'My professional rosary'

When I was training to be a psychotherapist, the one person who made the most sense was Irvin Yalom.  Unlike so many other theorists, who seemed desperate to impose a rigid construct on the world, Yalom’s perspective had a fluidity that allowed for the unknown.  In turn, this allowed Yalom to be the type of psychotherapist that really helps other people:  They do not pretend to be an ‘expert’, but instead they admit to struggling with existential questions as the client may be.  And in this relationship of equals (what Yalom referred to as his ‘professional rosary’), therapist and client can welcome the unknown, believe in growth, and keep hope alive.

Here are just a few of Yalom’s many pearls of wisdom:
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• ‘The first step in all therapeutic change is responsibility assumption.  If one feels in no way responsible for one’s predicament, then how can one change it?’
  
• ‘To my mind, ‘good’ therapy (which I equate with deep, or penetrating, therapy, not with efficient or even, I am pained to say, helpful therapy) conducted with a ‘good’ patient is at bottom a truth-seeking venture.'
  
• ‘This business of comparing yourself unfavourably to others is always self-destructive...It’s always possible, if you want to torment yourself, to find someone to compare yourself with unfavourably... Why not just one time pick someone who may not have what you have?’
  
• 'It is one of our chief methods of denying death, and the part of our mind whose task it is to mollify death terror generates the irrational belief that we are invulnerable – that unpleasant things like aging and death may be the lot of others but not our lot, that we exist beyond law beyond human and biological destiny.'
• 'One must learn to live with the living before one can learn to live with the dead.’
  

Chris Warren-Dickins LPC is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Ridgewood NJ 07450 and Teaneck NJ 07666. 
To book an appointment, please telephone +1 (201) 862-7776 or email chris@exploretransform.com
https://www.exploretransform.com/

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