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.

Very Angry People aren’t Very Approachable.

There’s a popular saying, a paraphrase of a Robert Frost poem: “The only way out is through.”

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

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.

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 truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

“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.” How many times had I said something similar to my own patients? But here I feel as if I’m hearing this for the first time. Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.

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.

Most people’s parents did their absolute best, whether that “best” was an A-minus or a D-plus.

The answer to an unasked question is always no,

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

“Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.”

This was grief: You laugh. You cry. Repeat.

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

I think about how it’s the not knowing that torments all of us. Not knowing why your boyfriend left. Not knowing what’s wrong with your body. Not knowing if you could have saved your son. At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we’ll never know why.

John shakes his head. “Let me tell you something,” he says, locking his eyes on mine. There’s an intensity in his voice. “I’m a parent. I have two girls. I won’t let them down. I will not be a basket case and ruin their childhoods. I will not leave them with two parents who are haunted by the ghost of their son. They deserve better than that. What happened isn’t their fault. It’s ours. And it’s our responsibility to be there for them, to have our shit together for them.”

“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. You can feel your feelings privately, or with Margo, or here with me—you can let them out in the adult sphere—and doing that might allow you to be more alive with your kids. It might be a different way of keeping your shit together for them. It might even be confusing for them if Gabe is never mentioned. And allowing yourself to rage or cry or sit with the despair at times might be more manageable if Gabe were given some air in your household and not tucked away in a box in the proverbial attic.”

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.

Is there anything that makes us feel more vulnerable than asking someone, Do you like me?

I told Rita what I tell everyone who’s afraid of getting hurt in relationships—which is to say, everyone with a heartbeat. I explained to her that even in the best possible relationship, you’re going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you’re human. 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.

But most important, Myron spoke to himself. His voice inside said, Take a risk. Maybe our pasts don’t define us but inform us. Maybe all she’s been through is exactly what makes her so interesting—and so caring now.

Rita’s third addition is a small print featuring two abstract gray-haired people, their bodies entwined and in motion, surrounded by cartoon-like exclamations: Ouch … my back! Slow down … my heart! In elegant calligraphy above the bodies, she wrote, Old People Still Fuck. It’s her best-selling piece to date.

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

Will a part of me remain alive in you?

Walking to my car that day, I hear Julie’s question: Will you think about me? All these years later, I still do. I remember her most in the silences.

“Maybe happiness is sometimes,”

John will say in this session that I was right—that it was, in fact, okay to cry with Margo, and that instead of drowning them both in a flood of tears, it brought them safely onto land.

The light on the corner is about to change so I run to catch it, but then I notice the warmth on my skin and I stop at the curb, tilting my face to the sun, soaking it in, lifting my eyes to the world. Actually, I’ve got plenty of time.