Just lovely

CBR12 Bingo: Cannonballer Says

Man, am I thankful I read and took to heart ardaigle’s glowing review of this book. I had this checked out from my library before I even finished reading the review. And I really loved it.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is kind of hard to summarize. It’s about Lori Gottlieb’s career path that led her to becoming a psychologist. It’s about her own experiences being in therapy when she was going through a personal crisis. It’s about some of her clients and the breakthroughs they had while seeing her. She covers a lot in this book.

For me, the best parts were the parts about her clients. I loved reading their stories and found some of them to be extremely moving. I think this book will be a different experience for everyone, and what you get out of it will probably depend on what’s going on in your life when you read it. Besides the stories of her clients, I just really appreciated Gottlieb’s vulnerability and openness throughout. Many, many tears were shed while reading this, but not sad tears. Just emotional tears.

There were a lot of great passages that made me wish I’d bought a copy rather than downloading a library e-book, so I could underline parts–I’ll probably just end up buying this. Two parts have stuck with me the most–at one point, she says to “follow your envy” as it will lead you to what you really want, and I found that to be a really refreshing way to look at an emotion that we’re taught is wrong and should be ignored and denied. The other line was one about working with couples, and how she asks them to think before speaking, “what is this going to feel like to the person I am speaking to?” As a person who has spent a lot of time and effort trying to be better about thinking before speaking, I found that to be really valuable.

Anyway, as usual with a rec from a fellow Cannonballer I just loved this. And I think you should read it.