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

by Lori Gottlieb

We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.

Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way. A lot can happen in the space of a step.

What people don’t like to think about is that you can do everything right—in life or in a treatment protocol—and still get the short end of the stick. And when that happens, the only control you have is how you deal with that stick—your way, not the way others say you should.

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

ultimately humans want to have agency over their lives, which is why children spend their childhoods begging to make their own decisions. (Then they grow up and plead with me to take that freedom away.)

try to wrap my mind around this paradox: self-sabotage as a form of control. If I screw up my life, I can engineer my own death rather than have it happen to me.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn’t one of them.

The inability to say yes, however—to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program—is more about lack of trust in oneself.