There are two tropes of the therapist in our culture,Lori Gottliebsays.
The very removed person whouh-huhsand [is] a very blank slate and the hot mess.
)Optioned for an ABC series by Eva Longoria,Talkdepicts Gottliebs own journey coming off an ugly breakup.
Credit: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Leigh Manacher
She can be petty, judgmental, obsessive.
The book isnow available for purchase.
At the time, I was starting my practice.
I was seeing that up-close-and-personal in the therapy room.
I wanted to bring people behind the curtain with me and see what I was seeing.
For you, its obviously important you show the other side and how it affects the therapist.
Which of course we want: We want someone with expertise, thats why were going to them.
But were also human.
I know what its like to be a person.
I dont think anybody wants to go and talk to a brick wall.
Thats what makes us so effective as therapists.
[My colleague] burst into tears and her patient, who saw her, never came back.
Thats uncomfortable and creepy.
I wanted to show that were more the same than we are different, and thats a good thing.
Thats something thats very important in the relationship between therapists and patients.
We are more similar because we do understand.
We might not be in your circumstance, but we understand what its like to be a person.
Did you struggle at all with what you chose to reveal about yourself?
In terms of what I revealed, yes I revealed a lot, but I wasnt a hot mess.
I was having a normal reaction to something that was very shocking.
I was just being a normal human.
Is it risky to show that youre a normal person when youre a therapist?
Thats why my profession is so weird.
In any other profession, you’re free to be a normal person and nobody blinks.
Nobodys like, Oh, thats so weird, I dont want to know that.
As a therapist, were held to a different standard.
But I also think that standard keeps people isolated in a lot of ways.
Thats where a lot of stigma around our emotional health comes from.
If even a therapist cant be a normal person, then the stigma is never going to go away.
I found it especially moving when you challenge yourself and your judgments.
You mentioned wanting to hit a particular feeling in our culture right now.
The answer is that we grow in connection with others.
But people grow through those connections.
Its a very intense relationship.
There are no screens, no devices, no pinging.You look into the other persons eyes.
It lowers you heart-rate, it improves your immune system.
All of these physiological effects of just being present with another person.
Its important for people to be intentional about their relationships, be intentional about how theyre connecting.
I think about how therapy is so much about boundaries, too, in contrast to the instant-gratification culture.
But I realized that it was a way of connecting with him.
It was a way of making contact.
The first draft is your most unfiltered draft.
Without even realizing it, I had edited myself.
I went back and said, I really did have this idea of not really letting go.
I had to let myself go in the way I let my patients go.
Do you hope this changes the way people view therapy?Absolutely.
I hope that it shows what therapy actually is, and not what they may think that it is.
In movies and television shows, sometimes there are ideas that just arent what modern therapy looks like.
We dont want to waste your time and money.
Then we can look at it.
Then we know what were talking about.
If we pretend its not there, were getting nowhere.
