“Cultural messages inform the populace that if they aren't perpetually electric they are missing out on the pinnacle of relatedness. Every pop-cultural medium portrays the height of adult intimacy as the moment when two attractive people who don’t know a… — 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 world he has never seen; he offers himself up to be changed in ways he can't possibly envision. As his assurance of successful transmutation he has only the gossamer of faith. At the journey's end, he… — Thomas Lewis Copy Share
“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 obviously helpful happened - telling a stranger about your pain sounds nothing like a certain recipe for relief. And the feeling inevitably dwindles, sometimes within minutes, taking the warmth and security with it. But the longer… — Thomas Lewis Copy Share
“People rely on intelligence to solve problems, and they are naturally baffled when comprehension proves impotent to effect emotional change. To the neocortical brain, rich in the power of abstractions, understanding makes all the difference, but it doesn’t count for much in the neural systems that evolved before understanding existed. Ideas bounce like so many peas off the sturdy incomprehension… — Thomas Lewis Copy Share
“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 to want the right thing or to love the right person or to be happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times. People lack this capacity not through a deficiency of discipline… — Thomas Lewis Copy Share
“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
