiosyncratic way, so that their experience seems to bear no relation to the meaning of actual events of their world.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“Once all the technical mystique has been stripped away from psychotherapy, it does seem that a likely explanation for its almost explosive expansion over the last few decades is that it provides something which is otherwise in very short supply in a world in which a kind of watchful defensiveness against our vulnerability has replaced any kind of spontaneous generosity which people may more often once have felt for each other.”
― David Smail, Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety