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

by Lori Gottlieb

“There’s something likable in everyone,”

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

Loss of trust is harder to repair.

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.

“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.”

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

“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.”

I might expect to have hope that things will work themselves out again.

Then there’s the fact that losses tend to be multilayered.

Carl Jung coined the term collective unconscious to refer to the part of the mind that holds ancestral memory, or experience that is common to all humankind.

therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself — to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.

“All the prisoner has to do is walk around. But still, he frantically shakes the bars. That’s most of us. We feel completely stuck, trapped in our emotional cells, but there’s a way out — as long as we’re willing to see it.”

Patient, age twenty-five, reports feeling “anxious” for the past few months, though nothing of note has recently occurred. States that she is “bored” at her job. Describes difficulty with parents and a busy social life but no history of significant romantic relationships. Reports that to relax, she drinks “a couple glasses of wine” nightly.

(Wendell: “I think you’ll benefit more from understanding why this decision is so hard for you.”)

Wouldn’t their time have been better spent allowing themselves just one more minute to reflect on what we had just talked about or to mentally reset and transition back to the world outside?

You won’t get today back. And the days were flying by.

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

I don’t know what will happen next — how potentially exciting!

“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.”

Because my father, too, shows me how it feels to be exquisitely seen.

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.

by diminishing my problems, I was judging myself and everyone else whose problems I had placed lower down on the hierarchy of pain.

This strategy, in which the therapist instructs patients not to do what they’re already not doing, is called a paradoxical intervention.

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

“Every laugh and good time that comes my way feels ten times better than before I knew such sadness.”

Everyone should have at least one epic love story in their lives, Julie concluded. Ours was that for me. If we’re lucky, we might get two. I wish you another epic love story.

“First you will do, then you will understand.” Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and experience something before its meaning becomes apparent. It’s one thing to talk about leaving behind a restrictive mindset. It’s another to stop being so restrictive. The transfer of words into action, the freedom of it, made me want to carry that action outside the therapy room and into my life.