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

by Lori Gottlieb

if you see yourself in these pages, it’s both coincidental and intentional.

We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it.

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.

After all, how many people have the luxury of working only on what matters most to them?

the pull toward that feeling of “home” makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children.

She has the gift of time, if she uses it wisely.

In a state of perpetual distraction, they seemed to be losing the ability to be with others and losing their ability to be with themselves.

He won’t change, so she’ll have to.

“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.”

I think about how there’s nothing in the world like laughing with my dad. I think about how knowledgeable he is on almost any topic and how fully he loves me and how kind he is—not just to me, but to everyone.

They strive to give their children all the things they themselves didn’t have, but they sometimes end up, without even realizing it, resenting the kids for their good fortune.

You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it.

how scared they are to lose what they have, even if they still complain about it.

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