Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

by Lori Gottlieb

what underlies a person’s type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity.

the pull toward that feeling of “home” makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children.

To her unconscious, his emotional stability felt too foreign.

If Charlotte works through her complicated feelings toward her parents with me, she’ll find herself increasingly attracted to a different type, one that might give her the unfamiliar experience she’s seeking with a compassionate, reliable, and mature partner.

Just as often, there are people who have extremely problematic relationships and fantastic sex, and there are people who are deeply in love but who don’t click with the same intensity in the bedroom.

Projective identification is like tossing a hot potato to the other person. The man no longer has to feel his anger, since it’s now living inside his partner.

conversion disorder. This is a condition in which a person’s anxiety is “converted” into neurologic conditions

People with factitious disorder have a need to be thought of as sick and intentionally go to great lengths to appear ill.

there’s no identifiable medical explanation for them.

caused by emotional distress that the patient is completely unconscious of.

so that we could continue to be together even though we couldn’t.

he’ll make me face this mystery illness head-on instead of pretending it away.

It’s important to disrupt the depressive state with action, to create social connections and find a daily purpose, a compelling reason to get out of bed in the morning.

She hated the fact that she was almost seventy and still analyzing interactions with men with the same obsessiveness she had in college.

Had the man who’d just left been the “end of the line,” as I’d put it — the last chance at love? Rita, too, has been grieving something bigger.

Charlotte believes she’s been hit with a wave of “bad karma.”

Charlotte has been distracting herself from the real crises in her life — the internal ones.

ultracrepidarianism, which means “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.”

people resent being told what to do. Yes, they may have asked to be told — repeatedly, relentlessly — but after you comply, their initial relief is replaced by resentment.

ultimately humans want to have agency over their lives,

lies the assumption that Wendell is a more competent human being than I am.

every decision they make is based on two things: fear and love.

emotional blindness: alexithymia.

nobody can keep profound feelings sealed up forever.

Children, however, don’t like having to be hyper-competent.

“seduce me with her misery.”

she’s prone to what we call “doorknob disclosures.”

It’s so —” He held up

the scissors, searching for the right word. “Draining.”

“Maybe everything they complain about isn’t actually a problem!

Maybe they’d be happier if they didn’t try to change things. Just be.”

Sometimes people needed to accept themselves and others ...

therapists don’t provide a simple weekly fix.

when presented with two awful alternatives, maybe neither was an option.”

This was grief: You laugh. You cry. Repeat.

“I feel guilty for putting him through this and jealous that he gets a future,”

“And then I feel guilty for being jealous.”

How noble can people reasonably be expected to be when their partners get something they desperately want but can’t have?

Perhaps men apologize preemptively, by holding their tears back.

I was just getting to a place where I really like myself. I like me.

Speed is about time, but it’s also closely related to endurance and effort.

“the bearing of provocation, annoyance, misfortune, or pain without complaint, loss of temper, irritation, or the like.”

it’s a lot easier — and quicker — to swallow a pill than to do the heavy lifting of looking inside yourself.

it wasn’t that psychotherapy didn’t work. It was that it didn’t work fast enough for today’s patients, who were now, tellingly, called “consumers.”

People wanted a speedy solution to their problems, but what if their moods had been driven down in the first place by the hurried pace of their lives?

he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.”

“Today, everybody moves at the speed of want.”

I was ready to begin a career I felt passionate about, and my being older also gave it a sense of urgency.

there seemed to be this common element of loneliness, a craving for but a lack of a strong sense of human connection. A want.

The second people felt alone, I noticed, usually in the space between things — leaving a therapy session, at a red light, standing in a checkout line, riding the elevator — they picked up devices and ran away from that feeling.