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4.38 AVERAGE
4.38 AVERAGE
funny
informative
reflective
medium-paced
All of the things
This book was everything I was looking for, funny, moving, and thought- provoking. Loved every moment spent with Lori and her life
This book was everything I was looking for, funny, moving, and thought- provoking. Loved every moment spent with Lori and her life
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
I valued the insights and stories here, as someone who has personally found therapy empowering and revelatory. I love my therapist! :) This was a book I wanted to savor and not to end, but I couldn't keep from reading on at the same time. I appreciated the author's vulnerability in showing us the scared and defensive parts of herself and some of her patterns that created her predicament, which led to discovering the underlying issues beyond the breakup itself. And also her journey of choosing to be a single mother--very powerful and inspirational! I also enjoyed the patient stories she chose to share with us because they seemed relatable on many levels for a human life. I took away some new lessons and insights myself from these stories.
"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." pg. 6
"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." pg. 43-44
"For the next several weeks, I come to Wendell's office and report the details of my circular conversations with Boyfriend (admittedly, there are several more) while Wendell tries to interject something useful (that he's not sure how this helping me; that this feels masochistic; that I keep telling the same story hoping for a different outcome). He says that I want Boyfriend to explain himself to me--and that he is explaining himself to me--but that I keep going back because his explanation isn't what I want to hear." pg. 61
"'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.' He goes on to explain that all of this perseverating I'm doing, all of this endless rumination and speculation about Boyfriend's life, is adding to the pain and causing me to suffer. So, he suggests, if I'm clinging to the suffering so tightly, I must be getting something out of it. It must be serving some purpose for me." pg. 62-63
"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 fact, Wendell continues, I've lost more than my relationship in the present. I've lost my relationship in the future. 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 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.Can I sit through the pain, or do I want to suffer?" pg. 66-67
"'Do you think I'm a bad person?' she'd ask, and I'd assure her that everyone who comes to therapy worries that what they think or feel might not be 'normal' or 'good,' and yet 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." pg. 77
"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. If the divorce happens at midlife, the loss might involve coping with the limitations of knowing someone and being known again with the same degree of intimacy." pg. 114
"People want to be understood and to understand, but for most of us, our biggest problem is that we don't know what our problem is. We keep stepping in the same puddle. Why do I do the very thing that will guarantee my own unhappiness over and over again?" pg. 116
"Therapists use three sources of information when working with patients: What the patients say, what they do, and how we feel while we're sitting with them. . . Our experiences with this person are important because we're probably feeling something pretty similar to what everyone else in this patient's life feels." pg. 121
"In therapy, you'll be asked to be both accountable and vulnerable. Rather than steering people straight to the heart of the problem, we nudge them to arrive there on their own, because the most powerful truths--the ones people take the most seriously--are those they come to, little by little, on their own. Implicit in the therapeutic contract is the patient's willingness to tolerate discomfort, because some discomfort is unavoidable for the process to be effective." pg. 124
"Happiness equals reality minus expectations. Apparently, you can make people happy by delivering bad news and then taking it back (which, personally, would just make me mad)." pg. 134
"The therapist explained that often different parts of ourselves want different things, and if we silence the pats we find unacceptable, they'll find other ways to be heard." pg. 134
"I know that therapy won't make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I'll always act from a place of enlightenment. 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.But how to help people do this is another matter." pg. 151
"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.
Why would people do this to themselves? Because the pull toward that feeling of 'home' makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parent who in some way hurt them. In the beginning of a relationship, these characteristics will be barely perceptible, but the unconscious has a finely tuned radar system inaccessible to the conscious mind. 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. Freud called this 'repetition compulsion.' Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar--but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable." pg. 192-193
"But now the kiss has presented another crisis for Rita--possibility. And that may feel even more intolerable to her than her pain." pg. 231
"There was an unspoken irony to all of this. 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? They imagined that they were rushing now in order to savor their lives later, but so often, later never came. They psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had made this point more than fifty years earlier: '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." pg. 257
"If you'd asked me when I started as a therapist what most people came in for, I would have replied that they hoped to feel less anxious or depressed, to have less problematic relationships. But no matter the circumstances, there seemed to be this common element of loneliness, a craving for but a lack of a strong sense of human connection. A want. They rarely expressed it that way, but the more I learned about their lives, the more I could sense it, and I felt it in many ways myself." pg. 259
"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." pg. 260
"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." pg. 266
"The four ultimate concerns are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness. Death, of course, is an instinctive fear that we often repress but that tends to increase as we get older. What we fear isn't just dying in the literal sense but in the sense of being extinguished, the loss of our very identities, of our younger and more vibrant selves. How do we defend against this fear? Sometimes we refuse to grow up. Sometimes we self-sabotage. And sometimes we flat-out deny our impending deaths. But as Yalom wrote in Existential Psychotherapy, our awareness of death helps us live more fully--and with less, not more, anxiety." pg. 266-267
"In a way, this midlife crisis may be more about opening up than shutting down, an expansion rather than a constriction, a rebirth rather than a death. I remember when Wendell said that I wanted to be saved. But Wendell isn't here to save me or solve my problems as much as to guide me through my life as it is so that I can manage the certainty of uncertainty without sabotaging myself along the way.
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! I'm going to have to figure out how to make the most of the life I have, illness or not, partner or not, the march of time notwithstanding. Which is to say, I'm going to have to look more closely at the fourth ultimate concern: meaninglessness." pg. 267-268
"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." pg. 281
"People often start therapy during the contemplation stage. . . Here people procrastinate of self-sabotage as a way to stave off change--even positive change--because they're reluctant to give something up without knowing what they'll get in its place. The hiccup at this stage is that change involves the loss of the old and the anxiety of the new. Although often maddening for friends and partners to witness, this hamster wheel is part of the process; people need to do the same thing over and over a seemingly ridiculous number of times before they're ready to change." pg. 282-283
"I particularly liked this line from 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.'" pg. 289
"I feel lighter, relieved of a burden. 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." pg. 293
"'I don't know, ' he says after a beat. 'I'll have to think about it.
'Frankl's quote pops into my mind again. He's making space between the stimulus and response in order to choose his freedom." pg. 293
"She seemed to be stuck in what the psychologist Erik Erikson termed despair. In the mid-1900s, Erikson came up with eight stages of psychosocial development that still guide therapists in their thinking today. Unlike Freud's stages of psychosexual development, which end at puberty and focus on the id, Erikson's psychosocial stages focus on personality development in a social context (such as how infants develop a sense of trust in others). Most important, Erikson's stages continue throughout the entire lifespan, and each interrelated stage involves a crisis that we need to get through to move on to the next. They look like this:
Infant (hope) - trust versus mistrust
Toddler (will) - autonomy versus shame
Preschooler (purpose) - initiative versus guilt
School-age child (competence) - industry versus inferiority
Adolescent (fidelity) - identity versus role confusion
Young adult (love) - intimacy versus isolation
Middle-aged adult (care) - generativity versus stagnation
Older adult (wisdom) - integrity versus despair" pg. 297
Book: borrowed from SSF Main Library.
"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." pg. 6
"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." pg. 43-44
"For the next several weeks, I come to Wendell's office and report the details of my circular conversations with Boyfriend (admittedly, there are several more) while Wendell tries to interject something useful (that he's not sure how this helping me; that this feels masochistic; that I keep telling the same story hoping for a different outcome). He says that I want Boyfriend to explain himself to me--and that he is explaining himself to me--but that I keep going back because his explanation isn't what I want to hear." pg. 61
"'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.' He goes on to explain that all of this perseverating I'm doing, all of this endless rumination and speculation about Boyfriend's life, is adding to the pain and causing me to suffer. So, he suggests, if I'm clinging to the suffering so tightly, I must be getting something out of it. It must be serving some purpose for me." pg. 62-63
"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 fact, Wendell continues, I've lost more than my relationship in the present. I've lost my relationship in the future. 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 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.Can I sit through the pain, or do I want to suffer?" pg. 66-67
"'Do you think I'm a bad person?' she'd ask, and I'd assure her that everyone who comes to therapy worries that what they think or feel might not be 'normal' or 'good,' and yet 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." pg. 77
"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. If the divorce happens at midlife, the loss might involve coping with the limitations of knowing someone and being known again with the same degree of intimacy." pg. 114
"People want to be understood and to understand, but for most of us, our biggest problem is that we don't know what our problem is. We keep stepping in the same puddle. Why do I do the very thing that will guarantee my own unhappiness over and over again?" pg. 116
"Therapists use three sources of information when working with patients: What the patients say, what they do, and how we feel while we're sitting with them. . . Our experiences with this person are important because we're probably feeling something pretty similar to what everyone else in this patient's life feels." pg. 121
"In therapy, you'll be asked to be both accountable and vulnerable. Rather than steering people straight to the heart of the problem, we nudge them to arrive there on their own, because the most powerful truths--the ones people take the most seriously--are those they come to, little by little, on their own. Implicit in the therapeutic contract is the patient's willingness to tolerate discomfort, because some discomfort is unavoidable for the process to be effective." pg. 124
"Happiness equals reality minus expectations. Apparently, you can make people happy by delivering bad news and then taking it back (which, personally, would just make me mad)." pg. 134
"The therapist explained that often different parts of ourselves want different things, and if we silence the pats we find unacceptable, they'll find other ways to be heard." pg. 134
"I know that therapy won't make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I'll always act from a place of enlightenment. 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.But how to help people do this is another matter." pg. 151
"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.
Why would people do this to themselves? Because the pull toward that feeling of 'home' makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parent who in some way hurt them. In the beginning of a relationship, these characteristics will be barely perceptible, but the unconscious has a finely tuned radar system inaccessible to the conscious mind. 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. Freud called this 'repetition compulsion.' Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar--but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable." pg. 192-193
"But now the kiss has presented another crisis for Rita--possibility. And that may feel even more intolerable to her than her pain." pg. 231
"There was an unspoken irony to all of this. 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? They imagined that they were rushing now in order to savor their lives later, but so often, later never came. They psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had made this point more than fifty years earlier: '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." pg. 257
"If you'd asked me when I started as a therapist what most people came in for, I would have replied that they hoped to feel less anxious or depressed, to have less problematic relationships. But no matter the circumstances, there seemed to be this common element of loneliness, a craving for but a lack of a strong sense of human connection. A want. They rarely expressed it that way, but the more I learned about their lives, the more I could sense it, and I felt it in many ways myself." pg. 259
"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." pg. 260
"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." pg. 266
"The four ultimate concerns are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness. Death, of course, is an instinctive fear that we often repress but that tends to increase as we get older. What we fear isn't just dying in the literal sense but in the sense of being extinguished, the loss of our very identities, of our younger and more vibrant selves. How do we defend against this fear? Sometimes we refuse to grow up. Sometimes we self-sabotage. And sometimes we flat-out deny our impending deaths. But as Yalom wrote in Existential Psychotherapy, our awareness of death helps us live more fully--and with less, not more, anxiety." pg. 266-267
"In a way, this midlife crisis may be more about opening up than shutting down, an expansion rather than a constriction, a rebirth rather than a death. I remember when Wendell said that I wanted to be saved. But Wendell isn't here to save me or solve my problems as much as to guide me through my life as it is so that I can manage the certainty of uncertainty without sabotaging myself along the way.
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! I'm going to have to figure out how to make the most of the life I have, illness or not, partner or not, the march of time notwithstanding. Which is to say, I'm going to have to look more closely at the fourth ultimate concern: meaninglessness." pg. 267-268
"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." pg. 281
"People often start therapy during the contemplation stage. . . Here people procrastinate of self-sabotage as a way to stave off change--even positive change--because they're reluctant to give something up without knowing what they'll get in its place. The hiccup at this stage is that change involves the loss of the old and the anxiety of the new. Although often maddening for friends and partners to witness, this hamster wheel is part of the process; people need to do the same thing over and over a seemingly ridiculous number of times before they're ready to change." pg. 282-283
"I particularly liked this line from 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.'" pg. 289
"I feel lighter, relieved of a burden. 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." pg. 293
"'I don't know, ' he says after a beat. 'I'll have to think about it.
'Frankl's quote pops into my mind again. He's making space between the stimulus and response in order to choose his freedom." pg. 293
"She seemed to be stuck in what the psychologist Erik Erikson termed despair. In the mid-1900s, Erikson came up with eight stages of psychosocial development that still guide therapists in their thinking today. Unlike Freud's stages of psychosexual development, which end at puberty and focus on the id, Erikson's psychosocial stages focus on personality development in a social context (such as how infants develop a sense of trust in others). Most important, Erikson's stages continue throughout the entire lifespan, and each interrelated stage involves a crisis that we need to get through to move on to the next. They look like this:
Infant (hope) - trust versus mistrust
Toddler (will) - autonomy versus shame
Preschooler (purpose) - initiative versus guilt
School-age child (competence) - industry versus inferiority
Adolescent (fidelity) - identity versus role confusion
Young adult (love) - intimacy versus isolation
Middle-aged adult (care) - generativity versus stagnation
Older adult (wisdom) - integrity versus despair" pg. 297
Book: borrowed from SSF Main Library.
This review may contain spoilers.
The first 25 to 30% of the book was really uninteresting for me to get through. Had I not committed to reading it, I would have definitely dropped it. However, when the plot moved from the author’s personal life to her patients and her therapist, things got a lot more interesting. I am happy I read the book. I enjoyed reading about various psychological theories and how they could apply to people’s narratives. John, Rita and Wendell were memorable characters in many ways, and I thought the author articulately described their state of mind.
The problems the patients (or clients) were going to therapy for, were the problems similar to the ones people try to cope with all their lives, just alone. There is a widespread idea that people should get themselves together on their own, or that all hope is lost, that there is a point in life after which change will not be possible but you read these stories and see there are success stories, that some people, when they reach out for help, really see themselves and others, they learn to "edit their stories"
Some quotes:
“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”
“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.”
“Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.”
“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.”
Having grown up in three generations of psychiatrists, this book's topics were so familiar to me. Lori Gottlieb, however, has the ability to take you farther in, through her authentic descriptions of her interactions with her own patients as well as sharing so openly with the reader about her own therapy. She has the ability to keep this book so readable I couldn't put it down, and yet her descriptions of psychoanalytic theory and practice were woven into the stories seamlessly. I can't recommend this book highly enough for anyone interested in human behaviour.
One of the best books I’ve read, insightful, her clients are endearing and you like her start to form a earth for them. Lori is someone you want in your life as her perspective is so honest and refreshing. I’m happy she finally wrote her book in the end because we all can benefit from it. Read the book! It’s worth it time and time again!