Who Needs Therapy? Lori Gottlieb On the View from Both Sides of the Couch

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2021

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In her bestselling book Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, author Lori Gottlieb tells the stories of five people in psychotherapy. Four are her own patients and one is Lori herself. A practicing therapist for more than a decade, she took an unusual route to her vocation, working as a television writer and then attending medical school before realizing that her love of storytelling could be combined with helping people in a clinical setting. Since then, she's become celebrated as a writer and as a therapist. Lori spoke with Meghan what's most often misunderstood about therapy, what therapists secretly think of their patients and how to know when it's time to end treatment. She also talked about her work with singles seeking committed partnerships, the pros and cons of dating apps and how having realistic expectations is not the same thing as "settling." Guest Bio: Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and author of the New York Times bestseller Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which is currently being adapted as a television series. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes the "Dear Therapist" advice column for The Atlantic and is co-host of the popular "Dear Therapists" podcast. Her recent TED talk was one of the top ten most watched of the year. Find her at https://lorigottlieb.com.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm hearing about profound loneliness. And I hear that from almost everybody that comes in in some way,
0:15.1	whether they're grieving, whether they're coming in because of something, you know, concrete
0:20.7	that happened in their lives something, you know, concrete that happened in
0:21.6	their lives. I think people are feeling disconnected and lonely, even if they have a great partner,
0:30.2	even if they have great family, even if they have great friends. There's a sense of not really truly feeling connected in a way that they want to.
0:41.9	And connected to themselves, too, by the way. So it's not just connected to others, but connected
0:46.0	to self.
0:51.9	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Down. My guest this week is author and therapist Lori Gottlieb. You may be familiar with her best-selling book. Maybe you should talk to someone, which follows the therapy journeys of five people in psychotherapy, four of them Lori's own patients, and one of them, Lori herself.
1:13.7	Now, there are a lot of books out there written by therapists, but Lories is a little different
1:18.2	because she shares not just her expertise, but some of the details of her own issues.
1:23.7	She spoke with me about her rather circuitous path to her current vocation.
1:28.1	She was a television writer and then a medical student before becoming a therapist
1:31.7	and what she's learned from her practice, what she thinks people misunderstand about therapy,
1:37.3	and why and whether anyone should go to therapy in the first place.
1:46.1	Lori Gottlieb, welcome to The Unspeakable.
1:49.3	Well, thank you so much, Megan.
1:51.6	Your book, maybe you should talk to someone, does something unique in that it talks about
1:57.5	your work as a therapist through the lens, or at least partly through the lens,
2:01.4	of your own experience in therapy. The book has been enormously successful. And I know you've
2:06.8	had lots of conversations about different aspects of it in the couple of years since it was
2:11.4	published. I definitely want to touch on a number of those aspects. But first, I wanted to talk
2:16.8	about what the last year has been like
	...

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