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

by Lori Gottlieb

But I also know something less commonly understood: that change and loss travel together. We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.

If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.

Attachment styles are formed early in childhood based on our interactions with our caregivers. Attachment styles are significant because they play out in people’s adult relationships too, influencing the kinds of partners they pick (stable or less stable), how they behave during the course of a relationship (needy, distant, or volatile), and how their relationships tend to end (wistfully, amiably, or with a huge explosion).

He knows what all therapists know: That the presenting problem, the issue somebody comes in with, is often just one aspect of a larger problem, if not a red herring entirely. He knows that most people are brilliant at finding ways to filter out the things they don’t want to look at, at using distractions or defenses to keep threatening feelings at bay.

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.

Flannery O’Connor quote: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

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.

Everything that made this man himself—his personality, his memories, his experiences, his likes and dislikes, his loves and losses, his knowledge and abilities—was contained in this three-pound organ. You lose a leg or a kidney, you’re still you, but lose a part of your brain—literally, lose your mind—and who are you then?

There is a difference, I point out to them, between self-blame and self-responsibility, which is a corollary to something Jack Kornfield said: “A second quality of mature spirituality is kindness.

Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals. —Gretel Ehrlich

What makes therapy challenging is that it requires people to see themselves in ways they normally choose not to.

We are afraid to have hope for things that we might not get.

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

He’d given me permission to feel and also a reminder that, like so many people, I’d been mistaking feeling less for feeling better.

The feelings are still there, though. They come out in unconscious behaviors, in an inability to sit still, in a mind that hungers for the next distraction, in a lack of appetite or a struggle to control one’s appetite, in a short-temperedness, or—in Boyfriend’s case—in a foot that twitched under the covers as we sat in that heavy silence under which lay the feeling that he’d kept to himself for months: whatever he wanted, it wasn’t me.

In couples therapy, therapists talk about the difference between privacy (spaces in people’s psyches that everyone needs in healthy relationships) and secrecy (which stems from shame and tends to be corrosive). Carl Jung called secrets “psychic poison,”

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.

a description of the past as “a vast encyclopedia of calamities you can still fix.”

what was so great about a loving intimacy was that there was room for repair. Therapists call this process rupture and repair, and if you had parents who acknowledged their mistakes and took responsibility for them and taught you as a child to acknowledge your mistakes and learn from them too, then ruptures won’t feel so cataclysmic in your adult relationships. If, however, your childhood ruptures didn’t come with loving repairs, it will take some practice for you to tolerate the ruptures, to stop believing that every rupture signals the end, and to trust that even if a relationship doesn’t work out, you will survive that rupture too. You will heal and self-repair and sign up for another relationship full of its own ruptures and repairs. It’s not ideal, opening yourself up like this, putting your shield down, but if you want the rewards of an intimate relationship, there’s no way around it.

“Maybe,” I say, “instead of worrying about them, you can love them. All you can do is find a way to love them that’s about what they need from you and not what you need from them right now.”

I wrote about outdated stories and false narratives and how the past and the future can creep into the present, sometimes eclipsing it entirely. I wrote about holding on and letting go and how hard it is to walk around those prison bars even when freedom isn’t just right in front of us but literally inside of us, in our minds. I wrote about how no matter our external circumstances, we have choices about how to live our lives and that, regardless of what has happened, what we’ve lost, or how old we are, as Rita put it, it ain’t over till it’s over. I wrote about how sometimes we have the key to a better life but need somebody to show us where we left the damn thing.

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.