Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

by Lori Gottlieb

In therapy, you’ll be asked to be both accountable and vulnerable.

the most powerful truths — the ones people take the most seriously — are those they come to, little by little, on their own.

“Most things worth doing are difficult,”

If I wanted to feel good in the short term, he said, I could eat a piece of cake or have an orgasm.

We have a lot of fears.

“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.”

how many people have the luxury of working only on what matters most to them?

Happiness equals reality minus expectations.

screen-to-screen

is, as a colleague once said, “like doing therapy with a condom on.”

Whenever one person in a family system starts to make changes, even if the changes are healthy and positive, it’s not unusual for other members in this system to do everything they can to maintain the status quo and bring things back to homeostasis.

While women feel cultural pressure to keep up their physical appearance, men feel that pressure to keep up their emotional appearance.

Many men don’t feel they have any other place to turn.

if you look beneath the surface, you’ll glimpse submerged feelings you either weren’t aware of or didn’t want to show: fear, helplessness, envy, loneliness, insecurity.

how people come to therapy expecting to feel better, but what does better really mean?

IT MEANS TO BE IN THE MIDST OF THOSE THINGS AND STILL BE CALM IN YOUR HEART.

After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.”

Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off.

We feel completely stuck, trapped in our emotional cells, but there’s a way out — as long as we’re willing to see it.”

freedom involves responsibility, and there’s a part of most of us that finds responsibility frightening.

if you plant the seeds too early, they won’t sprout.

How much do we want to know? How much is too much?

Follow your envy — it shows you what you want.

she didn’t want to just add things to her bucket list; she wanted to cross things off too.

it’s as patients begin to get better that the risk for suicide increases.

men commit suicide three times more often than women)?

their generation grew up largely believing that they could “get through it” (whatever “it” was) on their own.

other older people assume that what they’re feeling is a normal part of aging and don’t realize that treatment might help.

old age is a proportionately larger percentage of the average person’s life than it used to be.

a sign of depression known as psychomotor retardation.

most of us aren’t aware of how we actually spend our time or what we really do

all day until we break it down hour by hour and say it out loud.

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

regret can go one of two ways: it can either shackle you to the past or serve as an engine for change.

It’s the most common refrain I hear from single women of all ages: Dating sucks.

We marry our unfinished business.

Do people who have been together fifty years not notice because they acclimate to the gradual changes over time?

touch is important for well-being throughout our lifetimes.

Touch can lower blood pressure and stress levels, boost moods and immune systems.

(adults who are touched regularly ...

skin h...

Maybe you’ll be touched in an entirely new way, one that’s more satisfying than your other relationships have been.”

The bookshelves in my office? Built by Sam.

Often when patients see our humanity, they leave us.

Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions. Being silent is like emptying the trash.

less prone to blaming others for her unhappiness (what we call externalizing).

“emotional sobriety” — the ability to regulate one’s feelings without self-medicating, whether that medication comes in the form of substances, defenses, affairs, or the internet.

What makes you think life is supposed to be fair?”

The internet can be both a salve and an addiction, a way to block out pain (the salve) while simultaneously creating it (the addiction).