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

by Lori Gottlieb

happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system.

Carl Jung said this: “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”

This is a book that asks, “How do we change?” and answers with “In relation to others.”

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. —James Baldwin

But that was last week. Today he just seems like an asshole. An asshole with spectacular teeth.

I know what it’s like to bathe in self-righteous outrage, in the certainty that I’m completely right and have been terribly wronged, because that’s exactly how I’ve felt all day.

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

(Be forewarned: therapy will always take you into uncharted territory, even if you choose to preserve the status quo.)

His eerie silence earlier was his way of bringing this up.

Will you spot the insecurities that I’m so skillful at hiding? Will you see my vulnerabilities, my lies, my shame?

Will you see the human in my being?

Therapy elicits odd reactions because, in a way, it’s like pornography.

Both involve a kind of nudity. Both have the potential to thrill. And both have millions of users, most of whom keep their use private.

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

Do they consider what they’re saying to be the only version of the story—the “accurate” version—or do they know that theirs is just one of many ways to tell it?

We both sit there laughing,

at the ways in which our minds betray us as much as our bodies do.

I had to remember that I was there to help Julie, not comfort myself.

Patients, of course, want to be helped, but they also want to be liked and admired. In other words, they want to hide their vulnerabilities and entrenched patterns and struggles.