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

by Lori Gottlieb

change and loss travel together.

I’ve always been drawn to stories—not just what happens, but how the story is told. When people come to therapy, I’m listening to their narratives but also for their flexibility with them.

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.

Relationships and interactions like this repulse me.

that this feels masochistic; that I keep telling the same story hoping for a different outcome).

“You’re going to have to feel pain—everyone feels pain at times—but you don’t have to suffer so much. You’re not choosing the pain, but you’re choosing the suffering.”

let go of the fantasy of creating a better past.

Do the plot points reveal a theme?

searching for issues that would inevitably provide her with a reason to leave. In not wanting her boyfriends to be the enigma that her father was, she’d unwittingly re-create a story of abandonment—only in this version, she was the one doing the abandoning.

to avoid abandonment like that occurring in childhood, people will become the abandoner in their own relationships—this way they can protect themselves from the possibility of abandonment. i fucking do this constantly.

Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.

this. and a narcissistic or deeply insecure person will never want to hear honesty. they want sympathy and validation of their delusions.

disappointed and liberated.

yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life. But

don’t be your own prison guard. you can literally do anything you want.

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

yo. think a little.

the past twenty-four hours in as much detail as possible.

i love this concept for a conversation starter or a timid person.

what underlies a person’s type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity.

not that people want to get hurt again. It’s that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this “repetition compulsion.” Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar—but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable. This

Omg:)

don’t have to tell you their stories with words because they always act them out for you.

Freud’s female hysteric, experiencing what’s known as conversion disorder. This is a condition in which a person’s anxiety is “converted” into neurologic conditions such as paralysis, balance issues, incontinence, blindness, deafness, tremors, or seizures. The symptoms are often temporary and tend to be related (sometimes symbolically) to the psychological stressor at its root.

people can’t identify their feelings because they were talked out of them as children. The child says, “I’m angry,” and the parent says, “Really? Over such a tiny thing? You’re so sensitive!” Or the kid says, “I’m sad,” and the parent says, “Don’t be sad. Hey, look, a balloon!” Or the child says, “I’m scared,” and the parent says, “There’s nothing to be worried about. Don’t be such a baby.”

Let children feel...

compulsion is a formidable beast.

i’m interested in this

want to leave you feeling as unsettled as they do.

yo. i swear people do this to cope and it is so emotionally immature.

I’m also going to miss myself.

You have two ears and one mouth; there’s a reason for that ratio”),

what-aboutery,” the practice of diverting attention from the difficulty under discussion by raising a different problematic issue.

projection vibes. just talk about it mate.

feels like a fraud, like somebody who won the lottery but stole the ticket.

wesh wesh wesh imposter syndrome can be the thief of joy and success.

is a tricky thing, in the way that apologies can be. Are you apologizing because it makes you feel better or because it will make the other person feel better? Are you sorry for what you’ve done or are you simply trying to placate the other person who believes you should be sorry for the thing you feel completely justified in having done? Who is the apology for? There’s

What brings you here?” but “What brings you here now?”

Great distinction...travel question.

diminishing my problems, I was judging myself and everyone else whose problems I had placed lower down on the hierarchy of pain.

Do not try to qualify or quantify pain.

people avoid trying for things they really want in life because it’s more painful to get close to the goal but not achieve it than not to have taken the chance in the first place. During

The possible 'failure' is not loss, its redirection.