humanity

One thing I__e learnt about humans: you can__ judge their strength by the size of their actions, but by the devotion of an act, no matter how small.

Any coward can instill fear. It's easy to scare people, but having the strength to make them feel safe? Now that's power.

It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

As long as grace abounds, I will work with all my strength.

We have one world. We have one chance; to be a united force of positive strength, to feed humanity the light of being humane." Jessica Edouard

May we continue to encourage one another, so that we will increase in strength and in wisdom.

We have one world. We have one chance; to be a united force of positive strength, to feed humanity the light of being humane.

We ought to encourage, build and strengthen one another.

An odd thing about perception is that when we identify some new thing with one or more of our five senses, it is not really, immutably real -- it is a passing will o_ the wisp, an artifact of the senses and the translations of the brain until we get used to it and we give it a home in our hearts

Should you operate upon your clients as objects, you risk reducing them to less than human. Following the culture of appropriation and mastery your clients become a kind of extension of yourself, of your ego. In the appropriation and objectification mode, your clients_ well-being and success in treatment reflect well upon you. You __id_ something to them, you made them well. You acted upon them and can take the credit for successful therapy or treatment. Conversely, if your clients flounder or regress, that reflects poorly on you. On this side of things the culture of appropriation and mastery says that you are not doing enough. You are not exerting enough influence, technique or therapeutic force. What anxiety this can breed for some clinicians! DBT offers a framework and tools for a treatment that allows clients to retain their full humanity. Through the practice of mindfulness, you can learn to cultivate a fuller presence to the moments of your life, and even with your clients and your work with them. This presence potentiates an encounter between two irreducible human beings, meeting professionally, of course, and meeting humanly. The dialectical framework, which embraces contradictions and gives you a way of seeing that life is pregnant with creative tensions, allows for your discovery of your limits and possibilities, gives you a way of seeing the dynamic nature of reality that is anything but sitting still; shows you that your identity grows from relationship with others, including those you help, that you are an irreducible human being encountering other irreducible human beings who exert influence upon you, even as you exert your own upon them. Even without clinical contrivance.

We are creatures built on a house of cards of language.

The scientific study of suffering inevitably raises questions of causation, and with these, issues of blame and responsibility. Historically, doctors have highlighted predisposing vulnerability factors for developing PTSD, at the expense of recognizing the reality of their patients' experiences_ This search for predisposing factors probably had its origins in the need to deny that all people can be stressed beyond endurance, rather than in solid scientific data; until recently such data were simply not available_ When the issue of causation becomes a legitimate area of investigation, one is inevitably confronted with issues of man's inhumanity to man, with carelessness and callousness, with abrogation of responsibility, with manipulation and with failures to protect.

The moment we refuse to hurt others because of our own pain, is the time we evolve as souls.

The qualities required to be a good leader are usually incompatible with the qualities required to become a leader.

Human emotions have deep evolutionary roots, a fact that may explain their complexity and provide tools for clinical practice.The Nature of Emotions (2001)

Solutions to mankind__ problems are easy and obvious. They remain unsolved because those who could solve them _ don__ want to.

No ideology or psychological theory can possibly do justice to the full range of human experience.

There is something in man which can detect real love. We rub it out, or muffle it, by substitute-love.