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

by Lori Gottlieb

What makes therapy challenging is that it requires people to see themselves in ways they normally choose not to.

it was about a common theme that comes up in therapy, and not just in dreams—the theme of exclusion. It’s the fear that we’ll be left out, ignored, shunned, and end up unlovable and alone.

Carl Jung coined the term collective unconscious to refer to the part of the mind that holds ancestral memory, or experience that is common to all humankind.

It’s no surprise that we often dream about our fears. We have a lot of fears. What are we afraid of? We are afraid of being hurt. We are afraid of being humiliated. We are afraid of failure and we are afraid of success. We are afraid of being alone and we are afraid of connection. We are afraid to listen to what our hearts are telling us. We are afraid of being unhappy and we are afraid of being too happy (in these dreams, inevitably, we’re punished for our joy). We are afraid of not having our parents’ approval and we are afraid of accepting ourselves for who we really are. We are afraid of bad health and good fortune. We are afraid of our envy and of having too much. We are afraid to have hope for things that we might not get. We are afraid of change and we are afraid of not changing. We are afraid of something happening to our kids, our jobs. We are afraid of not having control and afraid of our own power. We are afraid of how briefly we are alive and how long we will be dead. (We are afraid that after we die, we won’t have mattered.) We are afraid of being responsible for our own lives.

A patient dreams that she’s lying in bed hugging her roommate; initially she thinks it’s about their strong friendship but later she realizes she’s attracted to women.

I haven’t told Wendell about the book-I’m-not-writing because every time I think about it, I’m filled with panic, dread, regret, and shame.

I mean, who do I think I am, Elizabeth Gilbert at the beginning of Eat, Pray, Love when she’s crying on the bathroom floor as she thinks about leaving the husband who loves her? Gretchen Rubin in The Happiness Project who has the loving, handsome husband, the healthy daughters, and more money than most people will ever see but still has that niggling feeling of something missing?

After all, two hundred years ago, the philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe succinctly summarized this sentiment: “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.”

Which all boils down to: Happiness equals reality minus expectations.

Apparently, you can make people happy by delivering bad news and then taking it back (which, personally, would just make me mad).

So many of our destructive behaviors take root in an emotional void, an emptiness that calls out for something to fill it.

Say what you will about the wonders of technology, but screen-to-screen is, as a colleague once said, “like doing therapy with a condom on.”

While women feel cultural pressure to keep up their physical appearance, men feel that pressure to keep up their emotional appearance.

Women tend to confide in friends or family members, but when men tell me how they feel in therapy, I’m almost always the first person they’ve said it to.

If we were out in the world, I’d think he was a nerdy guy in a cardigan, but in here, it’s his confidence and spontaneity that strike me, his willingness to be fully himself, entirely unconcerned that he’ll come across as foolish or unprofessional. I can’t imagine doing this in front of my patients.

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’

“I think I can help,” he says, “but maybe not in the way you imagine. I can’t bring your boyfriend back, and I can’t give you a redo. And now you’re in this book situation and you want me to save you from that too. And I can’t do that either.” I let out a snort at how preposterous this is. “I don’t want you to save me,” I say. “I’m a head of household, not a damsel in distress.”

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.

As the late psychotherapist John Weakland famously said, “Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.”

Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off.

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.

Have tried to force myself to write stupid miserable happiness book but end up on Facebook, feeling envious of all the people who manage to have their shit together.

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

When he opens his eyes again, we sit there for a while, saying nothing, two therapists comfortable together in a long silence. I lean back and luxuriate in it, and I think about how I wish everyone could do this more in daily life, simply be together with no phones, laptops, TVs, or idle chitchat. Just presence. Sitting like this makes me feel relaxed and energized at the same time.

“I’m reminded,” he begins, “of a famous cartoon. It’s of a prisoner, shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out—but to his right and left, it’s open, no bars.” He pauses, allowing the image to sink in. “All the prisoner has to do is walk around. But still, he frantically shakes the bars. That’s most of us. We feel completely stuck, trapped in our emotional cells, but there’s a way out—as long as we’re willing to see it.”

If we have a choice between believing one of two things, both of which we have evidence for—I’m unlovable, I’m lovable—often we choose the one that makes us feel bad.

Why do we keep our radios tuned to the same static-ridden stations (the everyone’s-life-is-better-than-mine station, the I-can’t-trust-people station, the nothing-works-out-for-me station) instead of moving the dial up or down? Change the station. Walk around the bars. Who’s stopping us but ourselves?

There is a way out—as long as we’re willing to see it. A cartoon, of all things, has tau...

I open my eyes and smile, and Wendell smiles back. It’s a conspiratorial smile, one that says, Don’t be fooled. It may seem as though you’ve had an earth-shattering ...

Then, finally, Julie had an idea that caught me off guard. She told me that at one point during those weeks when she believed she was about to die, she was waiting in line at Trader Joe’s and found herself mesmerized by the cashiers. They seemed so themselves in the ways they interacted with their customers and one another, making conversation about the small daily things that are really the big things in people’s lives—food, traffic, the weather. How different she imagined this job from her own, which she loved but which also came with a constant pressure to produce and publish, to position herself for advancement. With a shortened future, she imagined doing work where she could see tangible results in the moment—you pack groceries, you cheer up customers, you stock items. At the end of the day, you’ve done something concrete and useful.

Julie decided that if she had only, say, a year to live, she’d apply to be a weekend cashier at Trader Joe’s. She knew she was idealizing the job. But she still wanted to experience that sense of purpose and community, of being a small part of lots of different people’s lives—even if just for the time it took to ring up their groceries.

Therapists tell their patients: Follow your envy—it shows you what you want. Did watching Julie’s blossoming highlight the fact that we were too afraid to act on our own equivalents of working at Trader Joe’s—and that we wanted Julie to remain like us, dreaming without doing, constrained by nothing more than the open bars on our prison cells?

I hesitate. After all, Julie might feel awkward ringing up her therapist. And, truth be told, I might feel awkward too. She knows so little about me that even displaying the contents of my shopping cart feels somehow too revealing.

I try not to stare as we wait our turn, but I can’t help it. I’m watching the real-life version of the vision she described in her therapy session—her dream literally come true. When Zach and I get to the register, Julie banters with us as she does with her other customers.

It isn’t until half an hour later, as I’m unpacking the bags in my kitchen, that I see something scrawled on my credit card receipt. I’m pregnant! it says.

After all, in her daily life, she wasn’t encountering any single older men, much less those who met her requirements: intelligent, kind, financially stable (“I don’t want anyone looking for a nurse and a purse”),

Thrice-divorced and the mother of four troubled adults (due to her own bad mothering, she explained), grandchildless and living alone, retired from a job she disliked, Rita saw no reason to get up in the morning.

In fact, it’s as patients begin to get better that the risk for suicide increases. During this short window, they’re no longer so depressed that eating or dressing seem like monumental efforts but they’re still in enough pain to want to end it all—a dangerous mix of residual distress and newfound energy.

But once the depression lifts and suicidal thoughts subside, a new window opens. That’s when the person can make changes that improve life significantly over the long term.

With aging comes the potential to accrue many losses: health, family, friends, work, and purpose.

Instead, as she aged, she was becoming aware of the losses she had been living with her entire life.

“The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, but vitality.”

I thought about how regret can go one of two ways: it can either shackle you to the past or serve as an engine for change.

It takes me a minute to connect the dots: She buys vibrators? Good for her! “Do you know,” Rita adds, “how long it’s been since I’ve been touched?”

It’s the most common refrain I hear from single women of all ages: Dating sucks.

After her divorce at age thirty-nine, Rita had returned to tedious secretarial work (her only marketable skill, despite her keen intelligence and artistic talent).

Each time, Rita was shocked to find herself alone, but her history didn’t surprise me. We marry our unfinished business.

But it’s a deep human need. It’s well documented that touch is important for well-being throughout our lifetimes. Touch can lower blood pressure and stress levels, boost moods and immune systems. Babies can die from lack of touch, and so can adults (adults who are touched regularly live longer). There’s even a term for this condition: skin hunger.

Rita tells me that she splurges on pedicures not because it matters if her toenails are painted (“Who’s going to see them?”), but because the only human touch she gets is from a woman named Connie. Connie has been doing her toes for years and doesn’t speak a lick of English. But her foot massages, Rita says, “are heaven.”