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

by Lori Gottlieb

“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?