Child Therapy Quotes

“The individual psychotherapy patient comes to the therapist with an almost automatic deference, a sense of dependence and compliance. The role pattern is old and established: the dependent child seeking guidance from a parent figure. There is no such traditional image for the family, no established pattern in which an entire family submits to the guidance of an individual. And the family structure is simply too powerful and too crucial for the members to go trustingly into an experience that threatens to change the entire matrix of their relationships. If the family therapist is to acquire that initial "authority figure" or "parent" role that is so necessary if therapy is to be more powerful than an ordinary social experience, he has to earn it.”

— Augustus Y. Napier

“Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder DSM-5 describes a new disorder that has elements of ASD but is actually conceptualized as outside the autism spectrum. The intention is to provide diagnostic coverage for children with symptoms in the social-communication domain but who have never displayed repetitive, restricted behaviours or interests. However, it is unclear how Social Communication Disorder (SCD) will be different from ASD, which support or therapy services will be available, and what the child will qualify for.”

— Tony Attwood

“If a child stays quiet in the context of extroverted friends, or even prefers time alone, a parent may worry and even send her to therapy. She might be thrilled- she'll finally get to talk about the stuff she cares about, and without interruption! But if the therapist concludes that the child has a social phobia, the treatment of choice is to increasingly expose her to the situations she fears. This behavioral treatment is effective for treating phobias - if that is truly the problem. If it's not the problem, and the child just likes hanging out inside better than chatting, she'll have a problem soon. Her "illness" now will be an internalized self-reproach: "Why don't I enjoy this like everyone else?" The otherwise carefree child learns that something is wrong with her. She not only is pulled away from her home, she is supposed to like it. Now she is anxious and unhappy, confirming the suspicion that she has a problem.”

— Laurie A. Helgoe

“The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely he will be to recover from trauma and thrive. Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love.”

— Bruce D. Perry

“But when I look at myself squarely, it's not just that I have a few difficulties or unresolved issues. Unlike those lucky people for whom therapy or medication delivers them back to themselves, I've been suffering from something that was unnamable for most of my life. Yes, I've had periods of relative stability, but the whole concept of "recovery" brings up some painful questions. What do I recover? With drug addiction, you hear that you can recover and reclaim your former self, the person you were before you started using. With other psychiatric illnesses, getting rid of symptoms means you're more or less back to "yourself." But what if you simply don't have a solid self to return to-if the way you are is seen as basically broken? And what if you can't conceive of "normal" or "healthy" because pain and loneliness are all you remember? "You were such a happy child," my mother says. But I don't remember that. So what do I recover?”

— Kiera Van Gelder

“To quote Maslow again regarding his self-actualizing individuals: "One does not complain about water because it is wet, nor about rocks because they are hard ... As the child looks out upon the world with wide, uncritical and innocent eyes, simply noting and observing what is the case, without either arguing the matter or demanding that it be otherwise, so does the self-actualizing person look upon human nature both in himself and in others." (4, p. 207) This acceptant attitude toward that which exists, I find developing in clients in therapy.”

— Carl R. Rogers

“I had massive anxiety as a child. I was in therapy. From 8 to 10, I was borderline agora-phobic. I could not leave my mom's side. I don't really have panic attacks anymore, but I had really bad anxiety.”

— Emma Stone

“I know in my own marriage I stayed in it to provide my son with what I thought was a stable background and to give him what I thought was the family life a child should have with two parents. But that isn't always the best way, and it took me taking my son to therapy after the divorce to really see it.”

— Regina King

“As a child I was not allowed to express my feelings, so I had to go back through therapy and express the child's pain.”

— John Bradshaw

“Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting
not for the first time
on the peculiarity of adults. Thet took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.”

— Stephen King

“I'm a typical middle child. I'm the mediator. The one that makes everything OK, puts their own needs aside to make sure everybody's happy. It's hard to change your nature, even with years and years of therapy.”

— Jennifer Jason Leigh

“Part of me must have really wanted to believe
like a child hearing, in perfect safety, a tale of horror
that the unconscious would be like any other room, once the light was let in. That the dark shapes would resolve only into toy horses and Biedermeyer furniture. That therapy could tame it after all, bring it into society with no fear of its someday reverting. I wanted to believe, despite everything my life had been. Can you imagine?”

— Thomas Pynchon

“What I learned about stammering was that, when as a young child you lose the confidence of anyone who wants to listen to you, you lose confidence in your voice and the right to speech. And a lot of the therapy was saying, 'You have a right to be heard.'”

— Tom Hooper

“Tiger Mother felt like reliving a childhood trauma; The Drama of the Gifted Child felt like going through the therapy to cure it.”

— William Deresiewicz

“What happened to you as a child, particularly something bad, changed you, absolutely and completely. It was like part of your brain became closed off and refused to mature any further. As an adult you were powerless to fight against it. It was simply who you were until the day you died. There was no "therapy" that could cure it. That wall was built and nothing could tear it down.”

— David Baldacci

“Milton Erickson was a master at using experiential techniques to elicit strengths that were previously dormant. Mills and Crowley have masterfully captured essential elements of Erickson's work and applied it to therapy with children. Easy to read, meticulously referenced, and filled with inspiring case studies, Therapeutic Metaphors for Children and the Child Within has now been updated with important new findings, and it's essential reading for clinicians who work with children as well as for those who want to improve their use of therapeutic metaphor.”

— Jeffrey K. Zeig

“Play Therapy is based upon the fact that play is the child's natural medium of self-expression. It is an opportunity which is given to the child to 'play out' his feelings and problems just as, in certain types of adult therapy, an individual 'talks out' his difficulties.”

— Virginia Axline

“You need to take small steps when you dream big dreams. I am a published author with dyslexia, a professional speaker who was in speech therapy for three years as a child because I had a lisp; and a slow stiff kid from the suburbs who became an All-Pro in the NFL.”

— Karl Mecklenburg