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

by Lori Gottlieb

hours spent surfing the internet (an activity my colleague calls “the most effective short-term nonprescription painkiller”).

Kids and freedom are mutually exclusive.

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

“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.”

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.

There is a continuing decision to be made as to whether to evade pain, or to tolerate it and therefore modify it.

if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place, in perpetual regret.

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

When we dance, we express our buried feelings, talking through our bodies instead of our minds—and that can help us get out of our heads and to a new level of awareness.

“Just because she sends you guilt doesn’t mean you have to accept delivery.”

There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest.

But Wendell told me that by diminishing my problems, I was judging myself and everyone else whose problems I had placed lower down on the hierarchy of pain.

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

Nobody is going to save you,