Quotes from Lori Gottlieb

Some people hope that therapy will help them find a way to be heard by whoever they feel wronged them, at which point those lovers or relatives will see the light and become the people they'd wished for all along. But it rarely happens like that.

Therapists tell their patients: Follow your envy—it shows you what you want.

A patient's boyfriend doesn't want to stop smoking pot and watching video games on weekends.

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. 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.

Some people hope that therapy will help them find a way to be heard by whoever they feel wronged them, at which point those lovers or relatives will see the light and become the people they'd wished for all along. But it rarely happens like that. At some point, being a fulfilled adult means taking responsibility for the course of your own life and accepting the fact that now you're in charge of your choices. You have to move to the front seat and be the mommy dog driving the car.

most therapists per capita are, in descending order, Argentina, Austria, Australia, France, Canada, Switzerland, Iceland, and the United States.)

not that she's hiding her feelings; it's that she can't access them. There's a word for this kind of emotional blindness: alexithymia. She doesn't know what she's feeling or doesn't have the words to express it.

But sometimes — more often than we tend to realize — those difficult people are us. That's right — sometimes hell is us. Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of "feeling felt." This matters more than the therapist's training, the kind of therapy they do, or what type of problem you have.

When people delude themselves into believing they have all the time in the world, she's noticed, they get lazy.

Everyone needs to hear that other person's voice saying, I believe in you. I can see possibilities that you might not see quite yet. I imagine that something different can happen, in some form or another. In therapy we say, Let's edit your story.

If an addict stops drinking, for instance, family members often unconsciously sabotage that person's recovery, because in order to regain homeostasis in the system, somebody has to fill the role of the troubled person.

cherophobia (chero is the Greek word for "rejoice").

How easy it is, I thought, to break someone's heart, even when you take great care not to.

that change and loss travel together.

High-functioning patients are those who can form relationships, manage adult responsibilities, and have a capacity for self-reflection.

If we no longer feel, we should be grieving our own deaths.

The inability to say no is largely about approval-seeking—people imagine that if they say no, they won't be loved by others.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.

And so it begins, at last. Charlotte doesn't leave this time. Instead, she stays in therapy until she learns to drive her own car, navigating her way through the world more safely, looking both ways, making many wrong turns but finding her way back, always, to where she truly wants to go.

Loss of trust is harder to repair.

the most important lessons from my training: There's no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn't be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering—I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I'm lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins—or loses?

After all, in her daily life, she wasn't encountering any single older men, much less those who met her requirements: intelligent, kind, financially stable ("I don't want anyone looking for a nurse and a purse"), and physically fit ("Somebody who can still get an erection in a timely manner"). Hair was optional, but teeth, she insisted, were not.

Relationships in life don't really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you've been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally) - all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep.