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

by Lori Gottlieb

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”

to reveal our shared humanity so that we can see ourselves more clearly. Which is to say, if you see yourself in these pages, it’s both coincidental and intentional.

It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them. We should take the world’s enemies, get them in a room to share their histories and formative experiences, their fears and their struggles, and global adversaries would suddenly get along.

but I figured that this comment was just one of John’s defenses against getting close to anybody or acknowledging his need for another human being.

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

No matter how open we as a society are about formerly private matters, the stigma around our emotional struggles remains formidable.

We are mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors, showing one another what we can’t yet see.

If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.

It boils down to fear—of being exposed, of being found out. Will you spot the insecurities that I’m so skillful at hiding? Will you see my vulnerabilities, my lies, my shame? Will you see the human in my being?

During an initial burst of pain, people tend to lash out either at others or at themselves, to turn the anger outward or inward.

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.

Yes, I’m seeking objectivity, but only because I’m convinced that objectivity will rule in my favor.

In this room, I’m going to see you, and you’ll try to hide, but I’ll still see you, and it’s going to be okay when I do.

It’s like a photo of you taken from an unfortunate angle and with a sour expression on your face. There might also be a photo in which you’re glowing, caught opening a present or mid-laugh with a lover. Both are you in that fraction of time, and neither is you in your entirety.

I want some sign of the scar tissue left behind. I want to know, in the end, that I mattered.

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.

“Do you think I’m a bad person?” she’d ask, and I’d assure her that everyone who comes to therapy worries that what they think or feel might not be “normal” or “good,” and yet it’s our honesty with ourselves that helps us make sense of our lives with all of their nuances and complexity. Repress those thoughts, and you’ll likely behave “badly.” Acknowledge them, and you’ll grow.

But I’d forgotten that people are often at their most interesting when they’ve got a proverbial gun to their head.

loneliness. I know that a person who acts this way both wants to be seen and is terrified of being seen.

People want to be understood and to understand, but for most of us, our biggest problem is that we don’t know what our problem is. We keep stepping in the same puddle. Why do I do the very thing that will guarantee my own unhappiness over and over again?

I have a feeling that there’s a lot of buried love between John and Margo because I know this: love can often look like so many things that don’t seem like love.

Anger is the go-to feeling for most people because it’s outward-directed—angrily blaming others can feel deliciously sanctimonious. But often it’s only the tip of the iceberg, and if you look beneath the surface, you’ll glimpse submerged feelings you either weren’t aware of or didn’t want to show: fear, helplessness, envy, loneliness, insecurity. And if you can tolerate these deeper feelings long enough to understand them and listen to what they’re telling you, you’ll not only manage your anger in more productive ways, you also won’t be so angry all the time.

If we have a choice between believing one of two things, both of which we have evidence for—I’m unlovable, I’m lovable—often we choose the one that makes us feel bad.

Why do we keep our radios tuned to the same static-ridden stations (the everyone’s-life-is-better-than-mine station, the I-can’t-trust-people station, the nothing-works-out-for-me station) instead of moving the dial up or down? Change the station.

freedom involves responsibility, and there’s a part of most of us that finds responsibility frightening.

I have a secret.

I like how we slowly learn deeper levels about her as the "session" goes on. Mirrors how she said early on that people take a while to reveal all sides of a story super cool structure

One of the things that surprised me as a therapist was how often people wanted to be told what to do,

Fleabag moment

Taped up next to my files is the word ultracrepidarianism, which means “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.”

Everyone wages this internal battle to some degree: Child or adult? Safety or freedom? But no matter where people fall on those continuums, every decision they make is based on two things: fear and love. Therapy strives to teach you how to tell the two apart.

“The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.”

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.

In the best goodbyes, there’s always the feeling that there’s something more to say.

Everyone should have at least one epic love story in their lives, Julie concluded. Ours was that for me. If we’re lucky, we might get two. I wish you another epic love story.

crying.

Relationships in life don’t really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you’ve been close to lives on somewhere inside you.