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

by Lori Gottlieb

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.

Therapists talk a lot about how the past informs the present—how our histories affect the ways we think, feel, and behave and how at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past. If we don’t accept the notion that there’s no redo, much as we try to get our parents or siblings or partners to fix what happened years ago, our pasts will keep us stuck. Changing our relationship to the past is a staple of therapy. But we talk far less about how our relationship to the future informs the present too. Our notion of the future can be just as powerful a roadblock to change as our notion of the past.

If you expect an hour of sympathetic head-nodding, you’ve come to the wrong place. Therapists will be supportive, but our support is for your growth, not for your low opinion of your partner. (Our role is to understand your perspective but not necessarily to endorse it.) In therapy, you’ll be asked to be both accountable and vulnerable. Rather than steering people straight to the heart of the problem, we nudge them to arrive there on their own, because the most powerful truths—the ones people take the most seriously—are those they come to, little by little, on their own.

It’s not that she’s hiding her feelings; it’s that she can’t access them. There’s a word for this kind of emotional blindness: alexithymia. She doesn’t know what she’s feeling or doesn’t have the words to express it. Praise from her boss will be reported in a monotone, and I have to probe … and probe … and probe, until I finally get to a hint of pride.

One day I was in the break room with some fellow interns, and we once again started counting our required number of hours and calculating how old we’d be when we finally got licensed. The higher the number, the worse we felt. A supervisor in her sixties walked by and overheard the conversation. “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.” We all went quiet. You won’t get today back. What a chilling idea. We knew that our supervisor was trying to tell us something important. But we didn’t have time to think about it.

“Are you waiting for the other shoe to drop?” I ask. There’s a term for this irrational fear of joy: cherophobia (chero is the Greek word for “rejoice”). People with cherophobia are like Teflon pans in terms of pleasure—it doesn’t stick (though pain cakes on them as if to an ungreased surface). It’s common for people with traumatic histories to expect disaster just around the corner. Instead of leaning into the goodness that comes their way, they become hypervigilant, always waiting for something to go wrong.

Julie gives more examples of what helps when she tells people she’s dying. “A hug is great,” she says. “So is ‘I love you.’ My absolute favorite is just a plain ‘I love you.’”

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

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 with it. You can’t change what you’re denying or minimizing. And, of course, often what seem like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.

“The more you welcome your vulnerability,” Wendell had said, “the less afraid you’ll feel.” This isn’t how we tend to view life when we’re younger. 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. Although time feels like it’s slipping away and I just can’t hold on to it, something else is true too: My illness has sharpened my focus.