Cover photograph supplied by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh.
A thematic selection of translated notebook fragments.
A partner is a symptom brought outside.
A sign of counterdependency: getting hooked on rejecting partners.
Self-sufficiency is not isolation. It is the ability both to be with others and to spend time alone without looking for something to distract or entertain you.
Interestingly, an avoidant attachment style often goes together with multiple dependencies.
Whatever you run from, and however far you run, you still take your internal conflict with you.
Envy is hatred of someone who possesses what you love.
Codependency is not a two-person relationship. It is always a threesome: two people and a dependency.
In a codependent relationship, the codependent person uses the dependent person to avoid encountering their own pain.
A family prohibition on growing up often comes together with a prohibition on sexuality.
An unsuitable partner, with whom you feel bad but the relationship continues and continues, is a way of punishing yourself.
Resilience to stress is determined by the balance between curiosity about the new and fear of change. More resilient people are more curious.
Treating others as objects usually goes together with treating yourself as an object and a function.
The “bad” person is often someone we use to service our own goodness.
Separation means recognising a loved one’s right to experience difficult feelings without plunging into them yourself.
A person’s enemies tell us about them as well as their friends do. Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you what is in your shadow.
If a person cannot receive love, no amount of it will relieve the unbearable hunger.
An anxious-avoidant attachment style is a recursive practice: running from intimacy in terror at the fact that you are running from intimacy.
With a counterdependent pattern, an imagined ideal helps justify avoiding intimacy. If someone is not perfect, there is no point even starting.
Nothing distracts us from our own problems quite like trying to rescue someone.
Hurrying is one expression of the “flight” response. Yet in the end, hurrying is a reliable way to slow down and complicate any task.
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