138+ Best Therapy Quotes That Have Changed My Life

A therapy or medical treatment is the attempted remediation of a health problem, usually following a diagnosis. Inspirational therapy quotes will challenge the way you think, change the way you live and transform your whole life.

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Famous Therapy Quotes

Therapy is often a matter of tipping the first domino. — Milton H. Erickson

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. — Eleanor Roosevelt

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. — Abraham Lincoln

I don’t know how people can live without a therapist. — Neve Campbell

Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us. — David Richo

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. — Graham Greene

The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love. — Hubert Humphrey

Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it does pay for therapy. — Travis Kalanick

Therapy isn’t radio. We don’t need to constantly fill the air with sounds. Sometimes, when it’s quiet, surprising things happen. — Mary Pipher

Cooking and baking is both physical and mental therapy. — Mary Berry

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. — Maya Angelou

The best therapy is actually the more aggressive kind when they break you open; they unleash you. — Cara Delevingne

I’m fine. Well, I’m not fine – I’m here. Is there something wrong with that? Absolutely. — Ned Vizzini

When we talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. — Fred Rogers

Therapy is like telling your nightmares when you’re a kid; they lose their power to hurt and control. — Beth Orton

The wilderness is healing, a therapy for the soul. — Nicholas Kristof

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. — Abraham Maslow

Psychotherapy is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing. — Thomas Szasz

Courage doesn’t happen when you have all the answers. It happens when you are ready to face the questions you have been avoiding your whole life. — Shannon L. Alder

Sometimes it takes dealing with a disability – the trauma, the relearning, the months of rehabilitation therapy – to uncover our true abilities and how we can put them to work for us in ways we may have never imagined. — Tammy Duckworth

My potential is unlimited. — Success Mantra

Therapy is not to ‘talk about’ things, but to change the person’s life, and to relieve suffering, such as depression, anxiety, or relationship problems. — David D. Burns

Think of your head as an unsafe neighborhood; don’t go there alone. — Augusten Burroughs

All children should be taught to unconditionally accept, approve, admire, appreciate, forgive, trust, and ultimately, love their own person. — Asa Don Brown

Some seek the comfort of their therapist’s office, other head to the corner pub and dive into a pint, but I chose running as my therapy. — Dean Karnazes

Cleaning is therapy for me. I’m not ashamed of holding the duster or broom. -Amisha Patel

You can’t change how people treat you or what they say about you. All you can do is change how you react to it. — Unknown

The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free. — Rollo May

In my early professional years, I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth? — Carl R. Rogers

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. — Confucius

What? What were you going to say? This is another trick of shrinks. They never let you stop in midthought. If you open your mouth, they want to know exactly what you had the intention of saying. — Ned Vizzini

Just putting my uniform on keeps me going. Being able to get out there keeps me going. That’s the best therapy. — Eric Davis

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. — Carl Jung

Effective psychotherapy works because the therapist continues to grow as a person and as a healer. — Jed Diamond

I wish you’d help me look into a more interesting problem – namely, my sanity. — Kurt Vonnegut

It’s difficult. I take a low dose of lithium nightly. I take an antidepressant for my darkness because prayer isn’t enough. My therapist hears confession twice a month, my shrink delivers the host, and I can stand in the woods and see the world spark. — David Lovelace

In Hollywood if you don’t have a shrink, people think you’re crazy. — Johnny Carson

Short Therapy Quotes

In therapy, I see myself in the mirror differently. — Ricky Williams

Lose not yourself in a far off time, seize the moment that is thine. — Friedrich Schiller

Procrastination is one of the most common and deadliest diseases and its toll on success and happiness is heavy. — Wayne Gretsky

Psychotherapy may begin with the primitive, but it must end with the divine, for both are integral factors in the human mind. — Dion Fortune

I had problems a therapist couldn’t solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate. — Cheryl Strayed

Cooking is good therapy for me. — Lidia Bastianich

When the well is dry, we know the worth of water. — Benjamin Franklin

We do not have to be mental health professionals to identify the traits of the possible sociopaths among us. — P.A. Speers

he ultimate goal of therapy… it’s too hard a question. The words come to me like tranquility, like fulfillment, like realizing your potential. — Irvin D. Yalom

Life doesn’t make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all. — Erik Erikson

I had people in my life who didn’t give up on me: my mother, my aunt, my science teacher. I had one-on-one speech therapy. I had a nanny who spent all day playing turn-taking games with me. — Temple Grandin

All great changes are preceded by chaos. — Deepak Chopra

Psychotherapy can be one of the greatest and most rewarding adventures, it can bring with it the deepest feelings of personal worth, of purpose and richness in living. — Eda Leshan

Talking to a therapist, I thought, was like taking your clothes off and then taking your skin off, and then having the other person say, Would you mind opening up your rib cage so that we can start? — Julie Schumacher

I’ve realized therapy is incredibly therapeutic. — Lisa Schroeder

Once you start making the effort to “wake yourself up” – that is be more mindful of your daily activities – you suddenly start appreciating your life more. — Robert Biswas-Diener

If the sound of happy children is grating on your ears, I don’t think it’s the children who need to be adjusted. — Stefan Molyneux

Artists need some kind of stimulating experience a lot of times, which crystallizes when you sing about it or paint it or sculpt it. You literally mold the experience the way you want. It’s therapy. — Erykah Badu

Cribbling things down is my therapy. I filter later. — Natascha McElhone

My therapy has come from paying attention to my life. — Oprah Winfrey

There are a variety of techniques to help people change the kind of thinking that leads them to become depressed. These techniques are called cognitive behavioral therapy. — Irving Kirsch

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. — Viktor Frankl

There thus appears to be an inverse correlation between recovery and psychotherapy; the more psychotherapy, the smaller the recovery rate. — Hans Eysenck

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own. — Henry Ford

…comedy acts as my therapy. I put my problems out there. I talk about them. I talk about everything before anybody has a chance. — Kevin Hart

In therapy, I have learned the importance of keeping spiritual life and professional life balanced. I need to regain my balance. — Tiger Woods

Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is. — William James

We may define therapy as a search for value. — Abraham Maslow

Baking is therapy. — Paul Hollywood

Massage therapy has been shown to relieve depression, especially in people who have chronic fatigue syndrome; other studies also suggest benefit for other populations. — Andrew Weil

o me, wrestling is therapy. No matter how bad my personal situation is, when I step into the ring, all my troubles disappear. My baggage stays in the back where it belongs. — Eddie Guerrero

Nothing will work unless you do. — Maya Angelou

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance. — George Bernard Shaw

Shopping at any level is a bit of therapy for my medulla oblongata. — Theophilus London

I didn’t learn about depression or anxiety at school. So when I had to go to my parents to say ‘I need help, I need to go to therapy,’ I felt like this weird, messed up kid. And I wasn’t… — Lili Reinhart

[Children] just cannot be sad too long, it is not in them, as children mourn in little bits here and there like patchwork in their lives. — Nancy E. Turner

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no one recipe for living that suits all cases. — Carl Jung

Happy Therapy Quotes

I explain to my patients that abused children often find it hard to disentangle themselves from their dysfunctional families, whereas children grow away from good, loving parents with far less conflict. After all, isn’t that the task of a good parent, to enable the child to leave home? — Irvin Yalom

For many people, managing pain involves using prescription medicine in combination with complementary techniques like physical therapy, acupuncture, yoga, and massage. I appreciate this because I truly believe medical care should address the person as a whole – their mind, body, and spirit. — Naomi Judd

The moment you have to recruit people to put another person down, in order to convince someone of your value is the day you dishonor your children, your parents and your God. If someone doesn’t see your worth the problem is them, not people outside your relationship. — Shannon L. Alder

By marrying to soon, many individuals sacrifice their chance to struggle through this purgatory of solitude and search toward a greater sense of self-confidence. They glance at the world outside the family and with hardly a second thought grasp anxiously for a partner. In marriage they seek a substitute for the security of the family of origin and an escape from aloneness. What they do not realize is that moving so quickly from one family to another, they make it easy to transfer to the new marriage all their difficult experiences in the family of origin. — Augustus Y. Napier

I used to be pretty hard on myself, like, if I didn’t like a haircut I did on someone, I would think about it a lot and second-guess myself. But after therapy and a lot of work, I know how to dust myself off a lot faster, and those things don’t knock me down as much as they used to. — Jonathan Van Ness

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination. — Carl Rogers

Psychotherapy is a cyclical process from isolation into relationship. It is cyclical because the patient, in terror of existential isolation, relates deeply and meaningfully to the therapist and then, strengthened by this encounter, is led back again to a confrontation with existential isolation. — Irvin D. Yalom

Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who’ve been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment. — James Hillman

I’m not really gay, and I can’t sit here and say that I am, because that’s not real and that’s not genuine. But I also can’t sit here and say that I’m straight. This is something I’ve come to the conclusion through therapy and from being honest with myself. I am bisexual. — Shane Dawson

I get a lot of the ideas when I’m resting – either when I’m meditating or getting some kind of work done on my back, like physical therapy or acupuncture. That’s where I get my best ideas, maybe because I’m balancing my body. — Katy Perry

A failure is not a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying. — BF Skinner

Words of comfort, skillfully administered, are the oldest therapy known to man. — Louis Nizer

In any given moment, we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety. — Abraham Maslow

When you’re singing, you’re using extra muscles, and it requires a lot of exercise and breathing. You can’t do that if you’re a sissy. If I have any fitness advice for people, I’d tell them to sing more. It’s good therapy, too. — Willie Nelson

Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime’s work, but it’s worth the effort. — Fred Rogers

And so, it is not astonishing that, though the patient enters therapy insisting that he wants to change, more often than not, what he really wants is to remain the same and to get the therapist to make him feel better. — Sheldon B. Kopp

Cognitive therapy is based on the idea that when you change the way you think, you can change the way you feel and behave. In other words, if we can learn to think about other people in a more positive and realistic way, it will be far easier to resolve conflicts and develop rewarding personal and professional relationships. — David D. Burns

Always remember that for each patient you see you may be the only person in their life capable of both hearing and holding their pain. If that’s not sacred, I don’t know what is.

Everyone may agree upon the diagnosis, but not everyone may consent to the therapy. Indeed, for healing, things have to be sacrificed at times and separation or loss might always be heartbreak and leave scars of remorse or regret. (Sorrow) — Erik Pevernagie

The future depends on what you do today. — Mahatma Ghandi

Psychotherapy is the art of finding the angel of hope in the midst of terror, despair and madness. — Cloe Madanes

Success as a therapist is not found in doing something for the client, but rather in being something for the client. — Ili Rivera Walter

There’s no weakness as great as false strength. — Stefan Molyneux

The manic relief that comes from the fantasy that we can with one savage slash cut the chains of the past and rise like a phoenix, free of all history, is generally a tipping point into insanity, akin to believing that we can escape the endless constraints of gravity, and fly off a tall building. I’m freeeee… SPLAT!. ― Stefan Molyneux

One of the best ways of repressing emotions is artificial certainty. — Stefan Molyneux

Loss is only temporary when you believe in God! — Latoya Alston

I’m on a constant path of self-discovery and change. I’m trying to become a better person, a nicer person. I love therapy – it’s brilliant. — Julia Sawalha

If you plan on being anything less than what you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life. — Abraham Maslow

The first principle of cognitive therapy is that all your moods are created by your ‘cognitions,’ or thoughts. A cognition refers to the way you look at things – your perceptions, mental attitudes, and beliefs. It includes the way you interpret things – what you say. about something or someone to yourself. — David D. Burns

I do it as a therapy. I do it as something to keep me alive. We all need a little discipline. Exercise is my discipline. — Jack LaLanne

Playing my drums is therapy. — Travis Barker

I’m not telling you it’s going to be easy. I’m telling you it’s going to be worth it. — Art Williams

Meanings are not determined by situations. We determine ourselves by the meanings we ascribe to situations. — Alfred Adler

Psychotherapy isn’t a twentieth-century artifice imposed on nature, but the reinstatement of a natural healing process. — Patricia Love

One of the things that therapists do if you are suicidal, like a trick, is ask you about the future. They want to know what your plans are. Do you want to be the president? Do you want to be a rock star? They want to know if you want to live later even if you want to die now. — Albert Borris

Positive psychology is not remotely intended to replace therapy or pharmacology. So when depressed, anxious or in panic or post-traumatic stress disorder I’m all for therapies that will work. Positive psychology is another arrow in the quiver of public policy and psychology through which we can raise wellbeing above zero. — Martin Seligman

People who are diagnosed as having generalized anxiety disorder are afflicted by three major problems that many of us experience to a lesser extent from time to time. First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural human inclination to focus on threats and bad news is strongly amplified in them, so that even significant positive events get suppressed. An inflexible mentality and tendency toward excessive verbalizing make therapeutic intervention a further challenge. — Winifred Gallagher

The role of the therapist is to reflect the being/accepting self that was never allowed to be in the borderline. — Michael Adzema

There are many ways of getting strong, sometimes talking is the best way. — Andre Agassi

The toxic behaviors were there before you decided to enter into relationships with them. The signs were there. You may have chosen to look the other way, but the signs were there. — P.A. Speers

Therapy and counseling can do wonderful things for people. But they have emerged so far as what are sometimes called ‘cottage industries’ – that is, as individuals or small groups offering generally quite expensive services to a few clients. — Alain de Botton

Using no control and using humor will build a relationship and make a dent to where the client puts the counselor in their quality world and then begins to relate and seek out the counselor. Effective therapy begins with the acceptance of the therapist into the client’s quality world. — William Glasser

Through therapy and a lot of thinking and writing my memoirs, I’ve been able to use my life as a lesson. — Jane Fonda

he chief difficulty for those who begin the study of scientific psychology is that men indulge in popular psychology. — Karl Muenzinger

I realized that therapy helps me explain what I’m feeling better. — Charlamagne Tha God

I would say that I began with a very edgy, very driven personality and after a sufficient amount of therapy over many, many years, I managed to become rather relaxed and happy. — John Cleese

And for me, it’s acting. I find acting very therapeutic for whatever it is. — Kevin Bacon

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out. – Robert Collier

The secret to change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new. — Dan Millman

Everything is in slow motion down there and silent. It could replace psychotherapy. — Ashrita Furman

You can’t selectively numb your anger, any more than you can turn off all lights in a room, and still expect to see the light. — Shannon L. Alder

I think therapy is a rather misguided notion of capitalist societies whereby the self-indulgent examination of one’s life supersedes the actual living of said life. — Peter Cameron

With ‘Location’ and all the other songs around it, my music turned into therapy for others. And that’s something I really love and am blown away by. — Khalid

A combination of fine tea, enchanting objects and soothing surroundings exerts a therapeutic effect by washing away the corrosive strains and stress of modern life. [… It] induces a mood that is spiritually refreshing [and produces] a genial state of mind. — John Blofeld

It is painful to face the self we know we have never had the integrity to honor and assert. — Nathaniel Branden

Sorrow can be a bully. — Amy Waldman

If you can’t control your tweeting habits, then stop tweeting. Go seek therapy. — Ana Navarro

How can you get through to yourself? — Alexandra Katehakis

I’d be cheating everyone here, the staff and rest of my teammate if I wasn’t able to stay on top of my work. It was almost like therapy, to come back and get in an environment I’m comfortable with. — Roger Clemens

If you are not happy with something, you should change it. So I went to a lot of therapy, and finally, I am able to speak up for myself: You are going to hear me roar! — Katy Perry

Food is a lot of people’s therapy – when we say comfort food, we really mean that. It’s releasing dopamine and serotonin in your brain that makes you feel good. — Brett Hoebel

I believe that a different therapy must be constructed for each patient because each has a unique story. — Irvin D. Yalom

Music is therapy. Music moves people. It connects people in ways that no other medium can. It pulls heartstrings. It acts as medicine. — Macklemore

And you? When will you begin the long journey into yourself? — Rumi