Therapist’s insights thoughtful, gripping

By: Reviewed by Jennifer Robinson Posted: 4:00 AM CDT Saturday, Apr. 6, 2019

Should therapists share personal stories with their patients? Hug them? Google them? Make house visits? Attend their funerals? Scream expletives with them when they ask you to? Dance with them? Dump them?

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/04/2019 (2696 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Los Angeles psychotherapist and Atlantic columnist Lori Gottlieb grapples with all of these questions and more in her latest book.

“It’s impossible to get to know somebody deeply and not come to like him,” she reminds herself in the opening chapters of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.

Her patient, John, is a TV writer seeking her help to “manage the idiots” he feels he is surrounded with.

In their early sessions John’s arrogance is barely tolerable. He refers to Gottlieb as “Sherlock,” rolls his eyes at her perceived idiocy and orders takeout meals to their sessions.

Gottlieb, however, is undeterred. As she works with John to develop a close therapeutic relationship and to peel back the layers of his life, what emerges is a man who has learned to keep people at a distance in order to avoid facing the immensity of the loss he has experienced.

What also emerges is a man who is incredibly talented, ambitious, hilarious, and yes, sometimes “incredibly f—ing annoying.”

Gottlieb’s readers are positioned behind the one-way mirror in this gripping page-turner, and John’s is just one of several threads we follow.

There’s Rita, an eccentric artist who tells it like it is and confesses to having irreparably damaged her kids by staying in an abusive relationship. There’s Julie, a newlywed suddenly hit by the randomness of life (terminal cancer).

And there’s Gottlieb herself, who makes the decision to enter therapy after a crisis upends her sense of stability.

“Of all my credentials as a therapist, my most significant is that I’m a card-carrying member of the human race,” she says.

The book is incredibly revealing and will appeal to multiple audiences: those of us with voyeuristic leanings (all of us); those interested in the process of psychotherapy and of change; and those of us who have struggled with irrational emotions, difficult relationships, inexplicable grief and questions about meaning in life (again, all of us).

While Gottlieb reveals all of this to us, she’s also willing to reveal herself in the tradition of the great psychotherapist-writer Irvin Yalom.

She tells us of her reactions to her patients (not always flattering, but always therapeutic), of her mistakes and of her own process of growth.

But she’s only willing to reveal herself so much. While she shares the inner conflicts, insecurities and childhood hangups of her patients, she withholds an in-depth examination of herself, and we’re left craving a little more bravery from her — wanting her to “come clean,” so to speak.

Despite these omissions, this is a work that delves deeply into human life and the narratives which define us all, both in their universals and particulars.

It’s the kind of book that keeps you up at night, saying “just one more chapter.”

Jennifer Robinson is a Winnipeg psychotherapist.