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

by Lori Gottlieb

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.

Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties.

“The only way out is through.” The only way to get to the other side of the tunnel is to go through it, not around

but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many

Therapists use three sources of

information when working with patients: What the patients say, what they do, and how we feel while we’re sitting with them.

Carl Jung coined the term collective

unconscious to refer to the part of the mind that holds ancestral memory, or experience that is common to all humankind.

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 (in these dreams, inevitably,

(We are afraid that after we die, we won’t have mattered.)

We are afraid of being responsible for our own lives.

“Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.”

It’s impossible to grow without first becoming vulnerable.

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

it.”

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

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

“The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, but vitality.”

alexithymia.