Sample Excerpts, Wisdom, & Quotes from
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone:

“Telling somebody you’re a psychotherapist often leads to a surprised pause, followed by awkward questions like these: “Oh, a therapist! Should I tell you about my childhood?” Or “Can you help me with this problem with my mother-in-law?” Or “Are you going to psychoanalyze me?” (The answers, by the way, are “Please, don’t”; “Possibly”; and “Why would I do that here? If I were a gynecologist, would you ask if I was about to give you a pelvic exam?”)

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If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good” you may deprive yourself of joy.

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I’ll bet you could name five truly difficult people off the top of your head right now-some you assiduously avoid, others you would assiduously avoid if they didn’t share your last name. But sometimes—more often than we tend to realize—those difficult people are us. That’s right—sometimes hell is us. Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

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A therapist will hold up a mirror to patients, but patients will also hold up a mirror to their therapists. Therapy is far from one-sided; it happens in a parallel process. Every day, our patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves. If they can see themselves more clearly, through our reflections, we can see ourselves more clearly through theirs. This happens to therapists when we’re providing therapy, and it happens to our own therapists too. We are mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors, showing one another what we can’t see.

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