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

by Lori Gottlieb

As a therapist, I know a lot about pain, about the ways in which pain is tied to loss. 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.

Before I became a therapist, I always wondered why it was so hard for people (myself included!) to make changes, especially changes that we know will be positive (a much-needed job change, getting out of a bad relationship, disengaging from the same recurring argument with a family member). When I paid more attention to the loss involved, it all made sense: we cling to what we know, because there’s comfort in the familiar, even if the familiar is downright miserable. Knowing this helped me to work with people differently in the therapy room. It wasn’t just about helping people to see the changes they could make. We also needed to talk about their fear of losing something that had become comfortable and of moving outside of their comfort zone. Once they could talk about the loss, they could more easily make the change.

Doing something prompts you to do something else, replacing a vicious cycle with a virtuous one. Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way.

There’s something so inspiring about the Nike slogan, “Just do it!” But most of us don’t “just do it.” In Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, I write about the stages of change—from pre-contemplation to action and maintenance. By the time we’ve made a decision, we’ve probably gone through this process without even realizing it. I always tell patients, “Action begets action.” One small action leads to another small action which leads to another, and then one day, you look at where you are and say, “I’m so different from how I was a year/five years ago.”

Above all, I didn’t want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion—an apt phrase, given John’s worldview. 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 do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.

This is exactly what happens to me after the breakup. My friends offer “idiot compassion”—“You dodged a bullet!” “He’s dead to me!” But Wendell offers “wise compassion” by holding up a mirror to me and asking me to look at my own role in the situation. Idiot compassion feels so soothing in the short-term, but in therapy, we want to give people something far more valuable than a Band Aid. We want to give them a sense of awareness that will serve them well in the long term.

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.

This is something I see so much in the therapy room. People come in, and they’re in pain, and understandably they want to stop feeling they pain. So they say, essentially, Help me not to feel. But it doesn’t work that way. If we numb our feelings, it’s not that they go away. They just come out in other ways, and the more we try to suppress them, they stronger they get. Numbness isn’t at all “nothingness.” Numbing is what we do when we feel flooded by the intensity of our feelings.

“Your feelings don’t have to mesh with what you think they should be,” he explained. “They’ll be there regardless, so you might as well welcome them because they hold important clues.” How many times had I said something similar to my own patients? But here I feel as if I’m hearing this for the first time. Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.

We tend to place value judgments on our feelings—certain feelings are often considered “positive” (like, joy), and others are considered to be “negative” (like, anger). But our feelings are important because they give us crucial information about what we want. They’re like our GPS. “Oh, I’m sad—let me figure out what’s not working about my current situation, so I know a better direction to go in.” We tend to try to avoid the “negative” feelings, not realizing that the way to feel better is to welcome all of our feelings and use them as data to guide us.

The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at.

I see a lot of couples in my practice, and often when one partner says something that’s so true about the other partner, there tends to be a big reaction. “I’m not like that AT ALL.” And three sessions later, the person starts to think, “Oh, wait… maybe.” And by the time they leave, it becomes, “Oh, I’m TOTALLY like that.”

There is a continuing decision to be made as to whether to evade pain, or to tolerate it and therefore modify it.

This is the human condition in a nutshell, isn’t it?

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

This really resonated with me because I firmly believe that we are more the same than we are different. Once you get to know someone deeply, you find that you’re grappling with the same essential questions—they just manifest (very) differently on the surface.

“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.”

I was always struck by this quote from Viktor Frankl because he was writing about having choices even in the most horrifying of circumstances—the concentration camps in the Holocaust. It’s a reminder that whether it’s an extreme situation or the ordinary day-to-day, so many times we feel trapped by our circumstances. But we always have the freedom of our minds. Once we embrace this freedom, a whole world of possibility opens up. So often we forget that in any given moment, we can choose to either make ourselves feel better or make ourselves feel worse. The choice is ours—what’s more liberating than that?

I particularly liked this line from Frankl’s book: “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.”

Wendell—thank you for seeing my neshama, even (and especially) when I couldn’t. It’s an understatement to say that I feel so lucky to have landed in your office when I did.

My personal favorite take-away from the book comes from the session in which Wendell tells me about the cartoon of the prisoner, shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out. But, he adds, on the right and the left, the bars are open. All the person has to do is walk around those bars—but many of us don’t. It was such a paradigm shift: Why are so many of us acting as our own jailers?

When you’re writing a book, it takes a long time before you have the privilege of connecting with readers,

One of the most gratifying outcomes of putting this very vulnerable book out there has been the response from readers who have told me their own stories of seeing themselves in the stories in Maybe You Should Talk To Someone. When I'm writing, I'm not writing for an audience--I'm writing to make sense of the world. But I share the writing to help others makes sense of their worlds too. And that's worth waiting for.