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

by Lori Gottlieb

If you’re used to feeling abandoned, if you already know what it’s like for people to disappoint or reject you — well, it may not feel good, but at least there are no surprises; you know the customs in your own homeland. Once you step into foreign territory, though — if you spend time with reliable people who find you appealing and interesting — you might feel anxious and disoriented. All of a sudden, nothing’s familiar. You have no landmarks, nothing to go by, and all of the predictability of the world you’re used to is gone. The place you came from may not be great — it might, in fact, be pretty awful — but you knew exactly what you’d get there (disappointment, chaos, isolation, criticism).

Forgiveness is a tricky thing, in the way that apologies can be. Are you apologizing because it makes you feel better or because it will make the other person feel better? 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? Who is the apology for?

We may want others’ forgiveness, but that comes from a place of self-gratification; we are asking forgiveness of others to avoid the harder work of forgiving ourselves.

Julie thinks about this. “They can say, ‘I’m so sorry.’ They can say, ‘How can I be helpful?’ Or ‘I feel so helpless but I care about you.’

“They can be honest,” she continues. “One person blurted out, ‘I have no idea how to say the right thing here,’ and I was so relieved! I told her that before I got sick, I wouldn’t have known what to say either. At work when my grad students first heard, they all said, ‘What will we do without you?’ and that felt good, because it was an expression of how they feel about me.

Experiences — dancing at a birthday party, people-watching at Starbucks, buying a cute dress, opening the mail. All of this, no matter how mundane, delights her to no end. She’s become hyper-present. When people delude themselves into believing they have all the time in the world, she’s noticed, they get lazy.

Julie gives more examples of what helps when she tells people she’s dying. “A hug is great,” she says. “So is ‘I love you.’ My absolute favorite is just a plain ‘I love you.’

But Wendell didn’t mean a romantic partner. He said I could ask anyone — that I could lean on people if I needed support, dancing or otherwise.

He’d given me permission to feel and also a reminder that, like so many people, I’d been mistaking feeling less for feeling better.

if we’re cut off from our feelings, just skating on the surface, we don’t get peace or joy — we get deadness.

The inability to say no is largely about approval-seeking — people imagine that if they say no, they won’t be loved by others.

The inability to say yes, however — to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program — is more about lack of trust in oneself. Will I mess this up? Will this turn out badly? Isn’t it safer to stay where I am? But there’s a twist. Sometimes what seems like setting a boundary — saying no — is actually a cop-out, an inverted way of avoiding saying yes.

remember one of the most important lessons from my training: There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest.

You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can’t change what you’re denying or minimizing.

I told Rita what I tell everyone who’s afraid of getting hurt in relationships — which is to say, everyone with a heartbeat. I explained to her that even in the best possible relationship, you’re going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you’re human.

Therapists call this process rupture and repair, and if you had parents who acknowledged their mistakes and took responsibility for them and taught you as a child to acknowledge your mistakes and learn from them too, then ruptures won’t feel so cataclysmic in your adult relationships. If, however, your childhood ruptures didn’t come with loving repairs, it will take some practice for you to tolerate the ruptures, to stop believing that every rupture signals the end, and to trust that even if a relationship doesn’t work out, you will survive that rupture too. You will heal and self-repair and sign up for another relationship full of its own ruptures and repairs. It’s not ideal, opening yourself up like this, putting your shield down, but if you want the rewards of an intimate relationship, there’s no way around it.

I’ve told her about the many relationships I’ve seen implode simply because one person was terrified of being abandoned and so did everything in his or her power to push the other person away.

In the best goodbyes, there’s always the feeling that there’s something more to say.

For many people, going into the depths of their thoughts and feelings is like going into a dark alley — they don’t want to go there alone. People come to therapy to have somebody to go there with,

Wendell once pointed out that we talk to ourselves more than we’ll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren’t always kind or true or helpful — or even respectful. Most of what we say to ourselves we’d never say to people we love or care about, like our friends or children. In therapy, we learn to pay close attention to those voices in our heads so that we can learn a better way to communicate with ourselves.

“Let’s consider this a pause in the conversation,

“We can still consider it a pause,” Wendell replies, then adds the part that’s hardest to say. “Even if we don’t meet again.”

Relationships in life don’t really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you’ve been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally) — all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep.