Thomas Lewis Quotes

The person of the therapist is the converting catalyst, not his order or credo, not his spatial location in the room, not his exquisitely chosen words or denominational silences. So long as the rules of a therapeutic system do not hinder limbic transmission - a critical caveat - they remain inconsequential, neocortical distractions. The dispensable trappings of dogma may determine what a therapist thinks he is doing, what he talks about when he talks about therapy, but the agent of change is who he is. (187)

The benefits of deep attachment are powerful - regulated people feel whole, centered, alive.

Every mental activity — contemplating a theorem, savoring a hot fudge sundae, dreaming of the boy next door — consists of neurons firing in a certain sequence.

"When anxiety becomes problematic, most people try vainly to think their way out of trouble. But worry has its roots in the reptilian brain, minimally responsive to will. As a wise psychoanalyst once remarked of the autonomic nervous system (which carries the outgoing fear messages from the reptilian brain), "It's so far from the head it doesn't even know there is a head." (49)"

DNA is not the heart’s destiny; the genetic lottery may determine the cards in your deck, but experience deals the hand you can play.

Like any other momentous shift in emotion, depression is not an occupation by a foreign army; it is civil insurrection, the subversion of identity's republic from within. A depressed person loses more than energy and appetite — he loses himself and the capacity to make the decisions his former, pre-coup self would have made.

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 of ’29? Which person triggered the outbreak of World War I? Which word of Poe’s “The Rave” suffuses it with an atmosphere of brooding melancholy?

Many people conceive of evolution as an upward staircase, an unfolding sequence that produces ever more advanced organisms. From this perspective, the advantages of the neocortex — speech, reason, abstraction — would naturally be judged the highest attributes of human nature. But the vertical conceptualization of evolution is fallacious. Evolution is a kaleidoscope, not a pyramid: the shapes and variety of species are constantly shifting, but there is no basis for assigning supremacy, no pinnacle toward which the system is moving. Five hundred million years ago, every species was either adapted to that world or changing to become so. The same is true today. We are free to label ourselves the end product of evolution not because it is so, but because we exist now. Expunge this temperocentrist bias, and the neocortical brain is not the most advanced of the three, but simply the most recent.

Too many Americans are spurred to achieve, rather than to attach.

Emotions are humanity's motivator and its omnipresent guide. (36)

Recordings of encephalographic electrical waves show, amid their jagged spikes and hieroglyph swirls, a signature downward dip signifying that a neuronal mandate for motion is under way: the so-called readiness wave. While the motor cortex produces motion, the readiness wave appears to signal intent. So we should look here for will.

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 a patient depends, the more his stability swells, expanding infinitesimally with ever session as length is added to a woven cloth with each pass of the shuttle, each contraction of the loom. And after he weaves enough of it, the day comes when the patient will unfurl his independence like a pair of spread wings. Free at last, he catches a wind and rides into other lands. (172)

The brain’s dense thicket of interrelationships, like those of history or art, does not yield to the reductivist’s bright blade.

Evolution is a wandering process wherein multiple simultaneous influences, including chance and circumstance, shape biological structures over eons. A more capricious designer than any committee, evolution is a story full of starts, setbacks, compromises, and blind alleys, as generations of organisms adapt to fluctuating conditions.

Proof that expressions are intrinsic is closer at hand than the South Pacific. As Darwin knew, a congenitally blind baby will smile while interacting pleasurably with his mother. Such a smile comes from a developing creature unable to speak, walk, or even sit up, but he already knows how to express happiness through a configuration of muscular contractions he has never seen on anyone’s face.