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

by Lori Gottlieb

But what are we so afraid of? It’s not as if we’re going to peer in those darker corners, flip on the light, and find a bunch of cockroaches. Fireflies love the dark too. There’s beauty in those places. But we have to look in there to see it.

A lot can happen in the space of a step.

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.

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.

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

“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.”

You’re grieving something bigger pops into my head, like a song lyric I can’t shake. “But if I don’t talk about the breakup, I won’t have anything to say,” I insist. Wendell tilts his head. “You’ll have the important things to say.”

I hear him and I don’t.

we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past.

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.

How easy it is, I thought, to break someone’s heart, even when you take great care not to.

“How about we agree that you’ll be kind to yourself while you’re in here? You can go ahead and beat yourself up all you want as soon as you leave, okay?”

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

“Most things worth doing are difficult,”

The patients who are boring are the ones who won’t share their lives, who smile through their sessions or launch into seemingly pointless and repetitive stories every time, leaving us scratching our heads: Why are they telling me this? What significance does this have for them? People who are aggressively boring want to keep you at bay.

A therapist is supposed to be a container for the hope that a depressed person can’t yet hold,

We marry our unfinished business.

Perhaps men apologize preemptively, by holding their tears back.

“Avoidance is a simple way of coping by not having to cope.”

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.”

Reacting vs. responding = reflexive vs. chosen.

“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.”

Your misery doesn’t change their situation. You can’t lessen their misery by carrying it for them inside you. It doesn’t work that way.

pain can be protective; staying in a depressed place can be a form of avoidance. Safe inside her shell of pain, she doesn’t have to face anything, nor does she have to emerge into the world, where she might get hurt again.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If you stay in therapy,” I say softly, “you might have to let go of the hope for a better childhood—but that’s only so that you can create a better adulthood.”

“Five years from now, a lot of people my age won’t be single anymore, and I’ll be the girl who hooks up with a guy in the waiting room or her neighbor and then tells the story at a party like it’s just another adventure. Like I don’t even care.” “The cool girl,” I say. “The one who has no needs or feelings and just goes with the flow. But you do have feelings.” “Yeah,” she says. “Being the cool girl feels like shit.” She’s never admitted this before. She’s taking off her beekeeper suit. “Is ‘like shit’ a feeling?” she asks. “It sure is,” I say.

by diminishing my problems, I was judging myself and everyone else whose problems I had placed lower down on the hierarchy of pain. You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it

You can’t change what you’re denying or minimizing. And, of course, often what seem like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.

Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel—anxiety, elation, anguish—blows in and out again.

everyone lives with things that may not get worked out.

the middle has to be the resolution, and how we make meaning of it becomes our task.

none of us can love and be loved without the possibility of loss but that there’s a difference between knowledge and terror.

the story a patient comes into therapy with may not be the story she leaves with.

The patient’s own role might change too—from bit player to protagonist, from victim to hero.

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.

if you had parents who acknowledged their mistakes and took responsibility for them and taught you as a child to acknowledge your mistakes and learn from them too, then ruptures won’t feel so cataclysmic in your adult relationships. If, however, your childhood ruptures didn’t come with loving repairs, it will take some practice for you to tolerate the ruptures, to stop believing that every rupture signals the end, and to trust that even if a relationship doesn’t work out, you will survive that rupture too. You will heal and self-repair and sign up for another relationship full of its own ruptures and repairs.

Maybe our pasts don’t define us but inform us. Maybe all she’s been through is exactly what makes her so interesting—and so caring now.

She is starting to see that what makes self-sabotage so tricky is that it attempts to solve one problem (alleviate abandonment anxiety) by creating another (making her partner want to leave).

FAILURE IS PART OF BEING HUMAN.

“Almost is always the hardest, isn’t it?” she said one afternoon. “Almost getting something. Almost having a baby. Almost getting a clean scan. Almost not having cancer anymore.” I thought about how many people avoid trying for things they really want in life because it’s more painful to get close to the goal but not achieve it than not to have taken the chance in the first place.

In the best goodbyes, there’s always the feeling that there’s something more to say.

Everyone should have at least one epic love story in their lives, Julie concluded. Ours was that for me. If we’re lucky, we might get two. I wish you another epic love story.

He added that he didn’t believe that people disappeared but that something in us was eternal and survived.

Maybe we all need to doubt, rail against, and question before we can really let go.

The people who are watching us—the people who really see us—don’t care about the false self, about the show we’re putting on.

I couldn’t write the happiness book because I wasn’t actually searching for happiness. I was searching for meaning—from which fulfillment and, yes, occasionally happiness ensue.

There will be an answer, let it be

“First you will do, then you will understand.” Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and experience something before its meaning becomes apparent. It’s one thing to talk about leaving behind a restrictive mindset. It’s another to stop being so restrictive.