Quotes from Lori Gottlieb

Therapists will be supportive, but our support is for your growth, not for your low opinion of your partner.

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

once told Wendell that I'm a terrible decision maker, that often what I think I want doesn't turn out the way I'd imagined.

The purpose of inquiring about people's parents isn't to join them in blaming, judging, or criticizing their parents. In fact, it's not about their parents at all. It's solely about understanding how their early experiences inform who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present (and not wear psychological clothing that no longer fits).

Flannery O'Connor quote: "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

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 ... 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 wanted John to feel comfortable in therapy but not so comfortable that I wasn't helping him. Above all, I didn't want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion

unfinished business. For the next decade, Rita steered

O que este livro pergunta é: "Como mudamos?", e o que ele responde é: "Ao nos relacionarmos com os outros".

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.

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.

If don't recognize that "the perfect is the enemy of the good" yo may deprive yourself of joy

No, the irony hasn't been lost on me: the happiness book has been making me miserable.

I also know how helpless it feels to watch a friend suffer and do nothing to fix it. Sitting-with-you-in-your-pain is one of the rare experiences that people get in the protected space of a therapy room, but it's very hard to give or get outside of it

Sullivan believed that our struggles were interactional (meaning "relational"). He went so far as to say, "It's the mark of a senior clinician that he or she is the same person in their living room that they are in their office." We can't teach patients to be relational if we aren't relational with them.

I've told her about the many relationships I've seen implode simply because one person was terrified of being abandoned and so did everything in his or her power to push the other person away.

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.

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

This stage is hard because the behaviors people want to modify are embedded in the fabric of their lives; people with addiction issues (whether that addiction is to a substance, drama, negativity, or self-defeating ways of being) tend to hang out with other addicts.

Sabe, em relação a esses idiotas, eu tenho uma ideia a respeito. E se as pessoas que estão te deixando louco não estiverem tentando te deixar louco? E se essas pessoas não forem idiotas, mas razoavelmente inteligentes, e só estão fazendo o melhor que podem num determinado dia?

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

If they can see themselves more clearly through our reflections, we can see ourselves more clearly through theirs. This happens to therapists when we're providing therapy, and it happens to our own therapists too. We are mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors, showing one another what we can't yet see.

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

But sometimes—more often than we tend to realize—those difficult people are us.