Lori Gottlieb Quotes

We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.

There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest.

We tend to think that the future happens later, but we're creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists.

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.

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.

Follow your envy - it shows you what you want.

peace. it does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. it means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.

Relationships in life don't really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you've been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)--all of them evoke memories, conscious or not.

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

You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn’t one of them.

It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them.

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.

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

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

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

If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.

Just because she sends you guilt doesn’t mean you have to accept delivery.

But many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You’ll also mute the joy.

In the best goodbyes, there’s always the feeling that there’s something more to say.

The inability to say no is largely about approval-seeking—people imagine that if they say no, they won’t be loved by others. The inability to say yes, however—to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program—is more about lack of trust in oneself. Will I mess this up? Will this turn out badly? Isn’t it safer to stay where I am?

In therapy we aim for self-compassion (Am I human?) versus self-esteem (a judgment: Am I good or bad?).

Happiness (t) = w0+ w1  γt−jCRj+ w2  γt−jEVj+ w3  γt−jRPEj Which all boils down to: Happiness equals reality minus expectations.

at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past.

What people don’t like to think about is that you can do everything right—in life or in a treatment protocol—and still get the short end of the stick.

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

Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals. —Gretel Ehrlich

Above all, I didn't want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call 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. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.—James Baldwin

The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at.

Anger is the go-to feeling for most people because it’s outward-directed—angrily blaming others can feel deliciously sanctimonious. But often it’s only the tip of the iceberg, and 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. And if you can tolerate these deeper feelings long enough to understand them and listen to what they’re telling you, you’ll not only manage your anger in more productive ways, you also won’t be so angry all the time.

I remember a quote from Einstein: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

Your feelings don’t have to mesh with what you think they should be,” he explained. “They’ll be there regardless, so you might as well welcome them because they hold important clues.

If you stay in therapy,” I say softly, “you might have to let go of the hope for a better childhood—but that’s only so that you can create a better adulthood.

I think of a Flannery O’Connor quote: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

Ultracrepidarianism: the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.

Being silent is like emptying the trash. When you stop tossing junk into the void—words,words,words—something important rises to the surface.

every decision they make is based on two things: fear and love. Therapy strives to teach you how to tell the two apart.

Forgiveness is a tricky thing, in the way that apologies can be. Are you apologizing because it makes you feel better or because it will make the other person feel better?

When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists.

The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.” It was a paraphrase of something he’d read that had resonated with him both personally and as a therapist, he told me, because it was a theme that informed nearly every person’s struggles.

We are mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors, showing one another what we can’t yet see.

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.

You’ll turn thirty or forty or fifty anyway, whether your hours are finished or not,” she said. “What does it matter what age you are when that happens? Either way, you won’t get today back.

we grow in connection with others.

Follow your envy—it shows you what you want.

Yalom wrote in Existential Psychotherapy, our awareness of death helps us live more fully—and with less, not more, anxiety.

Sharing difficult truths might come with a cost—the need to face them—but there’s also a reward: freedom. The truth releases us from shame.

What makes for a good marriage isn't necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Marriage isn't a passion-fest; it's a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane and often boring non-profit business. And I mean this in a good way.

it’s our honesty with ourselves that helps us make sense of our lives with all of their nuances and complexity. Repress those thoughts, and you’ll likely behave “badly.” Acknowledge them, and you’ll grow.

we talk to ourselves more than we’ll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren’t always kind or true or helpful—or even respectful. Most of what we say to ourselves we’d never say to people we love or care about, like our friends or children.

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.

Sometimes the only thing to do is yell, “Fuck!

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

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. 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.

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.

When I look at my friend's marriages, with their routine day-to-dayness, they actually seem far more romantic than any dating relationship might be. Dating seems romantic, but for the most part it's an extended audition. Marriage seems boring, but for the most part it's a state of comfort and acceptance. Dating is about grand romantic gestures that mean little over the long-term. Marriage is about small acts of kindness that bond you over a lifetime. It's quietly romantic. He makes her tea. She goes to the doctor appointment with him. They listen to each other's daily trivia. They put up with each other's quirks. They're there for each other.

We marry our unfinished business.

With aging comes the potential to accrue many losses: health, family, friends, work, and purpose.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sometimes in their pain, people believe that the agony will last forever. But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel—anxiety, elation, anguish—blows in and out again.

As a therapist, I know a lot about pain, about the ways in which pain is tied to loss. But I also know something less commonly understood: that 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. To help John, I’m going to have to figure out what his loss would be, but first, I’m going to have to understand mine. Because right now, all I can think about is what my boyfriend did last night. The idiot! I look back at John and think: I hear you, brother.

But Wendell told me that by diminishing my problems, I was judging myself and everyone else whose problems I had placed lower down on the hierarchy of pain. You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can’t change what you’re denying or minimizing. And, of course, often what seem like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.

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

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.

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.

Therapy elicits odd reactions because, in a way, it’s like pornography. Both involve a kind of nudity. Both have the potential to thrill. And both have millions of users, most of whom keep their use private.

Next time you're about to rule out some guy because he's not your ideal, try to focus on the good things about him, because some guy is going to have to focus on the good things about you, even though he may have wanted someone more easygoing or taller. Every time you start to dissect some guy, note that he's willfully ignoring all of this in order to go out with you.

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.

An interesting paradox of the therapy process: In order to do their job, therapists try to see patients as they really are, which means noticing their vulnerabilities and entrenched patterns and struggles. Patients, of course, want to be helped, but they also want to be liked and admired. In other words, they want to hide their vulnerabilities and entrenched patterns and struggles. That’s not to say that therapists don’t look for a patient’s strengths and try to build on those. We do. But while we aim to discover what’s not working, patients try to keep the illusion going to avoid shame—to seem more together than they really are. Both parties have the well-being of the patient in mind but often work at cross-purposes in the service of a mutual goal.

One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current predicaments, because once they realize that they can (and must) construct their own lives, they’re free to generate change.

Reacting vs. responding = reflexive vs. chosen. We can choose

Every laugh and good time that comes my way feels ten times better than before I knew such sadness.

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.

Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, 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.

Well you seem like you're enjoying the experience of suffering, so I thought I'd help you out with that... 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

During an initial burst of pain, people tend to lash out either at others or at themselves, to turn the anger outward or inward.

Relationships in life don’t really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you’ve been close to lives on somewhere inside you.

Insight allows you to ask yourself, Is this something that’s being done to me or am I doing it to myself? The answer gives you choices, but it’s up to you to make them.

Before you speak, ask yourself, What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to? 

If we have a choice between believing one of two things, both of which we have evidence for -- I'm unlovable, I'm lovable - often we choose the one that makes us feel bad. Why do we keep our radios tuned to the same static-ridden stations (the everyone's-life-is-better-than-mine, the I-can't-trust-people station, the nothing-works-out-for-me station) instead of moving the dial up or down? Change the station. Walk around the bars. Who's stopping us but ourselves?

Right now it’s all about one foot, then the other. That’s one thing I tell patients who are in the midst of crippling depression, the kind that makes them think, There’s the bathroom. It’s about five feet away. I see it, but I can’t get there. One foot, then the other.

There’s a term for this irrational fear of joy: cherophobia (chero is the Greek word for “rejoice”). 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).

The answer to an unasked question is always no

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

The only way to get to the other side of the tunnel is to go through it, not around it.

The nature of life is change, but the nature of people is to resist change.

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.

Displacement’s a bitch, isn’t it? We all use defense mechanisms to deal with anxiety, frustration, or unacceptable impulses, but what’s fascinating about them is that we aren’t aware of them in the moment.

Before diagnosing people with depression, make sure they’re not surrounded by assholes”),

Take a risk. Maybe our pasts don’t define us but inform us.

Typically, a patient might have a difficult session about a childhood trauma, then come in the next week and announce that therapy is no longer 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.

A supervisor once likened doing psychotherapy to undergoing physical therapy. It can be difficult and cause pain, and your condition can worsen before it improves, but if you go consistently and work hard when you’re there, you’ll get the kinks out and function so much better.

She hadn’t expected to experience this pleasure in her grief, to find it invigorating, in a way. But even as she’s dying, she’s realized, life goes on—even as the cancer invades her body, she still checks Twitter. At first she thought, Why would I waste even ten minutes of the time I have left checking Twitter? And then she thought, Why wouldn’t I? I like Twitter!

Erikson maintained that, in later years, we experience a sense of integrity if we believe we have lived meaningful lives. This sense of integrity gives us a feeling of completeness so that we can better accept our approaching deaths. But if we have unresolved regrets about the past—if we think that we made poor choices or failed to accomplish important goals—we feel depressed and hopeless, which leads us to despair.

One foot, then the other. Don't look at all five feet at once. Just take a step. And when you've taken that step, take one more. Eventually you'll make it to the shower. And you'll make it to tomorrow and next year too. One step.

Our younger selves think in terms of a beginning, middle, and some kind of resolution. But somewhere along the way—perhaps in that middle—we realize that everyone lives with things that may not get worked out. That the middle has to be the resolution, and how we make meaning of it becomes our task.

Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.

You want to mute the pain? You’ll also mute the joy.

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.

Might it feel safer to stay in jail?

Until you tell me what’s really on your mind, you’ll stay stuck exactly where you are.

And when that happens, the only control you have is how you deal with that stick—your way, not the way others say you should.

Our notion of the future can be just as powerful a roadblock to change as our notion of the past.

complaining about the way a relative would try to make me feel guilty, my father quipped, “Just because she sends you guilt doesn’t mean you have to accept delivery.

Happiness equals reality minus expectations.

rules are bent with thoughtful intention, it broadens the definition of what effective treatment can be.

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.

So what I say is this: You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn’t one of them.

Your misery doesn't change their situation. You can't lessen their misery by carrying it for them inside you.

But what are we so afraid of? It’s not as if we’re going to peer in those darker corners, flip on the light, and find a bunch of cockroaches. Fireflies love the dark too. There’s beauty in those places. But we have to look in there to see it.

Look for reasons to say 'yes' instead of 'no,' he reminded me. Screen in rather than constantly screening out. Always ask yourself this: If an interesting guy were right in front of you, would you honestly turn that person away because of a few pounds or inches, or a sentence in a profile that you don't like? If so, that's fine. Just don't complain when you can't find anybody suitable because you've eliminated every potential guy on a technicality. Because if these guys eliminated people on technicalities, they probably wouldn't date you, either.

I think of something else Wendell once said: “The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.” It was a paraphrase of something he’d read that had resonated with him both personally and as a therapist, he told me, because it was a theme that informed nearly every person’s struggles.

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.

Unfortunately, sometimes people leave just as their symptoms lift, not realizing (or perhaps knowing all too well) that the work is just beginning and that staying will require them to work even harder.

One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current predicaments, because once they realize that they can (and must) construct their own lives, they’re free to generate change. Often, though, people carry around the belief that the majority of their problems are circumstantial or situational—which is to say, external. And if the problems are caused by everyone and everything else, by stuff out there, why should they bother to change themselves? Even if they decide to do things differently, won’t the rest of the world still be the same? It’s a reasonable argument. But that’s not how life generally works. Remember Sartre’s famous line “Hell is other people”? It’s true—the world is filled with difficult people (or, as John would have it, “idiots”). I’ll bet you could name five truly difficult people off the top of your head right now—some you assiduously avoid, others you would assiduously avoid if they didn’t share your last name. But sometimes—more often than we tend to realize—those difficult people are us. That’s right—sometimes hell is us. Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can’t change what you’re denying or minimizing. And, of course, often what seen like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.

You can let more people into the mix who could possibly make you happy. Or you can hold out for that two percent of men who you assume meet your requirements, and hope that coincidentally, someone in that two percent feels that you're in his two percent. And even then, the people you assume to meet your requirements might in fact not be the right fit for you.

at a life stage when everyone else is moving forward; the thirties are a decade of building the foundation of the future. He’s out of sync with his peers, and in his own way, in his own grief, he probably feels completely alone.

His self-involvement, defensiveness, demeaning treatment of others, need to dominate the conversation, and sense of entitlement—basically, his being an asshole—all fall under the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder.

If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy. At first patients are taken aback by my bluntness,

Half my life is over, I would say, seemingly out of nowhere, in our very first session—and Wendell would jump right on this. He was picking up where my internship supervisor had left off years earlier. You won’t get today back. And the days were flying by.

Relationships in life don’t really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you’ve been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)—all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep.

There’s a term we use in therapy: forced forgiveness. Sometimes people feel that in order to get past a trauma, they need to forgive whoever caused the damage—the parent who sexually assaulted them, the burglar who robbed their house, the gang member who killed their son. They’re told by well-meaning people that until they can forgive, they’ll hold on to the anger. Granted, for some, forgiveness can serve as a powerful release—you forgive the person who wronged you, without condoning his actions, and it allows you to move on. But too often people feel pressured to forgive and then end up believing that something’s wrong with them if they can’t quite get there—that they aren’t enlightened enough or strong enough or compassionate enough. So what I say is this: You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn’t one of them.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

In the fifth century BC, however, Hippocrates noted that aromas didn’t seem to be working for this malady, which he had named hysteria, from the Greek word for “uterus.

I want some sign of the scar tissue left behind. I want to know, in the end, that I mattered.

Now I keep in mind that none of us can love and be loved without the possibility of loss but that there’s a difference between knowledge and terror.

Which all boils down to: Happiness equals reality minus expectations.

Sometimes the changes you want in another person aren’t on that person’s agenda

If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.

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

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day”),

Perhaps men apologize preemptively, by holding their tears back.

Therapy elicits odd reactions because, in a way, it’s like pornography. Both involve a kind of nudity.

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

He wasn’t doing anything fancy; he just seemed wholly at home in his skin.

Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and experience something before its meaning becomes apparent.

The Noonday Demon: “The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, but vitality.

often different parts of ourselves want different things, and if we silence the parts we find unacceptable, they’ll find other ways to be heard.

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.

The more you welcome your vulnerability the less afraid you'll feel

Most things worth doing are difficult,

I remember saying that there was a difference between examining and dwelling, and if we’re cut off from our feelings, just skating on the surface, we don’t get peace or joy—we get deadness.

Whatever the problem, it generally “presents” because the person has reached an inflection point in life. Do I turn left or right? Do I try to preserve the status quo or move into uncharted territory? (Be forewarned: therapy will always take you into uncharted territory, even if you choose to preserve the status quo.) But people don’t care about inflection points when they come for their first therapy session. Mostly, they just want relief. They want to tell you their stories, beginning with their presenting problem. So let me fill you in on the Boyfriend Incident.

Even in the best possible relationship, you’re going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you’re human. You will inevitably hurt your partner, your parents, your children, your closest friend—and they will hurt you—because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal.

Julie told me that she wanted people to keep her in mind the way she keeps me in mind between sessions. “I’ll be driving, and I’ll panic about something, but then I’ll hear your voice,” she explained. “I’ll remember something you said.” I thought about how I did this with Wendell—how I’d internalized his lines of questioning, his way of reframing situations, his voice. This is such a universal experience that one litmus test of whether a patient is ready for termination is whether she carries around the therapist’s voice in her head, applying it to situations and essentially eliminating the need for the therapy.

Then there’s the fact that losses tend to be multilayered. There’s the actual loss (in my case, of Boyfriend), and the underlying loss (what it represents). That’s why for many people the pain of a divorce is only partially about the loss of the other person; often it’s just as much about what the change represents—failure, rejection, betrayal, the unknown, and a different life story than the one they’d expected.

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.

I remember reading a divorced woman’s experience of getting to know a new lover after her decades-long marriage ended: “I will never lock eyes in the delivery room with David,” she wrote. “I’ve never met his mother.

Before I die, I want to be completely myself. Soon the idea spawned over a thousand such walls all over the world: Before I die, I would like to have a relationship with my sister. Be a great dad. Go skydiving. Make a difference in someone’s life. I don’t know if people followed through, but based on what I’ve seen in my office, a good number may have had momentary awakenings, done a little soul-searching, added more to their lists—and then neglected to tick things off. People tend to dream without doing, death remaining theoretical.

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. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him

How long do you think the sentence for this crime should be? A year? Five? Ten?' Many of us torture ourselves over our mistakes for decades, even after we've genuinely attempted to make amends. How reasonable is that sentence?

I started going over the lines in my head for this French play I’m in at school. I play a rabbit called Janot Lapin, who’s the leader of a group of farm animals. It’s not the most interesting play in the universe, but we only know three verb tenses so far so we didn’t have a lot of choices. There’s this one scene where I’m really hungry because the landowners aren’t feeding us, and I keep saying, “J’ai faim.” In case you don’t know, that means “I’m hungry,” but it really means “I have hunger.” That’s what real French people say. I think it’s neat how French people have hunger, but they aren’t hungry like Americans are. I mean, it’s a lot easier to try not to have something than to try not to be it.

I regularly made an effort to remember one of the most important lessons from my training: There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering—I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I’m lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins—or loses?

Typically therapists are several steps ahead of our patients—not because we’re smarter or wiser but because we have the vantage point of being outside their lives. I’ll say to a patient who has bought the ring but can’t seem to find the right time to propose to his girlfriend, “I don’t think you’re sure you want to marry her,” and he’ll say, “What? Of course I am! I’m doing it this weekend!” And then he goes home and doesn’t propose, because the weather was bad and he wanted to do it at the beach. We’ll have the same dialogue for weeks, until one day he’ll come back and say, “Maybe I don’t want to marry her.” Many people who say, “No, that’s not me,” find themselves a week or a month or a year later saying, “Yeah, actually, that’s me.

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. In

Insight is the booby prize of therapy“ is my favorite maxim of the trade, meaning that you can have all the insight in the world, but if you don’t change when you’re out in the world, the insight and the therapy is worthless. Insight allows you to ask yourself, "Is this something that’s being done to me or am I doing it to myself?“. The answer gives you choices, but it’s up to you to make them.

Therapist and writer Lori Gottlieb wrote an article for the Atlantic questioning why so many of her twentysomething patients were unaccountably depressed, even though they had great parents and on the surface great lives. This category of patients stumped her until she discovered the right questions to ask. “Back in graduate school,” she wrote, “the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?”2

these negative emotions are not simply something to endure and erase. They are purposeful. Beneficial. They tell us what we need. Anger inspires action. Sadness is necessary to process grief. Fear helps keep us safe. Completely eradicating these emotions is not just impossible—it’s unhealthy. These negative emotions only become toxic when they block out all the other emotions. When we feel so much sadness that we can’t let any joy in. When we feel so much anger that we cannot soften around others. True mental health looks like a balance of these good and bad feelings. As Lori Gottlieb says in her book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, “Many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You’ll also mute the joy.

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.

There’s another related concept that I share with John: impermanence. Sometimes in their pain, people believe that the agony will last forever. But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel—anxiety, elation, anguish—blows in and out again.

There's an unspoken irony to all of this. People wanted a speedy solution to their problems, but what id their moods had been driven down in the first place by the hurried pace of their lives? They imagined they were rushing now in order to save their lives later, but so often, later never came.

Did I tell you that she created a shared Google calendar to make sure I won’t forget things that are ‘important’”—with his free hand, John does an air quote as he says the word important—“so now I’m even more stressed because my calendar is filled with Margo’s things and I’ve already got a packed schedule!

It’s no surprise that we often dream about our fears. We have a lot of fears. What are we afraid of? We are afraid of being hurt. We are afraid of being humiliated. We are afraid of failure and we are afraid of success. We are afraid of being alone and we are afraid of connection. We are afraid to listen to what our hearts are telling us. We are afraid of being unhappy and we are afraid of being too happy (in these dreams, inevitably, we’re punished for our joy). We are afraid of not having our parents’ approval and we are afraid of accepting ourselves for who we really are. We are afraid of bad health and good fortune. We are afraid of our envy and of having too much. We are afraid to have hope for things that we might not get. We are afraid of change and we are afraid of not changing. We are afraid of something happening to our kids, our jobs. We are afraid of not having control and afraid of our own power. We are afraid of how briefly we are alive and how long we will be dead. (We are afraid that after we die, we won’t have mattered.) We are afraid of being responsible for our own lives.

But I got a second chance too. Wendell once pointed out that we talk to ourselves more than we’ll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren’t always kind or true or helpful—or even respectful. Most of what we say to ourselves we’d never say to people we love or care about, like our friends or children. In therapy, we learn to pay close attention to those voices in our heads so that we can learn a better way to communicate with ourselves.

Until very recently, most mental-health practitioners believed that personality disorders were incurable because unlike mood disorders, such as depression and anxiety, personality disorders consist of long-standing, pervasive patterns of behavior that are very much a part of one’s personality. In other words, personality disorders are ego-syntonic, which means the behaviors seem in sync with the person’s self-concept; as a result, people with these disorders believe that others are creating the problems in their lives. Mood disorders, on the other hand, are ego-dystonic, which means the people suffering from them find them distressing. They don’t like being depressed or anxious or needing to flick the lights on and off ten times before leaving the house. They know something’s off with them.

It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains—that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant. —RICHARD BENTALL, Journal of Medical Ethics, 1992

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;

If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.

Who looks inside, awakes.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

She can’t concentrate because trying not to cry is taking all of her focus. She looked up the symptoms of depression and ticked off all the boxes.

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!

you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others.

Almost is always the hardest, isn’t it?” she said one afternoon. “Almost getting something. Almost having a baby. Almost getting a clean scan. Almost not having cancer anymore.” 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.

During my training, a supervisor once told me, “There’s something likable in everyone,” and to my great surprise, I found that she was right. It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them. We should take the world’s enemies, get them in a room to share their histories and formative experiences, their fears and their struggles, and global adversaries would suddenly get along. I’ve found something likable in literally everyone I’ve seen as a therapist, including the guy who attempted murder. (Beneath his rage, he turned out to be a real sweetheart.)

I thought I should call a matchmaker. For me, this seemed like a radical step. It never occurred to me to hire a matchmaker when I was younger because I always believed I'd meet a man on my own. He'd be sitting next to me on an airplane, waiting in line behind me at the dry cleaner, working in the same office attending the same party, hanging out at the same coffeehouse. It seemed ridiculous now, when I thought about the odds of this happening. After all, we don't subject other important aspects of out lives to pure chance. When you want to get a job you don't just hang out in the lobbies of office buildings, hoping an employer will strike up a conversation with you. When you want to buy a house, you don't walk aimlessly from neighborhood to neighborhood on your own, hoping to spot a house that happens to be for sale, matches your personal taste and contains the appropriate number of bedrooms and bathrooms. That's too random. If that's your only method of house hunting, you might end up homeless. So you hire a real estate broker to show you the potential homes that meet your needs. By the same token, why not hire a matchmaker to show you potential partners?

Even in the best possible relationship, you’re going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you’re human.

„I’m reminded“, he begins, „of a famous cartoon. It’s of a prisoner, shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out – but to his right and left, it’s open, no bars.“ He pauses, allowing the image to sink in. „All the prisoner has to do is walk around. But still, he frantically shakes the bars. That’s most of us. We feel completely stuck, trapped in our emotional cells, but there’s a way out – as long as we’re willing to see it.

When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists. But if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place, in perpetual regret. By Google-stalking Boyfriend, I’ve been watching his future unfold while I stay frozen in the past. But if I live in the present, I’ll have to accept the loss of my future.

Speed is about time, but it’s also closely related to endurance and effort. The faster the speed, the thinking goes, the less endurance or effort required. Patience, on the other hand, requires endurance and effort. It’s defined as “the bearing of provocation, annoyance, misfortune, or pain without complaint, loss of temper, irritation, or the like.” Of course, much of life is made up of provocation, annoyance, misfortune, and pain; in psychology, patience might be thought of as the bearing of these difficulties for long enough to work through them. Feeling your sadness or anxiety can also give you essential information about yourself and your world.

There’s a colleague who used to be in my consultation group,” she begins. “But I’m not sure. He’s great. Very skilled. He always has insightful things to say. It’s just—” Caroline hesitates. “Just what?” “He’s so happy all the time. It feels . . . unnatural. Like, what the hell is he so happy about? But some patients like that. Do you think your friend would do well with him?” “Definitely not,” I say. I, too, am suspicious of chronically happy people.

Why do parents do this? Often, they envy their children’s childhoods--the opportunities they have; the financial or emotional stability that the parents provide; the fact that their children have their whole lives ahead of them, a stretch of time that’s now in the parents’ pasts. They strive to give their children all the things they themselves didn’t have, but they sometimes end up, without even realizing it, resenting the kids for their good fortune.

During the course of the day, he said, each spouse had confessed independently to him to taking antidepressants but didn’t want the other to know. It turned out that they were hiding the same medication in the same house. No matter how open we as a society are about formerly private matters, the stigma around our emotional struggles remains formidable. We’ll talk with almost anyone about our physical health (can anyone imagine spouses hiding their reflux medication from each other?), even our sex lives, but bring up anxiety or depression or an intractable sense of grief, and the expression on the face looking back at you will probably read, Get me out of this conversation, pronto.

But I can do any kind of dance,” he continued, smiling at my incredulity. “I also do swing, modern. What would you like to dance to?” “No way,” I said. “I’m not dancing with my therapist.” I wasn’t concerned that he was being sexually suggestive or creepy; I knew that he had no intention of that. It was more that I didn’t want to use my therapy time that way. I had things to talk about, like how I was coping with my medical condition. But part of me also knew that this was just an excuse I was giving myself, that this intervention could be useful, that the movement of dance allows our bodies to express our emotions in a way that words sometimes can’t. When we dance, we express our buried feelings, talking through our bodies instead of our minds—and that can help us get out of our heads and to a new level of awareness. That’s partly what dance therapy is about. It’s another technique some therapists use. But still—no.

told Rita what I tell everyone who’s afraid of getting hurt in relationships—which is to say, everyone with a heartbeat. I explained to her that even in the best possible relationship, you’re going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you’re human. You will inevitably hurt your partner, your parents, your children, your closest friend—and they will hurt you—because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal.

however, your childhood ruptures didn’t come with loving repairs, it will take some practice for you to tolerate the ruptures, to stop believing that every rupture signals the end, and to trust that even if a relationship doesn’t work out, you will survive that rupture too. You will heal and self-repair and sign up for another relationship full of its own ruptures and repairs. It’s not ideal, opening yourself up like this, putting your shield down, but if you want the rewards of an intimate relationship, there’s no way around it.

When I asked what she wanted that day to be like, first she said, “Well, I’d rather not be dead that day,” but failing that, she didn’t want it to be all “sugarcoated” and “cheery.” She liked the idea of a “celebration of life,” which the party planner told her was all the rage nowadays, but she didn’t like the message that came with it. “It’s a funeral, for God’s sake,” she said. “All these people in my cancer group say, ‘I want people to celebrate! I don’t want people to be sad at my funeral.’ And I’m like, ‘Why the fuck not? You died!’

We are afraid of being alone and we are afraid of connection. We are afraid to listen to what our hearts are telling us. We are afraid of being unhappy and we are afraid of being too happy (in these dreams, inevitably, we’re punished for our joy). We are afraid of not having our parents’ approval and we are afraid of accepting ourselves for who we really are. We are afraid of bad health and good fortune. We are afraid of our envy and of having too much. We are afraid to have hope for things that we might not get. We are afraid of change and we are afraid of not changing. We are afraid of something happening to our kids, our jobs. We are afraid of not having control and afraid of our own power. We are afraid of how briefly we are alive and how long we will be dead. (We are afraid that after we die, we won’t have mattered.) We are afraid of being responsible for our own lives.

But Wendell saw it differently. He'd given me permission to feel and also a reminder that, like so many people, I'd been mistaking feeling less for feeling better. The feelings are still there though. They come out in unconscious behaviors, in an inability to sit still, in a mind that hungers for the next distraction, in a lack of appetite or a struggle to control one's appetite, in a short-temperedness, or- in Boyfriend's case- in a foot that twitched under the covers as we sat in that heavy silence under which lay the feeling that he'd kept to himself for months: whatever he wanted, it wasn't me.

I feel my eyes get wet and the next thing I know my son calls out, “Mom, over here!” and I see that he has negotiated his way into Julie’s line. I hesitate. After all, Julie might feel awkward ringing up her therapist. And, truth be told, I might feel awkward too. She knows so little about me that even displaying the contents of my shopping cart feels somehow too revealing. But mostly, I’m thinking about how Julie talks about the sadness she experiences whenever she sees her friends’ kids while she and her husband are trying to find a way to become parents themselves. What will it be like for her to see me with my son? “Over here!” I reply, gesturing for Zach to move to a different line. “But this one’s shorter!” he yells back, and of course it is, because Julie’s so goddamned efficient, and that’s when Julie looks over at my son and then follows his gaze to me. Busted. I smile. She smiles. I start to head to the other line, but Julie says, “Hey, lady, listen to the boy. This line’s shorter!” I join Zach in Julie’s line.

I try to wrap my mind around this paradox: self-sabotage as a form of control. If I screw up my life, I can engineer my own death rather than have it happen to me. If I stay in a doomed relationship, if I mess up my career, if I hide in fear instead of facing what’s wrong with my body, I can create a living death—but one where I call the shots.

Once, at the end of a session with Wendell, I told him that sometimes, on days when I left more upset than when I came in—tossed out into the world, having so much more to say, holding so many painful feelings—I hated therapy. “Most things worth doing are difficult,” he replied. He said this not in a glib way but in a tone and with an expression that made me think he spoke from personal experience. He added that while everyone wants to leave each session feeling better, I, of all people, should know that that’s not always how therapy works. If I wanted to feel good in the short term, he said, I could eat a piece of cake or have an orgasm. But he wasn’t in the short-term-gratification business.

Wendell explains that my pain feels like it's in the present, but it's actually both in 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, out 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.

Our training has taught us theories and tools and techniques, but whirring beneath our hard-earned expertise is the fact that we know just how hard it is to be a person. Which is to say, we still come to work each day as ourselves—with our own sets of vulnerabilities, our own longings and insecurities, and our own histories. Of all my credentials as a therapist, my most significant is that I’m a card-carrying member of the human race.

The more you welcome your vulnerability,” Wendell had said, “the less afraid you’ll feel.” This isn’t how we tend to view life when we’re younger. Our younger selves think in terms of a beginning, middle, and some kind of resolution. But somewhere along the way—perhaps in that middle—we realize that everyone lives with things that may not get worked out. That the middle has to be the resolution, and how we make meaning of it becomes our task.

One thing that has surprised Julie about going through the process of watching herself die is how vivid her world has become. Everything that she used to take for granted produces a sense of revelation, as if she were a child again. Tastes- the sweetness of a strawberry, it’s juice dripping onto her chin; a buttery pastry melting in her mouth. Smells - flowers on a front lawn, a colleague‘s perfume, seaweed washed up on the shore, Matt’s sweaty body in bed at night. Sounds – the strings on a cello, the screech of a car, her nephew’s laughter. Experiences - dancing at a birthday party, people-watching at Starbucks, buying a cute dress, opening the mail. All of this, no matter how mundane, delights her to no end. She’s become hyper-present. When people delude themselves into believing they have all the time in the world, she noticed, they get lazy. She hadn’t expected to experience this pleasure in her grief, to find it invigorating, in a way. But even as she’s dying, she’s realized, life goes on - even as the cancer invades her body, she still checks Twitter. At first she thought, why would I waste even ten minutes of the time I have left checking Twitter? And then she thought, why wouldn’t I? I like Twitter! She also tries not to dwell on what she’s losing. “I can breathe fine now, “Julie says, “but it’ll get harder, and I’ll grieve for that. Until then, I breathe.

Gloria-in-human-resources wants an answer by tonight,” I heard Brad say. “Should I pick the smart one or the hot one?” I froze, appalled. “Always pick the smart one,” the other agent replied, and I wondered which one Brad considered me to be. An hour later, I got the job. And despite finding the question outrageously inappropriate, I felt perversely hurt. Still, I wasn’t sure why Brad had pegged me as smart. All I’d done that day was dial a string of phone numbers (repeatedly disconnecting calls by pressing the wrong buttons on the confusing phone system), make coffee (which was sent back twice), Xerox a script (I pushed 10 instead of 1 for number of copies, then hid the nine extra screenplays under a couch in the break room), and trip over a lamp cord in Brad’s office and fall on my ass. The hot one, I concluded, must have been particularly stupid.

it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip—to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.” “Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.” But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place. So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around . . . and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills . . . and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy . . . and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.” And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away . . . because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss. But . . . if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things . . . about Holland.