Quotes from Lori Gottlieb

every decision they make is based on two things: fear and love.

This strategy, in which the therapist instructs patients not to do what they're already not doing, is called a paradoxical intervention.

A half shelf-life for a woman is about thirty-five. The real shelf life is forty. Once you're forty and dating online, no guy who wants to have kids is willing to even meet you. Divorced guys who already have kids will meet a forty-year-old, but many of them have had vasectomies.

early experiences inform who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present

I would have to cope with not knowing what my future held, manage my worry, and focus on living now.

He let me tell my story in whatever way I needed to today.

People don't always remember events or conversations clearly, but they do remember with great accuracy how an experience made them feel.

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.")

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

I know how affirming it feels to blame the outside world for my frustrations, to deny ownership of whatever role I might have in the existential play called My Incredibly Important Life.

We can't have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same. To

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.

flight to health is a phenomenon in which patients convince themselves that they're suddenly over their issues because, unbeknownst to them, they can't tolerate the anxiety that working through these issues is bringing up.

For many people, going into the depths of their thoughts and feelings is like going into a dark alley—they don't want to go there alone. People come to therapy to have somebody to go there with, and people watch John's show for a similar reason: it makes them feel less alone, allows them to see a version of themselves muddling through life

You can have compassion without forgiving.

more real in his life is allowing him to let others be more real too.

If you'd asked me when I started as a therapist what most people came in for, I would have replied that they hoped to feel less anxious or depressed, to have less problematic relationships. But no matter the circumstances, there seemed to be this common element of loneliness, a craving for but a lack of a strong sense of human connection. A want. They rarely expressed it that way, but the more I learned about their lives, the more I could sense it, and I felt it in many ways myself.

on the screen. Maybe in this way, he is a psychiatrist to many—and maybe his bravery in writing about his own loss had inspired me to write about mine.

self-sabotage as a form of control.

Above all, I didn't want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion — an apt phrase, given John's worldview. In 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.

One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current predicaments,

That's right - sometimes hell is us. Sometimes we are the cause of our own difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

think about how common it is, even in everyday situations, to be jealous of a spouse and how taboo it is to talk about that. Aren't we supposed to be happy for their good fortune? Isn't that what love is about?

Wendell once pointed out that we talk to ourselves more than we'll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren't always kind or true or helpful—or even respectful. Most of what we say to ourselves we'd never say to people we love or care about, like our friends or children. In therapy, we learn to pay close attention to those voices in our heads so that we can learn a better way to communicate with ourselves.