Quotes from Lori Gottlieb

The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.

people procrastinate or 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.

How can there be an endpoint to love and loss? Do we even want there to be? The price of loving so deeply is feeling so deeply – but it's also a gift, the gift of being alive.

Until you don't recognize that "the perfect is the enemy of the good" you may deprive yourself of joy.

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

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?

She still equates feeling loved not with peace or joy but with anxiety.

Displacement (shifting a feeling toward one person onto a safer alternative) is considered a neurotic defense, neither primitive nor mature.

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.

Sometimes I wonder, Who am I to make the important decisions in my own life? Am I really qualified for this? Everyone wages this internal battle to some degree: Child or adult? Safety or freedom? But no matter where people fall on those continuums, every decision they make is based on two things: fear and love. Therapy strives to teach you how to tell the two apart.

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.

Every day, our patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves. If they can see themselves more clearly through our reflections, we can see ourselves more clearly through theirs.

Pushing aside emotions only makes them stronger.

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.

There's a difference between a criticism and a complaint, how the former contains judgment while the latter contains a request. But a complaint can also be an unvoiced compliment.

Most of us come to therapy feeling trapped—imprisoned by our thoughts, behaviors, marriages, jobs, fears, or past. Sometimes we imprison ourselves with a narrative of self-punishment. 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

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.

emotional sobriety"—the ability to regulate one's feelings without self-medicating, whether that medication comes in the form of substances, defenses, affairs, or the internet.

I remember a quote from Einstein: "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." I've always felt that made sense, but, like most of us, I also believe that I should be able to think my way out of my problem by going over and over how I thought myself into it.

Well, sure, the vows say "in sickness and health" and "for better or worse" and all that, but that's kind of like clicking okay to the terms and conditions when you download an app or sign up for a credit card. You don't think any of that is going to apply to you.

You seem depressed," she said with concern. I said I wasn't depressed; I was just bored. I hadn't considered that if the only thing that keeps you going all day is knowing you'll get to turn on the TV after dinner, you probably are depressed.

The internet can be both a salve and an addiction, a way to block out pain (the salve) while simultaneously creating it (the addiction).

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.

I once told Wendell that Mike, my colleague, had said a while back that when we feel fragile, we're like raw eggs—we crack open and splatter if dropped. But when we develop more resilience, we're like hard-boiled eggs—we might get dinged up if dropped, but we won't crack completely and spill all over the place.