Quotes from Lori Gottlieb

One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current predicaments, because once they realize that they can (and must) construct their own lives, they're free to generate change.

Frankl's book: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

We marry our unfinished business.

With aging comes the potential to accrue many losses: health, family, friends, work, and purpose.

Every laugh and good time that comes my way feels ten times better than before I knew such sadness.

two hundred years ago, the philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe succinctly summarized this sentiment: "Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.

Erikson maintained that, in later years, we experience a sense of integrity if we believe we have lived meaningful lives. This sense of integrity gives us a feeling of completeness so that we can better accept our approaching deaths. But if we have unresolved regrets about the past—if we think that we made poor choices or failed to accomplish important goals—we feel depressed and hopeless, which leads us to despair.

Right now it's all about one foot, then the other. That's one thing I tell patients who are in the midst of crippling depression, the kind that makes them think, There's the bathroom. It's about five feet away. I see it, but I can't get there. One foot, then the other.

Reacting vs. responding = reflexive vs. chosen. We can choose

There's a term for this irrational fear of joy: cherophobia (chero is the Greek word for "rejoice"). People with cherophobia are like Teflon pans in terms of pleasure—it doesn't stick (though pain cakes on them as if to an ungreased surface).

She hadn't expected to experience this pleasure in her grief, to find it invigorating, in a way. But even as she's dying, she's realized, life goes on—even as the cancer invades her body, she still checks Twitter. At first she thought, Why would I waste even ten minutes of the time I have left checking Twitter? And then she thought, Why wouldn't I? I like Twitter!

A supervisor once likened doing psychotherapy to undergoing physical therapy. It can be difficult and cause pain, and your condition can worsen before it improves, but if you go consistently and work hard when you're there, you'll get the kinks out and function so much better.

Insight allows you to ask yourself, Is this something that's being done to me or am I doing it to myself? The answer gives you choices, but it's up to you to make them.

During an initial burst of pain, people tend to lash out either at others or at themselves, to turn the anger outward or inward.

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.

Our younger selves think in terms of a beginning, middle, and some kind of resolution. But somewhere along the way—perhaps in that middle—we realize that everyone lives with things that may not get worked out. That the middle has to be the resolution, and how we make meaning of it becomes our task.

The nature of life is change, but the nature of people is to resist change.

Whenever one person in a family system starts to make changes, even if the changes are healthy and positive, it's not unusual for other members in this system to do everything they can to maintain the status quo and bring things back to homeostasis.

The only way to get to the other side of the tunnel is to go through it, not around it.

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.

I think of something else Wendell once said: "The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change." It was a paraphrase of something he'd read that had resonated with him both personally and as a therapist, he told me, because it was a theme that informed nearly every person's struggles.

You can let more people into the mix who could possibly make you happy. Or you can hold out for that two percent of men who you assume meet your requirements, and hope that coincidentally, someone in that two percent feels that you're in his two percent. And even then, the people you assume to meet your requirements might in fact not be the right fit for you.

Even in the best possible relationship, you're going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you're human. You will inevitably hurt your partner, your parents, your children, your closest friend—and they will hurt you—because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal.

People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn't the absence of feelings; it's a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.