More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 3 - May 12, 2019
In other words, I’m dealing with my pain the way I suspect John has been dealing with his: by covering it up.
As a therapist, I know a lot about pain, about the ways in which pain is tied to loss. But I also know something less commonly understood: that change and loss travel together. We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.
One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current predicaments, because once they realize that they can (and must) construct their own lives, they’re free to generate change.
Ask about somebody’s spouse while they’re both still in love, then ask about that same spouse post-divorce, and each time, you’ll get only half the story.
He knows what all therapists know: That the presenting problem, the issue somebody comes in with, is often just one aspect of a larger problem, if not a red herring entirely. He knows that most people are brilliant at finding ways to filter out the things they don’t want to look at, at using distractions or defenses to keep threatening feelings at bay.
he needs to help the patient replace the defense with something else so that he doesn’t leave the person raw and exposed with no protection whatsoever. As the term implies, defenses serve a useful purpose. They shield people from injury . . . until they no longer need them.
In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.
Because therapists know that at first, each patient is simply a snapshot, a person captured in a particular moment. It’s like a photo of you taken from an unfortunate angle and with a sour expression on your face. There might also be a photo in which you’re glowing, caught opening a present or mid-laugh with a lover. Both are you in that fraction of time, and neither is you in your entirety. So therapists listen, suggest, nudge, guide, and occasionally cajole our patients to bring other snapshots into view, to shift their experience of what’s happening inside and around them. We sort through
...more
“There’s a difference between pain and suffering,” Wendell says. “You’re going to have to feel pain—everyone feels pain at times—but you don’t have to suffer so much. You’re not choosing the pain, but you’re choosing the suffering.”
Then there’s the fact that losses tend to be multilayered. There’s the actual loss (in my case, of Boyfriend), and the underlying loss (what it represents). That’s why for many people the pain of a divorce is only partially about the loss of the other person; often it’s just as much about what the change represents—failure, rejection, betrayal, the unknown, and a different life story than the one they’d expected.
“I’m reminded,” he begins, “of a famous cartoon. It’s of a prisoner, shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out—but to his right and left, it’s open, no bars.” He pauses, allowing the image to sink in. “All the prisoner has to do is walk around. But still, he frantically shakes the bars. That’s most of us. We feel completely stuck, trapped in our emotional cells, but there’s a way out—as long as we’re willing to see it.” He lets that last part linger between us. As long as we’re willing to see it.
Most of us come to therapy feeling trapped—imprisoned by our thoughts, behaviors, marriages, jobs, fears, or past. Sometimes we imprison ourselves with a narrative of self-punishment. If we have a choice between believing one of two things, both of which we have evidence for—I’m unlovable, I’m lovable—often we choose the one that makes us feel bad.
Here people procrastinate or self-sabotage as a way to stave off change—even positive change—because they’re reluctant to give something up without knowing what they’ll get in its place. The hiccup at this stage is that change involves the loss of the old and the anxiety of the new.
“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.”
when I was complaining about the way a relative would try to make me feel guilty, my father quipped, “Just because she sends you guilt doesn’t mean you have to accept delivery.”
“You want to have touched people and for them to be affected by your death,” I said. “And for those people to remember you, to keep you in mind.” Julie told me that she wanted people to keep her in mind the way she keeps me in mind between sessions. “I’ll be driving, and I’ll panic about something, but then I’ll hear your voice,” she explained. “I’ll remember something you said.” I thought about how I did this with Wendell—how I’d internalized his lines of questioning, his way of reframing situations, his voice. This is such a universal experience that one litmus test of whether a patient is
...more
That week, I’d told Wendell again that my greatest fear is leaving Zach without a mother, and Wendell said that I had two choices: I could give Zach a mother who’s constantly worried about leaving him motherless, or I could give him a mother whose uncertain health makes her more acutely aware of the preciousness of their time together.
