psychological resistance Quotes

The Shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. Indeed, self-knowledge as a psychotherapuetic measure frequently requires much painstaking work extending over a long period of time.

The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?

Belief is harder to shake than knowledge.

Excuses are the explanations we use for hanging on to behaviors we don't like about ourselves; they are self-defeating behaviors we don't know how to change. InExcuses Begone! I review 18 of the most common excuses people use, such as "I'm too busy, too old, too fat, too scared or it's going to take too long or be too difficult."

I don't believe that climate-change fiction will change the mind of a denier because most of the deniers I've met are basically in a cult situation. It's a faith issue. It's not a rational issue. There's no fact that's going to change their mind. They simply believe in the cult of climate-change denial and it somehow feeds into the rest of the mythos of their own life story.

Rebuttals never alter desire.

My smile is my way of saying: "You can destroy my body, but not my soul.

Our minds are lazier than our bodies.

Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth; left to itself, it sweeps in like the tide.

Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity.

Now, you'll hear people call here on my show claiming they used to be lib and they've changed their minds. That happens, but it happens naturally. It's not because I've focused on trying to persuade people. I think while it's a noble objective to try to help people to see things the right way, this is a different psychological collection of human beings, and they are walled off from anything that's not them.

We are motivated more by aversion to the unpleasant than by a will toward truth, freedom, or healing. We are constantly attempting to escape our life, to avoid rather than enter our pain we, and we wonder why it is so difficult to be fully alive. (43)

It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.

My analyst refused to hear my dreams. This was years ago.

All the time you're saying to yourself, 'I could do that, but I won't,'--which is just another way of saying that you can't.

Every civilization must contend with an unconscious force which can block, betray, or countermand almost any conscious intention of the collectivity.

No truly conscious human being sabotages himself - it's impossible, because it's contrary to Nature.

Because the fundamental human problem is that people are afraid of change.

Changing people’s expectation is the hardest thing to do.

Just as a stream flows smoothly on as long as it encounters no obstruction, so the nature of man and animal is such that we never really notice or become conscious of what is agreeable to our will; if we are to notice something, our will has to have been thwarted, has to have experienced a shock of some kind.

If you cannot accept an external event immediately, then some kind of resistance will come up. And there may be some external events you cannot accept at all.

Mental inertia is death.

What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.