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

by Lori Gottlieb

During my training, a supervisor once told me, “There’s something likable in everyone,” and to my great surprise, I found that she was right.

I know what it’s like to bathe in self-righteous outrage, in the certainty that I’m completely right and have been terribly wronged,

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

“If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” 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. At

Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way.

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.

“Before you speak, ask yourself, What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to? ”

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.

You’re not choosing the pain, but you’re choosing the suffering.” He goes on to explain that all of this perseverating I’m doing, all of this endless rumination and speculation about Boyfriend’s life, is adding to the pain and causing me to suffer.

“Your feelings don’t have to mesh with what you think they should be,” he explained. “They’ll be there regardless, so you might as well welcome them because they hold important clues.” How many times had I said something similar to my own patients? But here I feel as if I’m hearing this for the first time. Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.

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

Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we’d been skating by on the project:

Most people’s parents did their absolute best, whether that “best” was an A-minus or a D-plus. It’s the rare parent who, however limited, deep down doesn’t want his or her child to have a good life. That doesn’t mean people can’t have feelings about their parents’ limitations (or mental-health challenges). They just need to figure out what to do with them.

You are not the best person to talk to you about you right now.

“Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.”

“The cardinal rules of good parenting—moderation, empathy, and temperamental accommodation with one’s child—are simple and are not likely to be improved upon by the latest scientific findings.”

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.

Peace. It Does Not Mean To Be In A Place Where There Is No Noise, Trouble, Or Hard Work. It Means To Be In The Midst Of Those Things And Still Be Calm In Your Heart.

In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But 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.

We feel completely stuck, trapped in our emotional cells, but there’s a way out—as long as we’re willing to see it.”

“repetition compulsion.”

It may seem logical that if you identify with a patient, it will make the work easier because you intuitively understand her, but in many ways, this kind of identification makes things harder. I’ve had to be extra-vigilant in our sessions, making sure that I’m seeing Charlotte as a separate person and not as a younger version of myself that I can go back and fix.

You won’t get today back.

American Psychological Association published a paper called “Where Has All the Psychotherapy Gone?” It noted that 30 percent fewer patients received psychological interventions in 2008 than they had ten years earlier and that since the 1990s, the managed-care industry—the same system that my medical-school professors had warned us about—had been increasingly limiting visits and reimbursements for talk therapy but not for drug treatment. It went on to say that in 2005 alone, pharmaceutical companies spent $4.2 billion on direct-to-consumer advertising and $7.2 billion on promotion to physicians—nearly twice what they spent on research and development. Of course, it’s a lot easier—and quicker—to swallow a pill than to do the heavy lifting of looking inside yourself.

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had made this point more than fifty years earlier: “Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.”

Fromm was right; people didn’t use extra time earned to relax or connect with friends or family. Instead, they tried to cram more in.

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

The four ultimate concerns are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness.

Losing somebody you love is such a profoundly lonely experience, something only you endure in your own particular way.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

“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.”

could give Zach a mother who’s constantly worried about leaving him motherless, or I could give him a mother whose uncertain health makes her more acutely aware of the preciousness of their time together.

we talk to ourselves more than we’ll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren’t always kind or true or helpful—or even respectful. Most of what we say to ourselves we’d never say to people we love or care about, like our friends or children. In therapy, we learn to pay close attention to those voices in our heads so that we can learn a better way to communicate with ourselves.