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

by Lori Gottlieb

alexithymia.

“Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.”

“Why are we essentially outsourcing the thing that defines us as people?”

I came across a character who described his constant worry as “a relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.”

“I heard on the radio that about half of today’s Americans weren’t alive in the 1970s!”

self-sabotage as a form of control.

The four ultimate concerns are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness.

There’s a reason that solitary confinement makes prisoners literally go crazy; they experience hallucinations, panic attacks, obsessional behavior, paranoia, despair, difficulty with focus, and suicidal ideation.

When released, these people often struggle with social atrophy, which renders them unable to interact with others.

flooded, meaning that his nervous system is in overdrive, and when people feel flooded, it’s best to wait a beat. We do this with couples when one person is so overwhelmed by anger or hurt that all he can do is lash out or shut down. The person needs a few minutes for his nervous system to reset before he can take anything in.

“You’re so focused on being a good dad,” I say to John, “but maybe part of being a good dad is allowing yourself the full range of human emotions, of really living, even if living fully can sometimes be harder than not.

there are many ways to defend oneself from the unspeakable. Here’s one: you split off unwanted parts of yourself, hide behind a false self, and develop narcissistic traits. You say, Yeah, this catastrophic thing has happened, but I’m A-Okay. Nothing can touch me because I’m special. A special surprise. When John was a boy, wrapping himself in the memory of his mother’s delight was a way to shield himself from the horror of life’s utter unpredictability. He may have comforted himself this way as an adult too, clinging to how special he was after Gabe died. Because the one certainty that John can count on in this world is that he is a special person surrounded by idiots. Through his tears, John says that this is exactly what he didn’t want to happen, that he didn’t come here to have a breakdown. But I assure him that he’s not breaking down; he’s breaking open.

The hiccup at this stage is that change involves the loss of the old and the anxiety of the new. Although often maddening for friends and partners to witness, this hamster wheel is part of the process; people need to do the same thing over and over a seemingly ridiculous number of times before they’re ready to change.

her relationship with her parents couldn’t change until she had something new to bring to it.

people with addiction issues (whether that addiction is to a substance, drama, negativity, or self-defeating ways of being) tend to hang out with other addicts. But by the time a person is in maintenance, she can usually get back on track with the right support.

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.

Every relationship is a dance.

“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.”

“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.”

The truth

releases

us from ...

if we think that we made poor choices or failed to accomplish important goals—we feel depressed and hopeless, which leads us to despair.

“There’s only one person in this entire world who benefits from you not being able to enjoy anything good in your life.” Rita’s forehead becomes a series of lines. “Who?” “You,” I say. I point out to her that pain can be protective; staying in a depressed place can be a form of avoidance. Safe inside her shell of pain, she doesn’t have to face anything, nor does she have to emerge into the world, where she might get hurt again. Her inner critic serves her: I don’t have to take any action because I’m worthless.

Unconditional positive regard is an attitude, not a feeling.

When people delude themselves into believing they have all the time in the world, she’s noticed, they get lazy.

“Love wins,” I say, referencing a story Julie once told me about the time her parents went through a rough patch and separated for five days when Julie was twelve. By the weekend, they were back together, and when she and her sister asked why, her father looked at her mother with such affection

“Because at the end of the day, love wins. Always remember that, girls.”

Yeah. It was almost like my pain was evidence of my love for Gabe, and if it let up, it meant I was forgetting about him. That he didn’t matter as much to me.”

The grief psychologist William Worden takes into account these questions by replacing stages with tasks of mourning. In his fourth task, the goal is to integrate the loss into your life and create an ongoing connection with the person who died while also finding a way to continue living.

I think about how hard it is for John to be vulnerable.

How ashamed and needy it makes him feel. How scary connection seems.

You will inevitably hurt your partner, your parents, your children, your closest friend—and they will hurt you—because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal.

If, however, your childhood ruptures didn’t come with loving repairs, it will take some practice for you to tolerate the ruptures, to stop believing that every rupture signals the end, and to trust that even if a relationship doesn’t work out, you will survive that rupture too. You will heal and self-repair and sign up for another relationship full of its own ruptures and repairs. It’s

Rita has been on the verge of reading something negative into something Myron has said, of sabotaging her relationship so that she could punish herself for her happiness or retreat to the familiar safety of loneliness.

I’ve told her about the many relationships I’ve seen implode simply because one person was terrified of being abandoned and so did everything in his or her power to push the other person away.

what makes self-sabotage so tricky is that it attempts to solve one problem (alleviate abandonment anxiety) by creating another (making her partner want to leave).

FAILURE IS PART OF BEING HUMAN.

“First you will do, then you will understand.”