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

Recommended by my sil the child psychologist I found this book both irresistible, rich and wise. Want to know how it feels to be a therapist? How it feels to be a therapist who needs some therapy? Gottlieb leads us through the journey of four of her clients (fictionalized) as well as her own therapeutic journey after the unexpected end of a long-term relationship. The work starts with that as the issue, but moves deeper into issues of her own mortality and search for meaning. Gottlieb has the gift of citing and highlighting the work of various psychologists she admires and has found useful (like Carl Whittaker's, "the good enough parents theory". As someone who has benefitted from the help of therapists during transitional periods of my show more life, I loved this look behind the curtain.***** show less

I’m so glad my book club is reading this and that I bought a copy so I can push it on people. I need to talk about it! It’s non-fiction/memoir (sort of*). It is by Lori Gottleib who is a therapist after a round about career to get there including being a screenwriter on ER. She has a bad breakup in the beginning and realizes she needs therapy herself. Throughout the book it is her sitting on her therapists couch and then her being the therapist. The patients she sees show that we are all trying to get through something. She easily puts in explanations of how we deflect/defend/transfer emotions and how therapy works to fix that. I got so attached to many of the patients I got frustrated for them, felt happy when they figured things show more out, cried a few times.
Lori is speaking next week at Bookbar. I will definitely be going to see her.
*for patient privacy she changed a lot of details and in some cases put multiple patients challenges into one patient story. The author’s note says “All changes were carefully considered and painstakingly chosen to remain true to the spirit of each story while also serving the greater goal; to reveal our shared humanity so that we can see ourselves more clearly.” show less

The best parts were when Gottlieb wrote about herself, her ex and the relationship with her therapist. She's like your super-smart girlfriend discussing her problems. Although, she's a little unrelatable because she has a successful writing career, and went to Yale and then Standford medical school for 2 years. Her years of feeling lost look nothing like mine! Gottlieb's book did make me reflect on my own negative thinking loops and the narratives we tell ourselves. Writing about her patients, or I am going to assume a mash-up of patients to better hide their identities, was trickier territory. Her patients' lives were far more "successful" than most, at least in outward appearance. These are patients who have time and money for a year show more or more of weekly therapy, and I am resentful about it. Most of us don't have that kind of access, but we still have the same tragedies only with subpar professional help or without any professional help at all. Patient problems were tidied up in the end, and the reality is some patients never get anywhere, stay the same, quit therapy, run out of money, and or need medication in addition to therapy to get unstuck. Life is so much messier and unresolved. show less

Lori Gottlieb is a Los Angeles-based psychotherapist who reveals her vulnerability in "Maybe You Should Talk to Someone." In her office, she is a skilled and empathetic listener who tries to support her clients while they work through their problems. Ironically, as the book opens, Lori's significant other, whom she calls Boyfriend, leaves her after they have been together for two years. He claims that he wants his freedom and has no interest in co-parenting Lori's eight-year-old son, Zach. Gottlieb feels betrayed, infuriated, and becomes so depressed that she frequently bursts into tears. Since she is having difficulty letting go of her fury and despair, she decides to visit a therapist herself.

In this rich, meaningful, and entertaining show more work of non-fiction, the author explains how talk therapy can be beneficial. Naysayers claim that it is impractical and expensive to visit a mental health practitioner for months or even years. Gottlieb asserts, however, that an individual who is fortunate enough to find the right therapist may acquire useful coping skills, achieve a measure of self-awareness, and find a path to joy and fulfillment. Gottlieb once said in an interview that "we’re so afraid of the truth that sometimes we even hide it from ourselves." One of a therapist's tasks is to help remove the blinkers from our eyes.

On one level, "Maybe You Should Talk to Someone" is an introduction to the art of psychotherapy. Gottlieb writes lucidly about therapeutic terminology, touches on the contributions of pioneers in the field, and provides insight into what can be accomplished if someone's treatment progresses well. The author has a marvelous sense of humor (much of it self-deprecating), and the case studies that she presents are intriguing. It is fascinating to observe Lori in session with John, a narcissistic, sarcastic, and obnoxious writer for a popular television series who believes that he is smarter and more competent than everyone else. Julie is a young woman who discovers shortly after her wedding that she may not have long to live. Rita, a gifted artist, has repeatedly failed at marriage and is estranged from her adult children. While Lori does her best to help her patients heal themselves, she also continues to visit her own therapist, whose guidance enables her to recognize why she has been obsessing so much about her ex-boyfriend. This is a candid, engrossing, and poignant book in which Lori Gottlieb suggests that psychotherapy can help us uncover the hidden truths about ourselves and pave the way for constructive change. show less

Lori Gottlieb is a Los Angeles therapist who suddenly finds herself on the other side of the couch after a personal crisis, and she takes you into both rooms with uncommon candor. The premise is simple: her sessions with Wendell, her own therapist, braid together with the lives of four patients, each arriving with a problem they swear is the whole problem. It never is.
What makes this book work is character, not case study. John, the self-important Hollywood producer who insults everyone in reach, is rendered with enough specificity that his arrogance stops being a cartoon and starts reading like armor. Julie, newly married and facing terminal cancer, is written without the inspirational gloss that so often gets pasted onto sick women show more for other people’s comfort. Rita, approaching seventy and threatening to end her life if nothing changes, is heartbreaking because she is ordinary, and because the book refuses to treat loneliness as a quirky subplot. Charlotte, stuck in a loop of bad men and worse choices, is the one many readers will want to shake, which is exactly why she lands. These people feel real because Gottlieb lets them be contradictory, defensive, funny, and needy, sometimes in the same conversation.
The thematic current running underneath everything is about narrative, the private scripts we write to explain why we are stuck, and how invested we become in staying stuck when change threatens our identity. Gottlieb shows how therapy looks in practice, including the small evasions, the performative competence, the ways people try to hire a therapist to validate their version of events. She also shows the uncomfortable flip side: therapists are not immune to the same vanity and denial, and her own blind spots are on the page, unprotected.
Unputdownable.
The only weakness is that some insights arrive with a touch of polish, like a lesson landing exactly on cue, and a few passages circle familiar self-help language before moving on. It barely matters. When I was done, I wanted to call a friend and be braver with my own sentences. show less

This book isn't what I thought it would be from its title: a book-length explanation of why anyone can benefit from talk therapy. While it is that, it's incidental: this is primarily an outstanding memoir by an excellent therapist who is remarkably open about her own life challenges and how she overcame them by entering therapy with a colleague. It's fascinating to see how she fell into the same defensive reactions as her own patients, even while being able to see and identify them for herself, and to watch her move from trepidation to trust just as her own patients must. As she repeatedly makes clear, it's not only the therapist's experience and skills, it's the relationship between patient and therapist that heals.

Just as one would show more want from one's own therapist, Lori Gottlieb is funny, warm, and brilliant without being either ostentatious or shy about it. Her (disguised) stories about the paths of her own patients through therapy, including the obnoxious writer of a hit TV comedy-drama and a newly married young woman with terminal cancer, keep the reader turning pages and are ultimately moving. The seven effusive blurbs on the back cover are all true. I didn't want to read anything else while I read this book. show less

Truly excellent book. Gottlieb weaves together her own life story with the lives of 4 of her patients in a way I haven't seen before: I have read quite a few books by counsellors and therapists at this point and while they all keep saying "I'm flawed too, I'm flawed too!" I've never seen one be brave enough to expose how she is just as batshit crazy as the rest of us and finds it just as difficult to see what's going on in her own life (and what she's really up to!).

Another way this is special is that it bravely tries to do two things at once: It's a personal memoir suitable as an introductory university textbook. I know that Yalom had to be convinced over and over again by his publishers that when he writes books about his cases he show more shouldn't explain why he says what he says, that he doesn't put in too much theory. Well, the publishers in this case took the risk that the public are interested in knowing what therapists know, and judging by the reviews it has paid off. show less