Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

I've been fascinated with psychotherapy since childhood, when I began seeing my first therapist for anxiety. I went off and on until things got better, but after college I experienced what my current therapist called a "quarter life crisis" and I've been seeing her ever since. The pandemic has caused me to reexamine everything in my life - my relationships, my health, my habits, my coping mechanisms, everything. I've been doing a lot more reading as well, mostly to distract myself from all the chaos of this year. I remember the title of Lori Gottlieb's book, "Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed." It caught my attention last year, but it wasn't until I saw a blogger rave about it during the height of my daily pandemic panic attacks that I bought a copy. This book came into my life at the exact moment I needed it. It sounds so cliche, but I laughed and cried more with this book than I ever have before. I even read certain chapters to Nate, and we would discuss why it resonated so much with me.

Link here

Brief Synopsis:
Half-memoir, half sort of self-help, the book delves into not only what it's like to be a patient in therapy, it also examines what it's like for the clinician. What are therapists like in their own lives? Are they perfectly balanced, well adjusted people? Or are they just doing the best they can everyday, like most of us? Lori Gottlieb is a happy, single mother of a young son living in Los Angeles. She practices therapy, and has a wonderful boyfriend that she wants to marry. Everything is great, until seemingly out of the blue one night, her boyfriend tells her that he can't live with another kid under his roof and he breaks Gottlieb's heart. This event takes her into a tailspin, and that's when she sees a therapist with her own "presenting problem," or the thing that causes someone to seek therapy.

Must-Read:
What I love about the book is that it opens the window and lets the reader peek into other people's lives. There's something deeply personal, almost voyueristic about it. The relationship between a patient or client and their therapist is often profound, but because it's also privileged, you rarely get to hear what goes on behind closed doors. There's a lot of references to psychological theories, terms in the DSM that brought me back to some of my courses in college. Erik Erikson, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Carl Jung. I love the way it all comes together, bouncing around between different characters' therapy sessions, and then turning the tables on Gottlieb's own sessions where she becomes the patient. It humanizes therapy in a way I've not read before. Gottlieb injects humor into her writing, while also remaining painfully honest. The handful of patients that she documents are interesting, but the one that really affected me the most was the woman in her mid-thirties that was dying from cancer. I could barely get through her story without blubbering like a crazy person on the couch, wiping tears from my face after every sentence. I've been thinking about mortality all Spring and Summer, how death is inevitable but it's not something people really talk about in earnest. It's explored in a really meaningful way in this book, the theme of one's mortality woven into many of the characters and chapters.

While I read the book, I was also speaking to my own therapist weekly and it definitely alleviated some of my worries. I really hope you'll pick this book up! It's a fast, enjoyable read that's also thought-provoking and incredibly funny. Everyone should read it.

Have you read it?