Knowing someone is the first goal of therapy. Modulating emotionality - whether by relatedness or psychopharmacology or both - is second. Therapy's last and most ambitious aim is revising the neural code that directs an emotional life. (176)
Thomas LewisThe person of the therapist is the converting catalyst, not his order or credo, not his spatial location in the room, not his exquisitely chosen words or denominational silences. So long as the rules of a therapeutic system do not hinder limbic transmission - a critical caveat - they remain inconsequential, neocortical distractions. The dispensable trappings of dogma may determine what a therapist thinks he is doing, what he talks about when he talks about therapy, but the agent of change is who he is. (187)
Thomas LewisThe skill of becoming and remaining attuned to another's emotional rhythms requires a solid investment of years.
Thomas LewisThe brevity of mini (psycho)therapies is another efficient forestaller of healing. The neocortex rapidly master didactic information, but the limbic brain takes mountains of repetition. No one expects to play the flute in six lessons or to become fluent in Italian in ten. (189)
Thomas LewisLove is simultaneous mutual regulation, wherein each person meets the needs of the other, because neither can provide for his own.
Thomas LewisThe benefits of deep attachment are powerful - regulated people feel whole, centered, alive.
Thomas LewisWhat Richard Selzer, M.D. once wrote of surgery is true of therapy: only human love keeps this from being the act of two madmen.
Thomas LewisScience is an inherent contradiction — systematic wonder — applied to the natural world. In its mundane form, the methodical instinct prevails and the result, an orderly procession of papers, advances the perimeter of knowledge, step by laborious step. Great scientific minds partake of that daily discipline and can also suspend it, yielding to the sheer love of allowing the mental engine to spin free. And then Einstein imagines himself riding a light beam, Kekule formulates the structure of benzene in a dream, and Fleming’s eye travels past the annoying mold on his glassware to the clear ring surrounding it — a lucid halo in a dish otherwise opaque with bacteria — and penicillin is born. Who knows how many scientific revolutions have been missed because their potential inaugurators disregarded the whimsical, the incidental, the inconvenient inside the laboratory?
Thomas LewisEmotional life can be influenced, but it cannot be commanded.
Thomas LewisTags: love relationships psychotherapy
The dogged implicitness of emotional knowledge, its relentless unreasoning force, prevents logic from granting salvation just as it precludes self-help books from helping. The sheer volume and variety of helf-help paraphernalia testify at once to the vastness of the appetite they address and their inability to satisfy it.
Thomas LewisTags: psychotherapy
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