A Quote by Norman Doidge
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243)
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Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.
Our ancestors are looking for us even if we're not looking for them. And by our ancestors I mean our bloodlines and the ancestors of the place where we live and our spiritual kin who go beyond our biological families. We could be walking around carrying an entire ancestral history of the wrong kind for us.
Do you believe in spirits? Or ghosts?...Yes, I do. I believe in ghosts....They're the ones who haunt us. The ones who have left us behind." "Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn the corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles." "The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin.
There is a deep sense in which we are all ghost towns. We are all haunted by the memory of those we love, those with whom we feel we have unfinished business. While they may no longer be with us, a faint aroma of their presence remains, a presence that haunts us until we make our peace with them and let them go. The problem, however, is that we tend to spend a great deal of energy in attempting to avoid the truth. We construct an image of ourselves that seeks to shield us from a confrontation with our ghosts. Hence we often encounter them only late at night, in the corridors of our dreams.
The relationships we have with our doctors are often the most trusted relationships of our lives. Our doctors tell us hard truths that others will not. We often tell our doctors what we will not tell others. We trust our doctors to give us the good, the bad and the ugly about our health so that each of us can make an informed decision.
We all fall into our habits, our routines, our ruts. They're used quite often, consciously or unconsciously, to avoid living, to avoid doing the messy part of having relationships with other people, of dealing with a person next to us. That's why we can all be in a room on our cell phones and not have to deal with one another.
In a world where there are no longer books we have almost all of us read, the movies we have almost all of us seen are perhaps the richest cultural bond we have. They go on haunting us for years the way our dreams go on haunting us. In a way they are our dreams. The best of them remind us of human truths that would not seem as true without them. They help to remind us that we are all of us humans together.
I believe consciousness is non-local and a big part of what we experience with near death and past lives. It's the consciousness that has come into us from other experiences and our consciousness that we remain aware of when we leave our bodies and they communicate with us through dreams, and even through drawings which I do a lot of work with myself.
We are a part of everything that is beneath us, above us, and around us. Our past is our present, our present is our future, and our future is seven generations past and present.
Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.
Often we want people to pray for us and help us, but we always defeat our object when we look too much to them and lean upon them. The true secret of union is for both to look upon God, and in the act of looking past themselves to Him they are unconsciously united.
Habit is formed out of memory... We often shape our present situation according to those habitual memories. Instead of starting fresh, we go back to what we've done in the past... easier for us than fighting our way through foreign territory.
Let us give up our work, our thoughts, our plans, ourselves, our lives, our loved ones, our influence, our all, right into His hand, and then, when we have given all over to Him, there will be nothing left for us to trouble about, or to make trouble about.
When we resent someone in some way we need to "be on the alert" that even innocent gestures on their part can become suspect to us. Even something as simple as their walking into a room or whispering something to someone else can be conjured up in our minds, to look to us as if they're doing it on purpose to irritate us -as if they're involved in some diabolical plot to hurt us further. What they may be doing may have no connection to their past actions that hurt us in the first place but our resentful feelings against them can often taint our perception of what's really taking place.
It's really important to have life strategies and part of that is sort of knowing where you want to go so you can have a map that helps you to get there. And the traditional way tells us oh we get into school and someone else advises us, helps us, but that often does not work for African Americans female and male. Because what works for the dominant culture often does not work for us.
Houses are not haunted. We are haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves, our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.
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