Helping Yourself with Lori Gottlieb

Welcome to Let It Be Easy with Susie Moore.

Susie Moore:

When Lori Gottlieb said yes to an interview for the Let It Be Easy podcast. I was so excited because I discovered her work years ago. Back when I had a corporate job, I was still in my twenties. I love that book. Marry Him. The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough. I remember reading about it in the media and discovering her, and I love the book and I shared it with a lot of my friends. And since then, Lori's done so many incredible things. Her most recent book is called, maybe You Should Talk to Someone. It's sold over a million copies. It's a New York Times bestselling book, and it's currently even being adapted as a TV series. Lori is this incredible psychotherapist who has her own clinical practice. She's also the host of the very popular Dear Therapist podcasts, which is produced by Katie Couric, and she also writes a column for The Atlantic called Dear Therapist.

I loved accessing this woman's brain understanding how and why she does the work she does, and I loved, maybe you should talk to someone so much because it's about her going to a therapist and the journey of a therapist receiving treatment and of course the stories of four of her own patients with very, very different wide and varied stories. Truly this conversation with Lori is one I will always remember and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Lori Gottlieb, what a joy. Your name, your books have been in my home or my iPad for so long, and your book maybe you should talk to someone is life-changing. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Lori Gottlieb:

Well, thank you so much for saying that, and I'm so glad to be here and be able to talk with you today.

Susie Moore:

Can I just say that when I first started your book, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I thought it might be something prescriptive, maybe you should talk to someone, signs you should talk to someone, and it's all in there. But I've never seen a book like this where it's you as a therapist, of course sharing stories of your own patients who have incredibly different stories and backgrounds, and then you seeking out your own therapist and they're very open, honest. I mean, I just kept thinking, wow, Lori's so courageous with everything that she's sharing in this book and that is so generous. Was that your intention kind of coming into this, creating this work? I feel like you are not holding back. You are just sharing.

Lori Gottlieb:

Right? Well, the funny thing about that is I wasn't as courageous as you might've thought because as you know from maybe you should talk to someone in the book, I describe how I was supposed to be writing a book about happiness and the happiness book was making me miserable, and the irony of that was not lost on me. I was getting depressed trying to write a book about happiness because it just felt so meaningless to me. I feel like happiness as a byproduct of living our lives with meaning and purpose is what we all aspire to, but happiness as the goal ends up being a recipe for disaster. And so I think we all want joy in our lives and we all want meaning and purpose and connection, and those are the things that give us that feeling of, yes, I'm living my life in the way I want to live it.

And so I wanted to just bring people into the therapy room instead of writing all these studies about happiness. And I said to my publisher, that's what I'm going to do. I canceled the happiness book. And everyone said, oh, no one's going to read that book. No one's going to read this book about people talking in a room. And that's not what the book is about. I mean, it's not even really a book about therapy. It's a book about the human condition. So in the book, I follow the lives of these four very different patients, as you said, and then I'm the fifth patient as I go to my own therapy after I go through this unexpected breakup, and it becomes this thing where you get to see the human condition from both sides. And I felt like since no one was going to read the book, I would just be as vulnerable as my patients were because I thought it was really important. I say at the beginning of the book that my greatest credential is that I'm a card carrying member of the human race, that I know what it's like to be a person in the world, which means I know what it's like to struggle. Because if you're a person in the world, you have struggled in ways big or small. And so I just wrote what I wanted to write for the three people that they said would read it. And of course, now by the way, it's sold over a million copies.

Susie Moore:

I know. Congratulations.

Lori Gottlieb:

Lots of people have read it. And I think that the reason that so many people have read it is because I didn't clean myself up. And there was a moment when I turned in the book to my publisher and they said, wow, I laughed, I cried. I gave it to five people. I talked about it with everybody, and I thought, uhoh,

Susie Moore:

You're like no people.

Lori Gottlieb:

I said, wait a minute. I thought three people were going to read this. And that's why I was so open. And then I thought, well, okay, well maybe 3000 people will read this and I'll have to deal with that. And of course, now that we've got so many people reading it, I really feel like it resonated because it was so authentic.

Susie Moore:

And I mean, amen. That's how it began, because who knows if you could have just been so

Lori Gottlieb:

Self-conscious about it.

Susie Moore:

Yes. I mean, I feel so much how genuine your emotions are, what you share, even the title itself. I mean, when a friend suggest, and what I found so interesting too is the therapy circles that you're in and how there's confidentiality. If you want to seek out a therapist, you have to kind of say it's for a friend and could there be some crossovers with therapy and all the rules around it. It's so fascinating. But how you also shared that it was a friend who said to you, maybe you should talk to someone. Yeah,

Lori Gottlieb:

It was actually a friend who happens to be a therapist too. And I think that that's important because I think that I was feeling like, well, I'll get through this. It's okay. And I was not getting through it. I mean, you can see in the book, and that's where the parts where I had at some point thought, oh no, maybe I should clean myself up. I was very real about the struggle I was going through to adjust to this new reality. And also then the minimizing that we do, that we have this almost hierarchy of pain that, oh, it's a breakup but not a divorce. Someone will say, oh, it's a miscarriage, but I didn't lose my 8-year-old child. Or It's this, but it's not that. Or Yeah, maybe I'm sad or anxious, but I have a roof over my head and food on the table. So it's really not that bad. We kind of talk ourselves out of what we're experiencing because we think there's some hierarchy of pain and there's not. Pain is pain. And so I was sort of thinking, well, it's not that bad. I'll get over it. And I was definitely not functioning well, and I talk about all of that in great detail in the book. And then my friend said, well, maybe you should talk to someone. And of course, that was instrumental in moving things forward.

Susie Moore:

What great advice. And here we are with a book later about it. I mean, truly what I love is how you share the story about a breakup after a couple of years. It was very out of left field, very, very unexpected. And when you went to find your own therapist, the part of the book that I found so fascinating and honest and reflective is because it was such a shock. You speak about the shock of the breakup. And Wendell in the book as he's called, I know you protect everybody's identity in this book, which is also cool, but you shared that he was an avoidant using this term avoidant, which is I think a lot of us understand what that means in a relationship to be an avoidant. And your therapist Wendell helped you understand that those qualities were in you too and

Lori Gottlieb:

Yes, yes. That's the part that we don't like to look at. So in the book I talk about the difference between idiot compassion and wise compassion and idiot compassion is what our friends do. So when the breakup happened, of course your friends, they agree with you. Yeah, he's a jerk. How could he do this? What's wrong with him? He's a sociopath. How could he not tell you this? Because he had said he'd given a reason for the breakup that I had to kind of get out of him. And my friends were just completely backing me up. And they would send me little emojis of he's trash and it send little trash emoji and it makes you friends.

But then you go to a therapist and they don't offer idiot compassion. And by the way, with idiot compassion, it's kind of like if a fight breaks out in every bar you're going to, maybe it's you. So if you see your friend's patterns over time, you might say, oh yeah, they're complaining about this thing again, maybe with a different person, but it's the same kind of thing. A therapist will offer wise compassion. That means that we will hold up a mirror to you and help you to see something about yourself that maybe you haven't been willing or able to see. And the word compassion is in there for a reason. It's very compassionate. But we have to look at what is your role in this too? So maybe it was a surprise, this breakup, but what were you not willing to look at during the relationship? What were you avoiding too? What were you aware of? You say you were blindsided, but now that we kind of look at this, maybe there were little hints there and you didn't want to explore it. And that's exactly what we started talking about in therapy was why was I avoiding talking about this sort of elephant in the room that ended up coming out much later?

Susie Moore:

Oh, yes. And I think we can all relate to this, Lori. It's often inconvenient to want to deal with the things that we kind of see. Sometimes I refer to them in the UK we call it an amber light, so there's red, amber, and green here. You just say a yellow light. But I'll go. Sometimes there are amber signs in a relationship or at work or if there's a problem, but it's not a red light. It's not like red, red, red yet. And we love to look away. And I love what you say here. You said, I'm telling Wendell everything I knew about boyfriends history of avoidance without realizing that what I'm unintentionally illustrating is my avoidance of his avoidance about which apparently I knew quite a bit. This is so funny, this book too, it's deep and funny, which is hard. I think that's such so hard as a writer. So I just love it from that context too. But you also speak to here, and I love how you delve into it. You speak about how people come to therapy with presenting problems, problem, and then often it's a therapist's job to get to the foundational or the core problem. Could you speak to us about the presenting problems?

Lori Gottlieb:

Yeah, so the presenting problem is the thing that the person comes in with. For me, it was a breakup for anybody, it might be a number of things. And what we find is that the presenting problem is a symptom of some pattern or some blind spot or some way of being in the world that maybe you haven't been aware of. And I think that that stems from this idea that we're all unreliable narrators. And what I mean by that is that we are not trying to mislead. It's that we're telling a story from our perspective, which is very subjective, but we think we're giving a very objective accounting of the situation. This person said this, I said this, they did this right? The back and forth of that, and you think I'm being really objective here. Here's exactly what happened, but we're emphasizing certain parts of the story.

We're minimizing other parts of the story. We're leaving other parts of the story out completely. We do that outside of our awareness. We want to come across in a way where people will understand us, they will empathize with us. We're not trying to be victims, we're just trying to help people understand what our pain is about. And I think what happens is we lose the other perspectives that are so useful in fleshing out the story. I did a Ted talk on this. It was called How changing Your Story Can Change Your Life. And in fact, there's a companion workbook that goes with, maybe you should talk to someone, which is a toolkit for changing your story to change your life. And it's all about examining these stories that we're carrying around with us and how they affect all of the behaviors and choices that we make on a daily basis. And when we become aware of these stories and these narratives and the fact that we are unreliable narrators, we can get a much more accurate version of what's going on.

Susie Moore:

And isn't it interesting that so often these stories are completely unconscious? We're like, I'm doing the right thing. I'm showing up, I'm being loyal, I'm paying my bills, I'm living life. And we often just, it's so invisible to us how another person could be experiencing something or if it doesn't suit the way that the vision that we have, it's so easy to just lean into just our own ways, and that's where we often seek out help like you.

Lori Gottlieb:

Yes. Yes. And we usually seek out help to get validation that we are, that we have been injured, that we are the one who has been hurt, that we didn't do the wrong thing, that how could this other person do this? I'm trying to understand that person. I come to therapy not to understand myself, but to understand why the other person is doing what they're doing. Why are they acting this way with me?

Susie Moore:

Yes. And this is what you did, right? Going to your therapist with pages of notes and evidence like your own.

Lori Gottlieb:

Yes. So then I did the whole embarrassing thing of having all those phone calls with him about why explain it. I don't understand it, why? And I would take notes because my background is a journalist, and I thought, I'm just going to try to figure this out that way. And I came in with all these notes and my therapist was like, this is not, it's not helping you. He's actually giving you the answer. You just don't like the answer. I thought that was really profound that I kept trying to get the why of it. And my therapist was like, he told you why, and you don't like the answer. And so you keep pushing for a different answer.

Susie Moore:

Isn't this interesting too, how as the storytellers in our lives, we love to push against thinking that works or thinking that if we push, push, push. I know there's a friend of mine, she was in a relationship for a long time and he was always very open. He said, I'm never getting married. I'm never getting married. And he had a son from a past relationship. He was like, I didn't marry her mother, his mother, I'm never getting married. But my friend was like, yeah, but he'll change his mind when we move to la. He'll change his mind, he'll change his mind. And I'm just like, Ooh. The stories, when I was reading a book, I kept thinking, gosh, how is this showing up in my life? What can I be avoiding? What is it that maybe I'm not seeking out? And I think that the unreliable narrator, I have this circled so many times, it really is, isn't this kind of our job on earth, Lori, to become a little bit more conscious? I mean, I think this is the purpose of a lifetime,

Lori Gottlieb:

Right? Well, I think it's conscious not only of our experiences, but of the experiences of the people we're in relationship with. And I think so many times we want them, I see this when I see couples all the time, that they want the other person to agree with their experience as opposed to being curious about how is your experience of the same event different from mine? Because that's where the connection will come from is, oh, you have this experience, I have this experience. Let's talk about that. As opposed to, you better agree with my experience, my version of the experience is right. My version is objective. Your version isn't right. Your version is skewed. And there has to be room for multiple perspectives without anybody being wrong that they just are

Susie Moore:

In your work because you clearly, I mean the people who you help, one woman was experiencing a terminal illness, she dies in the book, you're dealing with a man with very narcissistic tendencies, another lady who has a deadline for suicide if her life doesn't change when you work with different people, and of course through your own experience in this book as the patient yourself, do you just constantly find the same commonalities again and again irrespective of the experience, the actual external experience?

Lori Gottlieb:

I think that the commonality is that no matter what people are presenting with, the ultimate question that they're asking is, how can I love and be loved? I think every single person is asking that in a different way. Even if the presenting problem, like we talked about looks completely different, that is the underlying thing. Something is getting in the way, and that includes loving oneself. By the way, how can I love and be loved? How can I feel whole?

Susie Moore:

How can I love and be loved? I mean, do you think that even asking that? But we're not ready to receive that question. The average person, if they're going through a job loss or if they're going through, I mean with my background, so I grew up in shelters on welfare. My family story was kind of wild. If I think if love is the only real truth and loving and being loved is the answer, then therapy, the work that we do, reading books like yours, is that essentially the core of always what we're coming back to? Would you say it's as simple and sometimes as complex as that?

Lori Gottlieb:

Yeah, I think so. And again, the specifics matter. So you are dealing with the problem that they came in with, but you want to look at what is getting in the way. And I think that a lot of times what happens is people don't understand what is getting in the way, and that's where people do all kinds of things to protect themselves from understanding that. So this is where we don't want to feel our feelings. Our feelings are really important because they're like a compass. They tell us what we need, they tell us what direction to go in. And if we don't use our feelings like a compass, if we try to get rid of them, which we try to do all the time, we try to too much food, too much wine. Drama is a great way to numb your feelings. Chaos in a relationship, drama, you don't have to feel anything.

You can just be in chaos all the time, but your feelings will come out. So numbness, we try to numb your feelings. Numbness isn't the absence of feelings. Numbness is a sense of being overwhelmed by too many feelings. And so what do we do? We do all of these things that are not very, they don't serve us well, but there are ways to get rid of our feelings, but we don't get rid of our feelings. They come out in other ways. They come out in insomnia, they come out in relationship difficulties. They come out in that mindless scrolling through the internet and you say, what just happened for the last two hours? So it's all the ways that we try to numb the feelings. But if we would just sit with the feelings, oh, what is this anxiety about? What is it trying to tell me? What is this sadness about? What is it telling me is not working in my life? What is this anger about? Do I need to set more boundaries? Is somebody violating a boundary of mine?

Envy? I always say people don't like to feel envy. They feel like it's not okay. I think envy is great. It tells you something about desire. So I always say, follow your envy. It tells you what you want. Instead of pushing it down, say, oh, maybe there's something that I don't have in my life that I can now take steps to try to get in my life. So I think we need to really sit with what is the thing that is ailing us. And sometimes what we think is ailing us is a symptom of the underlying thing that we need to figure out more broadly. And that's where therapy I think is very, very effective.

Susie Moore:

Reading your book, Lori , I just kept thinking, wow, I want to go to therapy. It's like this incredible experience for the mind. I mean, because there isn't this space really in life where we can have such objective, compassion wise compassion, as you say, from somebody who is invested in of course. And you speak so beautifully about the relationships you create and the complexities of those two as a therapist, especially with your patient who passed. But I feel as if, I almost dunno how anyone gets by without something, without, I mean, I've had therapy in my life certainly and couples therapy, plenty of it. I was divorced in my early twenties too. But I think how do people get by without it? Lori, how does the average person survive without knowing that they can question their beliefs? They can question the emotions that they're experiencing or follow them, like you say, with curiosity and love. Do you ever think, where would you be without these tools? How would we get by?

Lori Gottlieb:

Well, I think some people grow up with really good modeling, and so they know how to really look at themselves in a different way and really understand what's happening, and they can regulate themselves better and they can understand more about the other person having the space for their perspective and all of those things. But many of us didn't grow up with that. And I feel like therapy is getting a really good second opinion on your life from someone who isn't already in your life, meaning I think everybody has the answers for themselves. I don't think that therapists have the answers for you, but I do think that we can help you access the answers that you already have. And often what happens is there's so much noise out there. So when I say a really good second opinion on your life from someone who isn't already in your life, we don't have all of the stuff that goes on between people that they might be saying, oh, you should do this, or I think this, but we're looking at someone in a more objective way.

So we're seeing them differently. We're not seeing them with all those complicated relationships out there. And I think that really helps. And so I think that when there's all that noise that they're bringing in from out there, I don't know what I should do about this, or I don't know why this is happening or whatever it is, there's cultural expectations. There's what society says. There's what your family that you grew up with says. There's what the family you have now says, there's what your friends say. All of those voices become so much louder than our own place of knowing inside. So my job as a therapist is to help people to quiet down all of those really loud voices that aren't theirs, and then to listen to the voice that is theirs. And that's where they start to say, oh, yeah, okay, so now I'm getting more clear about this. I'm getting more clear about what I want.

Susie Moore:

And you see such powerful examples in this book specifically. Sometimes when I started reading about your patient's journeys, I was like, oh, this is a tricky one. Where's this one going to go? And I'm like, well, Laurie, you've got your work cut out for you with this gentleman. And then I see the evolution through your own patients and your own, just I think willingness to also be uncomfortable and to, because it's brave, it would be easy to go, okay, well just talk and I'll listen, especially if something is especially uncomfortable because there are so much loss here too. But the journeys that I'm experiencing, I feel like I'm being healed, learning from these other people's stories whose stories have nothing to do with mine.

Lori Gottlieb:

And that's why I chose very different people because I think that we can see ourselves reflected in every single one of the patients that I write about, including me as the fifth patient. And I think that that's what's so important is that no matter what they're dealing with, and they very different personalities from John who's very narcissistic at the beginning, and he's very insulting to me and insulting to other people and thinks he's better than everybody else. And then to see what's underneath there and then to see someone, you see other people like Charlotte who was this young woman in her twenties who keeps dating these unavailable men who are going to hurt her and she thinks it's the men. And it's like, no, there's something going on with you, this repetition compulsion of we have this radar for if we haven't healed or process the things that happened when we were younger, we repeat them because we want to master them.

That's what repetition compulsion is. So we think, oh, I'm going to find someone like that person except this time I'm going to win and then I'm going to heal my childhood trauma. And that's not how it works. And by the way, this is completely outside of our awareness. We don't consciously think that. So Charlotte would always find these guys that would seem very different from her parents. But then once she got to know them, of course they were very similar in that they would kind of keep her on edge. She never knew where she stood. It was just very confusing to her. And our unconscious has this radar like, oh, you look familiar, come closer. But it's completely out of our awareness. And then it happens. We say, why does this keep happening to me again and again and again? And then when she finally would meet someone who was not like that, she'd be like, yeah, no, chemistry really had a great time. We had a three hour dinner. It was great. But yeah, no chemistry because the chemistry sometimes, sometimes there's healthy chemistry, but this was unhealthy chemistry was like my unconscious gets activated and lit up when I see someone who feels familiar.

Susie Moore:

Isn't it so fascinating? I mean, when you go through these pages, you realize, of course all of these patterns and you explain these therapist terms in such simple ways for anyone to understand and maybe identify with. And I think as I read this, because it's also so entertaining, the way that you share the stories too, the waiting room stories, oh my gosh, they were my favorite, John. Our lives are colorful and rich and vibrant and different, and we have these internal struggles, and we can never identify our own repetition convulsion, which is why of course, we seek out help, but the goal ultimately to love and be loved, I mean, I always just keep coming back to this, and as I read your stories, and I also love your story about having your son, that journey that you share so openly. I think too, when you asked Wendell, your therapist, you asked him or you wanted to ask him, or you roundabout asked and you said, do you like me? Can you tell us a bit about that? Because I think that was like, wow. Oh, a therapist is asking another therapist love.

Lori Gottlieb:

Yeah, it's really interesting because as a patient, I really very much in the beginning I think sort of had my therapist hat on like, oh, I know why he's asking that. He wants to know about my attachment styles. But I think that once you get past that, you realize that you're just two humans in a room together. And study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of our therapy is the relationship with our therapist. It actually matters more than the number of years of experience they have, the modality they use, the theoretical orientation they have, those things matter. Don't get me wrong, they matter, but not as much as the relationship. And so I think everybody wonders. Does my therapist like me? And so it's interesting because it's a place where you talk about everything including the relationship that's happening in the room, and you don't get to do that the same way outside. And so I was in this roundabout way sort of trying to ask him that question, and then he said, do you have a question for me?

And I asked him, and what he said was, and it was so beautiful, he said, I do like you, but not I think for the reasons that you want me to, meaning I think you want me to find you very sort of smart and funny and all those things that out in the world we get lots of praise for. But I like your nea. And it's a word that means your essence, like your soul, your essence, just your whole essence. And who doesn't want to be liked for their nea? And I think that's what happens when I was on the other side as a therapist, you can see how much I care about every single one of the people that I am going on this path with. I'm accompanying them as their witness and their guide. And it was interesting after I published the book, so I got obviously all the kinds of permissions and changed all kinds of things to protect their confidentiality.

But after the people in the book read the book, every single one of them said in a different conversation, I knew how much you cared about me when we were doing the work together, but reading the book, I could see how much you loved me. And it was like, that's what you want. You want your therapist to really, really care about you in that deep human way. It's such a human interaction. And so I think for people who have not experienced therapy, there are so many misconceptions about what it is like, oh, you're going to go to therapy and you're going to download the problem of the week and you're going to leave and you're going to come back and download the problem of the week, and the therapist is going to sit there and say, aha or Oh, wasn't that hard. No therapy. It's a very active process.

It's very much focused on the present. And so that we can then look at how the past informs the present, but how the present informs the future. What are you doing now to write that next chapter? So now that you have this freedom, Wendell said something to me that I think was incredibly important. And I put this in the book. I think at one point I was feeling very trapped, and he said to me, you remind me of this cartoon. And it's of a prisoner shaking the bars desperately trying to get out, but on the right and the left, it's open, no bars. So why don't we walk around those bars? Why do we sit there shaking the bars saying, I am trapped. Nothing's going to change. This is my life. This is terrible. And it's because with freedom comes responsibility. And if we walk around those bars, we can't blame things out there anymore. Not that the world is in a difficult place. And by the way, I always say before diagnosing someone with depression, make sure they aren't surrounded by assholes. That's one of my favorite sentences in

Susie Moore:

The book, by the way.

Lori Gottlieb:

Well, there are difficult people out there. So I'm not saying to people everything is your fault. What I'm saying is you have agency, you have choices. And when you walk around those bars, you are saying, I am responsible for the choices that I make in my life. Now I get to choose. And that's both a relief and in some sense a burden because now you have to take responsibility for yourself.

Susie Moore:

It's good and bad news,

Lori Gottlieb:

But I think ultimately it's excellent news. I mean, that's how you heal is you say, I am responsible. I have choices, and I'm going to make those choices. I'm going to make good choices for myself.

Susie Moore:

I agree with you. And you say here too around when it comes to being stuck in a problem, you share that Wendell says to you, if you're staying stuck in something behind those bars, not going left or right, there's a benefit to you being stuck somehow, which is probably that lack of responsibility required the ownership on our part. Would you say that, not to oversimplify here, but would you say that this could be the core of a lot of things that keep us stuck, just not wanting to see something, the scariness about what it may reveal to us about ourselves that could be ugly or scary,

Lori Gottlieb:

Right? Well, that's because it is scary, and I think change is hard. So this is why New Year's resolutions fail all the time. Change doesn't happen because you make up your mind and you say, okay, I'm going to do this, and then everything's going to change. What happens is I write about this, there's a chapter in, maybe you should talk to someone called How Humans Change, and it takes you through the steps. And it starts with pre-contemplation where you don't even know that you're thinking about making a change. And then there's contemplation where you're thinking about it, but you're not ready to do anything about it. And we've all been stuck in that stage for a very long time. I know I need to make a change, but yeah, it's okay. It's not that bad. I'm going to just keep things the way they are.

And then there is the preparation where you're preparing to make the change or thinking about what steps you need to is kind of a logistical stage. And then there's action, which is when you actually make the change. You switch jobs, you leave the relationship, you do something for your health, you do something different, and you set a boundary, whatever, it's you make the change. And people think that that's the end of it. Like, okay, that's it. You made the change. No, the next stage, which is the final stage, and the most important stage is called maintenance. And in maintenance, it's how do we maintain the change? And the big misconception about maintenance is that once, let's say that you decide, okay, I'm going to leave this relationship, but oh, I called him at three in the morning, so I failed. Forget it. I'll just go back to him.

So what we do is, or Oh, I was going to eat healthier, but oh, I ate all that cake, so forget it. I can't. I failed. No, it's not like that. You built into maintenance is that you're going to slip back because of course you've had these patterns for a long time. So you need to have a lot of self-compassion in the maintenance phase. It's okay to slip back, and then you just get the support that you need and you get right back on track. And the more you get right back on track, the less you're going to slip back. And the less you slip back, the easier it is to stay on track until the new thing becomes familiar to you. And the reason that change is so hard is that people don't realize they're going through lots of stages. But also it's hard because with change comes lost, even a good change, we would sometimes rather be in the unpleasant situation than go into a place of uncertainty where we are not familiar with it yet. So with change comes loss, the loss is familiarity. We lose the familiar thing. We would rather stay in the thing that we know because it's comfortable, even if it's unpleasant, than go to something that we don't know. So terrifying. And so I think that people need to realize that when you're in the maintenance phase, it's going to be scary. Let yourself, it's okay if you make a mistake, you go back, whatever, just get back on track. It's okay. It's part of the process. Be really, really compassionate with yourself.

Susie Moore:

I feel as if it's almost sometimes impossible for someone to practice self-compassion, the way that I just observe, the way we go through life. I'm a loser. I messed up. Nothing ever works out for me. And look, I understand, right? Life has its challenges. We're all here. It's earth school. I jokingly love to refer to it as earth school often, but when you think about it, the thing that you see ever, I mean, I would say if I see someone forgive themselves, go, oh, I think I did pretty good at that, or maybe it wasn't, I think I'd have a heart attack because it's just the opposite, opposite, opposite. So when it comes to self-compassion, it's coming back to loving and being loved just with the self. How do you incorporate it into your life?

Lori Gottlieb:

I'm so glad that you brought that up because this is really interesting. I see so much how people are so self-critical, another voice in their head that is always criticizing them. And again, they're not always aware of it, and we weren't born with that voice. So that voice came from somewhere. We don't know. Maybe the culture, maybe your environment, maybe the people who raised you, maybe the environment you're in right now, wherever it's coming from, it's hard to separate out that voice from your voice and it becomes internalized in that way. So whenever I'm giving a talk, I will often say to people from the stage, who is the person? Show of hands, who's the person that you talk to most in the course of your life? Is it your partner? Lots of hands. Is it your parents? Is it your sibling? Is it your best friend?

Lots of hands for all of those. But the person that we talk to most in the course of our lives is ourselves. And what we say to ourselves isn't always kind or true or useful. And those three criteria are so important. So I had this client who was so self-critical. Every week she would come in and she didn't even realize that she was being self-critical. And I said, listen, let's do an experiment. I want you to go home and I want you to listen for this voice that I'm hearing, and I want you to write down everything that voice says over the course of the week, and then come back next week and we'll talk about it. And she thought, oh, I'm not going to really hear anything. Well, she comes back the next week, she's written it all down, and she starts crying and she says, I am such a bully to myself.

And I had no idea. And some of the things she had written down were she was typing an email and she made a typo. And she said to herself immediately, the voice in her head went, you're so stupid. Now, first of all, if your friend had made that same typo, you would not think your friend was stupid. It's not like you're being nice to your friend. It's that you actually would not think that about your friend. You would think she was typing fast and she made a typo. So why would you say to yourself, I'm so stupid? She was passing herself. She saw a reflection in a mirror and she said, oh, you look terrible today. If her friend looked like that, she would not think my friend looks terrible. She went, my friend looks pretty cute. She looks fine. So this is how we talk to ourselves. So I think it's really important that we ask ourselves to listen to this voice and always ask, is it kind? Is it true? And is it useful? And if it doesn't meet those criteria, change the radio station. Listen to something else, because whatever you're listening to is not your voice. It's not the voice you were born with. It's something external. It's something out there, and you need to get rid of that. Why are you playing that toxic radio station over and over in your head?

Susie Moore:

And don't you think too, Lori , that our bodies, the way that we are just made is we, emotions are this real feedback, real time feedback system telling us how we're speaking, right? If I feel heavy, dense, don't want to get out of bed, really insecure, I'm like, there's something that I'm believing right now that isn't true. I mean, that has to be the case. Thank God for our emotions, the negative ones, because they're like, oh, a light come here, come this way. That's how I always think about it. And I'm like, if I feel like shit truly, especially for a long period, I'm like, there has to be something to examine because it's not by accident,

Lori Gottlieb:

Right? Well, first of all, depression distorts our thoughts and feelings. So I always say to people who are in the midst of experiencing depression, I say, you are not the best person to talk to you about you right now because everything that they're thinking about themselves is distorted through the lens of the depression, and they can't really see the big picture. Depression narrows our field of vision so much so that it becomes tunnel vision. So I think that's really important when you talk about that. And I also think it's important to remember that in general, maybe not clinical depression, which is something we treat differently, but when you are having these motions like, oh my gosh, you're feeling really heavy or you're feeling really sad, or you're feeling really anxious and it's not an ongoing thing, but it's something that you notice, I always say feelings are like weather systems.

They blow in, they blow out. And when we're in a feeling, it could be really hard to remember that this will blow over in a few hours or a day. And so whatever you're experiencing right then is just what you're like the weather. It's like there's a storm right now, it's cloudy right now, and then it will be windy, and then it will be sunny, and then it will go back to a storm again. And that's just sort of the ude of life. Now, if it's ongoing and it's really interfering with your functioning, you might want to go see someone and understand more about that. But I also don't think there's a bar for going to see someone. So I think that we do something different with our emotional health than we do with our physical health. So with our physical health, we don't say, well, I'm fine, so I never have to go get a checkup at the doctor, or I never have to pay attention to what's going on.

Or we have this, again, going back to the hierarchy of pain, we have that with, if you fall down and you break your arm, you're not going to say, well, I'm not going to go to the doctor and walk around with this broken arm because they don't have stage four cancer. We don't compare it to something else. No, but we do that with our emotional health. We're kind of like, yeah, I'm having trouble in this relationship, or I can't really sleep. I don't know why. Or I've been feeling sad for a while, or I'm feeling kind of anxious and I don't really know why, but it's not that bad compared to whatever we compare it to. It's like because I have this privilege or that privilege, or I have food and I have a roof over my head or whatever it is, we don't do that.

So what happens is people don't tend to come to therapy until they're having the equivalent of an emotional heart attack. So if you have chest pain, you're probably going to go to the cardiologist before you have a massive heart attack. If you have emotional pain, you wait until you have the emotional heart attack, and then you come to therapy. And that's so backward because first of all, it's harder to treat because now we got to get you back to the point when maybe you were starting to feel the emotional pain, and then now it's gotten so much worse because you've let it go for a long time. And now the part that's so heartbreaking is you've suffered unnecessarily for weeks or months or maybe even years. It can take so long for a person to actually get to therapy. It can take years sometimes. So they've been suffering in all of these ways when they didn't need to suffer so much and they lost all that time. So I always say to people, if you're thinking, should I see a therapist that's your inner therapist telling you, yes, I should see a therapist. You don't need to be having an emotional heart attack. You can just be like, Hey, I prioritize my emotional health. This matters to me and I want to see what's going on. Something feels a little bit off. I want to go see what's going on. That's it. You don't need a reason.

Susie Moore:

Again, I love how it comes back to this self-compassion. Often, I think too, I'm not sure if it's even just true with women, but I see we will put ourselves last and it will be like, well, I've got other people to take care of, and is she okay? Is he okay? And I'll be fine over here. Another guest on the podcast, Susan Caton recently said, she's like, I felt bad in a therapy group once because that woman had a four tissue problem. I just had a two tissue problem. I had problems with my mother, but she lost her brother. It was like a whole, the comparison thing is interesting, isn't it? Because it's so unrelated. Someone else's problem has nothing to do with us,

Lori Gottlieb:

And it's what prevents us from connecting. So we don't feel like we can talk to our friends about these problems that we're having because we feel like, oh, it's so trivial. Yes, we feel like it doesn't really merit discussion. Or I'm going to seem like I'm entitled in some way, or This problem isn't big enough to talk about, or I can't talk about this with my friend because she has this problem. And so my problem won't seem big enough. It's insensitive of me to talk about my problem with her, when really I think friends want to be involved in each other's lives. They want to have that emotional intimacy with each other. And you find that even if you think your problem is small, that there's something bigger. So I even talked about this, and maybe you should talk to someone. I wondered before I became a therapist, what would it be like for example, when I was seeing this young woman who had cancer, and then to have the next person come in and say, my husband's not having sex with me, right?

Susie Moore:

Oh, I love that

Lori Gottlieb:

He's dying of cancer. But I didn't feel that at all because what is really underlying this person's real emotional upheaval around? Am I not lovable, is really what it comes down to. Why am I feeling undesirable or not lovable? That's a real big life crisis type of thing to feel unloved by the person that you love and we can't talk about it, and he won't talk to me and I'm being shut out around this. Or, oh, the babysitter's stealing from me, like, oh my gosh, and this woman that just came in had cancer. Well, no, because what does that mean? This person that I trust with my child, I'm not sure that I can trust. And what does that mean? And what does this mean for our family? And what does this mean for our child? If I have to get somebody new, my child is going to be heartbroken. And what does that mean? And all my feelings of guilt that I work because I need to work and yet I need or want to work even worse, even worse than

Susie Moore:

Work a little bit everything.

Lori Gottlieb:

And you want to do something for yourself too. And then maybe you can't trust the person, the person that you care most about your child is being charged with. So it's very complicated. What feels like a trivial problem on the surface is actually a very human problem and a very relatable problem when you get down to what it really represents.

Susie Moore:

I always think that the goal that I have in mind when I want to receive some help or offer help is the soothing, whatever's going to bring a little bit of relief. And I think that even in the example of the babysitters stealing money, the nanny's stealing money. I mean, that would just represent that the world is scary. The person, like you said, you trust your heart is in a human form outside of your body, your child and the person who takes care of that child is stealing your money. I mean,

Lori Gottlieb:

And then what does it mean? What else can you not trust? The trust is broken and how person's telling you the truth about all kinds of things related to your child. So I think that it's really important that we're able to talk to each other. So the title of the book, maybe you should Talk to Someone, is yes, a nod to, maybe you should talk to a therapist, but it's also, maybe we need to talk more to each other. So everybody needs to go to therapy. I would encourage people if they want to go to therapy to do that for sure, but I think we also, we feel so alone and isolated in what we're going through because we don't know other people are going through similar things because we're so afraid to talk about it with each other. And so it looks like if you just look on Instagram, and we know intellectually by the way, that social media is not a real representation of people's lives, but I think we don't know what a real representation of people's lives is because we aren't actually talking about it with one another. And that's a real shame. It really prevents this kind of deep connection that I think helps us get through this really challenging time in the world.

Susie Moore:

I agree, Lori. And sometimes I feel like I'd love your opinion on this because sometimes I feel like I'm a little bit strange. I love to be open about things with people who I don't even know that well, even if it's a little bit uncomfortable. So as an example, recently we went to dinner with another couple and lovely couple. Of course, we like them, we want to be friends with them. And I was like, sorry, we're late. We had a fight on. That's the real reason. And I obviously don't go into details. I mean, unless they ask, in which case I would. But I just think, isn't it, sometimes I think I like to be the person who's willing to say something first, to throw something out there. Or I'll often offer something very unglamorous about my past or my experience, because I know that we don't connect through our San Pay vacations when we speak about those or how amazing our kid is.

Those things are wonderful too, to celebrate. But sometimes I think, well, I like to just offer something that is just real and maybe someone doesn't have the exact same experience, but all couples fight, all kids have problems. All of us have different challenges at work. I always think that especially, I'm not sure if it's specific to the US more, but I find as if it takes a long time in friendships to get there, or it can take years and years and years, and I just want to get there quickly. I just, let's just do it. Tell me about your life. Give me all sides of it.

Lori Gottlieb:

Yeah. Yeah. I think this speaks to vulnerability, and I think that so many times we don't know what vulnerability is. So when we see, so often you'll see on social media, someone will say, I'm just telling all of you guys, I'm being really vulnerable here, and let me share this with you. And I feel like on the one hand, I'm glad people are talking about things because people need to hear that people are human. But on the other hand, that's not, in my opinion, real vulnerability because you don't have to sit face-to-face with the people who are reading your post. And yes, they, they're going to put lots of validation and likes and whatever, but I think real vulnerability is when you have real stakes in something, I'm going to open up to this person in the flesh and blood right here. You're sitting on the couch next to me and I'm going to tell them something that feels very tender to me about, maybe it's about me.

Maybe it's about our relationship. And that is very risky, and that's real vulnerability, but it's also what brings real connection, not social media connection, real connection. And I think that that takes an incredible amount of courage, and that's where I want people to be vulnerable, is vulnerable. Can you be vulnerable with the people in your life that matter to you with those relationships? And I think you have to choose your audience well. I always say to people, you can't just willy-nilly be vulnerable with people, or they'll say like, oh, I did that, but it didn't go well. And so I want to say is choose your audience. Well, there are people that are going to be a good audience for this, and there are people who are not. And you have to learn that about the people in your life and maybe the people who are not serve a different role in your life.

They're the person you like to go on hikes with or go to movies with or whatever it is, or collaborate professionally with. But there are other people that really you can be audiences for each other where you can really be present. And being a good audience means being present. Do you know how to listen? Does the other person know how to listen and listening? We make this mistake all the time where we think, oh, I'm going to give this person what I would want in this moment. Instead of asking, how can I be helpful to you? How can I be here for you in this moment? What would happen if we asked that? How can I be here for you? I want to be here for you. How can I be here for you in this moment? They might say, I just want to vent right now.

I don't want your thoughts about this. I don't want a solution. I just want to vent. Okay, great. Even though you're thinking like, oh my God, here's what you need to do. Just want to vent. Because maybe a week later they might come back and say, that thing that we talked about, I've been thinking about, and I actually want to now have a conversation where we kind of brainstorm about what I should do about this. Or maybe I'm not seeing something about this. Can you help me with that? But in that moment, they want to vent. Or maybe they're like, I just want to hug right now and then I'll feel better. And then the thing will pass. We had this bad day at work and this thing happened or had this bad moment with my partner, but I just want to hug right now and I know I'll work it out. Or maybe they're saying, I really need another opinion on this. I really want to hear your thoughts. I trust you with this. I really want to hear, what do you think about this? Can you gently help me hear your thoughts? So everybody is different about what they want. And also in that moment, in therapy, we do this all the time, is therapists. It's always timing and dosage. When do we help them to see something? And how much do we deliver in that one session? And in that one moment,

Susie Moore:

Truly, Lori , reading this book, I've always had such respect for your work. But the way that you see people, the way that you care, the way that, I mean, I feel like anyone who reads this book too is going to be just a better friend. They're going to be more connected to others, to themselves. They'll see it was so quick to judge that person's wrong. They're behaving badly, they're being rude. The way that the humanity that you bring to this, I mean, I was deeply moved with it, and I could keep you,

Lori Gottlieb:

You're a Very busy lady.

Susie Moore:

I know.

Lori Gottlieb:

I hope that what people will take from it is more self-awareness is more awareness of their own blind spots, of their own patterns. I think it's so much easier to see somebody else enact a pattern that's similar to yours and recognize yourself in that and say to yourself, oh yeah, I do that too. Or I do a version of that, as opposed to somebody saying to you, you have this pattern and let me tell you about it. We get really defensive. But when you can see yourself mirrored in somebody else's experience in that way, then the awareness is the first step. You say, oh, well, maybe I do need to look at that without all the shame, without the judgment, without the blame, again, with compassion. So I think it's about self-awareness that you will learn a lot about yourself from reading. Maybe you should talk to someone, and you'll learn a lot about the people in your life, whether that's family members or friends or romantic partners. You'll learn a lot about them and have more compassion for them too. And so I want people to walk away with self-awareness. And then also I think self-compassion.

Susie Moore:

I mean, I would dare anyone not to become more self-aware after reading this book. I think the insights, the examples, the truths, and it's raw, real material in here we're dealing with the topic shared in here are the hardest that humans deal with the hardest. But

Lori Gottlieb:

I think what makes it really relatable, and I think that that's why we can see ourselves, is because of the humor. Because I think that human beings are ridiculous. And I have that, that's how I approach it as a therapist, that I know that there's this large gap so often with all of us between what we intend and what we actually do or what we want and the ways we prevent ourselves from getting it, or the ways we intend to have a conversation and the way we actually have a conversation, or the ways that we think we're coming across and the ways that we actually come across. And I think we're just, human beings are ridiculous. And if we can laugh at ourselves and others not in, I don't mean that we're laughing at them. I think we're more laughing with them, that we're laughing at our shared humanity at how much, there's so much humor in the mistakes that we make and the ways that we kind of fall in the same hole over and over and over again until we don't. And so I think you can see I'm very self-deprecating in the book about myself and all of the ways that I can't see my own issues. And I think that there's so much humor in the ways that I work with my patients in the room, that we laugh a lot in the therapy room too. And I think people don't realize that. And I want them to see that as well.

Susie Moore:

Lori, what's next for you? This book, everyone needs to read it available everywhere books are sold. Is there anywhere else people should check you out? Just lorigottlieb.com.

Lori Gottlieb:

Yeah. So season three of the Dear Therapist Podcast just launched. And so we do actual sessions on there and people get homework, and then they have a week to do the homework, and we hear actually how the session went. So you can see how even after one session, people can make real shifts in their lives, even if they've been stuck for a long time. And so that's Dear Therapist. And then I write the Dear Therapist column for The Atlantic, and they can watch my Ted Talk, of course, and they can get the workbook to, maybe you should talk to someone, which is called a toolkit for Changing your Story and Changing Your Life. And I'm writing a new book, which I am very excited about. So busy with all of that.

Susie Moore:

Oh, okay. Lori, I have a quick, rapid seven question round that I would love to finish on, if that's okay with you.

Lori Gottlieb:

Alright, I'll do my best.

Susie Moore:

What is your favorite word for therapist?

Lori Gottlieb:

My favorite word for therapist? Oh, there are lot

Susie Moore:

Of kind of nicknames, aren't there?

Lori Gottlieb:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say what Irv Yalom, who's a very famous psychiatrist and called people, fellow travelers. I think we're all fellow travelers.

Susie Moore:

Oh my God, that makes me emotional. Fellow travelers. When people come across you in your work, how do you want them to feel?

Lori Gottlieb:

I want them to feel seen

Susie Moore:

In one word. How would someone who knew you as a kid, describe you?

Lori Gottlieb:

Quirky.

Susie Moore:

Quirky? Number four here. What's one thing you really want to do that you haven't done yet?

Lori Gottlieb:

Oh, I don't know. Because I feel like I'm doing all the things that I want to be doing. That's a really hard one.

Susie Moore:

That's a wonderful answer though.

Lori Gottlieb:

I dunno. I'm doing them all. Nothing even wildly random. You don't want to go bungee jumping in New Zealand. Oh my gosh. That would be the biggest nightmare. No, you want me, you do not want me flying through the air. The screaming. The screaming of terror would resound throughout the world. World. It's not on my bucket list. Not on your bucket list. Okay. Favorite city? Favorite city? Ooh. I give horrible answers to this because you could put me in any city and I would be fascinated by it. I'm so curious about anywhere I am that I would just want to explore it. These are actually very good answers. They're like, oh, I like all cities. Oh, what would your last meal be? Oh, okay. This one. I know it would be steak. It would be a really, really delicious steak. There are so many people who do not understand why I eat red meat. I do. I love steak. Like a rib, a ribeye, unashamedly, say, that would be my last name. And any type of steak or just all steak, mignon, mignon, delish.

Susie Moore:

And then finally for the Let it be Easy podcast. What's one thing that you do consistently that allows your life to be easier?

Lori Gottlieb:

Get enough sleep.

Susie Moore:

Oh, aren't you a different woman after a good night's sleep?

Lori Gottlieb:

Yes. Sleep is everything. Sleep is like, it's the reset. It's the thing. I can't function if I don't have enough sleep, so I have to protect my sleep. I think people talk about it like, oh, well, it's okay if I stay up an extra hour. I stay up an extra two hours. And I say, people, what were you doing in that extra like, oh, I was on Instagram, or I was answering emails, or I was watching a TV show, which is fine. I do all of those things. But if you don't protect your sleep, you're going to notice it and it accumulates over time. So it's really important to protect your sleep for me.

Susie Moore:

I agree. And no one's actually said that yet. And I'm like, Ooh, sleep. You are right. It affects everything. And Lori, truly your wisdom, your words, your time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the work you do. Thank you for being with us.

Lori Gottlieb:

Oh my gosh. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. What a joy. And I hope we'll do this again sometime in the future.

Susie Moore:

Absolutely. I would love that. So much love. Take care.