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

The therapist Terry Real described our well-worn behaviors as “our internalized family of origin. It’s our repertoire of relational themes.” People don’t have to tell you their stories with words because they always act them out for you. Often they project negative expectations onto the therapist, but if the therapist doesn’t meet those negative ex

Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions. Being silent is like emptying the trash. When you stop tossing junk into the void—words, words, and more words—something important rises to the surface. And when the silence is a shared experience, it can be a gold mine for thoughts and feelings that the patient didn’t even

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.

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

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

As Andrew Solomon wrote in The Noonday Demon: “The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, but vitality.”

“I have something to tell you,” I say. He looks at me like No shit.

Follow your envy—it shows you what you want.

Taped up next to my files is the word ultracrepidarianism, which means “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.” It’s a reminder to myself that as a therapist, I can come to understand people and help them sort out what they want to do, but I can’t make their life choices for them.