#122 - Lori Gottlieb: Understanding pain, therapeutic breakthroughs, and keys to enduring emotional health - Peter Attia

one of the most important lessons from my training: There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest.

Sitting-with-you-in-your-pain is one of the rare experiences that people get in the protected space of a therapy room, but it’s very hard to give or get outside of it—even for Jen, who is a therapist.

The process is highly idiosyncratic because there’s no cookie-cutter way to help people through what are at the deepest level existential fears—or what Yalom called “ultimate concerns.”

Operating under an illness model of care doesn’t just carry powerful implications for the way we conceptualize perfectionism, it impacts the way we conceptualize every aspect of mental health. The slightest pang of sadness, a drizzle of frustration—we register any decline in positive emotion with an assumption of pathology. It’s a cultural tic. The

the most powerful truths—the ones people take the most seriously—are those they come to, little by little, on their own. Implicit in the therapeutic contract is the patient’s willingness to tolerate discomfort, because some discomfort is unavoidable for the process to be effective.

In the early sessions, it’s always more important for patients to feel heard and understood than it is for them to gain any insight or make any changes.

In the early sessions, it’s always more important for patients to feel heard and understood than it is for them to gain any insight or make any changes.