Olivia

“It’s the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals—my professional rosary.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“Psychotherapy is a demanding vocation, and the successful therapist must be able to tolerate the isolation, anxiety, and frustration that are inevitable in the work.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy

“Client-therapist disagreement about the goals and tasks of therapy may impair the therapeutic alliance.† This issue is not restricted to group therapy. Client-therapist discrepancies on therapeutic factors also occur in individual psychotherapy. A large study of psychoanalytically oriented therapy found that clients attributed their successful therapy to relationship factors, whereas their therapists gave precedence to technical skills and techniques.84 In general, analytic therapists value the coming to consciousness of unconscious factors and the subsequent linkage between childhood experiences and present symptoms far more than do their clients, who deny the importance or even the existence of these elements in therapy; instead they emphasize the personal elements of the relationship and the encounter with a new, accepting type of authority figure.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy

“The therapist's worldview is in itself isolating. Seasoned therapists view relationships differently, they sometimes lose patience with social ritual and bureaucracy, they cannot abide the fleeting shallow encounters and small talk of many social gatherings.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients