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

by Lori Gottlieb

It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them. We should take the world’s enemies, get them in a room to share their histories and formative experiences, their fears and their struggles, and global adversaries would suddenly get along. I’ve found something likable in literally everyone I’ve seen as a therapist, including the guy who attempted murder. (Beneath his rage, he turned out to be a real sweetheart.)

We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.

It’s not as if we’re going to peer in those darker corners, flip on the light, and find a bunch of cockroaches. Fireflies love the dark too. There’s beauty in those places. But we have to look in there to see it.

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. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.

People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.

Why would we choose a profession that requires us to meet unhappy, distressed, abrasive, or unaware people and sit with them, one after the other, alone in a room? The answer is this: Because therapists know that at first, each patient is simply a snapshot, a person captured in a particular moment. It’s like a photo of you taken from an unfortunate angle and with a sour expression on your face. There might also be a photo in which you’re glowing, caught opening a present or mid-laugh with a lover. Both are you in that fraction of time, and neither is you in your entirety.

People don’t always remember events or conversations clearly, but they do remember with great accuracy how an experience made them feel.

“There’s a difference between pain and suffering,” Wendell says. “You’re going to have to feel pain—everyone feels pain at times—but you don’t have to suffer so much. You’re not choosing the pain, but you’re choosing the suffering.”

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

“Your feelings don’t have to mesh with what you think they should be,” he explained. “They’ll be there regardless, so you might as well welcome them because they hold important clues.” How many times had I said something similar to my own patients? But here I feel as if I’m hearing this for the first time. Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.

The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at.

There is a continuing decision to be made as to whether to evade pain, or to tolerate it and therefore modify it.

We think we make bucket lists to ward off regret, but really they help us to ward off death. After all, the longer our bucket lists are, the more time we imagine we have left to accomplish everything on them.

“Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.”

Peace. It Does Not Mean To Be In A Place Where There Is No Noise, Trouble, Or Hard Work. It Means To Be In The Midst Of Those Things And Still Be Calm In Your Heart

I lean back and luxuriate in it, and I think about how I wish everyone could do this more in daily life, simply be together with no phones, laptops, TVs, or idle chitchat. Just presence. Sitting like this makes me feel relaxed and energized at the same time.

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 intimacy and distance; she could get close to me but not too close because at the end of the hour, whether she liked it or not, she went home.

Every day is another loss of something she took for granted until it was gone, like what happens to the couples I see who take each other for granted and then miss each other when the marriage seems to be dying.

“You’ll turn thirty or forty or fifty anyway, whether your hours are finished or not,” she said. “What does it matter what age you are when that happens? Either way, you won’t get today back.”

“Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.”

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

“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.”

Sharing difficult truths might come with a cost—the need to face them—but there’s also a reward: freedom. The truth releases us from shame.

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.”

It’s easy to conflate the intimate experience of romance or sex with the intimate experience of having somebody pay undivided attention to the details of your life, accept you fully, support you without competing agendas, and know you so deeply.

Another patient recently lamented, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be one of those people who doesn’t overthink anything, who just goes with the flow—who lives the unexamined life?” I remember saying that there was a difference between examining and dwelling, and if we’re cut off from our feelings, just skating on the surface, we don’t get peace or joy—we get deadness.

As she tells me about her beekeeper fantasy, I think that the metaphor is almost too neat: this job that would require her to wear head-to-toe protective clothing so she wouldn’t get stung and would allow her to master the very creatures that might hurt her, harvesting their sweetness in the end. I can see the appeal of having that kind of control over danger, especially if you grew up feeling like you had none.

There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest.

And then he starts crying, a guttural wail, raw and wild, and I recognize it instantly. It’s the sound I heard in the ER back in medical school from the parents of the drowned toddler. It’s a love song to his beloved son.

Besides, how can there be an endpoint to love and loss? Do we even want there to be? The price of loving so deeply is feeling so deeply—but it’s also a gift, the gift of being alive. If we no longer feel, we should be grieving our own deaths.

And our process lately has consisted of more and more silence, not because we’re avoiding saying something, but because this is how we’re facing each other most honestly. Our silences are rich, our emotions swirling in the air.

I explained to her that even in the best possible relationship, you’re going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you’re human. You will inevitably hurt your partner, your parents, your children, your closest friend—and they will hurt you—because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal.

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. No matter how jaded you are, how much suffering love has caused you, a new love can’t help but make you feel hopeful and alive, like that very first time.

“Every laugh and good time that comes my way feels ten times better than before I knew such sadness.”

“We can still consider it a pause,” Wendell replies, then adds the part that’s hardest to say. “Even if we don’t meet again.” I smile, knowing exactly what he means. Relationships in life don’t really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you’ve been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)—all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep.