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TED Talks Daily

Change your story, change your life | Lori Gottlieb

TED Talks Daily

TED

Ted, Ted Talks Daily, Ted Podcast, Ted Talks, Society & Culture

4.112.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2019

⏱️ 16 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Stories help you make sense of your life -- but when these narratives are incomplete or misleading, they can keep you stuck instead of providing clarity. In an actionable talk, psychotherapist and advice columnist Lori Gottlieb shows how to break free from the stories you've been telling yourself by becoming your own editor and rewriting your narrative from a different point of view.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

This TED Talk features psychotherapist and author Lori Gottlieb, recorded live at TED at DuPont 2019.

0:09.5

So I'm going to start by telling you about an email that I saw in my inbox recently.

0:14.2

Now, I have a pretty unusual inbox because I'm a therapist and I write an advice column called Dear Therapist.

0:22.2

So you can imagine, right, what's in there?

0:24.6

I mean, I've read thousands of very personal letters from strangers all over the world.

0:31.5

And these letters range from heartbreak and loss, just bats with parents or siblings.

0:36.2

I keep them in a folder on my laptop, and I've named it

0:39.4

the problems of living. So I get this email. I get lots of emails just like this, and I want to

0:45.5

bring you into my world for a second and read you one of these letters. And here's how it goes.

0:55.5

Dear therapist, I've been married for 10 years and things were good until a couple of years ago.

1:01.6

That's when my husband stopped wanting to have sex as much, and now we barely have sex at all.

1:06.4

I'm sure you guys were not expecting this.

1:09.4

Well, last night I discovered that for the past few months,

1:12.8

he's been secretly having long, late-night phone calls with a woman at his office.

1:17.0

I googled her, and she's gorgeous.

1:19.5

I can't believe this is happening.

1:21.4

My father had an affair with a coworker when I was young, and it broke our family apart.

1:26.3

Needless to say, I'm devastated.

1:28.6

If I stay in this marriage, I'll never be able to trust my husband again,

1:31.9

but I don't want to put our kids through a divorce, stepmom situation, etc.

1:36.3

What should I do?

1:39.7

Well, what do you think she should do?

...

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