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

by Lori Gottlieb

The late reporter Alex Tizon believed that every person has an epic story that resides “somewhere in the tangle of the subject’s burden and the subject’s desire.”

“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day”),

Happiness equals reality minus expectations.

Peace. It Does Not Mean To Be In A Place Where There Is No Noise, Trouble, Or Hard Work. It Means To Be In The Midst Of Those Things And Still Be Calm In Your Heart.

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.

“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.”

“Are you waiting for the other shoe to drop?” I ask. There’s a term for this irrational fear of joy: cherophobia (chero is the Greek word for “rejoice”). People with cherophobia are like Teflon pans in terms of pleasure—it doesn’t stick (though pain cakes on them as if to an ungreased surface). It’s common for people with traumatic histories to expect disaster just around the corner. Instead of leaning into the goodness that comes their way, they become hypervigilant, always waiting for something to go wrong.

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. Will I mess this up? Will this turn out badly? Isn’t it safer to stay where I am?