Cover photograph supplied by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh.
A thematic selection of translated notebook fragments.
Therapy is a change in your concept of yourself.
Indifference towards yourself is a form of self-directed aggression.
Therapy helps you stop looking for a hero outside yourself.
A dependent person feels sorry for themselves; a codependent person feels sorry for the dependent person instead of themselves.
Through a relationship with a dependent person, the codependent person tries to buy themselves omnipotence.
The way a person pays for therapy reflects the way they value themselves.
A dependent person often arranges a failure as a reason to relapse.
The victim position goes like this: having offered yourself up, offer someone else up too.
The economy of victimhood is the wish to buy special treatment with your wounds.
Overcoming dependency can greatly revive your sense of dignity. Freedom is an instinct and a supreme value.
With impostor syndrome, it is hard to own your achievements because the person doing the owning has such a weak sense of themselves.
Feeling unwell is sometimes the only way the psyche can draw your attention to yourself.
Dependence on an outside observer’s judgement reveals the weakness of the inner observer: the point of self is barely defined.
Unhappiness is often the result of demands that do not fit reality. Neurosis is a kind of Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish.
The victim position means idealising yourself and demonising the other person. Demonising the other is itself a way of idealising yourself.
The victim position often obscures cause and effect. It all just happened, all by itself.
When people say they did something for someone else, they did it for themselves: to get what they wanted from that person.
A lack of moderation means poor contact with the feeling of enough. Excess does harm. “Why does a person need so much? To harm themselves.”
Managing your time and material resources depends directly on how much respect you have for yourself.
Treating yourself well is not the same as indulging yourself. Treating yourself well includes knowing how to limit what is excessive and harmful.
Psychology Notebook is a translated personal archive of observations, study and lecture notes, paraphrases, quotations and remembered ideas. A fragment’s presence here does not establish exclusive authorship or scientific consensus. These are notebook fragments, not clinical guidance.
About Psychology Notebook · Fragments from a Therapist’s Notebook