Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

by Lori Gottlieb

In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.

People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.

The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at.

There is a continuing decision to be made as to whether to evade pain, or to tolerate it and therefore modify it.

our histories affect the ways we think, feel, and behave and how at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past.

When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists. But if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place, in perpetual regret.

But if I live in the present, I’ll have to accept the loss of my future.

Happiness equals reality minus expectations.

part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.

Einstein: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

What makes night within us may leave stars. —Victor Hugo

“Avoidance is a simple way of coping by not having to cope.”

You can still have another child. At least he lived a long life. She’s in a better place now. When you’re ready, you can always get another dog. It’s been a year; maybe it’s time to move on. To be sure, these comments are meant to comfort, but they’re also a way of protecting the speakers from the uncomfortable feelings that somebody else’s bad situation stirs up. Platitudes like these make a terrible circumstance more palatable for the person saying the words but leave the person experiencing the adversity feeling angry and alone.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

The inability to say no is largely about approval-seeking—people imagine that if they say no, they won’t be loved by others. The inability to say yes, however—to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program—is more about lack of trust in oneself.

“Just because she sends you guilt doesn’t mean you have to accept delivery.”

At some point, being a fulfilled adult means taking responsibility for the course of your own life and accepting the fact that now you’re in charge of your choices.

“you might have to let go of the hope for a better childhood—but that’s only so that you can create a better adulthood.”

the stages of change are such that you don’t drop all of your defenses at the same time. Instead, you release them in layers, moving closer and closer to the tender core: your sadness, your shame.

There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest.

how can there be an endpoint to love and loss? Do we even want there to be? The price of loving so deeply is feeling so deeply—but it’s also a gift, the gift of being alive.

the goal is to integrate the loss into your life and create an ongoing connection with the person who died while also finding a way to continue living. But many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You’ll also mute the joy.

Sometimes in their pain, people believe that the agony will last forever. But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out.

none of us can love and be loved without the possibility of loss but that there’s a difference between knowledge and terror.

“Every laugh and good time that comes my way feels ten times better than before I knew such sadness.”

many people avoid trying for things they really want in life because it’s more painful to get close to the goal but not achieve it than not to have taken the chance in the first place.