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.