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A review by ptstewart
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb
4.0
The more you welcome your vulnerability, the less afraid you’ll be.
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.
I find Maybe You Should Talk To Someone very difficult to review for a few reasons, the first of which is that I like it so much. Blending personal stories, client sessions (and growth), and therapeutic theory and wisdom, Gottlieb takes our hand and pulls us headfirst into the deep ends of her characters’ lives. Principle to being a therapist and commented on many times is the fact that therapists are likely to get to know their clients more intimately than many, many people in the clients’ lives. As Gottlieb gains greater empathy and understanding of her clients, we begin to love them more, too, cheering for them as they reach acceptance or they grow. There is no escaping the weight of Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, as even the most surface level problems are often linked to deep, long lasting pain.
From a narrative standpoint, some of the structure really works. Perhaps modeled after therapy, many of the most impactful aspects of individuals’ stories are withheld until—surprise!—the reader experiences the bombshell of implications right along with Gottlieb. This maintains interest and engagement in the reader, and it works well.
I have to comment alternatively that I am unsure if the sporadic peppering of therapeutic insight and background was formulated in the best means possible. In truth, I don’t know. This may be a detail Gottlieb and her editors struggled with—I have to mention the stages of change; where the fuck do I do that?—and there just wasn’t a satisfactory conclusion. The inclusion of therapeutic insight is clearly necessary to the book; the absorption of much of the work that is being done benefits from such context, but that doesn’t stop such sections from feeling occasionally clunky and out of place.
Finally, I think it is difficult to identify perspectives held by Gottlieb as a therapist and perspectives agreed upon by the psychological community. This is not to say by any means that Gottlieb’s assessments of various emotional experiences such as grief and death and overall change are necessarily inaccurate or even harmful; rather, this is to comment that a non-student or non-professional may not be able to identify concepts presented from a unique (though, admittedly, not unhealthy or inaccurate) perspective in relation to concepts presented from an agreed upon empirical perspective.
In totality, Maybe You Should Talk To Someone is rife with the aspect Gottlieb was going for: meaning; and it is because of this that the book is so enjoyable and impactful as a read.
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.
I find Maybe You Should Talk To Someone very difficult to review for a few reasons, the first of which is that I like it so much. Blending personal stories, client sessions (and growth), and therapeutic theory and wisdom, Gottlieb takes our hand and pulls us headfirst into the deep ends of her characters’ lives. Principle to being a therapist and commented on many times is the fact that therapists are likely to get to know their clients more intimately than many, many people in the clients’ lives. As Gottlieb gains greater empathy and understanding of her clients, we begin to love them more, too, cheering for them as they reach acceptance or they grow. There is no escaping the weight of Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, as even the most surface level problems are often linked to deep, long lasting pain.
From a narrative standpoint, some of the structure really works. Perhaps modeled after therapy, many of the most impactful aspects of individuals’ stories are withheld until—surprise!—the reader experiences the bombshell of implications right along with Gottlieb. This maintains interest and engagement in the reader, and it works well.
I have to comment alternatively that I am unsure if the sporadic peppering of therapeutic insight and background was formulated in the best means possible. In truth, I don’t know. This may be a detail Gottlieb and her editors struggled with—I have to mention the stages of change; where the fuck do I do that?—and there just wasn’t a satisfactory conclusion. The inclusion of therapeutic insight is clearly necessary to the book; the absorption of much of the work that is being done benefits from such context, but that doesn’t stop such sections from feeling occasionally clunky and out of place.
Finally, I think it is difficult to identify perspectives held by Gottlieb as a therapist and perspectives agreed upon by the psychological community. This is not to say by any means that Gottlieb’s assessments of various emotional experiences such as grief and death and overall change are necessarily inaccurate or even harmful; rather, this is to comment that a non-student or non-professional may not be able to identify concepts presented from a unique (though, admittedly, not unhealthy or inaccurate) perspective in relation to concepts presented from an agreed upon empirical perspective.
In totality, Maybe You Should Talk To Someone is rife with the aspect Gottlieb was going for: meaning; and it is because of this that the book is so enjoyable and impactful as a read.