“The work of psychological healing begins in a safe place, to be compared with the best of hospital experience or, from an earlier time, church sanctuary. The psychological safe place permits the individual to make spontaneous, forceful gestures and, at the same time, represents a community that both allows the gestures and is valued for its own sake. It stands at the crossroads of society and solitude, at the intersection of those often divergent and equally necessary paths leading to ourselves and to what we need for ourselves—others. In this safe place, created by doctor and patient, we can learn our inhibitions, false alliances, community-denying demands, and why we despair of anything better; and still more important, experience these bits of sickness within a deft association that provides tolerance and hope. Finally, this little community serves as a preliminary, general model for those eventual, particular lives we search for outside it.”

                                                                                                                                   

          Leston Havens. (1996). A Safe Place: Laying the Groundwork for Psychotherapy. p. vii.

 

 

 

“I have learned a surprising thing in writing this book. It is possible to move away from a vast, unbearable pain by delving into it deeper and deeper—by ‘diving into the wreck,’ to borrow the perfect words from Adrienne Rich. You can look at all the parts of a terrible thing until you see that they’re assemblies of smaller parts, all of which you can name, and some of which you can heal or alter, and finally the terror that seemed unbearable becomes manageable. I suppose what I am describing is the process of grief.”

 

                                   Barbara Kingsolver. (2003). Small Wonder: Essays. p. xiii.

 

 

“This book reveals specific aspects of my work toward one end: to write history where silence reigned, where silence was broken by an undeciphered cry that went unheard. When all the traces of history have been erased and the body itself is inscribed with an unknown language, how does a child begin to speak? How is it possible to listen so that the child comes to know something vital, and speaking freely becomes possible, so that living inside one’s own body is no longer a nightmare? These are the questions that would guide my listening.”

 

             Annie G. Rogers. (2007). The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma, p. xiv.

 

 

 

“What then can exist between the scream and the silence [of trauma]? We hope first that there is an engaged witness—an other that stands beside the event and the self and who cares to listen; an other who is able to contain that which is heard and is capable of imagining the unbearable; an other who is in a position to confirm both our external and our psychic realities and, thereby, to help us integrate and live within all realms of our experience. This is the presence that lives in the gap, absorbs absence, and transforms our relation to loss. It is the active and attuned affective responsiveness of the witnessing other that constitutes a ‘live third’—the presence that exists between the experience and its meaning, between the real and the symbolic, and through whom life gestates and into whom futures are born.”

           

            Samuel Gerson. (2009). “When the Third is Dead: Memory, Mourning, and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust.” p. 1342.

 

 

“One of therapy’s blessings is to promote the freedom to allow all sorts of psychic productions to swim into view, so that we become a little less afraid of ourselves. Not only does therapy let us see more of ourselves, but it does so from many different angles. In time, we begin to transcend any given vision. We are more than the sum of the thoughts, images, feelings, and actions that we produce. We do not possess immunity from our attitudes, beliefs, and frailties. But we discover that home is not identical with anything we can pin down.”

 

                   Michael Eigen. (1992). Coming Through the Whirlwind: Case Studies in Psychotherapy. p. 2.

 

 

 

 

“And what each of us needs from the other, whether on the couch or behind it, is at depth pretty much the same for both. We need to find in the other an affirming witness to the best that we hope we are, as well as an accepting and dependable respondent to those worst aspects of ourselves that we fear we are. We seek to test and find ourselves in the intimacy of the therapeutic relationship, to become known to and accepted by the other, in whose sum we may more fully assess ourselves.”

 

           James T. McLaughlin. (2005). The Healers Bent:  Solitude and Dialogue

in the Clinical  Encounter.  pp.157-158.