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.

But sometimes—more often than we tend to realize—those difficult people are us.

Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties.

For no reason at all, he’ll send you Amazon packages full of books (books being the equivalent of flowers to you),

One foot, then the other.

“Will you stay with me until I die?”

Then I obsess about whether I really miss him—did I even know him? Do I miss him, or do I miss the idea of him?

Attachment styles are significant because they play out in people’s adult relationships too, influencing the kinds of partners they pick (stable or less stable), how they behave during the course of a relationship (needy, distant, or volatile), and how their relationships tend to end (wistfully, amiably, or with a huge explosion).

“There’s a difference between pain and suffering,” Wendell says. “You’re going to have to feel pain—everyone feels pain at times—but you don’t have to suffer so much. You’re not choosing the pain, but you’re choosing the suffering.”

“Not knowing is a good place to start,”

I spend so much time trying to figure things out, chasing the answer, but it’s okay to not know.

“They’ll be there regardless, so you might as well welcome them because they hold important clues.”

Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.

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

if I live in the present, I’ll have to accept the loss of my future.

it occurred to her that there would always be somebody whose life seemed more—or less—enviable.

Looking death in the eye would force them to live more fully—not in the future, with some long list of goals, but right now.

“Everyone has to compromise to get along,” I said, “but if you have to compromise too much, it might be hard to be married to each other.

How easy it is, I thought, to break someone’s heart, even when you take great care not to.

I know that part of him is in the turret calling for help, hoping to be saved—from

Isn’t it harder to let go of a relationship filled with happy memories?

“How about we agree that you’ll be kind to yourself while you’re in here? You can go ahead and beat yourself up all you want as soon as you leave, okay?”

“A second quality of mature spirituality is kindness. It is based on a fundamental notion of self-acceptance.”

“Most things worth doing are difficult,” he replied.

We are afraid of not having our parents’ approval and we are afraid of accepting ourselves for who we really are.

how well things go but whether things go better than expected.

can tolerate these deeper feelings long enough to understand them and listen to what they’re telling you, you’ll not only manage your anger in more productive ways, you also won’t be so angry all the time.

PEACE. IT DOES NOT MEAN TO BE IN A PLACE WHERE THERE IS NO NOISE, TROUBLE, OR HARD WORK. IT MEANS TO BE IN THE MIDST OF THOSE

THINGS AND STILL BE CALM IN YOUR HEART.

There is a way out—as long as we’re willing to see it.

“Cute kid, by the way. Your son. The way he held your hand. Boys don’t always do that.”

“You take a risk, you fall down, and you get back up and do it all over again.”

It’s no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners,

critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical.

He missed Rita. Deeply. He wanted to tell her things—all the time, every day—the way he had wanted to tell his wife Myrna things throughout their marriage.

he thought she was beautiful. Absolutely stunning.

“And you know what I’m going to miss most of all? His face. I’m going to miss looking at his beautiful face. It’s my favorite face in the entire world.”

“Avoidance is a simple way of coping by not having to cope.”

even if living fully can sometimes be harder than not.

Sharing difficult truths might come with a cost—the need to face them—but there’s also a reward: freedom.

in later years, we experience a sense of integrity if we believe we have lived meaningful lives. This sense of integrity gives us a feeling of completeness so that we can better accept our approaching deaths.

Are you sorry for what you’ve done or are you simply trying to placate the other person who believes you should be sorry for the thing you feel completely justified in having done?

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.

At some point, being a fulfilled adult means taking responsibility for the course of your own life and accepting the fact that now you’re in charge of your choices.

you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others.

Whereas in their younger years, people often come to therapy to understand why their parents won’t act in ways they wish, later on, people come to figure out how to manage what is.

And so my question about my mother has gone from “Why can’t she change?” to “Why can’t I?”

“The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.”

And her mom loved her enough not to say I told you so.

Now I keep in mind that none of us can love and be loved without the possibility of loss but that there’s a difference between knowledge and terror.