Maybe you should talk to someone

Maybe you should talk to someone is a memoir where Gottlieb portrays a difficult time in her professional and personal life.

Part 1

1. Idiots

• Classic example for self center, arrogant
• Similar concept in Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson
• And then there is matter of arrogant
• To help others, one will have to figure out what others loss would be, but first, one will have to understand oneself

During the course of the day, he said, each spouse had confessed independently to him to taking antidepressants but didn’t want the other to know. It turned out that they were hiding the same medication in the same house.

• As therapists, they learned how to accept feedback, tolerate discomfort, become aware of blind spots, and discover the impact of our histories and behaviors on oneself and others.
• Life happens, and therapy helps confront our demons when they pay a visit. And visit they will, because everyone has demons. The shared demons are testament to the fact that therapists aren’t the outlier at all.
• With that, we can create a different relationship/narrative with our demons, one in which we no longer try to reason our way out of an inconvenient inner voice or numb our feelings with distractions like too much wine or food or hours spent surfing the internet ( maybe it is happening right now)
• One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current predicaments, because once they realize that they can ( and must) construct their own lives, they’re free to generate change.
• But sometimes - more often than we tend to realize - those difficult people are us.
• Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

2. Author’s side of story

• By definition, the presenting problem is the issue that sends a person into therapy. It might be a panic attack, a job loss, a death, a birth, a relational difficulty, an inability to make a big life decision, or a bout of depression. Sometimes the presenting problem is less specific - a feeling of “stuckness” or the vague but nagging notion that something just isn’t quite right.
• A common defense mechanism called compartmentalization ( compartmentalize a relationship, behaving differently under different relation)

3.

• It is easier and faster to get out of a tunnel by getting into it. To start, it is all about one foot at a time, then the other.
• Don’t look 5 feet away, just take a step. And when you’ve taken that step, take one more, Eventually you’ll make it to the shower.
• People may not be able to imagine their depression lifting anytime soon, but they don’t need to. Doing something prompts you to do something else, replacing a vicious cycle with a virtuous one. Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way.

4.

• The author had pointed out that she had been watching a lot of TV every night, like in a pathological way.
  • Just like me after dinner, no one is interested in talking to me and I sort of just watch YouTube until I sleep
  • You are not just bored. ( or, perhaps more accurately, the only time I felt the absence of something unpleasant that I couldn’t quite put my finger on) If the only thing that keeps you going all day is knowing you’ll get to turn on the TV after dinner, you probably are depressed

6.

• Depression affect sleep, concentration
• Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of “feeling felt”
• Is not a matter of empathy, it is fundamentally hard to image others experience ( other than going through with them at the same time)
• empathy, active listening is the Necessary and Sufficient Condition of “feeling felt”

7.

• High functioning: those who can form relationships, manage adult responsibilities and have a capacity for self-reflection. The kind who don’t call daily between sessions with emergencies.
• Studies show, and common sense dictates, that most therapists prefer to work with patients who are verbal, motivated, open and responsible - these are the patients who improve more quickly.
• therapeutic act not therapeutic word
• establish a therapeutic alliance
• Most people are brilliant at finding ways to filter out the things they don’t want to look at, at using distractions or defenses to keep threatening feelings at bay. He knows that pushing aside emotions only makes them stronger, but that before he goes in and destroys somebody’s defense

Anti-figulity of a system

Wasted two years of my life, but now i’m going to have to deal with the fallout by going to therapy, and I don’t have time for any of this because I’m 26 now and half my life is over

You are not hating small talk, you are grieving something bigger

8.

I get the sense that, despite all the people surrounding him, I am desperately isolated - and that this is by design.

Buddhists call idiot compassion - you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty.

it only when I am isolated that I feel safe because of a childhood issue?

主語 賓語省略 is way to dehumanize

co-worker no just A worker

Think about it, this all-idiot jackass has a wife, a dog, a set of perfect teeth, a 4 years old daughter and can afford multiple sessions of therapy, what are you?

Countertransference

go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job

dead, a slave to your head, being imperially alone, day in and day out

chasing some infinite abstract

making small talk is like the first thing they do

If you wanted to behind someone’s back be ready to be talk behind someone else’s back

People often mistake numbness for nothingness: numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.

Pet is the only one who doesn’t ask things of me.

• You family only call you when you did something wrong
• The people you work with only call you when something is wrong or you are wrong

Pet is the only one who doesn’t disappointed with me

9.

• a diagnostic and a fix

10. The future is also the present

• If you are taking maticunius notes during conversation, odds are you are trying to prove a point and not open to understanding others perspective
• No one is crazy
  • See also the psychology of money

11. Goodbye, Hollywood

• Left screen-writings to med school due to a field trip for script research, a amputated, diabetic woman despite the rotting smell comfort her

12. Welcome to Holland

• It is like planning a fabulous vacation trip to italy, you buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans but you end up being in Holland, is not a shit hole, it is just different place, so you must go out and buy new guide books and you must learn a whole new language. But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.

13. How Kids deal with grief

• Everyone has to compromise to get along, but if you have to compromise too much it might be hard to be married to each other

14. Harold and Maude

• Med school struggle as the author wanted to engage with real life but as more and more medical department having patient target, it is less likely no happen before she even finish med school, and still having 2 years residency

15. Hold the mayo

• John the out rage patient finally develop a safe environment to talk with the author
• Previously using phone, ordering food as a escape mechium to dodge hard question
• Narcissistic characteristic
• Self-involvement, defensiveness, demeaning treatment of others, need to dominate the conversation, and sense of entitlement, basically being an asshole

schizoid

schizotypal

• Sharing a meal together to gossip is a fundamental for Homo Sapiens
• At what moment do you feel at peace? e.g. walking the dog, reading

16. The Whole Package

• Left med school
• wanted to be a parent
• find sperm donor
• don’t have good option
• find a hot 27 years from networking event
• spending shit lot of emotional energy trying to make this happen, but the 27 years old ghosted her for 3 days and turn it down, end up feeling like ‘Boyfriend’

17. Without memory or desire

Part 2

Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals

18. Fridays at Four

• Becca, a patient with problems with her social life, feel excluded
• Therapist using group meetings to mitigate confirmation bias from pass experience blind spots
• Therapy can’t help people who aren’t curious about themselves
• At some point the author might even say something like “I wonder why I seem to be more curious about you than you are about yourself?”

It will pass and is ok to feel grief, but also it is not indefinited

A the

A liability

enigma

The first step for relationship is not juggy and generant interest, but most likely the first step is that i notice something that annoy the shit out of me

I will be negligent to myself if I don’t quite my job after this submissive this long

The responsibility for change lies squarely with the patient

You will be asked to be both accountable and vulnerable

People who are aggressively boring want to keep you at bay

Why am I telling people this? What significance does this have for me that shows I am sincerely engaging in the conversation?

19. What we dream of

• Dream as a precursor for self confession, a per-confession

20. The first confession

• I was like the closet gabler who gets dressed for work and kisses his family goodbye each morning and then drives to the casino instead of the office. ( Keeping people at bay)
• Every-time the author thinks about it, she is filled with panic, dread, regret, and shame.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day - Fitzgerald

• Despite the early success, there is a book deals at hand, a tv series lining up, more patient, the author said, with an astonishing lack of forethought: Thanks very much, that’s so kind, but I’d rather not.
• At some point you feel like a monumental fuck up
• She was torn between the part of me that wanted to provide for my family and the part of me that wanted to do something meaningful - something that touched my soul and hopefully others’ souls as well.
• Google-stalking

21. Therapy with a condom on (Zoom)

• Because in order to regain homeostasis in the system, somebody has to fill the role of the troubled person.
• Identifying in-the-moment feelings, because feelings lead to behaviours, but if we push them away the second they appear, often we end up veering off in the wrong direction, getting lost yet again in the land of chaos.

22. Jail

Do I want to be save?

Peace means being in the midst of chaos and still remain calm and collected

No problem can be solve by the same level of mind that created it - Elbert einstein

You are your own jailer

Freedom involves responsibility

You can have all the insight in the world, if you don’t change how you behave in the world, all the therapy will means nothing

support vs confrontation

Are you ready to face death?

23.

Follow your envy, it shows what you want? Dreaming without doing, constrinting by our own sets of rule (jail)

24.

End the pain, not death Almost no contact with other human being, many days I talk to nobody What everything that I did and image of death The opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality What should be accepted and what should be changed We married our unfinished business