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.

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

One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current predicaments,

because once they realize that they can (and must) construct their own lives, they’re free to generate change. Often, though, people carry around the belief that the majority of their problems are circumstantial or situational—which is to say, external. And if the problems are caused by everyone and everything else, by stuff out there, why should they bother to change themse...

It’s a reasonable argument. But that’s not how life generally works. Remember Sartre’s famous line “Hell is other people”? It’s true—the world...

John would have it, “idiots”). I’ll bet you could name five truly difficult people off the top of your head right now—some you assiduously avoid, others you would assiduously avoid if they didn’t share your last name. But sometimes—more often than we tend to realize—those difficult people are us. That’s right—sometimes hell is us. Sometimes we are the cau...

“the perfect is the enemy of the good,”

People want to be understood and to understand, but for most of us, our biggest problem is that we don’t know what our problem is. We keep stepping in the same puddle. Why do I do the very thing that will guarantee my own unhappiness over and over again?

Many people begin therapy more curious about others than about themselves—Why does my husband do this? But in each conversation, we sprinkle seeds of curiosity, because therapy can’t help people who aren’t curious about themselves.

Implicit in the therapeutic

contract is the patient’s willingness to tolerate discomfort, because some discomfort is unavoidable for the process to be effective.

Unfortunately, sometimes people leave just as their symptoms lift, not realizing (or perhaps knowing all too well) that the work is just beginning and that staying will require them to work even harder.

“Most things worth doing are difficult,”

What makes therapy challenging is that it requires people to see themselves in ways they normally choose not to. A therapist will hold up the mirror in the most compassionate way possible, but it’s up to the patient to take a good look at that reflection, to stare back at it and say, “Oh, isn’t that interesting! Now what?” instead of turning away.