Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is a fascinating look into the world of a therapist and how therapy works. Sprinkled throughout the book are snippets of psychology, including explanations of defense mechanisms, stages of change, tasks of mourning, and brief glimpses of the contributions of Freud, Erikson, Rogers, Franklin, and others to the field of psychology. It’s almost like getting a psychology education. Profound insights about human nature abound:
...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.
We marry our unfinished business.
It’s not that people want to get hurt again. It’s that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children.
Sometimes “drama,” no matter how unpleasant, can be a form of self-medication, a way to calm ourselves down by avoiding the crises brewing inside.
...pain can be protective; staying in a depressed place can be a form of avoidance. Safe inside her shell of pain, she doesn’t have to face anything, nor does she have to emerge into the world, where she might get hurt again.
Lori Gottlieb takes us on a journey of self-discovery with herself and her patients. We learn about the world of therapy — how it works, what’s it like from the therapist’s point of view, how change happens, when therapy ends, what’s it like when a therapist goes to a therapist, and much more.
...therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.
...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.
The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at.
Included throughout Maybe You Should Talk to Someone are conversations between therapist and client. Over the course of the book, we get to know several of Lori’s patients and their stories. These patients are fascinating and the authenticity of their sessions rings through.
Gottlieb writes well, in a friendly style with much insight, depth and meaning included in every paragraph. I appreciated her discussing her own problems — people often forget that therapists are human and have problems just like the rest of us. Gottlieb is not shy about revealing her issues and her thoughts as well as the process of therapy she undergoes for herself.
I just need a little crisis management, a few weeks to “process” an unexpected breakup, and then I’ll be good to go. I’ve done therapy before, I say, so I come “preshrunk.”
