“Therapists don’t perform personality transplants: they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself - to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.”
I’m Betty Martin with "Martin’s Must Reads" and that’s just one of the many great quotes in Lori Gottlieb’s book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. Gottlieb is a psychotherapist, best-selling author, columnist and has appeared on several media outlets --including NPR.
This is “a story about therapy: how we heal and where it leads us.” Gottlieb allows us to follow the progress of several of her patients, as well as her own, as we sit in on their therapy sessions. One of her patients is lonely, one is an alcoholic, one has anger issues and one is dying.
Gottlieb herself has been devastated by the end of a serious relationship and decides to seek help in making sense of her overwhelming feelings of betrayal. Interspersed throughout the book she describes different therapy theories and shares insights from her years of practice.
As therapy ends, Gottlieb writes, “We’ve helped them hear the questions they didn’t even know they were asking: Who am I? What do I want? What’s in my way?”
If you’re interested in a very readable introduction to therapy, how it works and how it can help people, then you must read Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb.
