Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

👍🏼Pick It: If you're a therapist, in therapy or refuse think you'd benefit.
👎🏼Skip It: If you're content with a life forever half-felt and never shared.

I have been to therapy off and on since I was a little girl. My uncle is a therapist. I'm familiar with the couches, the wall of first-session silence, the tissues that sop up the debris when it crumbles during your fifth.
I feel fortunate to find myself in a family that has always made space for treating the emotional self, no taboos attached. It's because of this proximity, I didn't expect to extract much novel insight.

What she offered me instead was the catalyst to consider my own recent refusal to get back on the couch.

I think part of therapy's stigma is derived from this image of a double-degreed lord or lady upon his or her throne, collecting your raw fears solely as ammunition to dish at the water cooler with their fellow Freudians.

“I've got ten on Patient #783 bolting before the session even starts.”
“Wanna hear about the train wreck I've got at 2?”

Gottlieb has done a service to the world of therapy by acknowledging this general misconception and sitting on the floor with readers instead.

How much did I like this book, you ask?
I Amazon Primed it to my porch the hour I finished my library copy. And every since I've been a missionary on a pamphlet route, shoving it into arms because I believe her account needs to be heard.

Read it.