Maybe You Should Talk To Someone

## Review Date #note/sourcereview/book | #source/book📚/fiction ## What is the story Lisa Gottlieb is a therapist. She weaves her experience working as a therapist and going to a therapist after a breakup with some dominant theories of therapy. ## What else do I wonder about? Should I see someone? ## Action See someone ## When do I want to stumble across this? #on/therapy ## Source: Gottlieb, L. (2019). _Maybe you should talk to someone: A therapist, HER therapist, and our lives revealed_. Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. ## References, Quotes, Ideas | | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | There’s a biblical saying that translates roughly as “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. | | I couldn’t write the happiness book because I wasn’t actually searching for happiness. I was searching for meaning—from which fulfillment and, yes, occasionally happiness ensue | | I thought about how many people avoid trying for things they really want in life because it’s more painful to get close to the goal but not achieve it than not to have taken the chance in the first place | | far better that [a patient make progress but] forget what we talked about than the opposite possibility (a more popular choice for patients)—to remember precisely what was talked about but to remain unchanged.” | | Maybe,” I say, “instead of worrying about them, you can love them. All you can do is find a way to love them that’s about what they need from you and not what you need from them right now.” | | the heart is just as fragile at seventy as it is at seventeen | | I could give Zach a mother who’s constantly worried about leaving him motherless, or I could give him a mother whose uncertain health makes her more acutely aware of the preciousness of their time together. | | : “The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.” | | emotional presbyopia happens around this age too, where people pull back to see the bigger picture: how scared they are to lose what they have, even if they still complain about it. | | sublimation, when a person turns a potentially harmful impulse into something less harmful (a man with aggressive impulses takes up boxing) or even constructive (a person with the urge to cut people becomes a surgeon who saves lives). | | In reaction formation, unacceptable feelings or impulses are expressed as their opposite, as when a person who dislikes her neighbor goes out of her way to befriend her or when an evangelical Christian man who’s attracted to men makes homophobic slurs. | | Wendell’s rule isn’t as simple as “There are no rules.” There are rules, and we’re trained to adhere to them for a reason. But he has shown me that when rules are bent with thoughtful intention, it broadens the definition of what effective treatment can be. | | In couples therapy, therapists talk about the difference between privacy (spaces in people’s psyches that everyone needs in healthy relationships) and secrecy (which stems from shame and tends to be corrosive). Carl Jung called secrets “psychic poison,” and after all of the secrets I’ve kept from Wendell, it feels good to have this final secret out in the open. | | therapist instructs patients not to do what they’re already not doing, is called a paradoxical intervention. Given the ethical considerations involved, a therapist has to be well trained on how and when to use paradoxical directives, but the idea behind them is that if patients believe that a behavior or symptom is beyond their control, then making it voluntary, something they can choose whether or not to do, calls that belief into question | | feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. | | The grief psychologist William Worden takes into account these questions by replacing stages with tasks of mourning. In his fourth task, the goal is to integrate the loss into your life and create an ongoing connection with the person who died while also finding a way to continue living. | | Many people don’t know that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s familiar stages of grieving—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—were conceived in the context of terminally ill patients learning to accept their own deaths. It wasn’t until decades later that the model came to be used for the grieving process more generally | | Just because she sends you guilt doesn’t mean you have to accept delivery.” | | Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. —Ralph Waldo Emerson | | these comments are meant to comfort, but they’re also a way of protecting the speakers from the uncomfortable feelings that somebody else’s bad situation stirs up. | | Wendell says that while I want to be liked for being smart or funny, he was talking about liking my neshama, which is the Hebrew word for “spirit” or “soul.” The concept registers instantly | | Unconditional positive regard is an attitude, not a feeling. | | Carl Rogers practiced what he called client-centered therapy, a central tenet of which was unconditional positive regard. His switch from using the term patient to client was representative of his attitude toward the people he worked with. Rogers believed that a positive therapist-client relationship was an essential part of the cure, not just a means to an end—a groundbreaking concept when he introduced it in the mid-twentieth century. | | People with cherophobia are like Teflon pans in terms of pleasure—it doesn’t stick (though pain cakes on them as if to an ungreased surface). It | | Frankl’s book: “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.” | | He wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” | | Frankl maintained that people’s primary drive isn’t toward pleasure but toward finding meaning in their lives | | In the 1980s, a psychologist named James Prochaska developed the transtheoretical model of behavior change (TTM) based on research showing that people generally don’t “just do it,” as Nike (or a new year’s resolution) might have it, but instead tend to move through a series of sequential stages that look like this: Stage 1: Pre-contemplation Stage 2: Contemplation Stage 3: Preparation Stage 4: Action Stage 5: Maintenance | | The four ultimate concerns are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness | | therapy as an existential experience of self-understanding | | You won’t get today back. | | a difficult tension: their togetherness on this unfortunate journey, but also their separateness. | | Maybe everything they complain about isn’t actually a problem! Maybe it’s fine the way it is. Maybe it’s even great, like their haircut. Maybe they’d be happier if they didn’t try to change things. Just be | | this misery-seduction dynamic | | make is based on two things: fear and love. Therapy strives to teach you how to tell the two apart. | | occasionally I’d feel pressure to give advice of the benign (or so I believed) sort. But then I realized that 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 | | like most stories—including mine—it bounces all over the place before you know what the plot really is. | | resistance is a clue to where the crux of the work lies; it signals what a therapist needs to pay attention to | | What most people mean by type is a sense of attraction—a type of physical appearance or a type of personality turns them on. But what underlies a person’s type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity. It’s no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical. | | skin hunger | | As Andrew Solomon wrote in The Noonday Demon: “The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, but vitality.” | | Our work is an intricate dance between support and confrontation. | | Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.” | | Which all boils down to: Happiness equals reality minus expectations | | two hundred years ago, the philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe succinctly summarized this sentiment: “Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.” | | Generally what happens between therapist and patient also plays out between the patient and people in the outside world, and it’s in the safe space of the therapy room that the patient can begin to understand why. | | placed the donor in my online shopping cart—just as I might with a book on Amazon—double-checked the order, then clicked Purchase Vials. I’m having a baby! I thought. The moment felt monumental. | | people who are demanding, critical, and angry tend to suffer from intense loneliness. I know that a person who acts this way both wants to be seen and is terrified of being seen. I believe that for John, the experience of being vulnerable feels pathetic and shameful | | People tend to dream without doing, death remaining theoretical. | | love him for who he was and not focus on who he wasn’t. | | Anywhere along here.” Wendell gestures from where I’m sitting all the way to position B. Suddenly the distance | | Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed. | | idiot compassion—an apt phrase, given John’s worldview. 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 | | This is called working in the here-and-now. Instead of focusing on a patient’s stories from the outside world, the here-and-now is about what’s occurring in the room. You | | Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of “feeling felt.” This matters more than the therapist’s training, the kind of therapy they do, or what type of problem you have. | | seemed like the perfect solution to my boredom. It would take years for me to realize that I’d solved the wrong problem. | | Doing something prompts you to do something else, replacing a vicious cycle with a virtuous one. Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way | | paraphrase of a Robert Frost poem: “The only way out is through.” The only way to get to the other side of the tunnel is to go through it, not around it. But I can’t even picture the entrance right now. | | most people are what therapists call “unreliable narrators.” That’s not to say that they purposely mislead. It’s more that every story has multiple threads, and they tend to leave out the strands that don’t jibe with their perspectives | | Fireflies love the dark too. There’s beauty in those places. But we have to look in there to see it. | | change and loss travel together. We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same | | This is a book that asks, “How do we change?” and answers with “In relation to others |