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

by Lori Gottlieb

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

the stages of change. If therapy is about guiding people from where they are now to where they’d like to be, we must always consider: How do humans actually change?

Here people procrastinate or self-sabotage as a way to stave off change—even positive change—because they’re reluctant to give something up without knowing what they’ll get in its place. The hiccup at this stage is that change involves the loss of the old and the anxiety of the new. Although often maddening for friends and partners to witness, this hamster wheel is part of the process; people need to do the same thing over and over a seemingly ridiculous number of times before they’re ready to change.

But Frankl wrote what became an extraordinary treatise on resilience and spiritual salvation, known in English as Man’s Search for Meaning.

“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.”

Forgiveness is a tricky thing, in the way that apologies can be. Are you apologizing because it makes you feel better or because it will make the other person feel better? Are you sorry for what you’ve done or are you simply trying to placate the other person who believes you should be sorry for the thing you feel completely justified in having done?

You can have compassion without forgiving.

unconditional positive regard.

It means that the therapist is warm and nonjudgmental and, most of all, genuinely believes in the client’s ability to grow if nurtured in an encouraging and accepting environment.

A flight to health is a phenomenon in which patients convince themselves that they’re suddenly over their issues because, unbeknownst to them, they can’t tolerate the anxiety that working through these issues is bringing up.

He’d given me permission to feel and also a reminder that, like so many people, I’d been mistaking feeling less for feeling better. The feelings are still there, though. They come out in unconscious behaviors,

You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it,

You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it.

Because broken relationships (with herself, with her children) require sensitive and intentional rapprochement, and new ones need support and self-awareness to flourish.

Underneath these details were the same essential questions Julie had been forced to face: How do I feel safe in a world of uncertainty? How do I connect?

For many people, going into the depths of their thoughts and feelings is like going into a dark alley—they don’t want to go there alone. People come to therapy to have somebody to go there with,

wrote about how sometimes we have the key to a better life but need somebody to show us where we left the damn thing.

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.

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. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)—all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep.