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

by Lori Gottlieb

During my training, a supervisor once told me, “There’s something likable in everyone,” and to my great surprise, I found that she was right. It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them.

Fireflies love the dark too. There’s beauty in those places. But we have to look in there to see it.

Certainly we all have our deal-breakers. But when patients repeatedly engage in this kind of analysis, sometimes I’ll say, “If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy. At first patients are taken aback by my bluntness, but ultimately it saves them months of treatment.

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.

“Not knowing is a good place to start,” he says, and this feels like a revelation. I spend so much time trying to figure things out, chasing the answer, but it’s okay to not know.

“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.

After all, two hundred years ago, the philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe succinctly summarized this sentiment: “Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.” Even in recent history—2003, to be exact—one of the early modern overparenting books, aptly named Worried All the Time, put it this way: “The cardinal rules of good parenting—moderation, empathy, and temperamental accommodation with one’s child—are simple and are not likely to be improved upon by the latest scientific findings.”

What parents needed, I believed, wasn’t another book about how they had to calm down and take a break. What they needed was an actual break from the deluge of parenting books.

His expression is sad instead of angry now. 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. And if you can tolerate these deeper feelings long enough to understand them and listen to what they’re telling you, you’ll not only manage your anger in more productive ways, you also won’t be so angry all the time.

There’s a magnet that somebody stuck on the refrigerator in our office’s kitchen: Peace. It Does Not Mean To Be In A Place Where There Is No Noise, Trouble, Or Hard Work. It Means To Be In The Midst Of Those Things And Still Be Calm In Your Heart.

You are your own jailer.

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.

“Maybe everything they complain about isn’t actually a problem! Maybe it’s fine the way it is. Maybe it’s even great, like their haircut. Maybe they’d be happier if they didn’t try to change things. Just be.”

But Matt’s at a life stage when everyone else is moving forward; the thirties are a decade of building the foundation of the future.

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

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

“But why now?” I ask, trying to phrase my next question graciously. “It seems like you’d had that furniture for, um … a long while?” Wendell laughs. I didn’t hide the subtext very well. “Sometimes,” he says, “change is like that.”

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel—anxiety, elation, anguish—blows in and out again.