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

by Lori Gottlieb

Greek word logos, or “meaning.”

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.

There’s a term for this irrational fear of joy: cherophobia (chero is the Greek word for “rejoice”).

Forgiveness 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?

You can have compassion without forgiving.

We may want others’ forgiveness, but that comes from a place of self-gratification; we are asking forgiveness of others to avoid the harder work of forgiving ourselves.

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.

One thing that has surprised Julie about going through the process of watching herself die is how vivid her world has become. Everything that she used to take for granted produces a sense of revelation, as if she were a child again.

When they found out she had cancer, his first words weren’t “We’ll beat this!” or “Oh, fuck!” but “Jules, I love you so much.” That was all she needed to know.

sessions to which patients come with neither a crisis nor an agenda tend to be the most revelatory ones. When we give our minds space to wander, they take us to the most unexpected and interesting places.

A flight to health is a phenomenon in which patients convince themselves that they’re suddenly over their issues because, unbeknownst to them, they can’t tolerate the anxiety that working through these issues is bringing up.

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

People imagine they come to therapy to uncover something from the past and talk it through, but so much of what therapists do is work in the present, where we bring awareness to what’s going on in people’s heads and hearts in the day-to-day.

Wendell once put it this way: “What people do in therapy is like shooting baskets against a backboard. It’s necessary. But what they need to do then is go and play in an actual game.”

The inability to say no is largely about approval-seeking—people imagine that if they say no, they won’t be loved by others. The inability to say yes, however—to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program—is more about lack of trust in oneself.

Sometimes what seems like setting a boundary—saying no—is actually a cop-out, an inverted way of avoiding saying yes.

“Just because she sends you guilt doesn’t mean you have to accept delivery.”

“Being the cool girl feels like shit.”

There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest.

pain. 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. You can’t change what you’re denying or minimizing. And, of course, often what seem like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.

But many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You’ll also mute the joy.

A series of studies by the researcher Daniel Gilbert at Harvard found that in responding to challenging life events from the devastating (becoming handicapped, losing a loved one) to the difficult (a divorce, an illness), people do better than they anticipate. They believe that they’ll never laugh again, but they do. They think they’ll never love again, but they do.

impermanence. Sometimes in their pain, people believe that the agony will last forever. But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out.

This strategy, in which the therapist instructs patients not to do what they’re already not doing, is called a paradoxical intervention.

Julie had once said that she finally understood the meaning of the phrase “living on borrowed time”: our lives are literally on loan to us.

In couples therapy, therapists talk about the difference between privacy (spaces in people’s psyches that everyone needs in healthy relationships) and secrecy (which stems from shame and tends to be corrosive). Carl Jung called secrets “psychic poison,”

we’re all time-traveling into the future and at exactly the same rate: sixty minutes per hour.

one litmus test of whether a patient is ready for termination is whether she carries around the therapist’s voice in her head, applying it to situations and essentially eliminating the need for the therapy.

We all use defense mechanisms to deal with anxiety, frustration, or unacceptable impulses, but what’s fascinating about them is that we aren’t aware of them in the moment.

parental relationships evolve in midlife as people shift from blaming their parents to taking full responsibility for their lives.

“The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.”

“The more you welcome your vulnerability,” Wendell had said, “the less afraid you’ll feel.”

none of us can love and be loved without the possibility of loss but that there’s a difference between knowledge and terror.

the story a patient comes into therapy with may not be the story she leaves with.

pain abates but doesn’t vanish.

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.

if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal.

Late-in-life love has the benefit of being especially forgiving, generous, sensitive—and urgent.

Failure Is Part Of Being Human.

That’s why it’s especially important to be the people we want to be now, to become more open and expansive while we’re able. A lot will be left dangling if we wait too long.

“Almost is always the hardest, isn’t it?” she said one afternoon. “Almost getting something. Almost having a baby. Almost getting a clean scan. Almost not having cancer anymore.”

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

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.

often in therapy, change happens “gradually, then suddenly,”

“Maybe happiness is sometimes,”

For many people, going into the depths of their thoughts and feelings is like going into a dark alley—they don’t want to go there alone. People come to therapy to have somebody to go there with,

sometimes we have the key to a better life but need somebody to show us where we left the damn thing.

There’s a biblical saying that translates roughly as “First you will do, then you will understand.” Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and experience something before its meaning becomes apparent.

Therapy can only work if it’s a joint endeavor.

Relationships in life don’t really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you’ve been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)—all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep.