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

by Lori Gottlieb

change and loss travel together. We can’t have change without loss,

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

if my goal is to be open to understanding his perspective, that’s hard to do when I’m trying to prove a point rather than have an interaction in earnest.

But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow 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.

it’s only in silence that people can truly hear themselves. Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions. Being silent is like emptying the trash. When you stop tossing junk into the void—words, words, and more words—something important rises to the surface.

the truth comes with a cost: the need to face reality.

“I think you’ll benefit more from understanding why this decision is so hard for you.”)

“You’ll turn thirty or forty or fifty anyway, whether your hours are finished or not,” she said. “What does it matter what age you are when that happens? Either way, you won’t get today back.”

The second people felt alone, I noticed, usually in the space between things—leaving a therapy session, at a red light, standing in a checkout line, riding the elevator—they picked up devices and ran away from that feeling. In a state of perpetual distraction, they seemed to be losing the ability to be with others and losing their ability to be with themselves.

“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 inability to say yes, however—to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program—is more about lack of trust in oneself. Will I mess this up? Will this turn out badly? Isn’t it safer to stay where I am?

the stages of change are such that you don’t drop all of your defenses at the same time. Instead, you release them in layers, moving closer and closer to the tender core: your sadness, your shame.

The price of loving so deeply is feeling so deeply—but it’s also a gift, the gift of being alive. If we no longer feel, we should be grieving our own deaths.

if patients believe that a behavior or symptom is beyond their control, then making it voluntary, something they can choose whether or not to do, calls that belief into question. Once patients realize that they’re choosing a behavior, they can examine the secondary gains—the unconscious benefits it offers (avoidance, rebellion, a cry for help).

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