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

by Lori Gottlieb

I hadn’t planned to do this, I explain. A week ago, pulled to my desk by what felt like a gravitational force, I fired up my laptop, opened a blank document, and wrote for hours, as if a dam had broken. I felt like myself again, but different—more free, more relaxed, more alive—and I was experiencing what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” It wasn’t until I began yawning that I stepped away, noticed the time, and climbed into bed. I was tired, but in an energized way, ready for rest after having been awakened.

I got up the next morning refreshed, and that night, the mysterious force drew me again to my laptop.

I wrote about outdated stories and false narratives and how the past and the future can creep into the present, sometimes eclipsing it entirely.

I wrote about how no matter our external circumstances, we have choices about how to live our lives and that, regardless of what has happened, what we’ve lost, or how old we are, as Rita put it, it ain’t over till it’s over.

I wrote about how sometimes we have the key to a better life but need somebody to show us where we left the damn thing. I wrote about how for me, that person has been Wendell, and how for others, that person is sometimes me.

I wasn’t actually searching for happiness. I was searching for meaning—from which fulfillment and, yes, occasionally happiness ensue.

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.

People often think they go to therapy for an explanation—say, why Boyfriend left, or why they’ve become depressed—but what they’re really there for is an experience, something unique that’s created between two people over time for about an hour each week. It was the meaning of this experience that allowed me to find meaning in other ways.

Wendell had smiled—it was the smile I’d seen recently that seemed to mean I’m delighted for you—then asked if we should talk about termination.

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I smile, knowing exactly what he means. 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.

I have patients to see at the office, people like me, all of us trying our best to get out of our own ways.

The light on the corner is about to change so I run to catch it, but then I notice the warmth on my skin and I stop at the curb, tilting my face to the sun, soaking it in, lifting my eyes to the world.

Actually, I’ve got plent...

we grow in connection with others.