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

by Lori Gottlieb

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.

Q 1?

hadn’t considered that if the only thing that keeps you going all day is knowing you’ll get to turn on the TV after dinner, you probably are depressed.

What people don’t like to think about is that you can do everything right—in life or in a treatment protocol—and still get the short end of the stick. And when that happens, the only control you have is how you deal with that stick—your way, not the way others say you should.

In this way, Julie started to see that we’re all in Holland, because most people don’t have lives that go exactly as planned.

Life has a 100 percent mortality rate. Every single one of us will die, and most of us have no idea how or when that will happen.

But no matter the circumstances, there seemed to be this common element of loneliness, a craving for but a lack of a strong sense of human connection. A want.

gasped in recognition. Just the day before, I’d joked to a colleague, “Why not have a therapist in your iPhone?” I didn’t know then that soon there would be therapists in smartphones—apps through which you could connect with a therapist “anytime, anywhere . . . within seconds” to “feel better now.”

The second people felt alone, I noticed, usually in the space between things—leaving a therapy session, at a red light, standing in a checkout line, riding the elevator—they picked up devices and ran away from that feeling. In a state of perpetual distraction, they seemed to be losing the ability to be with others and losing their ability to be with themselves.

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

I’m starting to realize, doesn’t mean the loss of hope—it

means there’s possibility.

“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.”

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Infant (hope)—trust versus mistrust Toddler (will)—autonomy versus shame Preschooler (purpose)—initiative versus guilt School-age child (competence)—industry versus inferiority Adolescent (fidelity)—identity versus role confusion Young adult (love)—intimacy versus isolation Middle-aged adult (care)—generativity versus stagnation Older adult (wisdom)—integrity versus despair

fear of joy: cherophobia

forced forgiveness.

There’s no hierarchy of pain.

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 mute one emotion without muting the others.

Just as your physiological immune system helps your body recover from physical attack, your brain helps you recover from psychological attack.

But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out.

paradoxical intervention.

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.

there was room for repair.