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

by Lori Gottlieb

“There’s something likable in everyone,”

Sometimes it’s hard to find!!

know how affirming it feels to blame the outside world for my frustrations, to deny ownership of whatever role I might have in the existential play called My Incredibly Important Life. I know what it’s like to bathe in self-righteous outrage, in the certainty that I’m completely right and have been terribly wronged,

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.

So true!!!

We’ll talk with almost anyone about our physical health (can anyone imagine spouses hiding their reflux medication from each other?), even our sex lives, but bring up anxiety or depression or an intractable sense of grief, and the expression on the face looking back at you will probably read, Get me out of this conversation, pronto.

Why is that? Even people who talk about a lot don’t talk about grief or mental health!

too much wine or food or hours spent surfing the internet (an activity my colleague calls “the most effective short-term nonprescription painkiller”).

(Be forewarned: therapy will always take you into uncharted territory, even if you choose to preserve the status quo.)

“If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” If

“the perfect is the enemy of the good,”

Done is more important than perfect!

In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty.

wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.

The answer to an unasked question is always no,

When I see couples in therapy, often one or the other will complain, not “You don’t love me” but “You don’t understand me.” (One woman said to her husband, “You know what three words are even more romantic to me than ‘I love you’?” “You look beautiful?” he tried. “No,” his wife said. “I understand you.”)

Everyone wants someone who “gets” them.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe succinctly summarized this sentiment: “Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.”

equals reality minus expectations.

of a prisoner, shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out—but to his right and left, it’s open, no bars.” He

All the prisoner has to do is walk around. But still, he frantically shakes the bars. That’s most of us. We feel completely stuck, trapped in our emotional cells, but there’s a way out—as long as we’re willing to see it.” He

allows you to ask yourself, Is this something that’s being done to me or am I doing it to myself? The answer gives you choices, but it’s up to you to make them. “Are

what happens to these sixty-year-olds’ identities during the decades they still have left? With aging comes the potential to accrue many losses: health, family, friends, work, and purpose. But

I only know what I would do. I don’t know what you should do,”

What does it matter what age you are when that happens? Either way, you won’t get today back.” We

I need to remember that!

second people felt alone, I noticed, usually in the space between things—leaving a therapy session, at a red light, standing in a checkout line, riding the elevator—they picked up devices and ran away from that feeling. In a state of perpetual distraction, they seemed to be losing the ability to be with others and losing their ability to be with themselves. The

reality that as people get older, they face more limitations.

lives are more defined, and sometimes they crave the freedom of youth.

1: Pre-contemplation Stage 2: Contemplation Stage 3: Preparation Stage 4: Action Stage 5: Maintenance So

Stages Of Change

hiccup at this stage is that change involves the loss of the old and the anxiety of the new.

the changes you want in another person aren’t on that person’s agenda—even if he tells you they are. “But—”

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” Indeed,

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

for this crime should be? A year? Five? Ten?” Many of us torture ourselves over our mistakes for decades, even after we’ve

attempted to make amends. How reasonable is that sentence? It’s

complaining about the way a relative would try to make me feel guilty, my father quipped, “Just because she sends you guilt doesn’t mean

have to accept delivery.”

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

Is Part Of Being Human. “I

we have the key to a better life but need somebody to show us where we left the damn thing.