Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

every story has multiple threads, and they tend to leave out the strands that don’t jibe with their perspectives.

generally “presents” because the person has reached an inflection point in life.

presenting problem

Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.

Every person you’ve been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)—all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to

we talk to ourselves more than we’ll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren’t always kind or true or helpful—or even respectful. Most of what we say to ourselves we’d never say to people we love or care about, like our friends or children. In therapy, we learn to pay close attention to those voices in our head

We grow in connection with others. Everyone needs to hear that other person’s voice saying, I believe in you. I can see possibilities that you might not see quite yet. I imagine that something different can happen, in some form or another.

Irvin Yalom, the psychiatrist, wrote that it was “far better that [a patient make progress but] forget what we talked about than the opposite possibility (a more popular choice for patients)—to remember precisely what was talked about but to remain unchanged.”