Psychologists From The United States

"Maintaining the illusion that I am in control is futile, lonely, and in the long run more always costly than the effort is worth."

"We make a mistake if we ask ourselves, "Am I good enough?" or "Is it worthwhile to be me?" … Whoever heard of a baby who was inadequate or a child who did not know just exactly how to be a child? How could it not be all right for me to be me? How could it not be just right for you to be you?"

"We must learn to give ourselves permission to blunder, to fail, and to make fools of ourselves every day for the rest of our lives. We do so in any case."

"The results were clear: the new environment inhibited recognition."

"In real life, as well as in experiments, people can come to believe things that never really happened."

"I collaborated on a brain imaging study in 2010, and the overwhelming conclusion we reached is that the neural patterns were very similar for true and false memories. We are a long way away from being able to look at somebody's brain activity and reliably classify an authentic memory versus one that arose through some other process."

"Therapists probably can't ethically do it, and they may have anti-deception provisions in their standards of conduct. But bad governments, bad people, they don't have requirements of conduct. When we recently published a study about planting false memories among U.S. soldiers, I was worried we were putting out a recipe for how you can do horrible things to somebody and then wipe their memory away."

"It is possible not to think about something for a long time, even something unpleasant that happened to you. But what's been claimed in these repressed-memory cases is something, by definition, that's too extreme to be explained by ordinary forgetting and remembering. They're saying that in order to go on in life, you had to wall off this memory, because it would be too painful to live with. Then finally you go into therapy and crack through the repression barrier and out comes this pristine memory. But there really is no credible scientific support for that notion."

"Memory works like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people."

"Which would you rather have? A kid with obesity, heart problems, shortened lifespan, diabetes -- or maybe a little bit of false memory?"

"Even if it's going to be a harmful memory, they don't want to let it go. (This is) why sometimes I get such resistance to the work I do. Because it's telling people that your mind might be full of much more fiction than you realize. And people don't like that."

"The problem is clear: the unreliability of eyewitness identification evidence poses one of the most serious problems in the administration of criminal justice and civil litigation."

"To be cautious, one should not take high confidence as any absolute guarantee of anything."

"It is a comfort to us that Jesus didn’t suffer in silence or with a smile."

"He has always been here, and He is here now. He loves you and is working actively for your good in His own way."

"…the big picture of our spiritual growth is not an event but the development of the habit of relationship with God."

"God wants to help us and will bear our burdens."

"Open your heart and your sad feelings to Him and the safe people He brings to you."

"Faith grows when we assume the position of one who can’t do it all by himself. That means we go to God, follow Him, and ask Him for help."

"Some of us have young faith, some broken faith, and some mature faith."

"We must exercise faith. We don’t pretend we’re fine. We don’t deny it. But we trust in Him."

"…faith in God creates the possibility that even if our situations do not change, life can be good."

"We want to know that life is good. Not perfect but good. Not problem free, but good. Good in some way that we did not anticipate. Good in some way that connects us to God, others, and our purposes in life."

"What is faith? Faith is trusting God for your problems and for your life."

"Hope is impossible unless we experience empathy and identification. We cannot feel hopeful that things will be OK unless someone understands what we are going through and gets it."

"I can’t keep count of the times when I have seen how hard times make people much more relationally accessible than they were before their difficulty."

"The message of Scripture is that God wants us to connect both with Him and also with each other."

"Where do you go when hard times hit? Most of the time, our tendency is to enter our internal cave…we naturally shut down, withdraw from it all, and try to figure things out on our own, reemerging from life when we have some sense of centeredness."

"I would not feel a lot of trust or hope in God if He was simply in touch with me without any impetus, power, or force to accomplish things. You may not always know the end game, but He is working for you."

"Trust in and value the benefit of God’s compassion and identification."

"Connecting with others during difficult times makes the trials more bearable."

"God has made Himself knowable through the Bible."

"Our image of God, whom we can’t see, is deeply affected by people, whom we can see."

"“Where are You?” can be both a protest against a problem and a search for understanding and perspective."

"…there is something beyond our circumstances, and that is an emotional, from-the-heart connection to God, no matter what is going on in our lives."

"I have noticed in this economic downturn that more of my friends talk about God…"

"Our tendency is to be strong, self-sufficient, and dependent on our own willpower, but rather than try harder, we should reach out to the God who is all-powerful…"

"…the central message of the Bible is about God redeeming a humanity that is in trouble and suffering."

"David, the man after God’s own heart, got right to it and spilled out his guts about his experience: “How long, O LORD? Will You forget me forever?”"

"It is easy to think that we should put up a brave front and stay positive about all our struggles. But that is not the biblical model."

"The essence of grace is that God is for you."

"Though your experience may indicate that God has forgotten you or has left you alone, He is on your side. He is the God of grace, and He is actively working on your behalf."

"Whatever our situation, we feel some sense of confusion, anxiety, and helplessness. At the same time, we think about God and wonder where He is."

"We need to find the courage to say NO to the things and people that are not serving us if we want to rediscover ourselves and live our lives with authenticity."

"If you aren't good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you'll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren't even giving to yourself."

"The more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present."

"In his subsequent book “Reflections on Life After Life,” Moody says:“All of these people agree on one point: they felt their suicidal attempts solved nothing. They found that they were involved [in the other world] in exactly the same problems from which they had been trying to extricate themselves by suicide. Whatever difficulty they had been trying to get away from was still there on the other side, unresolved. One person mentioned being “trapped” in the situation which had provoked her suicide attempt. [It was] repeated again and again, as if in a cycle.”"

"In his famous and highly regarded book “Life After Life.” With regard to interviews he had conducted with people who had had a Near Death Experience as a result of a suicide attempt from which they either survived or were medically resuscitated, Moody writes: “These experiences were uniformly characterized as being unpleasant. As one woman said, ‘If you leave here a tormented soul, you will be a tormented soul over there, too.’ In short, they report that the conflicts they had attempted suicide to escape were still present when they died, but with added complications. In their disembodied state they were unable to do anything about their problems, and they also had to view the unfortunate consequences which resulted from their acts. A man who was despondent about the death of his wife shot himself, ‘died’ as a result, and was resuscitated. He states: ‘I didn’t go where [my wife] was, I went to an awful place. … I immediately saw the mistake I had made. … I thought, ‘I wish I hadn’t done it.’ Others who experienced this unpleasant ‘limbo’ state have remarked that they had the feeling they would be there for a long time. This was their penalty for ‘breaking the rules’ by trying to release themselves prematurely from what was, in effect, an ‘assignment’ – to fulfill a certain purpose in life.”"

"Atheism may be, in some cases, just verbal behavior masking personal feelings that may be very different, perhaps even deeply religious."

"When an individual wishes to stand in opposition to authority, he does best to find support for his position from others in his group. The mutual support provided by men for each other is the strongest bulwark we have against the excesses of authority. (Not that the group is always on the right side of the issue. Lynch mobs and groups of predatory hoodlums remind us that groups may be vicious in the influence they exert.)"