(Book) Maybe You Should Talk To Someone

This book was suggested by a friend who works in therapy. Not sure why she suggested it to me, but after reading the first few pages, I thought it would be an interesting one to explore “the world of emotionally smart people”. And it was a fun read, giving lots of useful reference poitns and vocabularies look at and talk about emotions.

Here are just some quotes I highlighted during my read because I liked them at those particular points.

About therapy practice

Therapy can’t help people who aren’t curious about themselves.

What makes therapy challenging is that it requires people to see themselves in ways they normally choose not to. A therapist will hold up the mirror in the most compassionate way possible, but it’s up to the patient to take a good look at that reflection, to stare back at it and say, “Oh, isn’t that interesting! Now what?” instead of turning away.

While these seem to be about the limitations of therapy, they can also be seen as a mindset tip to be mentally healthy: be curious about yourself. And our mind is worth the curiosity. It is endless (we will never fully understand the cause of all of our thoughts and actions) and powerful (every little thing we understand about ourself help us live a slightly better life.)

Generally what happens between therapist and patient also plays out between the patient and people in the outside world, and it’s in the safe space of the therapy room that the patient can begin to understand why.

Made me thought of an analogous quote, which is: a reason someone cheats is not about the third person, but about what happens right in the relationship. Relationship problems are leaky, even though we are dealing with completely different people.

Our experiences with this person are important because we’re probably feeling something pretty similar to what everyone else in this patient’s life feels.

The flip of perspective here is intersting. When dealing with a difficult/interesting person, sometimes it feels like that specialness in that person has something to do with us. But probably everyone else interacted with them also find them difficult/interesting. That is a helpful theorem for therapists to operate on. But for normal people, it might also be helpful. For example, by asking a friend how they feel about us, we can somewhat know how many other people feel about us. The goal does not have to be to please more peole, but at least to be aware about our self image in social relationships. Asking for feedback to being socially healthy is like mirrors to being physically tidy.

After all, it wasn’t that psychotherapy didn’t work. It was that it didn’t work fast enough for today’s patients, who were now, tellingly, called “consumers.” […] The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had made this point more than fifty years earlier: “Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.”

Life today gets to a point where self-understanding, a very difficult and time-consuming process, is required to be so fast so that the “consumers” can move on to the next thing. Sometimes the more productive thing to do is to take our time.

Human psychology

I think about how common it is, even in everyday situations, to be jealous of a spouse and how taboo it is to talk about that. Aren’t we supposed to be happy for their good fortune? Isn’t that what love is about? In one couple I saw, the wife got her dream job on the same day that her husband was let go from his, which made for extreme awkwardness every night at the dinner table. How much should she share of her days without inadvertently making her husband feel bad? How could he manage his envy without raining on her parade? How noble can people reasonably be expected to be when their partners get something they desperately want but can’t have?

This is true – we feel guilty for prioritizing our immediate feelings above others, even when we are extremely happy or sad. Those ethical dilemmas may appear more frequent than we think.

If you’d asked me when I started as a therapist what most people came in for, I would have replied that they hoped to feel less anxious or depressed, to have less problematic relationships. But no matter the circumstances, there seemed to be this common element of loneliness, a craving for but a lack of a strong sense of human connection. A want. They rarely expressed it that way, but the more I learned about their lives, the more I could sense it, and I felt it in many ways myself.

[On a tangent] I shared this quote with another therapist friend, and they gave me ideas of the leading 2 causes of this loneliness in today’s age.

• The first one is social media: despite its promise to connect people everywhere in this world, it discourages genuine connections. The expectation to be nonchalant seen in youth today, to me, is a pandemic because it forces them to limit their self expressions due to the fear of social judgements, partly amplified by social networks sites.
• The second one is AI: despite its promise to solve human-being’s problems, it causes a serious problem for us, which is the decline of social interactions, specifically the act of asking for help, because “AI can do that.”

[About a man’s grief to his kid, which is different from his wife’s grief]

Losing somebody you love is such a profoundly lonely experience, something only you endure in your own particular way.

Grief is hard. This point also shows that loneliness has multiple forms. Here, it is the loneliness in experiencing a grief, which is impossible to avoid because everyone has a different set of interactions with the one who passed away.

You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it.

Therapy quotes like this sound cliche. But this one was highlighted because it was non-trivial in the character’s situation. “Accepting and tackling” a pain is easier said than done. Who wants to accept another pain in our lives?

I can help Ian manage his feelings about the patient who begins her sessions by reporting her horoscope (“I can’t stand this woo-woo shit,” he says).

Therapists are just humans (who have the skills of knowing how the mind works.) They are allowed to be upset with horoscopes.

Life

I think about how it’s the not knowing that torments all of us. Not knowing why your boyfriend left. Not knowing what’s wrong with your body. Not knowing if you could have saved your son. At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we’ll never know why.

This quote is talking about “not knowing”, the situation in which you realize you cannot know an answer to something every important to you. This can happen to everyone, no matter how rich they are.

Patience, on the other hand, requires endurance and effort. It’s defined as “the bearing of provocation, annoyance, misfortune, or pain without complaint, loss of temper, irritation, or the like.”

Just an interesting definition of patience. The book has a lot of examples of patient people – so patience that I felt calm when reading about them.

“I do like you,” he says in a way that makes me feel he means it. It sounds neither rote nor gushy. It’s so simple—and so unexpectedly moving in its simplicity. Yes, I like you. “I like you too,” I say, and Wendell smiles.

The author, being a therapist herself, was sharing all of her problems with her therapist. When we have problems that we need to share with a therpist, it is usually one we don’t know how to deal with. And saying to someone “I have this problem, and eventhough I tried, I could not solve it” feels extremely vulnerable. Before the quote above, the author asked if the therapist (Wendell) liked her, in a naive, patient-like way, because she felt quite embarassed about her problems. Even though the quote appears light (the fact that we say “I like you” a lot, and the fact that they just said it without any extra sentences), it appears beautiful in that context.

One day I was in the break room with some fellow interns, and we once again started counting our required number of hours and calculating how old we’d be when we finally got licensed. The higher the number, the worse we felt. A supervisor in her sixties walked by and overheard the conversation. “You’ll turn thirty or forty or fifty anyway, whether your hours are finished or not,” she said. “What does it matter what age you are when that happens? Either way, you won’t get today back.” We all went quiet. You won’t get today back. What a chilling idea. We knew that our supervisor was trying to tell us something important. But we didn’t have time to think about it.

This is a zen story in itself, profound and abrupt. [ELABORATE]

Fun

People make misguided comments about all kinds of misfortune, and Julie has been toying with the idea of writing a book she plans to call What Not to Say to a Dying Person: A Guide for the Well-Meaning but Clueless. According to Julie, here are a few things not to say:

• Are you sure you’re dying?
• Have you gotten a second opinion?
• Be strong. What are your odds?
• You need to be less stressed.
• It’s all about attitude.
• You can beat this!
• I know somebody who took vitamin K and was cured.
• I read about this new therapy that shrinks tumors—in mice, but still.
• You really have no family history of this? (If Julie did, the person asking would feel safer; it could be explained by genetics.)
• The other day, someone told Julie, “I knew a woman who had the same kind of cancer as you.” “Knew?” Julie said. “Um, yes,” the person replied sheepishly. “She, uh, died.”

As Julie goes through her list of things not to say, I think about other patients who’ve complained about comments people make at various difficult times:

• You can still have another child.
• At least he lived a long life.
• She’s in a better place now.
• When you’re ready, you can always get another dog.
• It’s been a year; maybe it’s time to move on.

To be sure, these comments are meant to comfort, but they’re also a way of protecting the speakers from the uncomfortable feelings that somebody else’s bad situation stirs up. Platitudes like these make a terrible circumstance more palatable for the person saying the words but leave the person experiencing the adversity feeling angry and alone.

Another nice instance of mind-blowing psychology, where a person who seems to be saying the right thing to help is actually just making it worse by being selfish.

A collective Mm-hmm fills the room.

Isn’t this a perfect description of that setting? Such a witty writing.

Remark?

As vast as the outside world is, our mind can be an endless space where weird things happen outside of our awareness. But just like weather in the atmosphere, those things inside our mind affects our life. It’s good to at least put an eye on it – no one says weather forecast is useless!