ZIP Reads - Summary & Analysis of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed | A Guide to the Book by Lori Gottlieb

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Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist practicing in Los Angeles with a life that would seem happy to anyone looking from the outside. She has a satisfying practice along with a very successful writing career. She has a healthy eight-year-old son and a caring boyfriend she is planning to marry. Her life is filled with good friends and family members. Then, without any warning (at least according to her), her boyfriend breaks up with her because he doesnt see himself sharing a life caring for a kid. Heartbroken and confused, she finds her way to Wendell, another therapist.

Over the next few months, the reader is privy to the process through which she comes to terms with not just the break-up but several other personal problems and, at the same time, works with several different peoplea TV executive dealing with stress, a nearly seventy-year-old woman suffering from acute depression, a thirty-something cancer patient coming to terms with her impending death, a twenty-something woman with a history of failed relationshipsto help them manage their own issues.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, thus, is a guided journey through the interesting and often complicated process of therapy that helps people confront their insecurities and fears and come out of the prison cells they tend to create for themselves.

Its the authors second session with John, a forty-year-old TV-industry professional who reports having difficulty sleeping and getting along with his wife, Margo. He is always annoyed with others, whom he considers idiots, including the previous therapist he was with. The author is finding it difficult to feel any compassion for the man who gives her no opportunity to speak and seems to believe that he has all the answers. As he starts on a rambling story about why his wife is angry with him, she realizes that he is somebody who has trouble connecting with people. The author didnt even mind it when, in the first session, he compared his secret visits to her with seeing a hooker. But today, despite her training that has taught her to find something likable in everyone, John comes across as an asshole.

At the same time, she can identify with his self-righteous outrage against the outside world because shes been feeling the same way. The previous night, the man she had believed she was going to marry unexpectedly called it quits. Shes been trying to deal with her pain the same way John isby covering it up.

This is what this book is abouta story of a handful of struggling humans, one of whom is the author herself. Being human, therapists deal with the daily challenges of life like everyone else and have their own vulnerabilities, longings, and insecurities. Revealing this humanity to others can be bad for business, though. This has got partly to do with the general discomfort people feel discussing psychological health. Its rarely discussed that therapists also see therapists, even after the mandatory sessions required for licensure.

One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current problems instead of continuing to blame others. For this, a therapist holds up a mirror to patients, but patients hold up a mirror to the therapist as well. This book is also about this ongoing process of mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors.

The presenting problem is the issue that sends a person into therapy. The problem generally presents itself because the person has reached an inflection point. Of course, people arent conscious of the inflection point when they begin therapy, they just want relief from the problem.

In the authors case, the presenting problem was the Boyfriend Incident. Boyfriend was extraordinarily decent and caring. But one night, just after deciding on a movie together for the weekend, the author notices he has gone silent. On being probed, he sheepishly discloses that, even though he wishes to marry her, he cant bear living with a child. His own children have grown up now and he doesnt want to take up the responsibility of another young person all over again. He had thought hed manage to adjust but he cant. She is bewildered and angry but knows theres no solution to this. She has a kid. He wants freedom. This is her presenting problem.

The author is depressed the morning after the Boyfriend Incident. But, instead of seeing a therapist, the author calls up her friends Allison, whos been married for twenty years (and so, unlikely to understand the authors situation), and Jen, another therapist. Allison criticizes Boyfriend, calling him Kid Hater, which makes the author feel temporarily better. Jen suggests going out with another guy. However, the idea of seeing someone else seems impossible to the author. She has to focus on the now, taking one step after the other, concentrating on her work. Its going to be difficult.

The authors interest in the different ways peoples stories can be told led her to Hollywood after graduating from college, where she worked as an assistant to a junior film agent. She didnt mind being one of the smart ones who ended up doing extra work while the hot assistants got all the attention because she loved crafting stories and fascinating characters with complicated inner lives. As she got promoted, she realized that the actual creative work was done at the junior level while her work as an executive mainly involved socializing. Bored, she applied for a job in television, where she felt she could have a hand in helping audiences get to know their favorite characters layer by layer. She began working in series development at NBC, but it would take her years to realize she had solved the wrong problem.

The author is in session with Julie, a thirty-three-year-old university professor seeking help dealing with a cancer diagnosis immediately after her honeymoon. Its the day after the Boyfriend Incident, and she has somehow managed through the day. As soon as Julie walks into the office, she notices the pajama top the author has worn to work. It is then that the author realizes that in her daze, she had put on the pajama top (which says Namastay in Bed on the front) instead of her sweater in the morning.

She could come up with some excuse like she is returning from a yoga class, but therapists generally practice a degree of self-disclosure, which includes admitting the truth. Julie, uncharacteristically, bursts out laughing when the author admits her mistake, wondering how her own sanctimonious yoga instructor who kept insisting that Julie needed take her yoga classes more seriously would react if she wore that top to the class. The author has never seen Julie laugh out loud like this.