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

by Lori Gottlieb

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

You are not the best person to talk to you about you right now.

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

are questions we all deal with in a quieter way: How much do we want to know? How much is too much? And how much is too much when you’re dying? The

was the perfect setup for somebody like Charlotte, a person who craved connection but also avoided it. Our relationship was the ideal combination of intimacy and distance; she could get close to me but not too close because at the end of the hour, whether she liked it or not, she went home.

of the things that surprised me as a therapist was how often people wanted to be told what to do, as if I had the right answer or as if right and wrong answers existed for the bulk of choices people make in their daily lives.

a reminder to myself that as a therapist, I can come to understand people and help them sort out what they want to do, but I can’t make their life choices for them. When I first started out, though, occasionally I’d feel pressure to give advice of the benign (or so I believed) sort. But then I realized that people resent being told what to do. Yes, they may have asked to be told—repeatedly, relentlessly—but after you comply, their initial relief is replaced by resentment.

my questions lies the assumption that Wendell is a more competent human being than I am. Sometimes I wonder, Who am I to make the important decisions in my own life? Am I really qualified for this? Everyone wages this internal battle to some degree: Child or adult? Safety or freedom? But no matter where people fall on those continuums, every decision they make is based on two things: fear and love. Therapy strives to teach you how to tell the two apart. Charlotte

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

the 1980s, a psychologist named James Prochaska developed the transtheoretical model of behavior change (TTM) based on research showing that people generally don’t “just do it,” as Nike (or a new year’s resolution) might have it, but instead tend to move through a series of sequential stages that look like this: Stage 1: Pre-contemplation Stage 2: Contemplation Stage 3: Preparation Stage 4: Action Stage 5: Maintenance So

remember how, initially, John’s appointment was scheduled after Julie’s and how I regularly made an effort to remember one of the most important lessons from my training: There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering—I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I’m lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins—or loses? But

When I was rolling on the floor with my family,” he says, “I had the strangest thought. I was thinking that I wished you could see us. I wanted you to see me in that moment because I felt so much like a person you don’t really know. Because in here, you know, it’s all doom and gloom. But driving over here today, I thought, Maybe she does know. Maybe you do have, like, some kind of therapist’s sixth sense about people. Because—and I’m not sure if it’s all of your annoying questions or the sadistic silences you put me through—but I feel like you get me, you know? And I don’t want your head to get too big or anything, but I thought, you have a more complete picture of my total humanity than anyone else in my life.” I’m