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

by Lori Gottlieb

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. —James Baldwin

Underneath his off-putting presentation, something likable—even beautiful—was sure to emerge. But that was last week. Today he just seems like an asshole. An asshole with spectacular teeth.

people carry around the belief that the majority of their problems are circumstantial or situational—which is to say, external. And if the problems are caused by everyone and everything else, by stuff out there, why should they bother to change themselves?

most people are what therapists call “unreliable narrators.”

if silence can be heard, tonight’s silence sounds different.

(When my therapist friends hear this part of the story, they immediately diagnose him as “avoidant.” When my nontherapist friends hear it, they immediately diagnose him as “an asshole.”)

Once they hear that I’m a therapist, I morph into somebody who might peer into their psyches if they aren’t careful to deflect the conversation with therapist jokes or walk away to refill a drink as soon as possible.

My tears are starting to spill onto my pants again when out of the corner of my eye, I see an object flying through the air toward me. At first it looks like a football, and I wonder if I’m hallucinating (from the zero hours of restful sleep I’ve gotten since the breakup), but then I realize that it’s a brown box of tissues—the one that was on the end table between the sofas, next to the seat I didn’t take. Instinctively, my hands fly up to catch it, but I miss. It lands with a thud on the cushion next to me, and I grab a bunch of tissues and blow my nose. Having the box there seems to narrow the space between Wendell and me, as if he just threw me a lifeline. Over the years, I’ve handed tissue boxes to patients countless times, but I’d forgotten how cared for that simple gesture can make someone feel.

He looks at me meaningfully, like he just said something incredibly important and profound, but I kind of want to punch him.

He knows what all therapists know: That the presenting problem, the issue somebody comes in with, is often just one aspect of a larger problem, if not a red herring entirely.

I’m in that space between knowing and not knowing.

I can’t understand how he could be fine while I’m suffering so much.

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.

I want some sign of the scar tissue left behind.

(the upside of being a therapist’s child is that nothing gets shoved under the rug; the downside is that you’ll be totally screwed up anyway).

One day, the Maude Squad, as we called Maude’s lab group, carved out her heart. One of the students lifted it gingerly and held it up for the others to examine, but it slipped off her glove, fell to the floor with a thud, and split apart. We all gasped—a broken heart. How easy it is, I thought, to break someone’s heart, even when you take great care not to.

Dissection showed us that living is a precarious thing,

They had told us to pay attention to our emotions, but we weren’t sure what our emotions were or what to do with them, anyway.

Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.