Quotes from Lori Gottlieb

The eminent Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said this: "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

During my training, a supervisor once told me, "There's something likable in everyone," and to my great surprise, I found that she was right.

There's a biblical saying that translates roughly as "First you will do, then you will understand." Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and experience something before its meaning becomes apparent.

People tend to dream without doing, death remaining theoretical.

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.

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 may want others' forgiveness, but that comes from a place of self-gratification; we are asking forgiveness of others to avoid the harder work of forgiving ourselves.

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.

Now I keep in mind that none of us can love and be loved without the possibility of loss but that there's a difference between knowledge and terror.

Fireflies love the dark too. There's beauty in those places. But we have to look in there to see it.

Feeling your sadness or anxiety can also give you essential information about yourself and your world.

but the stages of change are such that you don't drop all of your defenses at the same time. Instead, you release them in layers, moving closer and closer to the tender core: your sadness, your shame.

our awareness of death helps us live more fully—and with less, not more, anxiety.

Don't look at all five feet at once. Just take a step. And when you've taken that step, take one more.

Being the cool girl feels like shit.

While women feel cultural pressure to keep up their physical appearance, men feel that pressure to keep up their emotional appearance

What people don't like to think about is that you can do everything right—in life or in a treatment protocol—and still get the short end of the stick. And when that happens, the only control you have is how you deal with that stick—your way, not the way others say you should. I'd let Julie do it her way—I was so inexperienced that I didn't have a strong sense of what a "way" should look like—and it seemed to help.

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?

this midlife crisis may be more about opening up than shutting down, an expansion rather than a constriction, a rebirth rather than a death.

Just because she sends you guilt doen't mean you have to accept delivery.

as Fitzgerald put it, "In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day"), my stomach tightens and I feel paralyzed.

Repetition compulsion is a formidable beast.

There's no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn't be ranked, because pain is not a contest.

A 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.