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

by Lori Gottlieb

for the thing you feel completely justified in having done? Who is the apology for?

You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn’t one of them.

We may want others’ forgiveness, but that comes from a place of self-gratification; we are asking forgiveness of others to avoid the harder work of forgiving ourselves.

“How long do you think the sentence for this crime should be? A year? Five? Ten?” Many of us torture ourselves over our mistakes for decades, even after we’ve genuinely attempted to

make amends. How reasonable is that sentence?

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. There are ways for you to be a better mother to them at this point in all of your lives.

pain can be protective; staying in a depressed place can be a form of avoidance.

Is there anything that makes us feel more vulnerable than asking someone, Do you like me?

It means that the therapist is warm and nonjudgmental and, most of all, genuinely believes in the client’s ability to grow if nurtured in an encouraging and accepting environment.

To be sure, these comments are meant to comfort, but they’re also a way of protecting the speakers from the uncomfortable feelings that somebody else’s bad situation stirs up. Platitudes like

these make a terrible circumstance more palatable for the person saying the words but leave the person experiencing the adversity feeling angry and alone.

Not speaking about something doesn’t make it less real. It makes it scarier. For Julie, the worst thing is the silence, people who avoid her so that they don’t have to get into a conversation and say those awkward things in the first place. She’d choose awkward over ignored.

Everything that she used to take for granted produces a sense of revelation, as if she were a child again.

When people delude themselves into believing they have all the time in the world, she’s noticed, they get lazy.

“Because at the end of the day, love wins.

“For every single day of her thirty-five years,” she wanted it to read, “Julie Callahan Blue was loved.”

It turns out that sessions to which patients come with neither a crisis nor an agenda tend to be the most revelatory ones.

people, I’d been mistaking feeling less for feeling better. The feelings are still there, though. They come out in unconscious behaviors, in an inability to sit still, in a mind that hungers for the next distraction, in a lack of appetite or a struggle to control one’s appetite, in a short-temperedness,

there was a difference between examining and dwelling, and if we’re cut off from our feelings, just skating on the surface, we don’t get peace or joy—we get deadness.

I’m frustrated, which I admit to myself is a euphemism for mad.

The inability to say no is largely about approval-seeking—people imagine that if they say no, they won’t be loved by others. The inability to say yes, however—to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program—is more about lack of trust in oneself. Will I mess this up? Will this turn out badly? Isn’t it safer to stay where I am?

no—is actually a cop-out, an inverted way of avoiding saying yes.

“Just because she sends you guilt doesn’t mean you have to accept delivery.”

Some people hope that therapy will help them find a way to be heard by whoever they feel wronged them, at which point those lovers or relatives will see the light and become the people they’d wished for

all along. But it rarely happens like that. At some point, being a fulfilled adult means taking responsibility for the course of your own life and accepting the fact that now you’re in charge of your choices.

but the stages of change are such that you don’t drop all of your defenses at the same time. Instead, you release them in layers, moving closer and closer to the tender core: your sadness, your shame.

There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering—I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I’m lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins—or loses? But pain is pain.

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 and figuring out what to do with 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.

All parents forget these details about

their kids as they grow, and they mourn that loss too.

“What if your sadness—your grief—is what allowed you to love Ruby with so much joy when you first saw her?”

Many people don’t know that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s familiar stages of grieving—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—were conceived in the context of terminally ill patients learning to accept their own deaths. It wasn’t until decades later that the model came to be used for the grieving process more generally.

But for those who keep on living, the idea that they should be getting to acceptance might make them feel worse (“I should be past this by now”; “I don’t

Besides, how can there be an endpoint to love and loss? Do we even want there to be? The price of loving so deeply is feeling so deeply—but it...

The grief psychologist William Worden takes into account these questions by replacing stages with tasks of mourning. In his fourth task, the goal is to integrate the loss into your life and create an ongoing connection with the person who died while also finding a way to continue living.

But many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can’t mute one emotion without muting the

others. You want to mute the pain? You’ll als...

I tell John about what’s known as the psychological immune system. Just as your physiological immune system helps your body recover from physical attack, your brain helps you recover from psychological attack. A series of studies by the researcher Daniel Gilbert at Harvard found that in responding to challenging life events from the devastating (becoming handicapped, losing a loved one) to the difficult (a divorce, an illness), people do better than they anticipate. They believe that they’ll never laugh again, but they do.

impermanence. Sometimes in their pain, people believe that the agony will last forever. But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. 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.

“living on borrowed time”: our lives are literally on loan to us. Despite what we think in our youth, none of us have all that much time.

In couples therapy, therapists talk about the difference between privacy (spaces in people’s psyches that everyone needs in healthy relationships) and secrecy (which stems from shame and tends to be corrosive). Carl Jung called secrets “psychic poison,” and after all of the secrets I’ve kept from Wendell, it feels good to have this final secret out in the open.

Research shows that people tend to remember experiences based on how they end, and termination is a powerful phase in therapy because it gives them the experience of a positive conclusion in what might have been a lifetime of negative, unresolved, or empty endings.

description of the past as “a vast encyclopedia of calamities you can still fix.”

This is such a universal experience that one litmus test of whether a patient is ready for termination is whether she carries around the therapist’s voice in her head, applying it to situations and essentially eliminating the

need for the therapy.

“I think if you worry too much about the details, you might miss the big picture,”

I have the fantasy that all adults should be given the opportunity to hear parents—not their own—rip themselves open, become completely vulnerable, and give their versions of events, because in seeing this, you can’t help but come to a newfound understanding of your own parents’ lives, whatever the situation.

Wendell and I have discussed the ways parental relationships evolve in midlife as people shift from blaming their parents to taking full

responsibility for their lives. It’s what Wendell calls “the changing of the guard.”

“The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.”