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

by Lori Gottlieb

When you inquire, you risk this person asking why you want to see a therapist. “What’s wrong?” this person might say. “Is it your marriage? Are you depressed?”

patients often feel hopeful after making that first appointment, before even setting foot in the therapy room.

patients try to keep the illusion going to avoid shame—to seem more together than they really are.

therapy. It can be difficult and cause pain, and your condition can worsen before it improves, but if you go consistently and work hard when you’re there, you’ll get the kinks out and function so much better.

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.

People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.

But when people are in extremis, they want their therapists, these professionals, to do something.

You’re not choosing the pain, but you’re choosing the suffering.”

“Your feelings don’t have to mesh with what you think they should be,” he explained. “They’ll be there regardless, so you might as well welcome them because they hold important clues.”

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

narcissism. His self-involvement, defensiveness, demeaning treatment of others, need to dominate the conversation, and sense of entitlement—basically, his being an asshole—all fall under the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder.

choosing to stay in volatile, dysfunctional relationships rather than being alone.

that people who are demanding, critical, and angry tend to suffer from intense loneliness. I

If he spends any time at all with his emotions, they likely overwhelm him, so he projects them onto others as anger, derision, or criticism.

Can’t grief last six months or a year or, in some form or another, an entire lifetime?

sympathetic head-nodding, you’ve come to the wrong place.

It’s no surprise that we often dream about our fears. We have a lot of fears. What are we afraid of? We are afraid of being hurt.

We are afraid of being humiliated. We are afraid of failure and we are afraid of success. We are afraid of being alone and we are afraid of connection. We are afraid to listen to what our hearts are telling us. We are afraid of being unhappy and we are afraid of being too happy

We are afraid of change and we are afraid of not changing.

think about how people come to therapy expecting to feel better, but what does better really mean? There’s

can help patients find peace, but maybe a different kind than they imagined they’d find when they started treatment.

Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.” I

know that therapy won’t make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I’ll always ...

don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take ...

part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life. But

of us come to therapy feeling trapped—imprisoned by our thoughts, behaviors, marriages, jobs, fears, or past.

we imprison ourselves with a narrative of self-punishment.

is a way out—as long as we’re willing to see it.

list of mistakes was long: choosing the wrong husbands,

in purpose and full of regret. By her account, she had never truly been loved by anybody.

something isn’t working, do something different,

continue doing the same unhelpful thing over and over?

internet can be both a salve and an addiction, a way to block out pain (the salve) while simultaneously creating it (the addiction).

uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parent who in some way hurt them.

standard therapeutic calculation used when somebody seems defensive about drug or alcohol use: whatever the total reported, double it.) Eventually

then I realized that people resent being told what to do.

second people felt alone, I noticed, usually in the space between things—leaving a therapy session, at a red light, standing in a checkout line, riding the elevator—they picked up devices and ran away from that feeling.

Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.” I

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

somebody you love is such a profoundly lonely experience, something only you endure in your own particular way.

can’t convince people not to be self-destructive, because for now, the self-destruction serves them.

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.

hiccup at this stage is that change involves the loss of the old and the anxiety of the new. Although often maddening for friends and partners to witness, this hamster wheel is part of the process; people need to do the same thing over and over a seemingly ridiculous number of times before they’re ready to change. Charlotte

can’t change them because they don’t want to change.

adult (care)—generativity versus stagnation Older adult (wisdom)—integrity versus despair The

do I owe my parents, and what do they owe me?

they envy their children’s childhoods—the opportunities they have; the financial or emotional stability that the parents provide; the fact that their children have their whole lives ahead of them, a stretch of time that’s now in the parents’ pasts.

the kids for their good fortune. Rita

for the sad dying man who must have had his own pain.

in a better place now. When you’re ready, you can always get another dog. It’s been a year; maybe it’s time to move on. To