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

by Lori Gottlieb

Therapy is hard work—and not just for the therapist. That’s because the responsibility for change lies squarely with the patient. If you expect an hour of sympathetic head-nodding, you’ve come to the wrong place. Therapists will be supportive, but our support is for your growth, not for your low opinion of your partner. (Our role is to understand your perspective but not necessarily to endorse it.) In therapy, you’ll be asked to be both accountable and vulnerable. Rather than steering people straight to the heart of the problem, we nudge them to arrive there on their own, because the most powerful truths—the ones people take the most seriously—are those they come to, little by little, on their own. Implicit in the therapeutic contract is the patient’s willingness to tolerate discomfort, because some discomfort is unavoidable for the process to be effective.