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

by Lori Gottlieb

After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them.

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.”

“We’ve talked before about how there’s a difference between a criticism and a complaint, how the former contains judgment while the latter contains a request. But a complaint can also be an unvoiced compliment.

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.

The internet can be both a salve and an addiction, a way to block out pain (the salve) while simultaneously creating it (the addiction). When the cyber-drug wears off, you feel worse, not better.

The four ultimate concerns are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness.

How do humans actually change? In the 1980s, a psychologist named James Prochaska developed the transtheoretical model of behavior change (TTM) based on research showing that people generally don’t “just do it,” as Nike (or a new year’s resolution) might have it, but instead tend to move through a series of sequential stages that look like this: Stage 1: Pre-contemplation Stage 2: Contemplation Stage 3: Preparation Stage 4: Action Stage 5: Maintenance So let’s say you want to make a change—exercise more, end a relationship, or even try therapy for the first time. Before you get to that point, you’re in the first stage, pre-contemplation, which is to say, you’re not even thinking about changing.

Reacting vs. responding = reflexive vs. chosen.

“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.”

In the mid-1900s, Erikson came up with eight stages of psychosocial development that still guide therapists in their thinking today. Unlike Freud’s stages of psychosexual development, which end at puberty and focus on the id, Erikson’s psychosocial stages focus on personality development in a social context (such as how infants develop a sense of trust in others). Most important, Erikson’s stages continue throughout the entire lifespan, and each interrelated stage involves a crisis that we need to get through to move on to the next. They look like this: Infant (hope)—trust versus mistrust Toddler (will)—autonomy versus shame Preschooler (purpose)—initiative versus guilt School-age child (competence)—industry versus inferiority Adolescent (fidelity)—identity versus role confusion Young adult (love)—intimacy versus isolation Middle-aged adult (care)—generativity versus stagnation Older adult (wisdom)—integrity versus despair

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