Quotes from Lori Gottlieb

Frankl's quote pops into my mind again. He's making space between stimulus and response in order to choose his freedom.

a condition in which a person's anxiety is "converted" into neurologic conditions such as paralysis, balance issues, incontinence, blindness, deafness, tremors, or seizures. The symptoms are often temporary and tend to be related (sometimes symbolically) to the psychological stressor at its root.

Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions. Being silent is like emptying the trash. When you stop tossing junk into the void—words, words, and more words—something important rises to the surface.

Sitting with Rita, I was reminded that the heart is just as fragile at seventy as it is at seventeen. The vulnerability, the longing, the passion—they're all there in full force. Falling in love never gets old.

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.

O terapeuta explicou que, com frequência, diferentes partes do nosso íntimo querem coisas distintas, e se silenciamos as partes que consideramos inaceitáveis, elas encontrarão outras maneiras de se fazerem escutar.

to suffer so much. You're not choosing the pain, but you're choosing the suffering." He

1) 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.

Once we know what we're feeling, we can make choices about where we want to go with them.

Because at the end of the day, love wins.

Às vezes, me pergunto: Quem sou eu para tomar decisões importantes na minha própria vida? Será que sou mesmo qualificada para isso? Todo mundo trava essa batalha interna em algum grau: Criança ou adulto? Segurança ou liberdade? Mas independentemente de onde as pessoas caiam nessa continuidade, toda decisão feita é baseada em duas coisas: medo e amor. A terapia luta para ensinar como diferenciar um do outro.

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.

I was holding on to a future that had been canceled. I was watching Boyfriend's future unfold while I stayed locked in the past. I'd need to accept that his future and mine, his present and mine, were now separate and that all we had left in common was our history.

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

I think about how it's the not knowing that torments all of us. Not knowing why your boyfriend left, not knowing what's wrong with your body. Not knowing if you could have saved your son. At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we'll never know why.

It's no surprise that as I heal inside, I'm also becoming more adept at healing others.

take the most seriously—are those they come to, little by little, on their own.

Mas por que agora?", pergunto, tentando colocar minha nova pergunta com graça: "Parece-me que você estava com aqueles móveis havia... hã... um bom tempo?". Wendell ri. Não escondi muito bem o subtexto. "Às vezes", ele diz, "as mudanças são assim".

Nobody wants to buy therapy anymore," the consultant said matter-of-factly. "They want to buy a solution to a problem.

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.

One woman said to her husband, "You know what three words are even more romantic to me than 'I love you'?" "You look beautiful?" he tried. "No," his wife said. "I understand you.")

That's why it's especially important to be the people we want to be now, to become more open and expansive while we're able.

Sometimes what seems like setting a boundary - saying no - is actually a cop out, an inverted way of saying yes. The challenge is to get past the fear and say yes.

I point out to her that pain can be protective; staying in a depressed place can be a form of avoidance. Safe inside her shell of pain, she doesn't have to face anything, nor does she have to emerge into the world, where she might get hurt again. Her inner critic serves her: I don't have to take any action because I'm worthless.