Quotes from Lori Gottlieb

In therapy we say, Let's edit your story.

In couples therapy, therapists talk about the difference between privacy (spaces in people's psyches that everyone needs in healthy relationships) and secrecy (which stems from shame and tends to be corrosive). Carl Jung called secrets "psychic poison,

You'll turn thirty or forty or fifty anyway, whether your hours are finished or not," she said. "What does it matter what age you are when that happens? Either way, you won't get today back." We all went quiet. You won't get today back. What a chilling idea. We knew that our supervisor was trying to tell us something important. But we didn't have time to think about it.

People may seek peace and clarity, understanding and healing, but deathbeds themselves are often a stew

Lisa Clampitt, the matchmaker in New York who used to be a social worker, told me that often what seems like "chemistry" might be emotional baggage from childhood. That's why if she sees a client repeatedly going after men who aren't working out, she looks at the psychological roots of the attraction.

Before having a baby, I'd relished the freedom of a non-office job. But now I longed to get dressed every day and be in the company of verbal grownups. It was during this perfect storm of isolation and plummeting estrogen that I started to wonder if I'd made a mistake by leaving medical school.

difference between a criticism and a complaint, how the former contains judgment while the latter contains a request.

It's impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them. We should take the world's enemies, get them in a room to share their histories and formative experiences, their fears and their struggles, and global adversaries would suddenly get along.

if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place,

Sometimes people can't identify their feelings because they were talked out of them as children.

ultimate concerns are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness

He wrote, "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

When the rush is there, you're not acting like yourself. You're nervous and insecure. There's no critical thinking and you make idiotic choices: I just want to rip his clothes off and breathe his air and so what if he's clinically depressed!

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.

What makes therapy challenging is that it requires people to see themselves in ways they normally choose not to.

Our marriage is successful because it's built not on an unattainable fantasy of perfection, but out of the realization that love is created, not presented.

the famous stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

The answer to an unasked question is always no,

How long do you think the sentence for this crime should be? A year? Five? Ten?" Many of us torture ourselves over our mistakes for decades, even after we've genuinely attempted to make amends. How reasonable is that sentence?

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—even for Jen,

Carl Jung coined the term collective unconscious to refer to the part of the mind that holds ancestral memory, or experience that is common to all humankind. Whereas Freud interpreted dreams on the object level, meaning how the content of the dream related to the dreamer in real life (the cast of characters, the specific situations), in Jungian psychology, dreams are interpreted on the subject level, meaning how they relate to common themes in our collective unconscious.

If you ever want proof that what people present online is a prettier version of their lives, become a therapist and Google your patients.

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.

Instead, you release them in layers, moving closer and closer to the tender core: your sadness