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

by Lori Gottlieb

We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.

In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.

When working with couples on empathy, often I’ll say, “Before you speak, ask yourself, What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to? ”

People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.

“Your feelings don’t have to mesh with what you think they should be,” he explained. “They’ll be there regardless, so you might as well welcome them because they hold important clues.”

Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.

The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at.

If John’s wife becomes less depressed, how can John keep his role as the sane one in the couple? If she tries to get close in healthier ways, how can he preserve the comfortable distance he has so masterfully managed all of these years? I’m not surprised that John is having a negative reaction to Margo’s therapy. Her therapist seems to be doing a good job.

Anger is the go-to feeling for most people because it’s outward-directed—angrily blaming others can feel deliciously sanctimonious. But often it’s only the tip of the iceberg, and if you look beneath the surface, you’ll glimpse submerged feelings you either weren’t aware of or didn’t want to show: fear, helplessness, envy, loneliness, insecurity.

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

Insight allows you to ask yourself, Is this something that’s being done to me or am I doing it to myself? The answer gives you choices, but it’s up to you to make them.

It’s no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical.

This felt like a classic example of projective identification. In projection, a patient attributes his beliefs to another person; in projective identification, he sends them into another person. For instance, a man may feel angry at his boss at work, then come home and say to his spouse, “You seem angry.” He’s projecting, because the spouse isn’t angry. In projective identification, on the other hand, the man may feel angry at his boss, return home, and essentially insert his anger into his partner, actually making the partner feel angry.

What makes night within us may leave stars.

Sometimes “drama,” no matter how unpleasant, can be a form of self-medication, a way to calm ourselves down by avoiding the crises brewing inside.

“Avoidance is a simple way of coping by not having to cope.”

“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.”

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

we’re all time-traveling into the future and at exactly the same rate: sixty minutes per hour.

But then a smile formed on his face, the most evil smile I had ever seen, and he said, slowly, deliberately, in a voice that I can only describe as a growl, “If you leave, you will have nothing. The kids will have nothing. So, be my guest, Rita. Leave!” And then he started laughing, and there was venom in his laugh, and I knew right then it was a silly idea. I knew I would stay.

was reminded that the heart is just as fragile at seventy as it is at seventeen. The vulnerability, the longing, the passion—they’re all there in full force. Falling in love never gets old.

In the best goodbyes, there’s always the feeling that there’s something more to say.

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

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.

There will be an answer, let it be