Read Acid Test to Discover—
• How To Improve Your Creativity
• How To Improve Your Flexibility
• How To Improve Your Openness
• How To Improve Your Mental Perception
Counseling Posters
• This book is a compilation of posters from the author’s counseling practice.
• Some posters were designed to hang in the office, some in the waiting room, and some for clients to take home.
• Additional sayings have been added, and many posters have been rewritten and modified.
Chapter Contents for 1–3
• The first chapter consists of sayings related to right and wrong thinking patterns.
• You are helped to discover how thinking can easily lead to misperception.
• You are encouraged not to make thinking the screen between you and life.
• Thought can be either a wall or a door depending on how you use it.
• Chapter Two contains sayings that help make the difference between being a container and being the contents of a container.
• You are helped to rediscover your child nature as a container in favor of your adult nature as contents.
• Understanding the nature of self makes it easier to choose to live in authentic moments.
• The third chapter gathers sayings that help point to what is and what is not genuine self.
• You are helped to discover and live in self instead of ego.
Chapter Contents for 4–8
• Chapter Four mainly concerns how and why you are responsible for your feelings.
• You are helped to become more mature by owning and accepting responsibility for your feelings.
• Owning your feelings is necessary for awareness and honesty.
• Being responsible for your feeling is necessary for leading an empowered life.
• The fifth chapter collects sayings that did not easily fit into one of the first four chapters.
• Most of those sayings continue ideas presented in the previous chapters.
• You will discover as much meaning as your ego defenses will allow.
• Chapters 1–5 contain 365 sayings making them suitable for daily reflection or a calendar.
• Chapter Six consists of longer posters that could and should not be reduced to sayings.
• The seventh chapter consists of poems related to the book’s ideas.
• Chapter Eight is the final chapter, which includes end matter, such as a recommended reading list.
Benefit from Aphorisms
• Pithy sayings can be either instantly helpful or meaningless.
• Often, the best results from sayings or aphorisms come after they have grown slowly in the garden of your mind.
• Ideas you may reject at first can come to have more meaning in time.
• Aphorisms that make no sense today can suddenly reveal themselves to you years later.
• Some sayings can follow and teach you for a lifetime. For example, “Drink from your own well” has taught the author repeatedly for many years.
• Making yourself contemplate a saying you do not understand can reveal much about your thinking styles.
• Is it the saying or your lack of openness that is cold?
• Feeling your way to the inside meat of a saying is the best approach.
Sayings Bring Stillness
• Focus on the sayings that bring stillness.
• Listen beyond the words.
• Feel, rather than think, the sayings through.
• Sense, rather than think, the music behind the words.
• Manage to touch the energy behind the words, and your heart will be touched.
• If you are interested in quotations, then please visit the author’s website.
• There, you will find lists of quotations organized by topic.
• If you find quotations intriguing but not fulfilling, then please examine some of the author’s other works listed at the end of the book.
• Read and enjoy!
After more than twenty-five years in the counseling field, Mr. FitzMaurice has refined many principles and methods of counseling. He now puts those principles and methods into book form to share them with a wider audience, so more people can benefit than he can reach in person. He has more than forty books, most of which are available worldwide from Amazon and other sources.
Mr. FitzMaurice has a variety of formal and advanced training in counseling, which includes Addictions Counseling, Family Therapy, advanced Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), Transactional Analysis (TA), and over 1,650 hours of diverse training for continuing education units (CEUs).
To make the best use of that extensive training, he takes an integrative approach, grounding himself in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (REBT and CBT) and using the other theories to build upon that one core theory, rather than focusing on multiple theories and mastering none of them.
His writings and interests focus on philosophy, psychology, recovery, self-help, and spirituality.