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

by Lori Gottlieb

Dr. Cowboy Boots

vapid

impetus

missed the forest for the trees.

By focusing on one external calamity after another, Charlotte has been distracting herself from the real crises in her life—the internal ones. Sometimes “drama,” no matter how unpleasant, can be a form of self-medication, a way to calm ourselves down by avoiding the crises brewing inside.

I can’t just bear witness to a train wreck either.

anticipating the outcome of her decisions,

Repetition compulsion is a formi...

offhand aside.

‘Just be.’”

It’s just one of those things.

touched to his core

time together will be richer if there’s space for Matt to show more of his humanity during this process.

our capacity for love is big enough for both.

a form of torture in an already torturous situation.

my favorite face in the entire world.”

a comment that somehow stuck like a burr inside her for years

commiserate about our lack of time.

this phase was blessedly temporary.

you won’t get today back.”

Patience, on the other hand, requires endurance and effort. It’s defined as “the bearing of provocation, annoyance, misfortune, or pain without complaint, loss of temper, irritation, or the like.”

“Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.”

rife

Let him wonder,

“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 lady doth protest too much.

dirge,

Those first weeks, she spent hours each day clicking around on her site, coming up with ideas for new projects, imagining them on display.

A gift wrapped in a criticism.

self-gratification;

Your misery doesn’t change their situation. You can’t lessen their misery by carrying it for them inside you.

‘How can I be helpful?’

“I can breathe fine now,” Julie says, “but it’ll get harder, and I’ll grieve for that. Until then, I breathe.”

as the means to an end.

“It’s meaningless.” There’s no point in trying to analyze it, to give it meaning.

makes them feel accountable when they don’t want to be.

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

“The cool girl,” I say. “The one who has no needs or feelings and just goes with the flow.

pain is not a contest.

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.

Many people don’t know that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s familiar stages of grieving—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—were conceived in the context of terminally ill patients learning to accept their own deaths.

psychological immune system.

the best way to defuse an emotional land mine is to expose it).

paradoxical intervention.

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).

people tend to remember experiences based on how they end,

if you worry too much about the details, you might miss the big picture,”

we had been acting like a couple for months—why you would allow me to misperceive the situation

there was venom in his laugh,

back in hell.