Inside the mind of a therapist
New bestselling book puts author on couch — as psychotherapist and patient
“It’s not like everyone in L.A. is in therapy,” sighs Lori Gottlieb. “That’s a stereotype. I think it’s a big misconception.”
And having worked as a psychotherapist in the city for the past decade — and recently published Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (Houghton, Miflin Harcourt, 2019), a New York Times bestselling book on the matter — she should know.
“A lot of people have strange notions and misconceptions about what therapy is,” Gottlieb continues. “We’re not wizards; there are no tricks. When we look at the clock, we’re not bored; we’re looking at the rhythm of the session. We want to make sure that if (the patient) is talking about something very intense, we’re putting them back together before they leave.”
Gottlieb’s latest book follows her infamous 2010 bestseller Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough (Dutton, 2010), which caused a storm on both sides of the Atlantic.
The successful but highly divisive self-help book seemed to encourage women to settle for second best. Based on a magazine article Gottlieb wrote in 2008, it sparked multiple think pieces accusing Gottlieb of everything from being anti-feminist to provoking anxiety. Her new book is so rich with insight into the secretive and misunderstood world of therapy that it could have been called What Your Therapist is Really Thinking. That, however, would be selling it short. At the heart of it is something else entirely.
Five years ago, Gottlieb, a single mother (to a then eight-year-old son), was blindsided when the man she thought she was going to marry — referred to in the book only as Boyfriend — ended their relationship. He had grown-up children; he didn’t want to raise someone else’s. It just took him two years to figure that out. Gottlieb, then in her late40s, decided to get a therapist of her own.
“I was in so much shock that my whole reason for going to therapy was to have my therapist agree with me that Boyfriend was a jerk, then I would feel better, knowing I dodged a bullet,” she explains. “But while my friends were offering Idiot Compassion — ‘you’re right, he’s terrible, he’s a sociopath’ — therapists practise Wise Compassion: ‘How did you not know?’”
What starts out as a couple of sessions evolves into a difficult but transformative journey. “Boyfriend starts off as the villain, but it becomes clear that I knew a lot more than I let on,” reflects Gottlieb. “We were both ignoring the elephant in the room. We both wanted to be together, but we both knew that we couldn’t.”
Gottlieb effectively becomes the fifth patient in a book that goes behind the closed doors of her sessions with clients; from the 30-something newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, to the self-important Hollywood producer with anger issues.
How did it feel to expose herself — especially given the furor around her previous work?
“I wasn’t concerned about (the world of therapy); in fact, a lot of clinicians I’ve spoken to are very glad I’ve put it out there. Me? That’s a different story!” she laughs. “It wasn’t as if I woke up one day and said, ‘I want to write a book about myself in therapy,’ but I didn’t want to write a book about my patients being vulnerable while I was going through an upheaval in my own life. There was something almost fraudulent about hiding what I was going through.”
The most common reasons people come to see her are rooted in emptiness or loneliness. “We’ve lost the organic way we used to connect,” she explains.
“People have a lot of Facebook friends, but in real life you wouldn’t be able to manage that many. We’ve lost the ability to be alone with ourselves and with each other, and that’s detrimental to our mental health.
“I’m not anti-technology, but I think it’s gotten out of hand. We need to be more intentional in putting limits on social media and putting our phones away. In therapy, I make it clear it’s a phone-free 50 minutes.”
Sage advice aside, it’s Gottlieb’s personal story — from leaving a Hollywood career as a film and television executive to pursue medical school to having a baby with a sperm donor — that’s impossible not to invest in. She gave birth to her son, now a teenager, when she was 38.
“I very much wanted to do this with a partner, but I knew as I got older it would be harder to have a child and I didn’t want to wait,” she says. “When a friend suggested I look at sperm-donor sites, I hadn’t even heard of such a thing.
“But it was the best decision of my life.”