“
People don’t really want to be cured.
What they want is relief; a cure is painful.
— Anthony De Mello
Posted on December 27, 2012 (♥ 10)
+ eating disorder + addiction + cure + painful + relief + recovery + difficult + want
“
It was Kierkegaard who called attention to another source of guilt- the transgression against oneself, the failure to live the life allotted to one. As Rank put it:”When we protect ourselves from a too intensive or too quick living out or living up, we feel ourselves guilty on account of the unused life, the unlived life in us,” Repression is thus a double-edged sword; it provides safety and relief from anxiety, while at the same time it generates life restriction and a form of guilt, henceforth referred to as “existential guilt.
— Existential Psychotherapy
Posted on August 14, 2012 (♥ 13)
+ existential + psychotherapy + guilt + kierkegaard + self + guilty + failure + life + lived + unlived life + safety + relief + anxiety + restriction + depression
update.
“
If we are taken over by craving, no matter who or what is before us, all we can see is how it might satisfy our needs. This kind of thirst contracts our body and mind into a profound trance. We move through the world with a kind of tunnel vision that prevents us from enjoying what is in front of us. The color of an autumn leaves or a passage of poetry merely amplifies the feeling that there is a gaping hole in our life. The smile of a child only reminds us that we are painfully childless. We turn away from simple pleasures because our craving compels us to seek more intense stimulation or numbing relief.
— Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing your Life with the Heart of Buddha
Posted on May 15, 2012 (♥ 6)
+ Tara Brach + buddha + acceptance + craving + urge + impulse + tunnel vision + satisfy + needs + feeling + empty + numb + relief
“
Her emotional pain confirms her belief that she is bad and weak. If she feels lonely,her loneliness confirms that she is unworthy of company. If she feels sad, her sadness proves what a pathetic creature she is. Because painful feelings accentuate her core sense of defectiveness and shame, and because she does not know how to tolerate her psychic pain or to seek effective and nondestructive relief from it, she feels unable to bear the disappointments, hurts, rejections, injustices, frustrations, losses, and limitations that are inevitably part of human life.
— Sensing the Self
“
That night, in my room, I gorged myself. I had stolen a half-gallon of strawberry ice cream from the freezer, and I forced spoonful after spoonful down my throat. And later, for several hours after that, I sat hunched on the fire escape landing outside my bedroom, retching back into the ice cream container. And I remember wondering why it was eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.
— Amy Tan, Joy Luck Club
“
In depression, the pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying- or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity- but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes. And this results in a striking experience- one which I have called, borrowing military terminology, the situation of the walking wounded. For in virtually any other serious sickness, a patient who felt similar devistation would by lying flat in bed, possibly sedated and hooked up to the tubes and wires of life-support systems, but at the very least in a posture of repose and in an isolated setting. His invalidism would be necessary, unquestioned and honorably attained. However, the sufferer from depression has no such option and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk, and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown and, God help him, even smile. But it is a fierce trial attempting to speak a few simple words.
— ― William Styron, Darkness Visible
Posted on May 03, 2012 (♥ 26)
+ depression + darkness visible + william styron + war + suffer + talk + hell + despair + unrelenting + intolerable + relief + hopeless + pain + lifeless + unending
“
Even the best psychologist will tell you that, that people don’t really want to be cured.
What they want is relief; a cure is painful.
— Anthony De Mello
“
Did you really want to die?”
“No one commits suicide because they want to die.”
“Then why do they do it?”
“Because they want to stop the pain.
“
If you can’t get what you want, you end up doing something else, just to get some relief. Just to keep from going crazy. Because when you’re sad enough, you look for ways to fill you up.
— Laura Pritchett (Sky Bridge: A Novel)
“
—and then you’re in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, deadly serious trouble, because this Substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, that for so long gave you relief from the pain of the Losses your love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and god and compadre, has finally removed its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes and a ravening maw, and canines down to here, it’s the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror, now, it’s you, the Substance has devoured or replaced and become you, and the puke-, drool- and Substance-crusted T-shirt you’ve both worn for weeks now gets torn off and you stand there looking and in the root-white chest where your heart (given away to It) should be beating, in its exposed chest’s center and centerless eyes is just a lightless hole, more teeth, and a beckoning taloned hand dangling something irresistible, and now you see you’ve been had, screwed royal, stripped and fucked and tossed to the side like some stuffed toy to lie for all time in the posture you land in. You see now that It’s your enemy and your worst personal nightmare and the trouble It’s gotten you into is undeniable and you still can’t stop. Doing the Substance now is like attending Black Mass but you still can’t stop, even though the Substance no longer gets you high. You are, as they say, Finished. You cannot get drunk and you cannot get sober; you cannot get high and you cannot get straight. You are behind bars; you are in a cage and can see only bars in every direction. You are in the kind of a hell of a mess that either ends lives or turns them around.
Posted on April 25, 2012 (♥ 6)
+ david foster wallace + infinite jest + addiction + eating disorder + trouble + relief + pain + nightmare + cage + hell
