Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

"This is a psychotherapist’s memoir, essentially. Gottlieb is also a journalist and a writer, but she’s a working psychotherapist, and this is the story of a crisis in her own life, intertwined with a whole cast of characters based on her patients. I really want to talk to her about how you do this, actually; I fully believe that she has protected everybody’s confidentiality, and yet these composite characters must be drawn very heavily from life, because they just ring so incredibly true. It really reminds you – or me, anyway – that in many ways there’s no more exciting plot than the course of an ordinary life. That said, she’s a therapist in Los Angeles, so there’s a certain amount of Hollywood show business stuff which adds extra glitter. Some of the lives in question are unfolding on the sets of network television shows, and things like that. I don’t want to spoil any of the specific plots, but there’s this idea that in therapy, and life in general, the ‘presenting problem’ is not necessarily the real problem. People seek Gottlieb out in a way that’s related to how we seek out self-help books – thinking we know what’s missing in our lives, and that you can hire someone to fix it, like you might hire a plumber or an accountant. But very often those assumptions are precisely what needs to be questioned. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That has shown itself to be the case in my own life over and over again: you can be really, really efficient and brilliant at fixing certain problems, but actually, you’ve not understood the problem that you have. Often you’ve just gone and made it worse. To put it in the terms that Gottlieb might use, a lot of that kind of fixing is often really a form of avoidance. An example that springs to mind is: you think you need to get tons more work done, so you go and buy self-help books about productivity techniques and becoming more efficient. Or you even seek out a therapist, and say: ‘Give me advice on cramming more into my day.’ But maybe your problem is actually workaholism. Maybe work is an attempt to avoid something else – to become so much the master of your work, say, that you don’t need to think about what’s happening to your life in terms of relationships. In that case, trying to become more efficient is a defence mechanism to help you avoid acknowledging the true situation. What Gottlieb is so good at is that she’s not telling them that they’re full of shit, she takes their perspective on things very seriously – and yet creates this space in which they can also then let things come to the surface that they had been denying, or trying to keep down. Does that make sense? This is related to the book I’m trying to write at the moment, but it’s also related to my own life. I definitely know how easy it is to confuse frenetically doing with doing things that matter, and deriving a lot of self-worth from your ability to do things that aren’t necessarily worth doing, or are serving some kind of unhelpful hidden agenda. The other thing I’d like to say about Gottlieb is that she really drills down into this idea that everybody’s behaviour has some kind of emotional rationale. It’s very dicey to talk in this way, because it can sound like justifying terrible behaviour, but it’s not; it’s about explaining it. She writes a brilliant advice column for The Atlantic , where people write in to report the ways in which their partners or family are behaving appallingly towards them. I think a lot of writers in that context would just ally themselves with the letter-writer in condemning the people they’re complaining about. And obviously there are contexts in which you should do that. But she also leads them toward seeing things from the other people’s perspective – not to excuse the bad behaviour, but because you can’t make any progress in life until you start to learn the emotional rationales according to which other people’s behaviour makes sense to them."