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

by Lori Gottlieb

Doing something prompts you to do something else, replacing a vicious cycle with a virtuous one.

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

People who are aggressively boring want to keep you at bay.

Uncertainty, I’m starting to realize, doesn’t mean the loss of hope—it means there’s possibility. I don’t know what will happen next—how potentially exciting!

This!

“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.”

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.

Regarding people with traumatic pasts

“We don’t know what they’re going to do. But it doesn’t help them in any way for you to be miserable. Your misery doesn’t change their situation. You can’t lessen their misery by carrying it for them inside you. It doesn’t work that way. There are ways for you to be a better mother to them at this point in all of your lives. Sentencing yourself to life in prison isn’t one of them.”

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.

I was complaining about the way a relative would try to make me feel guilty, my father quipped, “Just because she sends you guilt doesn’t mean you have to accept delivery.”

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.