“Knowing someone is the first goal of therapy. Modulating emotionality - whether by relatedness or psychopharmacology or both - is second. Therapy's last and most ambitious aim is revising the neural code that directs an emotional life. (176)” — Thomas Lewis Copy Share Image
“One brain’s blueprint may promote joy more readily than most; in another, pessimism reigns. Whether happiness infuses or eludes a person depends, in part,… — Thomas Lewis Copy Share Image
“The limbic connectedness of a working psychotherapy requires uncommon courage. A patient asks to surrender the life he knows and to enter and emotional… — Thomas Lewis Copy Share Image
“Everything a person is and everything he knows resides in the tangled thicket of his intertwined neurons. These fateful, tiny bridges number in the… — Thomas Lewis Copy Share Image
“People who need regulation often leave therapy sessions feeling calmer, stronger, safer, more able to handle the world. Often they don't know why. Nothing… — Thomas Lewis Copy Share Image
“People rely on intelligence to solve problems, and they are naturally baffled when comprehension proves impotent to effect emotional change. To the neocortical brain,… — Thomas Lewis Copy Share Image
“The benefits of deep attachment are powerful - regulated people feel whole, centered, alive.” — Thomas Lewis Copy Share Image
“Long-standing togetherness writes permanent changes into a brain's open book. In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. (144)” — Thomas Lewis Copy Share Image
“When trying to fathom an immense, intricate system, drawing direct arrows of causality between micro and macro-components is perilous. Which stock caused the crash… — Thomas Lewis Copy Share Image
“Modern amorists are sometimes taken aback at the prospect of investing in a relationship with no guarantee of reward. It is precisely that absence,… — Thomas Lewis Copy Share Image
“In a dazzling vote of confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being “in love” while discounting the importance… — Thomas Lewis Copy Share Image
“A person cannot direct his emotional life in the way he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. He cannot will himself… — Thomas Lewis Copy Share Image
“What Richard Selzer, M.D. once wrote of surgery is true of therapy: only human love keeps this from being the act of two madmen.” — Thomas Lewis Copy Share Image
