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.

Of all my credentials as a therapist, my most significant is that I’m a card-carrying member of the human race.

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.

“The only way out is through.” The only way to get to the other side of the tunnel is to go through it, not around it. But I can’t even picture the entrance right now.

Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way.

Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of “feeling felt.”

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.

Neuroscientists discovered that humans have brain cells called mirror neurons that cause them to mimic others, and when people are in a heightened state of emotion, a soothing voice can calm their nervous systems and help them stay present.

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.

The answer is this: Because therapists know that at first, each patient is simply a snapshot, a person captured in a particular moment. It’s like a photo of you taken from an unfortunate angle and with a sour expression on your face. There might also be a photo in which you’re glowing, caught opening a present or mid-laugh with a lover. Both are you in that fraction of time, and neither is you in your entirety.

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

There is a continuing decision to be made as to whether to evade pain, or to tolerate it and therefore modify it.

it occurred to her that there would always be somebody whose life seemed more—or less—enviable.

students not knowing what to make of the tears we’d sometimes shed at the most unexpected moments.

“A second quality of mature spirituality is kindness. It is based on a fundamental notion of self-acceptance.”

because the most powerful truths—the ones people take the most seriously—are those they come to, little by little, on their own.

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

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

Charlotte had been forced to act as a grownup prematurely, like an underage driver navigating her life without a license. She rarely got to see her parents acting like adults, like her friends’ parents.

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Sometimes the only thing to do is yell, “Fuck!”

we both know that avoidance is almost always about fear.

After all of her efforts to try to get these men to love her the way she wants to be loved, she can’t change them because they don’t want to change.

“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.”

Sharing difficult truths might come with a cost—the need to face them—but there’s also a reward: freedom. The truth releases us from shame.

You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn’t one of them.