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

by Lori Gottlieb

The eminent Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said this: “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” But he also said this: “Who looks inside, awakes.”

There is a continuing decision to be made as to whether to evade pain, or to tolerate it and therefore modify it.

Sometimes the only thing to do is yell, “Fuck!”

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

“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.”

The truth releases us from shame.

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.

When people delude themselves into believing they have all the time in the world, she’s noticed, they get lazy.

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