Claire Weekes Quotes

“A setback is part of recovery.”

“Accept that you may frighten yourself for some time to come-until habit dies and sensitization improves.”

“Be patient - we have to grow into recovery.”

“Be prepared to let it do its very worst.”

“Be prepared to think and feel anything. Let come what will.”

“Coping, although frightened, is true courage.”

“Do not be bluffed by new strange nervous feelings.”

“Float through it, don't fight it.”

“Floating resembles accepting but implies moving forward with the sensations and feelings without offering tense resistance”

“Go with the tide, tread water, until the worst is over.”

“However long you have suffered, if you wish to recover then you can!”

“If you sometimes seek refuge outside, ask yourself why you can gradually relax when outside yet cannot do so while inside. You will say, "As soon as I am outside I feel different."
The truth is, as soon as you are outside you think differently so of course you feel better. You can find peace in the middle of Times Square because you take your cure with you wherever you go.”

“In the final count, it takes less effort, even less courage, to go forward with true acceptance than to go forward fighting grimly.”

“Inward thinking can be cured!”

“It is important to be able to tolerate being alone - otherwise you will spend your life running away from yourself.”

“Let true acceptance be written on your heart.”

“Pay them no mind!”

“Recovery always lies ahead - however painful the moment.”

“Recovery lies in the places and experiences you fear the most.”

“Some people are discouraged by the word ‘accept’. I then suggest that they move forward prepared to 'react freely,' that is to give free rein to all feelings and let them all come without trying to brake any of them.”

“Strength is not born from strength. Strength can be born only from weakness. So be glad of your weaknesses now, they are the beginnings of your strength.”

“The agoraphobe must go out prepared to panic but he must know how to go through the panic when it comes. There is a special technique for doing this: he must be prepared to accept the panic as willingly as he can manage, at the same time breathing in deeply, then breathing our slowly and letting the panic flash without withdrawing from it. It is useless to go through 99% of the panic and then withdraw from the last 1%. Recovery lies in going through that last 1%. It is withdrawal that is the jailer. Acceptance relieves enough tension to take the biting edge off the peak of the first fear and to blunt the impact of the second fear. This is the beginning of recovery. A word can make a great difference to a patient. One woman said: “I hate panic so much, I’ll never be able to accept it and go toward it willingly!” I asked: “Could you go toward it resignedly?” She thought she could.”

“The average person, tense with battling, has an innate aversion to letting go. He vaguely thinks that were he to do this, he would lose control over the last vestige of his will power and his house of cards would tumble.”

“The body will react just as naturally by healing itself when stress is removed.”

“They are only thoughts - however horrible.”

“Thoughts that are keeping you ill can be changed - your approach to your illness can be changed.”

“To recover, he must know how to face, accept, and go through panic until it no longer matters. This is the only way to permanent cure.”

“True acceptance means 'facing and relaxing' - it is submission.”

“Try to not withdraw at the peak of suffering. This is the most important moment.”

“Understanding in itself releases some tension.”

“You may think I stress acceptance too much. You may be skeptical about the simplicity of this approach or may have hoped for a more impressive treatment, especially one that does not leave so much for you to do.

I stress acceptance because I have seen it cure when all else failed. I have seen it cure people after more than forty years of trying one different method after another. Indeed I have not seen it fail. Of course, acceptance is made easier by understanding, and this I am trying to give you.

Consider how acceptance works. It brings a less tense approach; emotions have a chance to calm a little, and there is release from asking the everlasting WHY? WHY? WHY? So mental fatigue gradually lifts.”

“You will never recover while gazing at the ceiling.”

“'Putting up with' means withdrawing from panic in panic; adding panic to panic, hoping that panic will go quickly and not come back; it means avoiding people and places that bring on panic so that one’s horizon becomes narrower and narrower until it is finally bounded by the front gate; it means always keeping the way open for quick retreat; it means expecting retreat. It means continued illness.”

“If our education had included training to bear unpleasantness and to let the first shock pass until we could think more calmly, many an apparently unbearable situation would become manageable, and many a nervous illness avoided. There is proverb expressing this. It says, trouble is a tunnel thorough which we pass and not a brick wall against which we must break our head.”

“Present sensitization remains to be cured, whatever the original cause.”

“Recovery lies in
- Facing
- Accepting
- Floating
- Letting time pass”

“The great majority of my nervously ill patients have been made ill and kept ill because of the way they feel; because of fear of what they think may happen next.”

“When a person is constantly sensitized and afraid of the state he is in, we say he is nervously ill.”

“Without fear a body will quickly repair its sensitized state.”

“Nothing is quite as depressing as depression.”

“Setback is like Grandma's muffins.”

“Wait on no mood.”

“When desperately concerned with our own affairs, it is not easy for any one of us to be interested in a neighbor's new stereo.”

“You may think that there is so much to remember, so much to do.
There isn't, you know. It is all in one word: accept.”

“You who are suffering and read this, turn your attention to the way you think, not to your feelings. Come to terms with your attitude, and your feelings will look after themselves”

“So when you panic, take a deep breath, let your body go loose, wait, and then go on. It's like playing golf: You know how to swing a club, but to do it the right way every time is a different matter.”

“When you learn how to cope with panic and all the other sensations that you dread, you gradually lose your fear of them, and when you are unafraid, there is no longer any it, because it is the fear you create.”