Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

by Lori Gottlieb

(an activity my colleague calls “the most effective short-term nonprescription painkiller”).

Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

it’s that most people are what therapists call “unreliable narrators.”

if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.

Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way.

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.

wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.

People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.

territory. In time, they find out that they aren’t at war after all, that the path to peace is to call a truce with themselves.

“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.”

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

Wendell explains that my pain feels like it’s in the present, but it’s actually in both the past and the future. Therapists talk a lot about how the past informs the present — how our histories affect the ways we think, feel, and behave and how at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past. If we don’t accept the notion that there’s no redo, much as we try to get our parents or siblings or partners to fix what happened years ago, our pasts will keep us stuck. Changing our relationship to the past is a staple of therapy. But we talk far less about how our relationship to the future informs the present too. Our notion of the future can be just as powerful a roadblock to change as our notion of the past.

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

You lose a leg or a kidney, you’re still you, but lose a part of your brain — literally, lose your mind — and who are you then?

Repress those thoughts, and you’ll likely behave “badly.” Acknowledge them, and you’ll grow.

the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we’d been skating by on the project: our lives.

I flash on a thought I often have when seeing my own self-flagellating patients: You are not the best person to talk to you about you right now.

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

but for most of us, our biggest problem is that we don’t know what our problem is.

“Most things worth doing are difficult,”

that after we die, we won’t have mattered.)

“Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.”

“The cardinal rules of good parenting — moderation, empathy, and temperamental accommodation with one’s child — are simple and are not likely to be improved upon by the latest scientific findings.”

happiness stems not from how well things go but whether things go better than expected.

Happiness equals reality minus expectations.

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

“Insight is the booby prize of therapy”

“The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, but vitality.”

Each time, Rita was shocked to find herself alone, but her history didn’t surprise me. We marry our unfinished business.

Babies can die from lack of touch, and so can adults (adults who are touched regularly live longer). There’s even a term for this condition: skin hunger.

“Modern man thinks he loses something — time — when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.” Fromm was right; people didn’t use extra time earned to relax or connect with friends or family. Instead, they tried to cram more in.

In a state of perpetual distraction, they seemed to be losing the ability to be with others and losing their ability to be with themselves.

are an office staple. How strange, I think — and yet I feel so taken care of, like when he tossed me the tissues. I make a mental

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

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

our awareness of death helps us live more fully — and with less, not more, anxiety.

Uncertainty, I’m starting to realize, doesn’t mean the loss of hope — it means there’s possibility. I don’t know what will happen next — how potentially exciting! I’m going to have to figure out how to make the most of the life I have, illness or not, partner or not, the march of time notwithstanding.

Losing somebody you love is such a profoundly lonely experience, something only you endure in your own particular way.

But Frankl wrote what became an extraordinary treatise on resilience and spiritual salvation, known in English as Man’s Search for Meaning.

Reacting vs. responding = reflexive vs. chosen.

There’s another related concept that I share with John: impermanence.

Research shows that people tend to remember experiences based on how they end, and termination is a powerful phase in therapy because it gives them the experience of a positive conclusion in what might have been a lifetime of negative, unresolved, or empty endings.

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