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

by Lori Gottlieb

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

Change

One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current predicaments, because once they realize that they can (and must) construct their own lives, they’re free to generate change.

“the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.

What are we afraid of? We are afraid of being hurt. We are afraid of being humiliated. We are afraid of failure and we are afraid of success. We are afraid of being alone and we are afraid of connection. We are afraid to listen to what our hearts are telling us. We are afraid of being unhappy and we are afraid of being too happy (in these dreams, inevitably, we’re punished for our joy). We are afraid of not having our parents’ approval and we are afraid of accepting ourselves for who we really are. We are afraid of bad health and good fortune. We are afraid of our envy and of having too much. We are afraid to have hope for things that we might not get. We are afraid of change and we are afraid of not changing. We are afraid of something happening to our kids, our jobs. We are afraid of not having control and afraid of our own power. We are afraid of how briefly we are alive and how long we will be dead. (We are afraid that after we die, we won’t have mattered.) We are afraid of being responsible for our own lives.

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

“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.”

So what I say is this: You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn’t one of them.

“For every single day of her thirty-five years,” she wanted it to read, “Julie Callahan Blue was loved.” Love wins.

Take a risk. Maybe our pasts don’t define us but inform us. Maybe all she’s been through is exactly what makes her so interesting—and so caring now.