Tag: Lori Gottlieb

Gift Ideas

I think what I have been most jealous about men, throughout my life, is that they don’t seem to worry nearly as much as we women do, about what other people think. I just finished watching a wonderful Oprah Insider video which featured an author and psychotherapist, Lori Gottlieb. She said this: “Guilt is not part of the X chromosome.” The audience of mostly women, laughed knowingly and appreciatively. Gottlieb’s point is that society has conditioned women to believe that other people’s feelings are our responsibility, and so we take on what is called “emotional load/labor” on top of all of the other caretaking duties that often end up disproportionately in our laps.

Interestingly though, because we women often believe that we are responsible for other people’s feelings, we tend to get really controlling about the narrative. We try to control what other people think about us, or about situations, instead of just accepting and allowing other people to think what they think, and to feel what they feel. In this regard, men tend to be better at “Live and let live.” Men don’t seem to get their self-worth from what other people think about them, nearly as much as we women do. Men get their self-worth from what they think about themselves, and my hunch is that they aren’t nearly as hard on themselves, as we women tend to be on ourselves.

I don’t mean to generalize. This is just a theme that has been playing out lately in my life, when talking to friends who are women, and with shows and podcasts I have listened to recently. Perhaps a beautiful holiday gift we could give to ourselves, is to stop worrying so much about what other people think, and put all of that energy back into what we think is best for ourselves. And at the same time, a beautiful holiday gift that we could give to others, is the acceptance that they are free to think what they think, and to feel what they feel, without interference from our desperate need to control the narrative.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

What is the Question?

To work on and practice my writing, I starting answering some questions on Quora. Today, I was flattered to have someone ask me, specifically, a direct question. I started to question in my mind, why they wanted me to answer their question. Most questions are Quora are not black and white. Some people post riddle-like, mathematical equation type questions that I suppose may have factual, right or wrong answers. Still, most of Quora seems to be more philosophical, “from your life experience”, what is your opinion on such-and-such topic?

I didn’t reach out to the person asking me the question, but I have to assume that she must have liked some of my previous answers and thus thought that I might have some good wisdom to share for her query. This reminded me of this quote I read a while back:

“People sometimes say be honest when they really mean validate me.” – Holiday Mathis

That statement is a hard truth, isn’t it? There are very few people in your life who will give you their complete, unvarnished truth, as they see it. The older that I get, the more I value these people in my life, even if I want to slap them silly, first. A book that I just finished and recommend reading, called Maybe You Should Talk To Someone by Lori Gottlieb, describes therapists’ work as the intricate process of supporting patients, while confronting them at the same time. That must be almost impossible work. Talk about a tight rope act.

Along these same lines, I love this:

Image result for discussions are always better than arguments

Have a wonderful weekend, my treasured friends. My prayers and thoughts are going out to all of us, but are particularly intense for those of you who are going through some of life’s tougher uncertainties and situations that cause fear, pain and grief. You’ve got my arms around you from afar. See you tomorrow!

Book Binge

I’ve been on a book binge. There are worse things to binge on, right? I love to read. To me, reading is one of the greatest pleasures in life. Two books that I recommend are My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing and Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb.

I finished My Lovely Wife in a day. It is a horribly dark, scary thriller about a suburban couple who become serial killers together. I’ve been frustrated with how long our renovations are taking, so I thought that reading this book was a healthy way to vent my dark side. The book is not particularly gory or gruesome, but it is chilling and I have been jumpy ever since reading it. I like to tell myself that I read My Lovely Wife to see what a successful first novel looks like, but the truth is, I found the premise of the book, kind of intriguing and interesting and I like books with twists and turns. It’s a page turner, for sure, and it is likely to end up as a movie, starring Jessica Chastain.

I’m halfway through Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. Lori Gottlieb is a Stanford educated therapist who writes a weekly advice column for The Atlantic. She turned into a therapist later in life, as she also attended medical school and worked as a producer for TV shows like “Friends” and “ER”. Lori explains all of this in her book in such a candid, honest, funny way that I stayed up late to keep reading it last night and now, this morning, I am cranky as hell. But as soon as I finish this post, I am going to get back to reading the book. It’s really good. The book is the true story of a “therapist going to a therapist” after a bad break-up and the insights from both sides are hilarious, helpful, insightful and a truly honest look at what it means to be human, and sometimes flawed, in our thinking and our perspectives.

Please share in the comments section your book recommendations. When I’m on a book binge, I just want to keep on going. I want to eat the whole box of doughnuts and/or the entire cake, you know what I mean?

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” – George R.R. Martin

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” – Harper Lee