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

by Lori Gottlieb

that change and loss travel together.

denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

one. Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way.

Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.

We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it.

most mental-health practitioners believed that personality disorders were incurable because unlike mood disorders, such as depression and anxiety, personality disorders consist of long-standing, pervasive patterns of behavior that are very much a part of one’s personality.

human wish for self-preservation, acceptance, and safety.

We all have a deep yearning to understand ourselves and be understood.

Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.

therapy can’t help people who aren’t curious about themselves.

“We’ve talked before about how there’s a difference between a criticism and a complaint, how the former contains judgment while the latter contains a request. But a complaint can also be an unvoiced compliment. I know that what Margo says often feels like a series of complaints.

I’m always working with John on identifying his in-the-moment feelings, because feelings lead to behaviors. Once we know what we’re feeling, we can make choices about where we want to go with them. But if we push them away the second they appear, often we end up veering off in the wrong direction, getting lost yet again in the land of chaos.

Einstein: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created

freedom involves responsibility, and there’s a part of most of us that finds responsibility frightening.

Often people talk about suicide not because they want to be dead but because they want to end their pain. If they can just find a way to do that, they very much want to be alive.

I can’t help anybody unless I’m authentic in that

Speed is about time, but it’s also closely related to endurance and effort.

The faster the speed, the thinking goes, the less endurance or effort required. Patience, on the other hand, requires endurance and effort.

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.”

“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.”

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?

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.

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.

when we feel fragile, we’re like raw eggs—we crack open and splatter if dropped. But when we develop more resilience, we’re like hard-boiled eggs—we might get dinged up if dropped, but we won’t crack completely and spill all over the place.

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

explained to her that 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. You will inevitably hurt your partner, your

parents, your children, your closest friend—and they will hurt you—because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal.

what was so great about a loving intimacy was that there w...