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

by Lori Gottlieb

unconscious to refer to the part of the mind that holds ancestral memory, or experience that is common to all humankind.

psychology, dreams are interpreted on the subject level, meaning how they relate to common themes in our collective unconscious. It’s no surprise that we often dream about our fears. We have a lot of fears. What are we afraid of? We are afraid of being hurt. We are afraid of being humiliated. We are afraid of failure and we are afraid of success. We are afraid of being alone and we are afraid of connection. We are afraid to listen to what our hearts are telling us. We are afraid of being unhappy and we are afraid of being too happy (in these dreams, inevitably, we’re punished for our joy). We are afraid of not having our parents’ approval and we are afraid of accepting ourselves for who we really are. We are afraid of bad health and good fortune. We are afraid of our envy and of having too much. We are afraid to have hope for things that we might not get. We are afraid of change and we are afraid of not changing. We are afraid of something happening to our kids, our jobs. We are afraid of not having control and afraid of our own power. We are afraid of how briefly we are alive and how long we will be dead. (We are afraid that after we die, we won’t have mattered.)

haunts me, this dream.

I was telling the absolute truth. Or, rather, the truth as I knew it. Which is to say, the truth as I wanted to see it.

I was lying.

it’s not just what I do but who I am—and if

I can’t write,

then a crucial part of me go...

as Fitzgerald put it, “In a real

dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day”),

many of our destructive behaviors take root in an emotional void, an emptiness that calls out for something to fill it.

Or at least tell Wendell the truth about the mess I’m in.

Say what you will about the wonders of technology, but screen-to-screen is, as a colleague once said, “like doing therapy with a condom on.”

It’s not just the words people say or even the visual cues that therapists notice in person—the foot that shakes, the subtle facial twitch, the quivering lower lip, the eyes narrowing in anger. Beyond hearing and seeing, there’s something less tangible but equally important—the energy in the room, the being together.

You lose that ineffable dimension when you aren’t sharing the ...

Men tend to be at a disadvantage here because they aren’t typically raised to have a working knowledge of their internal worlds;

It’s impossible to grow without first becoming vulnerable.

Anger is the go-to feeling for most people because it’s outward-directed—angrily blaming others can feel deliciously sanctimonious. But often it’s only the tip of the iceberg, and if you look beneath the surface, you’ll glimpse submerged feelings you either weren’t aware of or didn’t want to show: fear, helplessness, envy, loneliness, insecurity. And if you can tolerate these deeper feelings long enough to understand them and listen to what they’re telling you, you’ll not only manage your anger in more productive ways, you also won’t be so angry all the time.

It’s taken me a while to get up the courage to tell him.

Until you tell me what’s really on your

mind, you’ll stay stuck exactly where you are. Then

I know that therapy won’t make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I’ll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off.

therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.

We marry our unfinished business. For the

But what underlies a person’s type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity. It’s no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical.

Why would people do this to themselves? Because the pull toward that feeling of “home” makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children.

They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parent who in some way hurt them. In the beginning of a relationship, these characteristics will be barely perceptible, but the unconscious has a finely tuned radar system inaccessible to the conscious mind. It’s not that people want to get hurt again. It’s that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freu...

wound from long ago by engaging with somebody f...

“our internalized family of origin.

Until then, every time she meets an available guy who might love her back, her unconscious rejects his stability as “not interesting.” She still equates feeling loved not with peace or joy but with anxiety.

She has the gift of time, if she uses it wisely.

But as much as she disliked leaving, therapy was the perfect setup for somebody like Charlotte, a person who craved connection but also avoided it. Our relationship was the ideal combination

Of course, patients think about their therapists between sessions all the time, but for Charlotte, keeping me in mind felt less like a stable connection and more like a loss of control. What if she relied on me too much?

One of the things that surprised me as a therapist was how

often people wanted to be told what to do,

It’s a reminder to myself that as a therapist, I can come to understand people and help them sort out what they want to do, but I can’t make their life choices for them.

that therapists have the answers and we simply aren’t telling them—that

that we’re being withholding.

every decision they make is based on two things: fear and love. Therapy strives to teach you how to tell the two apart.

Patients often do this as a way to ensure that the therapist won’t forget about their pain if they mention something positive. Good

and I’ll have to suppress the urge to blurt out, No! Don’t do it! But I can’t just bear witness to a train wreck either.

Sometimes the only thing to do is yell, “Fuck!”

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

Of course, it’s a lot easier—and quicker—to swallow a pill than to do the heavy lifting of looking inside yourself.

After all, it wasn’t that psychotherapy didn’t work. It was that it didn’t work fast enough for today’s patients, who were now, tellingly, called “consumers.”

If we create the space and put in the time, we stumble upon stories that are worth waiting for, the ones that define our lives.

“Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.”

It’s a story about avoidance. Everything I’ve told him since coming to therapy has been about avoidance, and we both know that avoidance is almost always about fear.

there’s no cookie-cutter way to help people through what are at the deepest level existential fears—or

The four ultimate concerns are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness. Death, of course, is an instinctive fear