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

by Lori Gottlieb

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” But he also said this: “Who looks inside, awakes.”

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.

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.

once heard creativity described as being the ability to grasp the essence of one thing and the essence of some very different thing and smash them together to create some entirely new thing. That’s what therapists do too. We take the essence of the initial snapshot and the essence of an imagined snapshot and smash them together to create an entirely new one.

Even so, the poet Philip Larkin put it best: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad, / They may not mean to, but they do.”

Often people talk about suicide not because they want to be dead but because they want to end their pain. If they can just find a way to do that, they very much want to be alive. We make the best assessment we can, and as long as there’s no imminent danger, we monitor the situation closely and work with the depression. If the person is set on suicide, though, there are a series of steps to take right away.

What makes night within us may leave stars. —Victor Hugo

When you’re a child and your father is loving and playful, then disappears for a while, and later comes back and acts as if nothing happened—and does this repeatedly—you learn that joy is fickle. When your mother emerges from her depression and suddenly seems interested in your days and acts the way you see other kids’ moms acting, you don’t dare feel joy because you know from experience that it will all go away. And it does. Every single time. Better to expect nothing too stable. Better to “hang out” with the guy in the waiting room who either still has a girlfriend or no longer does but flirted with you when he did.

“Maybe everything they complain about isn’t actually a problem! Maybe it’s fine the way it is. Maybe it’s even great, like their haircut. Maybe they’d be happier if they didn’t try to change things. Just be.”