Maybe You Should Talk To Someone Book Summary - Maybe You Should Talk To Someone Book explained in key points

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Maybe You Should Talk To Someone summary

Name: Maybe You Should Talk To Someone
Rating: 4.6 (219 reviews)
Author: Lori Gottlieb

Lori Gottlieb

A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

4.6 (219 ratings)

23 mins

What is Maybe You Should Talk To Someone about?

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (2019) is a unique memoir in which the author, a psychotherapist, tells the story of how she herself ended up on a therapist’s couch after descending into a personal crisis of her own. By reflecting on her experiences as both a therapist and a patient, and by relating them to the stories of four of her patients, she came to a better understanding of both her profession and herself.

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Maybe You Should Talk To Someone
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What’s in it for me? Learn how therapy works from the perspective of both a therapist and a patient.

If you knew someone who was suffering from a serious personal crisis or mental illness, such as divorce or depression, what advice would you give them? Perhaps you might say the words that form the title of the book that these blinks are based on: “Maybe you should talk to someone.” And that “someone,” in this case, would be a therapist.

But what if the person with the problem happened to be a therapist themselves? That’s precisely the situation the author found herself in when she started suffering a crisis of her own. Like many therapists, she ended up seeing another mental health professional.

A therapist sitting on another therapist’s couch – that might sound like the setup to a bad joke, but in the author’s case, it laid the groundwork for some tremendous insights. That’s because it allowed her to gain firsthand knowledge of how therapy works from the perspective of the patient. She was then able to gain a deeper understanding of her experiences by relating them to those of her patients – four of them in particular, who we’ll learn about in these blinks. While the details of these stories have been modified to protect the patients’ anonymity, the underlying truths and lessons remain.

In these blinks, you’ll learn about

the ways in which people blind themselves to the truth about their problems;
the deepest fears that often underlie those problems; and
the key factors to confronting and overcoming those fears.

When patients enter therapy, their problems are usually deeper than they first appear.

“So, tell me what brings you here today?”

That’s the question the author usually uses to begin her first therapy session with a patient. The answer the patient gives is called his presenting problem – the problem that brings him to the therapist’s office in search of a solution. It could be something specific, such as experiencing the loss of a loved one or suffering from panic attacks. Or it could be something vague, like a general sense of being “stuck.”

Unfortunately, a patient’s presenting problem usually isn’t his real, underlying problem – and the solution he seeks isn’t the real solution either. For example, a television scriptwriter named John came to the author with a seemingly straightforward set of presenting problems: he suffered from insomnia, fought with his wife and was feeling stressed out by work, where he thought all of his coworkers were “idiots.” To him, the solutions seemed similarly straightforward; he just wanted to be able to get a good night’s sleep and to vent to the author about his wife and colleagues.

But it turned out his real problems, along with their solutions, went much deeper. They involved some very tragic incidents from his past. When he was only six years old, his mother was run over by a car and died. Then, when he was an adult, he got into a car accident that killed his son; in a tragic coincidence, the boy was also only six years old at the time.

The combination of these two events led John to develop a host of personal and emotional problems, like unacknowledged grief and an inability to be vulnerable with people. Even in his therapy sessions with the author, he kept the tragedy of his son’s death a secret for nearly half a year, and he was unable to fully engage with the author. Instead, he deflected her questions with inappropriate jokes, insults, interruptions and other forms of rude behavior, including sending texts in the middle of therapy.

Acknowledging his grief and learning to become more vulnerable with people turned out to be the real solutions to his underlying problems. But it took him a lot of work to get to the point where he could even recognize these problems, let alone do anything about them. That’s true of most patients – even when they themselves are therapists. We’ll start looking at the reasons for this in the next blink.

Patients often begin therapy believing in unhelpful narratives that they’ve constructed about their problems.

When a patient begins therapy, she usually doesn’t just have a presenting problem – she also has a whole narrative built around it. Unfortunately, it’s usually a pretty unhelpful narrative, one that the patient uses to simplify her problem and project it outward instead of digging deeper and shifting her focus inward.

That was certainly the case for the author when she herself sought out therapy. For two years, she had been dating a man who she had been planning on marrying. They were in love, and everything seemed to be going fine. Then, out of the blue, he announced that he wanted to call off their relationship. The reason? Well, she was a single mom with an eight-year-old son, and he realized that he didn’t want to live with a child.

Therapy patients use defense mechanisms to avoid confronting the truth, and therapists must see through them.

Some of the main complications of therapy stem from a couple of very simple facts about human beings. The first is that, generally speaking, we don’t like to feel painful emotions, and we’ll avoid them if we can. The second is that – again, generally speaking – we want to feel positive about ourselves, and we want other people to feel positive about us too.

But in therapy, patients are asked to dig deep into the most emotionally painful parts of their psyches and reveal the ugly, potentially unflattering wounds that are festering there. This runs counter to both of the aforementioned human tendencies. As a result, many patients put up defense mechanisms to try to ward off the threat that therapy seems to pose to them.

Therapy often revolves around the loss and recovery of human connection.

While death may seem like the ultimate fear, ask yourself this: Would you choose to stay alive if you were told you had to live the rest of your life in solitary confinement?

The prospect of long-term loneliness is pretty terrifying – and the actuality of it can be downright unbearable. That was definitely true of one of the author’s elderly patients, a 69-year-old woman named Rita who had been almost completely socially isolated for about a decade when she came to see the author. Rita felt such a craving for human connection that she started getting pedicures just so she could have at least one form of physical contact in her life: the pedicurist touching her feet.

Oftentimes, therapy also revolves around the loss and recovery of a sense of meaning in a patient’s life.

Here’s another hypothetical question to start off with: given a choice between life and death, which would you choose? There’s one important caveat – you’ve got to spend the rest of your life doing something that feels completely meaningless to you.

Having no sense of meaning can make our lives feel empty, and it’s another common underlying issue that brings patients into the therapy room. That was the case for the author herself, although she didn’t realize it at the time.

Regaining a sense of freedom is one of the keys to recovery.

In deciding to throw caution to the wind and cancel her book contract, the author was also reckoning with the fourth and final underlying issue that often leads patients to seek out therapy: a lack of a sense of freedom.

One way or another, many patients feel trapped. For the author, it was feeling locked into a contract for a book she didn’t want to write. For the elderly woman Rita, it was feeling stuck in her social isolation; she didn’t want to seek out new relationships because she was afraid of being hurt by them, after having experienced multiple unsuccessful marriages and almost total estrangement from her children. For the television scriptwriter John, it was feeling unable to move on from the loss of his son, as well as feeling unable to be emotionally vulnerable with other people. And for Julie, a 33-year-old college professor, it was feeling doomed by the terminal cancer with which she had recently been diagnosed.

Our resistance to change can make it difficult to make use of our freedom and choose a healthier path.

At this point, you’ve met all of the main characters of the author’s story, except for one. Charlotte was a 25-year-old woman with a drinking problem, and a predilection for getting involved in unhealthy relationships with men of questionable character. She was one of those people who just couldn’t seem to help herself. No matter how many times she swore off drinking or pursuing unhealthy relationships, she always seemed to find herself returning to the bottle or falling for another man who wasn’t good for her.

What leads people like Charlotte to continue doing things they know are bad for them?

Letting our emotions out is the key to letting down our guard.

When Charlotte began her therapy with the author, she seemed almost emotionless. She spoke about everything in the same monotone voice, whether it was something positive, like a boss praising her work, or something horrible, like a sexual assault she experienced in college. But it wasn’t as if she couldn’t feel any emotions; she simply didn’t know what she felt or how to express it – a phenomenon called alexithymia.

Charlotte’s condition might have been on the extreme end of the spectrum, but many people experience some form of emotional disconnection. That’s especially true when it comes to their deepest negative emotions, like the fear of death or isolation. Most of us don’t want to feel those emotions, so we try to repress them. Some people resort to defense mechanisms. Other people engage in self-medication, as Charlotte did with alcohol.

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About the Author

Lori Gottlieb is an American psychotherapist and writer who lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough (2010) and the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post bestseller Stick Figure: a Diary of My Former Self (2000). She is a contributing editor for The Atlantic magazine, where she also writes a weekly advice column called “Dear Therapist.” Her writing has appeared in many other high-profile publications as well, including the New York Times Magazine, Slate and O, The Oprah Magazine.

Who should read Maybe You Should Talk To Someone?

Curious minds interested in how therapy works in practice
People suffering from personal, emotional or psychological problems
Those who are feeling lost and looking for some direction

Categories with Maybe You Should Talk To Someone

Psychology Biography & Memoir

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