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

by Lori Gottlieb

But pain is pain. I’d done this myself, too, apologizing to Wendell, embarrassed that I was making such a big deal about a breakup but not a divorce; apologizing for suffering from anxiety about the very real financial and professional consequences of an unmet book contract but that, nonetheless, were in no way as serious as the problems facing, well, the people in Kenya. I even apologized for talking about my health concerns—like when a patient noticed my tremor and I didn’t know what to say—because, after all, how bad was my suffering if I didn’t even have a diagnosis, much less a diagnosis that ranked high on the “acceptable problems to suffer from” scale? I had an unidentified condition. I didn’t—knock on wood—have Parkinson’s. I didn’t—knock on wood—have cancer. But Wendell told me that 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. “You still doing Tinder therapy?” I ask Cory. He rubs some product into my hair. “Hell, yeah,” he says.