Quotes from Lori Gottlieb

Will you think about me?" Julie used to ask me before she went in for her various surgeries, and I always told her I would. The assurance soothed her, helped her stay centered in the midst of her anxiety about going under the knife. Later, though, when it became clear that Julie would die, that question took on another meaning: Will a part of me remain alive in you?

Denial is not a river in Egypt.

There's a magnet that somebody stuck on the refrigerator in our office's kitchen: PEACE. 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.

You can't get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can't change what you're denying or minimizing. And, of course, often what seem like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.

But feelings are actually more like weather systems—they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn't mean you'll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel—anxiety, elation, anguish—blows in and out again.

it can either shackle you to the past or serve as an engine for change.

Is this something that's being done to me or am I doing it to myself?

Irvin Yalom, the psychiatrist, wrote that it was "far better that [a patient make progress but] forget what we talked about than the opposite possibility (a more popular choice for patients)—to remember precisely what was talked about but to remain unchanged.

Follow your envy - it shows what you want

You can't get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it.

You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can't change what you're denying or minimizing.

The therapist explained that often different parts of ourselves want different things, and if we silence the parts we find unacceptable, they'll find other ways to be heard.

It's one thing to talk about leaving behind a restrictive mindset. It's another to stop being so restrictive.

quote from Einstein: "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?' I thought I knew what I planned to do, but now everything has changed.

There is something likable in everyone. And to my great surprise, I found that she was right. It's impossible to get to know people deeply and not to come to like them.

There are many ways to tell a story, and if I've learned anything as a therapist, it's that most people are what therapists call "unreliable narrators." That's not to say that they purposely mislead. It's more that every story has multiple threads, and they tend to leave out the strands that don't jibe with their perspectives.

Fitzgerald put it, "In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day"),

Therapy elicits odd reactions because, in a way, it's like pornography. Both involve a kind of nudity. Both have the potential to thrill. And both have millions of users, most of whom keep their use private. Though statisticians have attempted to quantify the number of people in therapy, their results are thought to be skewed because many people who go to therapy choose not to admit it.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls." But he also said this: "Who looks inside, awakes.

is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type.

Sometimes we imprison ourselves with a narrative of self-punishment. If

alexithymia. She doesn't know what she's feeling or doesn't have the words to express it.

Your misery doesn't change their situation. You can't lessen their misery by carrying it for them inside you. It doesn't work that way. There are ways for you to be a better mother to them at this point in all of your lives. Sentencing yourself to live in prison isn't one of them.