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

by Lori Gottlieb

that we often repress but that tends to increase as we get older. What we fear isn’t just dying in the literal sense but in the sense of being extinguished, the loss of our very identities, of our younger and ...

our awareness of death helps us live more fully—and with less, not more, anxiety.

think about how it’s the not knowing that torments all of us.

At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we’ll never know why.

people’s primary drive isn’t toward pleasure but toward finding meaning in their lives.

“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.”

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

“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

attempted to make amends. How reasonable is that sentence?

Like most patients, I want my therapist to enjoy my company and have respect for me, but, ultimately, I want to matter to him. Feeling deep in your cells that you matter is part of the alchemy that takes place

in good therapy.

But unconditional positive regard doesn’t mean the therapist necessarily likes the client. 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. It’s a framework for valuing and respecting the

person’s “right to determination” even if her choices are at odds with yours. Unconditional positive regard is an attitude, not a feeling.

Wendell says that while I want to be liked for being smart or funny, he was talking about liking my neshama, which is the Hebrew word for “spirit” or “soul.” The concept registers instantly.

almost hate being in too good of a mood on therapy days—what’s there to talk about? Actually, I know better. It turns out that sessions to which patients come with neither a crisis nor an agenda tend to be the most revelatory ones. When we give our minds space to wander, they take us to the most unexpected and interesting places.

flight to health is a phenomenon in which patients convince themselves that they’re suddenly over their issues because, unbeknownst to them, they can’t tolerate the anxiety that working through these issues is bringing up.

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.

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 ...

But many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel.

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.

there’s a saying that therapists can take their patients only as far as they’ve gone in their own inner lives.

In our daily lives, many of us don’t have the experience of meaningful goodbyes, and sometimes we don’t get goodbyes at all. The termination process allows someone who has spent a great deal of time working through a significant life issue to do more than simply leave with some version of “Well, thanks again—see ya!”

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.

Recently, she said she was thinking about time travel. She’d heard a radio show about it and shared a quote she loved, a description of the past as “a vast encyclopedia of calamities you can still fix.” She’d memorized it, she said, because it made her laugh. And then it made her cry. Because she’ll never live long enough to have this list of calamities that other people acquire by the time they reach old age—relationships they’d want to mend, career paths they’d want to take, mistakes that they’d go back and “get right” this time.

“The future is hope,” Julie said. “But where’s the hope if you already know what happens? What are you living for then? What are you striving for?”

we’re all time-traveling into the future and at exactly the same rate: sixty minutes per hour.

Julie told me that she wanted people to keep her in mind the way she keeps me in mind

between sessions. “I’ll be driving, and I’ll panic about something, but then I’ll hear your voice,” she explained. “I’ll remember something you said.”

“And then all of a sudden I remember a frustrating phone conversation I’d had with my mother that morning and it clicks. I’m not angry with Zach. I’m angry with my mom. It was classic displacement.”

We all use defense mechanisms to deal with anxiety, frustration, or unacceptable impulses, but what’s fascinating about them is that we aren’t aware of them in the moment.

the ways parental relationships evolve in midlife as people shift from blaming their parents to taking full responsibility for their lives.

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

There’s so much about our lives that remains unknown. I would have to cope with not knowing what my future held, manage my worry, and focus on living now.

“The more you welcome your vulnerability,” Wendell had said, “the less afraid you’ll feel.”

Our younger selves think in terms of a beginning, middle, and some kind of resolution. But somewhere along the way—perhaps in that middle—we realize that everyone lives with things that may not get worked out. That the middle has to be the resolution, and how we make meaning of it becomes our task.

Now I keep in mind that none of us can love and be loved without the possibility of loss but that there’s a difference between knowledge and terror.

tormenting herself in a spiral I call catastrophizing,

was reminded that the heart is just as fragile at seventy as it is at seventeen.

The vulnerability, the longing, the passion—they’re all there in full force. Falling in love never gets old.

“Almost is always the hardest, isn’t it?”

In the best goodbyes, there’s always the feeling that there’s something more to say.

the beauty of the word sometimes, how sometimes evens us out, keeps us in the comfortable middle rather than dangling on one end of the spectrum or the other, hanging on for dear life. It helps us escape from the tyranny of black-or-white thinking.

Now, he says, he’s come to feel it’s not either/or, yes or no, always or never.

“Maybe happiness is sometimes,”

For many people, going into the depths of their thoughts and feelings is like going into a dark alley—they don’t want to go there alone. People come to therapy to have somebody to go there with, and

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

was reluctant to give light and space to the triumph, still spending more time thinking about how I’d failed rather than how I’d freed myself.

But I got a second chance too. Wendell once pointed out that we talk to ourselves more than we’ll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren’t always kind or true or helpful—or even respectful. Most of what we say to ourselves we’d never say to people we love or care about, like our friends or children. In therapy, we learn to pay close attention to those voices in our heads so that we can learn a better way to communicate with ourselves.