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

by Lori Gottlieb

But what are we so afraid of? It’s not as if we’re going to peer in those darker corners, flip on the light, and find a bunch of cockroaches. Fireflies love the dark too. There’s beauty in those places. But we have to look in there to see it.

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.

There’s a popular saying, a paraphrase of a Robert Frost poem: “The only way out is through.” The only way to get to the other side of the tunnel is to go through it, not around it. But I can’t even picture the entrance right now.

That’s one thing I tell patients who are in the midst of crippling depression, the kind that makes them think, There’s the bathroom. It’s about five feet away. I see it, but I can’t get there. One foot, then the other. Don’t look at all five feet at once. Just take a step. And when you’ve taken that step, take one more. Eventually you’ll make it to the shower. And you’ll make it to tomorrow and next year too. One step. They may not be able to imagine their depression lifting anytime soon, but they don’t need to. Doing something prompts you to do something else, replacing a vicious cycle with a virtuous one. Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way. A lot can happen in the space of a step.

Because therapists know that at first, each patient is simply a snapshot, a person captured in a particular moment. 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.

a magnet that somebody stuck on the refrigerator in our office’s kitchen: 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.

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

diminishing my problems, I was judging myself and everyone else whose problems I had placed lower down on the hierarchy of pain. You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it.

I had two choices: I 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. “Which