Quotes from Lori Gottlieb

dance allows our bodies to express our emotions in a way that words sometimes can't. When we dance, we express our buried feelings, talking through our bodies instead of our minds — and that can help us get out of our heads and to a new level of awareness. That's partly what dance therapy is about. It's another technique some therapists use.

The inability to say yes, however—to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program—is more about lack of trust in oneself. Will I mess this up? Will this turn out badly? Isn't it safer to stay where I am?

So many of our destructive behaviors take root in an emotional void, an emptiness that calls out for something to fill it.

The price of loving so deeply is feeling so deeply—but it's also a gift, the gift of being alive. If we no longer feel, we should be grieving our own deaths.

As the late psychotherapist Kohn Weakland famously said, "Before successful therapy, it's the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it's one dame thing after another.

You can't get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me.

succinctly summarized this sentiment: "Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously,

The more you welcome your vulnerability," Wendell had said, "the less afraid you'll feel." This isn't how we tend to view life when we're younger. 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.

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. John

But unlike neurosurgeons, we gravitate toward the sensitive area, pressing delicately on it, even if it makes the patient feel uncomfortable.

Because life happens and therapy helps us confront our demons when they pay a visit. And visit they will, because everyone has demons — big, small, old, new, quiet, loud.

There is a continuing decision to be made as to whether to evade pain, or to tolerate it and therefore modify it.

What parents needed, I believed, wasn't another book about how they had to calm down and take a break. What they needed was an actual break from the deluge of parenting books.

I'm smiling, Sherlock, because I know exactly what's bothering my wife!" "Ah!" I reply. "So—" "Wait, wait. I'm getting to the best part," he interrupts. "So, like I said, I really do know what's wrong, but I'm not that interested in hearing another complaint. So this time, instead of asking, I decide I'm going to—

joy isn't pleasure; it's anticipatory pain.

The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.

Fireflies love the dark too. There's beauty in those places.

I think of something else Wendell once said: "The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.

John lowers himself onto the couch, kicks off his shoes, then stretches out, lies down, and adjusts his head on the pillows. Usually he sits cross-legged on the sofa, so this is a first. I notice, too, that there's no food today. "Okay, you win," he begins with a sigh. "Win what?" I ask. "The pleasure of my company," he deadpans. I raise my eyebrows.

I'll bet you could name five truly difficult people off the top of your head right now—some you assiduously avoid, others you would assiduously avoid if they didn't share your last name. But sometimes—more often than we tend to realize—those difficult people are us. That's right—sometimes hell is us. Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it." Fromm was right;

Sometimes "drama," no matter how unpleasant, can be a form of self-medication, a way to calm ourselves down by avoiding the crises brewing inside.

I once heard creativity described as being the ability to grasp the essence of one thing and the essence of some very different thing and smash them together to create some entirely new thing. That's what therapists do too. We take the essence of the initial snapshot and the essence of an imagined snapshot and smash them together to create an entirely new one.

When we dance, we express our buried feelings, talking through our bodies instead of our minds—and that can help us get out of our heads and to a new level of awareness