Book Review: Maybe You Should Talk To Someone
This memoir of a therapist about herself, her patients and her therapist is funny and reflective at the same time.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is a memoir by Lori Gottlieb, where she talks about the time in her life where she underwent a personal crisis and how she managed to come out of it while providing therapy for her patients. The book begins on the day after her break up with her boyfriend who unexpectedly calls it quits after two years of their relationship. She is understandably devastated but after some deliberation, decides to go for therapy to “get-over” her breakup. What follows is her journey towards discovering her real problem because of which she missed the signals from her boyfriend that were indicating that all was not good. Along the way, she also shares the experiences while treating her patients — a self-obsessed writer, a cancer patient and an eighty-year old with a series of failed marriages, among others.
While sharing each of these experiences, she throws light on various psychological theories such as displacement, avoidance, homeostasis, all of which explain what shapes our thoughts and ultimately our choices. We discover that usually what brings a patient to the therapist (the presenting problem) is an indication of a history that is caused by experiences in their life that have had a significant impact on them without them realizing. Take for example, the case of a young woman who usually dates men with a history of abandoning people. This stemmed from the experiences of her childhood where she felt abandoned by her parents who didn’t spend time with her. By putting herself repeatedly in these situations, she was hoping for a different ending and almost always ending up with the same result.
Insight allows you you ask yourself, is this something that’s being done to me or am I doing this to myself?
I was fascinated by the numerous ways in which we are unaware of ourselves and how we cling to situations, good or bad, just because we are familiar with them. Change, as we see with almost all the people appearing in the book, is hard because it requires us to look at ourselves objectively and face what we are afraid of and sometimes don’t understand. Therapy helps, it is a journey for the therapist and the patient to discover more about themselves and grow from what those insights. It also helps us feel, we are all in some ways afraid of being sad, but as the author puts it — Feeling your sadness and anxiety can also give you essential information about yourself and your world.
“There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked because pain is not a contest.”
In one of the most poignant lines, when the author is comparing her pain to that of her patient with terminal cancer, her therapist says — “There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked because pain is not a contest.” We tend to forget this while we deal with our own pain or listen to others.
It was a completely rewarding experience of reading this book which kept me hooked from the beginning with a great narrative, interesting people and most importantly insights that have helped to learn more about myself and the people around me.
