How changing your story can change your life (w/ Lori Gottlieb) (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy:
You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, it's practically guaranteed that you've heard either me or one of our guests talk about therapy. And I, I feel like these days there is a lot of talk about how great therapy is, but a lot less about how it actually works.

It's a little bit like if everyone kept telling you that it's so great for your body to use weights to work out, but then when you tried to join a gym, it involved doing all sorts of research and asking for recommendations. And it was extremely complicated to figure out how much the gym was gonna cost each month, and also whether the gym had openings for new members.

Plus, no one could really explain to you exactly what the difference was between using a gym and just buying some dumbbells and keeping them under your bed. Okay, uh, I'm not gonna belabor the gym metaphor anymore here, but I think you get my point. That is why I am so excited about today's guest, Lori Gottlieb.

Lori is a therapist and an author who wrote the book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. Lori is amazing at explaining how and why therapy works, what you can do to change the inner narrative you may be telling yourself, and why therapy has been such an important force in her own life. One thing that I love about Lori is how she's so willing to talk about both the big picture stuff, and she's just as willing to dive into the nitty gritty details, including some very practical steps for how to find a therapist and what you should look for if you do meet with someone for the first time. To get us started, here's a clip from Lori's TED Talk.

[00:01:28] Lori Gottlieb:
Now I have a pretty unusual inbox because I'm a therapist, and I write an advice column called Dear Therapists. So you can imagine what's in there. I've read thousands of very personal letters from strangers all over the world, and these letters range from heartbreak and loss to spats with parents or siblings.

I keep them in a folder on my laptop, and I've named it “The Problems of Living”. But I have to be really careful when I respond to these letters because I know that every letter I get is actually just a story written by a specific author. And that another version of this story also exists. It always does. And I know this because if I've learned anything as a therapist, it's that we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives.

I am. You are. And so is everyone you know. Most of what people tell me is absolutely true, just from their current points of view. Depending on what they emphasize or minimize what they leave in, what they leave out, what they see, and what they want me to see, they tell their stories in a particular way. The way we narrate our lives shapes what they become. That's the danger of our stories because they can really mess us up, but it's also their power because what it means is that if we can change our stories, then we can change our lives.

[00:02:53] Chris Duffy:
We're gonna talk a lot more about how we narrate our stories in just a moment, but first, like any great story these days, we gotta take an ad break. We'll be right back after these messages.

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[00:03:14] Chris Duffy:
Today we're talking with Lori Gottlieb about how to change the stories that we tell to and about ourselves.

[00:03:19] Lori Gottlieb:
Hi, I'm Lori Gottlieb. I'm a psychotherapist, and I'm the author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, and I co-host the Dear Therapists podcast.

[00:03:29] Chris Duffy:
There's this big idea in your TED Talk, and it's a big piece of the book as well, that we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives.And so I wanna talk to you about that idea, but I also wanna talk about the thing that, to me, is a funny meta-level, which is that you are also literally the narrator of the book about your own life. How do you think about it in general for all of us? And then how did you think about it for yourself when you were crafting like a quite literal narrative that then people are gonna read about your life?

[00:03:54] Lori Gottlieb:
That’s such a great question. Nobody has ever asked me about the part about my narrating the book and the unreliable narrator part of that. I think that we like to think that we're reliable narrators because we feel like I'm telling the objective version of what happened, and yet, we are all subjective.

And it's not that what we're saying is untrue. What we're saying is absolutely true, but from our own vantage point. So we're leaving out a lot of things. We're bringing in certain things, certain threads to the story that we want the other person to hear. We're minimizing the parts that maybe we don't want them to hear as much, and the parts that maybe we don't want to acknowledge to ourselves.

When I was writing Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, I was following the lives of four very different patients as I was working with them as their therapist, but I included my narrative, and I'm the fifth patient in the book, where I go to therapy after something happens in my life because I felt like it would be really unreliable if I positioned myself as the expert up on high. I wanted to show, as in all of my subjectivity, how I do the same things in therapy that my therapy clients do with me in terms of being an unreliable narrator. And for the first part of the book, I'm a very unreliable narrator with my own therapist.

[00:05:11] Chris Duffy:
One of the things that you did with your own therapist was saying the same story over and over, hoping that you would convince them that, like, your perspective on it was of course, the right one and the only one which is, I certainly can relate to doing that in my own therapy, of saying, “My way has to be the only way, right? Give me some confirmation on that.” Which of course, a good therapist is not gonna do.

[00:05:29] Lori Gottlieb:
I think that's the difference between what I talk about in the book, idiot compassion and wise compassion. So idiot compassion is what we do with our friends. So after this breakup happened for me. Everybody said about my boyfriend, “Oh, you dodged a bullet. He's a jerk.” All of these things. But that really wasn't the story, but it was the story that felt comforting to me, and I think my friends truly believed that because I was telling them a certain story. It was the accurate story from my perspective, but it wasn't the whole story. And so idiot compassion is when our friends say, “Listen to what happened with my boss…” With my coworker, with my mother, with my partner, with my sibling. And we say, “Yeah, you're right. That's terrible. They're wrong.” Because we think we're being supportive. We're supporting our friend's version of the story, and we take that as truth.

But I think if you listen to your friends long enough, you start to hear a pattern. Like they've told me these kinds of stories before. Maybe different characters, maybe different scenario. If a fight breaks out in every bar you're going to, maybe it's you. We do not say that to our friends.

Wise compassion is what you get in therapy. Wise compassion is where we hold up a mirror to you. And we help you to see something that you aren’t willing or able to acknowledge about your own role in the situation. And that doesn't mean we're blaming you for the situation at all. There's the word compassion in there It's about, “What is your part in this dance with this other person?” We're all doing a dance when we're interacting with someone. What are your dance steps in this, and can you change them?

[00:07:03] Chris Duffy:
It really struck me in your book and, and in prepping for this interview and watching other talks and interviews that you've given, the idea of relationships as a dance. Not just the therapeutic relationship, but all of them. Because one thing that you say that I, I think is a really revelatory for me and for a lot of people is the idea that you can't change what the other person does. But if you keep dancing in the same way, they're gonna keep dancing in the same way with you.

[00:07:28] Lori Gottlieb:
That's right. I think a lot of people come to therapy wanting something to change, and what they want to change is usually someone else. It's how can I change this other person? How can I get them to do something different? And the way you do that is you do something different. So you can't change another person, but you can influence another person to see if they will change. And I see this in couples a lot. When couples come in for therapy, it's each person wants the other person to be the first to make the change.

In other words, to change the dance first. And I always say to people before they even come in for their first session, “What is something that you would like to do differently in this relationship, regardless of whether the other person changes?”

If you are going to be your best self in this relationship, what would that look like? What is something that you can do better in this relationship? And they come in with that mindset of, “I'm not here to change the other person. I'm here to do something different myself and to see what's here when I show up in this way.”

So the thing about the dance is, and this is like with boundaries too, people say, “Oh, I'm gonna set a boundary with this other person. I'm going to tell them you can't talk to me that way,” or “You can't bring up this topic,” or whatever the thing might be. And that's not really what a boundary is. A boundary is a request that I would like it if you would not do that, and it's the consequence that you are going to do, not what they need to do. And if you do, I'm going to end the conversation and we'll come and we'll talk about it another time.

The boundary is about you changing your dance steps. It's, “I would like it if you would change these dance steps, but in the meantime, if you don't, I'm going to leave the dance floor.” And what you find, by the way, is that if people change their dance steps, that the other person is either going to change their dance steps too, or they're gonna fall flat on the dance floor. If they won't do the new dance, then you have a choice. Do I want to have this person as my dance partner, or this is not a dance that I wanna do?

[00:09:29] Chris Duffy:
I find that the moments that are the most powerful or the moments that really have changed my life have been realizing that there are these invisible systems that I have built around myself that seem instinctive and natural, and of course that's just how things have to be. When someone acts like this, I must act like that, and to just get the tiniest bit of distance to see that actually that's something that I built, that’s a choice that I'm making, and I don't necessarily have to make those choices. I don't have to dance in that way if it's not serving me. Just seeing that it is a possible change, even before I make it, has been a mind blowing revelation for me in therapy.

[00:10:05] Lori Gottlieb:
I think that we forget that we're all co-creating a dynamic with a person. That it's not “This person is bad, and I am good”. “This person is toxic.” That's another thing that gets thrown around on social media a lot. “And I'm the healthy one,” because if you're participating in an unhealthy dynamic, you're co-creating that with the other person. I think a scene in the book that people talk about a lot is the moment when I'm in therapy and I'm feeling really trapped and I feel like I don't have any choices.

And my therapist says 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 the question is, why is it that sometimes we can't see that it's open? And why is it that even when we do see that it's open, we don't walk around those bars?

And I think that a lot of that has to do with the idea that there is some comfort. It’s, it’s discomfort, but there's a way of abdicating responsibility for our own lives if we say the problem is someone else or something else, and if we walk around those bars with freedom, the freedom that we would then have comes responsibility, and now we are responsible for our lives. We can't blame our unhappiness, our stuck-ness, whatever it might be, on someone else. Now we know we have the freedom to change that, and if we don't, we only have ourselves to blame.

[00:11:34] Chris Duffy:
We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back with more from Lori after this.

[BREAK]

[00:11:44] Chris Duffy:
And we are back. So Lori, you're obviously not just a really talented therapist, you're also a really talented writer and editor, and I know you've spoken before about how you see those as being complementary skills. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:11:55] Lori Gottlieb:
Yeah, I always loved stories and the human condition, and I started first working in film development after college, and then I was an executive at NBC. And when I was at NBC I was working on a show you may have heard of called ER. Um, I was not a writer on the show; I was an executive at the network. Our consultant on the show who was an ER doc kept saying to me, “I think you like it better here than you like your day job.”

ER, of course, was this incredible show, and the stories were, were so real, but they were also fiction. And when you're in an ER and you see these inflection points in people's lives, I was fascinated by that. And so I ended up going to medical school. I went up to Stanford, and I started writing when I was in medical school, and I left to become a writer. And it was later that I came back, decided to become a therapist, but I think that they're all related. They're all about stories and the human condition.

And I feel like as a therapist, when I'm sitting in the therapist chair, I almost feel like an editor, that people come in with their stories and they come in with these faulty narratives, and a lot of them are these narratives that we've carried around for so long that we don't even realize that we're holding them, these stories that someone else has told us about ourselves, that were much more about the storyteller, the person who told us this when we were younger than about us, but we interpreted it to be about us. So we took away these stories like, “I'm unlovable,” or “Nothing will ever work out for me,” or “I can't trust anyone”.

The way you see the world, and you act out those stories every day in all of your interactions without being aware of it. So one of the things I really do as an editor is to help people to edit their stories and make sure that they reflect their world in the present. As a writer, the arc that people go through in therapy very much mirrors the arc that people go through in any kind of narrative.

[00:13:53] Chris Duffy:
There's a chapter in your book called How Humans Change, and you talk about the steps that change actually takes. One of the things that I heard you say that it was really, I'm still gnawing on and mulling over, is the idea that change is complicated because with change comes loss.

[00:14:07] Lori Gottlieb:
Yes.

[00:14:07] Chris Duffy:
And I think that can be really one of the big things that holds us back.

[00:14:10] Lori Gottlieb:
It is. Even when the change is positive, it still comes with loss because we tend to cling to the familiar. The familiar is something that feels comfortable to us even if it's makes us miserable. It’s still something that we know. If we haven't processed the ways that we've been heard in the past, we tend to do this thing.

It's this phrase, repetition compulsion, where we try to master the situation that we couldn't master when we were younger. This time I will win, but we don't know that going in. We meet someone, and we think, “This person's really different from the person who hurt me. This person is not at all like my alcoholic parents, my parent with anger issues, my parent who was very withholding.”

And then you get into the relationship and it's like, “Uh-oh, this feels really familiar.” And the reason that change is so hard is because even though we're not happy in that situation, we know it. And humans don't do well with uncertainty. And the other thing about changes is that there are stages of change.

This is why New Year's resolutions fail so much, is because people don't realize that there are stages to change. And it starts with pre-contemplation, where you don't even know you're thinking about making a change, then contemplation, where you are wanting to make a change, but you're not ready to do it yet. And that's when people land in therapy.

Then there's, um, preparation where you're actually taking steps to prepare to make the change. And then there's action where you make the change, but that is not the last step. And so a lot of people, this is why people tend to fall off from change.

The last step is actually maintenance. And maintenance is how do you maintain the change? And a big misconception about maintenance is that once you've made the change, you're just maintaining it and you're just going along. And if you fall back, you failed. That is not true. It's like chutes and ladders, maintenance. And what happens is until a habit becomes something that starts to feel familiar to you, going back to how we get comfort from familiarity, you're gonna keep falling back.

And so you need to have a lot of self-compassion. So someone might say, “Oh, I was gonna break up with that person, but oh no, I called them and I got back together with them.” And then you just say, “Okay, but that was that day. And now you just get back on track.” Or, “Oh, I was going to exercise and then I didn't do it.” It's okay. So that happened that day.

And I think that people think that if you have self-compassion, that you're not holding yourself accountable, which is just not true. And I just wanna say that self-flagellation does not work in the long term. It might work in the short term, but it does not work in the long term.

[00:16:50] Chris Duffy:
It's interesting with maintenance as a form of change, because I think that with some pretty dramatic forms of change, one that comes to mind immediately for me is sobriety. The maintenance piece I think feels really natural to people. The idea of “I'm four years sober", “I'm 30 days sober”. The idea that it is an active thing, it's not just like you decided to be sober and that it's done, that it is something that needs to be maintained, but with other forms of, of change, people, sometimes they don't give themselves the pride that people feel in 10 years of sobriety. If it's 10 years of working to set healthy boundaries with family members, you pat yourself on the back.

[00:17:27] Lori Gottlieb:
Right. And I think that's because we're so self-critical with ourselves and we don't realize it. And what we say to ourselves isn't always kind or true or useful. But an example of this is I had this client and she was so self-critical and didn't realize it. And this could have been anybody because so many people are like this. I'm like this with myself. And I said to her, “I want you to listen for this voice in your head, and I want you to write down everything you say to yourself over the course of the week and come back next week and let's talk about it.”

And so she comes back the next week and she starts to read her list and she starts crying and she said, “I'm such a bully to myself. I had no idea.” We should always be kind and true and useful, not just with ourselves, but with other people. I think it would really change the dialogue if we use those criteria.

[00:18:16] Chris Duffy:
Do you recommend that people literally keep a list of what they're saying to themselves or, or what's the first step in, in making that shift?

[00:18:22] Lori Gottlieb:
I think the first step is yes, writing down what you say to yourself and then looking at the why. Whose voice is that? Usually it's not your voice. We are not born that way. We are not born with that critical voice in our heads. Usually it came from somewhere. It might be someone in your environment when you were growing up. It might be the culture; it could be the school system. Maybe you had a learning disability and people told you that you were not smart and that's just not true.

Where were you getting these messages? Whose stories are they? Again, going back to getting rid of those faulty narratives and rewriting those. That's a lot of the work of, I think, getting that voice in your head to be kind and true and useful.

[00:19:01] Chris Duffy:
We’ve talked about some of the, um, patients who you talk about in the book. There's, there's four patient stories, and then your own as the fifth. One of the patients who I wanna talk about is John, and he's really rude to you. That is a person who I think many people would question and, and did question to you like, “Why do you take care of someone who is gonna treat you badly even as the person who's trying to, to provide care for him?” But you have a really interesting reframing of why some people do act in this kind of obnoxious, rude, disrespectful way.

[00:19:31] Lori Gottlieb:
Yeah. When John came in, he was so insulting to me and so rude. Um, he was paying in cash because he didn't want his wife to know that he was coming to therapy. He was a, a very successful person in his professional world, and he said he was coming to me because I was a nobody, and he wouldn't run into anyone he knew in the waiting room. He said that he was paying in cash. It would be just like I was his mistress. And then he said, “Actually, you're not the kind of person I would choose as a mistress, more like my hooker.” And I think that the way he was so extreme in pushing me away said to me that he was very damaged somewhere. That that getting close to people was terrifying for him.

And I think that when we can't speak with words, we speak with our behavior. Behavior is another way of communicating. And a lot of times people misinterpret the behavior. So they say, “This person's an asshole.” Well, no, this person is actually terrified is what they are. So yes, their be—their behavior is not really acceptable. The way that they're coping with their pain is to make sure that nobody gets close to them so that they don't get more hurt. Everybody has this story, and I need to get at what the story is to help them. What would happen if I was able to see if he could talk about that story with me after we get past the behavior way of speaking?

We act out the unspeakable. And I wanted him to understand why he was acting out, what was unspeakable to him. And when people read the book, they say, “Oh, I really hated John at the beginning.” And by the end of the book they say, “I just wanted to hug him. He is my favorite person in the book.”

[00:21:13] Chris Duffy:
It, it’s also, I feel like there's an in-important disclaimer here that for you, because you are in a, a therapeutic setting, it makes sense to, to deal with someone who is gonna be disrespectful and obnoxious and try and get to the root of it, but for the rest of us, we can maybe use those ideas that they are acting in a certain way because of something that happened to them. We can use it to have more compassion, but it also doesn't mean that we have to then tolerate that person treating us poorly.

[00:21:40] Lori Gottlieb:
Absolutely not. The reason I wanted to help him was because he was ruining all of his relationships outside of the therapy room. Because nobody would tolerate that kind of behavior. His marriage was about to end. All kinds of things like that. And the therapy room is a microcosm of what happens out there. So whatever people do out there, they will reenact that with you. I think people forget that you as a therapist are having a relationship with your client. And so whatever they do out there, if they don't tell the truth out there, they're not gonna tell the truth in here.

If they are easily injured out there, they will be easily injured in the therapy room. What if they distract and avoid out there? They're gonna do that in the therapy room. And it's a really good place for you to be able to talk about it in a way that it's really hard to do outside of the therapy room with the people in your life.

[00:22:30] Chris Duffy:
Since you are inside this therapy room. You know, that's a huge part of how you're spending your time, and you're hearing a lot of traumatic things. You're hearing a lot of painful things, heavy, dark stuff. Does therapy feel like a depressing, uh, profession to you? Or is there instead… do you feel like you get to take that and transform it somehow?

[00:22:52] Lori Gottlieb:
So I'm smiling because I think that's such a misconception about the work of therapy. I think it's the most inspiring, hopeful profession. I'm so inspired by the people that I see. And I, I think even the idea that everybody is, is, I feel like a hero in the sense of they're making these small changes all the time that are really hard to make, things they've never done before in their lives, and you get to be a witness and a guide as they go along and do this.

And I, I, I think that we don't have forever and people forget that. Life has a hundred percent mortality rate. That's not just for other people. Even though we like to believe that. We are all going to die; none of us will get out of here alive. And that's not a morbid thought. It's, I think a very, it, it's a thought that gives us intention. How do I wanna spend my time that I know is limited while I'm here and able to?

And I think that when you're in therapy, you're much more aware of the limited amount of time that you have to make your relationships the way you wanna make them, to do the things with your life that you really wanna do and not be stuck by old narratives or these ideas about what you can and can't do with your life. And really realizing that we have agency to choose how we wanna live our lives.

[00:24:11] Chris Duffy:
I wonder if we could talk a little bit about, like, the nitty gritty if you're a person who's listening and has not ever had a therapeutic relationship. About how you actually get started and what you should look for and how, how you actually go about setting up that first appointment and, and all of the, those pieces of that.

[00:24:25] Lori Gottlieb:
I think what's unique about therapy is that the most important factor in the quote-unquote “success” of your therapy is your relationship with your therapist. And that matters more than the modality that they're using, than the number of years of experience than they have, what training they have.

All of that matters. So I'm not saying that doesn't matter, it's very important, but it doesn't matter as much as that one factor, which is how do you connect with that therapist. When people go to therapy for the first time and they, they sit in an office with some stranger, that there are two questions that I think are helpful to ask at the end of that session of yourself, which is: did I feel this person understood me? Did I feel understood?

And as much as someone can understand you and meeting you for the first time for 50 minutes, but there's a vibe. And the other part of it is, did this person say something that made me think about something potentially in a new way? So we're not gonna challenge people too much in a first session 'cause we're just getting to know them.

But we might say something like, “And what do you think this other person meant when they said that?" Or, “Has this ever happened to you before?” Or, “Where did you get that message?” Just to get them to think about something a little bit differently from the content. And we want them to go more into the process.

The content is the story they're telling. The process is what's happening underneath, what's driving it. And I think if you have both of those things, I would go back for a second session, but that doesn't mean you're in therapy with that person. It's like it would, that would almost be like going on a first date and saying, “I'm gonna marry this person 'cause we had a good first date.”

Therapy is very expensive in terms of both time and money. You don't wanna spend a lot of time, but I think in those first 1, 2, 3 sessions, you're gonna start to feel either more comfortable with this person or you're gonna start to feel like, “I'm not really sure about this.” So I think that people forget that you are free to go find the right therapist for you.

[00:26:28] Chris Duffy:
Just to make this concrete, right? Like I have, I've been in therapy with a few different people and, and I found people who were really helpful and I found people where I had a session, I was like, “That was not great.”

But I, I've been trying to convince my dad that he should try therapy and that it would be helpful for him and, and he finally was like, “Okay, how do I do it?” So what I told him is I, I said like, start by like, just get a list of therapists who are around you in your city. Send them just a very simple email that says, “Hi, I'm looking to start therapy. Are you accepting new patients?”

Some of those people will write back, they'll say no. If you get a few people who say yes, then I told him, I think that many people are open to this idea that you could ask for a five to 10 minute or 15 minute phone call just to chat and say what you're kind of looking to work on and just hear their voice even, 'cause maybe you'll get like the immediate sense of it's not even worth paying for one session 'cause I know that I don't like this person. Before you even get into it, do you have something like for that first phone call or for even in the email when you reach out, that you should be looking for?
[00:27:27] Lori Gottlieb:
I really feel like you have to sit in the room with the person for 50 minutes to really feel like, “Huh, this is what it's gonna be like.” For example, when I called my therapist for the first time—

[00:27:38] Chris Duffy:
Yeah.

[00:27:38] Lori Gottlieb:
He was almost said nothing on the phone. Like, I was in crisis. And he was, “Yes. Okay. Yes. Okay. I have this time available. Great. See you then.” And I made a joke on the phone. Like I said, it's, “I've been, I'm pretty shrunk. Like I know what it's like. I'm a therapist. I'm pretty shrunk,” and he didn't laugh.

[00:27:58] Chris Duffy:
Oh.

[00:27:58] Lori Gottlieb:
And I was like, “Okay, it's okay. I don't need a sense of humor.” But he ended up being very funny in person. I just think that you have to sit in a room with somebody one time to know what it's like.

[00:28:08] Chris Duffy:
Okay.

[00:28:08] Lori Gottlieb:
And also I just wanna say something about men in therapy. I'm really glad that your dad is going because so many times men will come in and, you know, once you get to know them, they'll say, “I've never told anyone this before.” And they literally have not told a soul. And even if they have a great marriage or they have great family or great friends, they just haven’t. Our culture has such stigma around men being vulnerable.

And women will also come in, and they'll say, “You know, I've never told anyone this before, except for my mother, my sister, my best friend.” So they've told maybe 1, 2, 3 people, but they feel like they haven't told anyone. And I think that's such a metaphor for what it feels like to be isolated in your own experience.

Whereas women feel isolated if they can only tell one, two, or three people, men truly have no one to tell. And I see this in couples therapy where if it's a heterosexual couple, I see all kinds of couples, usually it's the woman who will say to her husband or her partner, “I just, I want you to open up to me. I, I feel like we're disconnected. I, I wanna know what's going on with you, share with me your inner world.”

And they'll be right there on the couch in front of me, and he'll start to open up to her and he'll start to talk about what's going on with him, and maybe he tears up or maybe he starts crying and inevitably some version of the following happens.

She will look at me like a deer in headlights. “I don't feel safe when you don't open up to me, because then we feel disconnected, but I don't feel safe when you're crying in front of me either.” So this is why it's so hard for men especially to come to therapy. They need to challenge sort of the people out there who on the intellectually want them to be open and vulnerable, but also have their own kind of societal bias against men being vulnerable.

[00:30:04] Chris Duffy:
Okay. So, uh, a question that I have then to, to talk about this therapeutic relationship a little bit more and starting one is should you tell the therapist that you're seeing other therapists? Is it like when you go on a date and you're just like, “By the way, I, we're not exclusive yet. I'm seeing other people”? Should you actually say like, “I'm evaluating therapists and I, I wanna have a session with you, but I'm meeting with a couple other practitioners as well,” or is that a weird thing.

[00:30:27] Lori Gottlieb:
A hundred percent. No, it's not a weird thing. It's the first session. It's a consultation for both people. It's a consultation for the therapist to see, is this someone that I think I can help? Is this someone where maybe their issue is something that's outside of my area of expertise? Or maybe I think there's someone who has more expertise in this area that I would like them to see. I think that would be a better fit for them. And it's a consultation for you coming in to see how, again, how do I feel with this person?

Not just “is this person validating my experience”, but again, is this person going to challenge me? That's so important because I think there's this misconception that therapy is this thing where you go in every week, you download the problem of the week, and then you leave. And, and we always say that insight is the booby prize of therapy.

That you can have all the insight in the world, but if you don't make changes out in the world, the insight is useless. So it's one thing for a client to go home and say, “Oh look, I got into that fight with my partner this weekend, and I understood why.” And I'll say, “Great. So now you have the insight. Now what are you going to do differently now that you understand why that happens in that way?”

[00:31:33] Chris Duffy:
One of the funny downsides of the, for lack of a better term, like TikTok therapy is people being able to be like, “And that's my toxic trait, and I don't do anything about it, but I'm aware that it's a bad thing that I do that's unhelpful in my life and I just keep doing it.” It's like that's the insight piece. You gotta do the action piece too.

[00:31:49] Lori Gottlieb:
And I think that when you're with a good therapist, they're going to make sure that you're addressing that. So you don't just skate by. I think a good analogy for therapy is like physical therapy. That it, in the beginning it's really hard, it's work, and your muscles are gonna be sore 'cause that's what happens.

But you're gonna get stronger through this process and it's not gonna hurt as much, and you're gonna come out and you're gonna feel much better.

[00:32:13] Chris Duffy:
I think there's a cultural idea of therapy sometimes. That is you enter therapy and then you have a therapist for the rest of your life. And obviously you wouldn't think of that with physical therapy. If I get tendonitis in my shoulder, I'm there until we resolve the issue, and then I go and keep doing those exercises on my own. But I don't keep seeing the physical therapist forever.

[00:32:29] Lori Gottlieb:
And so people leave when they feel like, "You know what? I'm really functioning well. I understand this pattern better. I feel really good, so I'm gonna go.” And you go. A lot of people are afraid to leave therapy because they feel like they're gonna slip back or they're not gonna have the support. But good therapy helps you to have the resources to do this yourself. And if you need to come back, you can come back.

[00:32:52] Chris Duffy:
If you are at a moment where you feel like, “Okay, I've gotten the skills and it feels like I'm there and I don't feel like I'm getting pushed anymore,” how… ’cause people can be really scared about this. It does feel like a breakup sometimes to end therapy. Uh, do you have any tips for people who are trying to figure out how to end that relationship, even if it's just a temporary ending like you talked about?

[00:33:14] Lori Gottlieb:
I think that people need to know that therapists don't feel like you're breaking up with them. It's a weird business model because our goal is to get you to leave. That is success for us. So our goal is to put ourselves out of business. So we wanna make sure it's not sort of like in the middle of something really deep that's really painful that you're avoiding, and now you decide you wanna leave, but you're actually leaving for, because you feel like you are at a point where you've dealt with the things you wanna deal with, and now you're gonna go out into the world.

[00:33:44] Chris Duffy:
Well, Lori Gottlieb, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for your work, for your podcasts, for your talks, for your book, for all, all of the things that you bring to the world. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

[00:33:51] Lori Gottlieb:
Thanks so much for the conversation. I really enjoyed it.

[00:33:57] Chris Duffy:
That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Lori Gottlieb. Her book is called, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, and she co-hosts the podcast Dear Therapists with Guy Winch. I'm your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and upcoming live shows at chrisduffycomedy.com.

How to be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by Daniela Balarezo, Cloe Shasha Brooks, and BanBan Cheng, who always say that insight is the booby prize of listening to this podcast.

Every episode of our show is professionally fact-checked. This episode was fact-check by Julia Dickerson and Matheus Salles, who I'm sure ask themselves repeatedly about my mental state as they delete inaccuracies from this podcast that I have confidently stated as facts.

On the PRX side, when people tell me, “Maybe you should talk to someone,” I say, “I already do. It's a team of audio producers.” Morgan Flannery, Noor Gill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzales.

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