Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the first book I have read in this genre but I do follow the author in her very popular Dear Therapist series in The Atlantic. I love the series and the insights it has to give.

Now that I have finished the book, I am amazed at how honest, transparent and vulnerable the author has been to put out the most raw and potentially insecure parts of her own life. That shows her strength of character and how rooted she is. Another thing that struck me about her was how she shifted her path not once, not twice, but thrice to find her true calling. Starting off as a writer in Hollywood, she then went to med school, and then to becoming a therapist investing years of work in each, excelling at each and figuring out what worked and what did not work for her.

Then there are the lives of her patients. She talks of them from a place of empathy and compassion and is honest enough to say when it is hard to have these with particularly difficult ones. As a reader, I could feel the pain, discomfort, shame that the patients did. There are SO MANY instances where I could relate to something in my own life or something I have witnessed with people in my circle. I shall not mention them all because there are way too many.

There are some things she has written which have stayed in my head. Forgive me for these are not direct quotes, but how I remember them.
- Change and loss travel together. How simple and how so loaded!!
- In the space between stimulus and response, is our choice. We cannot control the stimulus, but can always control the response.
- How we are prisoners in our own minds. Meaningful, positive outcomes come from opening the mind to other possibilities than the narrative we have always taken shelter in.
- How even the world of therapy has succumbed to the instant-results mantra of today. I was surprised though I shouldn't have been.
- There was a part in the book where she went strongly on how we are addicted to our devices. It felt like that part was written for me.

I feel I have to read the book again to understand the technical aspects which she sprinkles throughout in the context of specific instances with her patients or herself. I have to read it again to absorb some more.

Key take away from the book - the answers are within. Or maybe I have viewed it through that lens.
And looks like we could all benefit from some therapy.




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