When You're Going Through Hell ...Keep Going

By Robert Falconer

The quotes in this book are the harvest of more than half a century spent studying and working at the boundary of spirituality and psychotherapy.

We cannot heal deeply unless we find some spiritual basis for our lives. These quotes have helped me form the bridge between trauma and psychotherapy on one side and spiritual healing and a sense

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Falconer
• Release date: Apr 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9798987858851

Robert Falconer

Robert Falconer is best known for his deep involvement with Internal Family Systems therapy as a practitioner, teacher, and writer. For much of his long career, he has focused on the healing of childhood sexual abuse and other major trauma. He now is focused on placing IFS in a multicultural and historical context and working with the others within us --what we find in our minds that is not part of our systems, called unattached burdens and guides in IFS. Bob has come to recognize and appreciate that how we conceive of ourselves and the boundaries of our minds is vitally important, not only as a substantial cause of personal suffering but also as an underlying factor in many of our modern social problems.

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Advance Praise for

When You’re Going Through Hell … Keep Going

Have you ever wished that someone would curate a book of profound, witty, astute, arresting quotes that you can peruse at breakfast, peek at on your way to a nap, forage for a presentation, or memorize before taking a walk on the beach? Well, here it is—a book that abounds with the bright lights of the attuned mind. Thank you, Bob!

— Martha Sweezy, PhD, Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, therapist in a private practice, and author of several IFS books

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A treasure chest of quotes, aphorisms, and anecdotes that will inspire, awaken, and make you think. Falconer has a touch for finding those jewels that both amuse and move. Either way, these nuggets open our heart and stir our deepest self.

— Frank Rogers Jr., PhD, Professor, Claremont School of Theology and co-founder of the Center for Engaged Compassion

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Timeless wisdom from across the ages from one of our finest therapy sages. May the luminous brilliance of this treasure trove of jewels reflect and illuminate your own true and deep Self.

— Barney Jordan, PhD, Harvard Medical School–trained psychologist and former meditation teacher at MIT

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If you’re on a healing journey, this remarkable collection of quotes is a wonderful companion. There’s so much timeless wisdom to nurture wounds, feed your Soul, and inspire you on your path forward.

— Stephen Chee, MD, MPH, MA, MTOM, LAc

When You’re Going Through Hell … Keep Going

Trauma, Healing, Spirit,

and Internal Family Systems

Robert Falconer

The title is a quote attributed to Sir Winston Churchill.

When You’re Going Through Hell … Keep Going:

Trauma, Healing, Spirit, and Internal Family Systems

Copyright © 2024 by Robert Falconer

Without prejudice, all rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise), without written permission from the author.

Great Mystery Press

www.greatmysterypress.com

Other recent books by Robert Falconer

The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems,

Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession

Many Minds, One Self: Evidence for a Radical Shift in Paradigm

Co-authored with Richard C. Schwartz

Introduction

The quotations and stories in this book were collected over the past fifty years as I have pursued healing for my own trauma and that of my clients. Healing from major trauma does not occur without spiritual depth and connection. Western therapy has largely ignored or denied this fact. The quotations in this collection can help us restore the connection between spirit and healing.

My own history is one of extreme abuse. We were a churchgoing family and, from the outside, looked fine. Under this thin veneer was rampant addiction and violence. My father, and sometimes his friends, sadistically sexually molested and beat both my brother and me throughout our childhood. Dad was a high-functioning alcoholic. Mom was a binge-drinking alcoholic and prescription pill addict. She was hospitalized several times for mental illness. When we were teenagers, my brother died by suicide. When I was twenty-one, my father was murdered in an unsolved crime.

All of this left me with many wounds that have taken a lifetime of hard work to heal. Many kinds of therapy have helped: Ericksonian hypnotherapy, ego state therapy, Pia Mellody’s Post-Induction Therapy, and Internal Family Systems therapy. This last one—IFS for short—is the most potent and respectful of all these modalities, in my opinion, and what I now mainly practice. IFS is at its core a spiritual method, but this is mostly implicit. All these therapy methods are important, but without connection to a deep ground of being, a sense of meaning and value—in short, spirituality—none of these therapies are enough.

It does not seem to matter much which spiritual tradition people connect with or whether they develop an original and unique approach. What seems to matter is that each person find a depth of meaning—a sense of values that is profound and solid enough for them to rest into during all the storms of recovery. These stories, sayings, and quotes have helped me and many others find this connection. I hope they help you as well.

Years ago I had a friend who was a bundle of contradictions. He was a high-powered executive who wore suits that cost thousands of dollars, and he drove the most expensive sports cars. He was an extremely muscular bodybuilder, and he deeply loved poetry. He would copy a poem and keep it in his wallet. Whenever he had a few minutes, he would pull it out and read it. When he read these poems aloud to me, he often broke out in tears. His way of being with these poems made them a part of his life that changed who he was. We need something similar so these quotations can affect us deeply. Some quotes—for example, Speak to be known; listen to be changed—seem so simple, we could just rush past them. But if you live with this quote, it will change how you relate to people. It helped me realize how much of what I said grew out of my desire to be liked and respected. When I listen to be changed, I take people much more seriously and listen much more respectfully, and they usually notice. These small changes can alter the whole tone of a conversation.

Please do not try to read straight through this book. If you do, you will quickly feel overwhelmed. Just read a few until one catches your attention, and then close the book and let it work in you. I hope you take the time to adopt some of these quotes and see if they can enlarge your life.

The Western tradition has been grounded for so long in a monarchy of the I and tyranny of univocal reason that we cannot believe that there could be psychical spontaneity without anarchy, polyphony without discord, or pluralism without psychosis.

—Graham Parks

If you want something you have never had, you must be willing to do something you have never done.

—Thomas Jefferson

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

—Proverbs 29:18

No statement, theological or otherwise, should ever be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.

—Rabbi Greenberg

Any movement toward wholeness begins with acknowledgment of our own suffering and the suffering of the world.

—Gabor Maté

First people are obsessed with their parents. Then they are obsessed with their partner. Then they are obsessed with their children. But who is obsessed with the Self?

—The Puranas, a Hindu holy text

If you want to know what a man is like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.

—J. K. Rowling

The Mari

The Mari are an ethnic group in northern Russia. There were once some fifty thousand of them, but their numbers are dwindling as the young people move to cities and abandon the old ways. The Mari don’t worship in churches—they worship outdoors. This would not be a huge challenge where I live in California, but in northern Russia it is a serious commitment. They worship among some sacred groves near the river. Any building we worship in, even the oldest churches, contains us in a history that is only one or two thousand years old at most. It contains us in a culture that is a very small part of all that is. Outside, we’re in a world that is hundreds of thousands of years old in terms of the species and rivers that surround us. We are no longer contained in something made by humans. The planet we stand on and the sky above us are billions of years old. We are in an immeasurably vaster place, a place not limited by our humanity, a place open to much bigger and more ancient things.

Whitewashing the pump won’t make the water pure.

—Traditional saying

We see truth most clearly through the eyes of love.

Home isn’t a place—it’s a person.

Ring the bell is that still can ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

—Leonard Cohen

The end is where we start from.

—T. S. Eliot

The addictions and the symptoms are not the problem—they are attempted solutions.

The Four Brains

Dan Foster is a friend of mine. He’s not only a doctor and therapist with more than forty years of experience; he’s also an Indigenous elder steeped in his Sioux traditions. We were discussing the three-brain theory of mind: the reptilian brain, which consists of the spinal cord and brain stem and which is survival oriented; the mammalian brain—basically the limbic system, which is about relationship; and the neocortex, which is responsible for thinking. This is a widely accepted model based on the triune brain research of Dr. Paul MacLean. Dan said it’s wrong. It misses the most important and evolved brain of all: spirit. There are four brains, not three.

Our literature is a substitute for religion.

—T. S. Eliot

He who does not weep does not see.

—Victor Hugo

The Monk and the Bum

In ancient India, there was a temple devoted to Shiva. The most sacred item in this temple was the