I've always had a deep appreciation for idiomatic expressions. Years ago, I lived in a tiny French town where I taught English alongside an Italian friend who taught Italian. Bored but inspired, we convinced the local radio station to give us a show where we'd explain idiomatic expressions from our respective languages to French audiences.
That experience taught me something valuable - that idiomatic expressions and quotes aren't just clever Instagram captions. They're powerful tools that compress ideas, theories, and thoughts into compact phrases. I think this is why they resonate.
With that in mind, I want to share some idiomatic expressions that might speak to you if you're considering therapy - especially from a psychodynamic and object relations lens. While these therapeutic approaches aren't extremely complicated to understand, the right quotes can capture their essence and show you how they work in practice.
This quote gets at the heart of psychodynamic work. Our internalized beliefs are like maps we create in childhood, but by the time we're adults, these maps are often outdated and no longer reflect current reality (the territory).
Think of Christopher Columbus searching for a route to India. His map was so inaccurate that he ended up in the Caribbean yet thought he was in India. He couldn't see the territory for what it actually was (
The same thing happens in our emotional lives. When you find yourself in repeated disagreements or patterns that keep showing up in your relationships, you might be operating from an old map about what's acceptable behavior. That map doesn't match the territory of your current reality. Psychodynamic therapy helps you recognize when your internal map needs updating.
This Shakespeare quote describes the central principle of psychodynamic work: past experiences, especially traumatic ones from early childhood, shape your current behavior and emotional life.
Just as you can't fully understand a book without reading its prologue (or risk losing a lot of context), you can't fully understand your present patterns without examining your past. The key insight here is that by understanding your prologue (not necessarily rewriting it, but understanding it), you can make sense of your current chapters. Once you understand your past, you gain the power to make different decisions moving forward. Which leads me to...
There's a common misconception that psychodynamic therapy is all talk and no change, that you'll spend sessions waxing poetic about your feelings without actually transforming anything. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The concept of "awareness is choice" connects to a fundamental truth: if your patterns are unconscious, you can't change them because you don't even know they're there. But once you become conscious of those patterns, you open yourself to the possibility of change. Awareness gives you options you didn't know existed.
Psychodynamic and object relations therapy helps you celebrate your unique story while giving you the tools to write new chapters. The idiomatic expressions above are shortcuts to understanding how this powerful therapeutic approach can help you make sense of your life and create meaningful change.
If you find yourself caught in repeating patterns, struggling with relationships in ways that feel familiar, or wondering why certain situations trigger unexpectedly strong reactions, psychodynamic therapy might offer the insights you're looking for. It's an approach that honors your past while empowering your future.