Quotes from Lori Gottlieb

It's not that people want to get hurt again. It's that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this "repetition compulsion." Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar—but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.

Fate, bad luck, probability—any of those seemed like a welcome respite from a dismal diagnosis. Now when her computer crashed or a pipe burst in the kitchen, she'd say, It's just one of those things. The phrase made her smile. It could work both ways, she decided. How many times do good things inexplicably come our way too?

hours spent surfing the internet (an activity my colleague calls "the most effective short-term nonprescription painkiller").

Before you speak, ask yourself, What is this going to feel like to the person I'm speaking to?

What makes therapy challenging is that it requires people to see themselves in ways they normally choose not to. A therapist will hold up the mirror in the most compassionate way possible, but it's up to the patient to take a good look at that reflection

Spend less time on his future, more on my present." Wendell nods,

But, Wendell says, like my patient, I've come up with my own way to cope. If I screw up my life, I can engineer my own death rather than have it happen to me. It may not be what I want, but at least I'll choose it. Like cutting off my nose to spite my face, this is a way to say, Take that, uncertainty.

Years later, when I've done thousands of first sessions, and information-gathering has become second nature, I'll use a different barometer to judge how it went: Did the patient feel understood? It always amazes me that someone can walk into a room as a stranger and then, after fifty minutes, leave feeling understood, but it happens nearly every time. When it doesn't, the patient doesn't return. And because Michelle did, something had gone right.

The therapy room seemed to be one of the only places left where two people sit in a room together for an uninterrupted fifty minutes. Despite its veil of professionalism, this weekly I-thou ritual is often one of the most human encounters that people experience.

the qualities she said she wanted in a partner, she came to therapy and reported: "It's too bad, but there just wasn't any chemistry." To her unconscious, his emotional stability felt too foreign.

The truth comes with a cost: the need to face reality.

Whenever I hear about saintly parents, I get suspicious. It's not that I'm looking for problems. It's just that no parent is a saint. Most of us end up being the "good-enough" parents that Donald Winnicott, the influential English pediatrician and child psychiatrist, believed was sufficient to raise a well-adjusted child.

doorknob disclosures.

the most powerful truths—the ones people take the most seriously—are those they come to, little by little, on their own.

Sometimes the changes you want in another person aren't on that person's agenda—even if he tells you they are.

But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you've told yourself about who you are so that you aren't trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you've been telling yourself about your life. But

I'd been mistaking feeling less for feeling better. The feelings are still there, though. They come out in unconscious behaviors, in an inability to sit still, in a mind that hungers for the next distraction, in a lack of appetite or a struggle to control one's appetite, in a short-temperedness,

Doing something prompts you to do something else, replacing a vicious cycle with a virtuous one. Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way.

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.

deathbeds themselves are often a stew of drugs, fear, confusion, weakness.

It's well documented that touch is important for well-being throughout our lifetimes. Touch can lower blood pressure and stress levels, boost moods and immune systems.

A second quality of mature spirituality is kindness. It is based on a fundamental notion of self-acceptance.

although, as the saying goes, "Before diagnosing people with depression, make sure they're not surrounded by assholes"),

A therapist will hold up a mirror to patients, but patients will also hold up a mirror to their therapists.