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

by Lori Gottlieb

But I also know something less commonly understood: that change and loss travel together. We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.

Change

Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

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.

wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.

Some snapshots are disturbing, and glimpsing them reminds me that we all have a dark side. Others are blurry. People don’t always remember events or conversations clearly, but they do remember with great accuracy how an experience made them feel.

People tend to dream without doing, death remaining theoretical.

what three adjectives come immediately to mind in relation to your mom’s [or dad’s] personality?”

Happiness equals reality minus expectations.

Our work is an intricate dance between support and confrontation.

The internet can be both a salve and an addiction, a way to block out pain (the salve) while simultaneously creating it (the addiction).

But what underlies a person’s type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity.

Why would people do this to themselves? Because the pull toward that feeling of “home” makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parent who in some way hurt them.

In the beginning of a relationship, these characteristics will be barely perceptible, but the unconscious has a finely tuned radar system inaccessible to the conscious mind. It’s not that people want to get hurt again. It’s that they want to master a situation

People don’t have to tell you their stories with words because they always act them out for you.

Sometimes “drama,” no matter how unpleasant, can be a form of self-medication, a way to calm ourselves down by avoiding the crises brewing inside.

the thirties are a decade of building the foundation of the future.

I think about how common it is, even in everyday situations, to be jealous of a spouse and how taboo it is to talk about that. Aren’t we supposed to be happy for their good fortune? Isn’t that what love is about?

“Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.”

As much as I claim to be dramatically different from my mother, there are times when I’m eerily similar.

I told Rita what I tell everyone who’s afraid of getting hurt in relationships—which is to say, everyone with a heartbeat. I explained to her that even in the best possible relationship, you’re going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you’re human. You will inevitably hurt your partner, your parents, your children, your closest friend—and they will hurt you—because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal.