Dr. Maya Shankar
Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist who served as a Senior Advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and served as Chair of the White House Behavioral Science…
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Psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb built her career helping people question the stories they tell themselves. But when an unexpected heartbreak left her reeling, she found herself sitting in the patient’s seat – and discovered just how hard it can be to rewrite your own story.
This week, Lori joins Maya to share what being a patient taught her about being a therapist, how therapy might not actually be for everyone, and how we can all start to be more honest with ourselves.
Check out Lori’s most recent book, “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.”
For more A Slight Change of Plans, we recommend our conversation with Julia Samuel, “Lessons from a Grief Therapist.”
Pushkin.
00:20
Speaker 2
We're very attached to our stories.
00:22
Speaker 3
Even if the stories make us feel miserable, we're very attached to them. As a therapist, I want to change the story. I want to help people to live differently. Psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb was trained to help people navigate the hardest moments in their lives. But just a few years into building her practice, she faced a personal crisis. And suddenly, Lori realized that maybe she was the one who needed to rewrite her story. And then when I was just really not able to function in the way that I wanted to, a friend of mine who is a therapist said, you know, maybe you should talk to someone.
01:02
Speaker 1
On today's show, what a therapist learned in therapy. I'm Maya Shunker, a scientist who studies human behavior, and this is A Slight Change of Plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. Lori's path to becoming a therapist wasn't straightforward. At one point, she actually worked as a film and TV exec in Hollywood, reviewing scripts for shows like ER and Friends. Therapy and Hollywood turned out to be more similar than they might seem. Both of her jobs involved unpacking complex characters and their stories. Lori's most recent book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, is about the unexpected heartbreak that led her to seek help. It's a candid, often humorous story about what happens when you end up sitting on both sides of the therapy room. Were there reservations that you had about becoming a therapist? I mean, it is not for the faint of heart. It is hard to hold space for everyone's problems. So were there parts that gave you pause or did you think immediately, yep, this is the career for me.
02:21
Speaker 4
I'm good with it.
02:23
Speaker 3
I think that a big misconception about being a therapist is that all day long you're hearing depressing stories. That's why in my book, I follow the lives of four of my patients and I'm the fifth patient in the book. I wanted people to see what it actually is because I think so many people don't seek out therapy because they have ideas about what it's going to be like that are not representative of what a good therapeutic experience can be. And so in the therapy room, yes, you're going to be talking about all kinds of things that you probably wouldn't examine in the same way out in the world, talking to people in your life, but you're also, you're laughing, you're experiencing joy, you're watching moments of growth and celebrating those.
03:09
Speaker 2
So you're seeing a this range of human experience. But there are.
03:13
Speaker 3
Lots of things that touch on us as therapists and we are not robots. So we come with our own histories, our own experiences, our own backgrounds, our own worldviews, our own ways of being, our own regrets, our own guilt, shame.
03:29
Speaker 4
Our own triggers.
03:30
Speaker 2
Our own triggers.
03:31
Speaker 3
A lot of people would say, that sounds like a horrible job. I would never sign up for that. Why would you do that?
03:36
Speaker 2
For me.
03:38
Speaker 3
My point of view was that sounds fascinating. We're all unreliable narrators, myself included. And so they come in and I want to help them tease out what is the narrative that is accurate. I want to help people to live differently. I want to help people struggle less.
03:58
Speaker 1
By the way, I'm made up of the same stuff as you because I would find it restorative work, whereas I know, like you said, a lot of people would think it's the worst thing in the world.
04:07
Speaker 3
Restorative, I think, is such a great word because, you know, we have the saying, insight is the booby prize of therapy, that you can have all the insight in the world, but if you don't make changes out in the world, the insight is useless. And so we aren't just helping people to understand themselves and the people in their world better. We're helping them to then do something with that. So if someone says to me, oh, I had that argument with my partner over the weekend and now I understand why. And I'll say, great, but did you do something different? Right?
04:35
Speaker 2
Because they're doing a dance. Did you change your dance steps? Did you do something different?
04:39
Speaker 3
Because otherwise, you're just going to keep doing the same dance, even if intellectually you understand it.
04:44
Speaker 2
It's not going to help.
04:45
Speaker 1
Yeah. So I want to unpack this philosophy a bit more. You've spoken about, in fact, your entire TED Talk, which I loved, is about storytelling and narrative. Given your fascination with story and the fact that you've said, People are unreliable narrators of their story. When a patient comes to you and you're trying to help poke holes in their narrative or help them see it from new vantage points or detach in some way, loosen their grip on a certain way of thinking. Where do you begin and what's your approach like, given that you're not going to hear other perspectives in the room, right? You're not going to get to hear what their mom thinks or their partner thinks or their kid thinks about their particular worldview or the story they're telling.
05:30
Speaker 3
Yeah, I might say to someone, if that person were sitting on my couch right now telling me that same story, I want you to tell it, use their experience. voice, tell it from, don't say they would say, like actually say I and be that person and tell the story. At first, they don't think there's going to be anything different or they might exaggerate how wrong the other person is.
05:54
Speaker 2
But then they'll find.
05:55
Speaker 3
This moment of insight, this moment of awareness, of recognition of, oh, I think that hurt them. I think they were feeling hurt or I think they were feeling dismissed or I think they were feeling unworthy in that moment. Or I think that they were feeling shame and so they got angry and defended against it, right? This isn't the language or the words that might come out, but it's something where they realize that person was experiencing something, but I was so in my own story, in my version of the story, that I had no room for theirs. So it's not, you said something about poking holes. It's not about poking holes in people's stories. It's about expanding and their stories. Can we expand the lens? Can we widen the lens? Can we say, what else is here? Why is it not also about poking holes, though, in one's narrative? I've found that sometimes the most instructive lessons I've received are when I've doubled down on a certain narrative in my mind, and then a friend or a partner or a boss helps me foster psychological distance between me and my current preoccupation and allows me to see it from a new angle such that a hole is poked, And then in turn, I'm able to issue a revision. Right.
07:10
Speaker 1
When I said poke holes, I meant more challenge an aspect of a narrative, pressure testing.
07:15
Speaker 2
Absolutely.
07:16
Speaker 4
You know?
07:16
Speaker 3
Yes. Yeah. Yes.
07:17
Speaker 2
That, absolutely.
07:18
Speaker 3
But I want to be really gentle with people when I do try to help them look at their stories because we're very attached to our stories. Totally.
07:26
Speaker 2
Totally.
07:27
Speaker 3
Even if the stories make us feel miserable, we're very attached to them.
07:31
Speaker 4
100%.
07:32
Speaker 3
So I think that what I might do is if someone's story is, I can't trust anyone.
07:37
Speaker 2
If someone's story is, I'm unlovable. If someone's story is, I really want to do this, but I can't, and here's why. I want to question that.
07:48
Speaker 3
And so I will ask lots of questions in a very gentle way.
07:53
Speaker 2
Which isn't to say, no, you can do that. Of course you can. Or no, of course you can trust people. Of course you're lovable. It's about, let's look at the evidence.
08:01
Speaker 3
How did you come to believe that? And there might be real evidence of someone didn't love them or someone betrayed their trust, or maybe many people did.
08:10
Speaker 2
But let's look at why and what happened.
08:12
Speaker 3
And is that about this person being inherently unable, like nobody's trustworthy?
08:17
Speaker 2
Or are you picking people who are not trustworthy?
08:20
Speaker 3
And what is that about? And where did you learn that? I think curiosity is so important. So I'm just really curious about their story. You know, people say, how do you find a therapist?
08:31
Speaker 2
I would look for two things.
08:33
Speaker 3
One is, did you feel basically understood as much as someone who doesn't know you yet can understand you? It's kind of a vibe. And did they say something even very small? Because we won't challenge people too much in a first session that made you ask yourself a question. that made you think about something potentially differently. Yeah.
08:55
Speaker 1
I love the criteria that you articulated for a working therapist-client relationship because, well, of course, one, they make you feel comfortable enough to expose yourself because you feel like you'll be understood. But the second piece just like cut right through me because what does it mean to ask a question that it means that your walls have been sufficiently lowered, your defenses, all that protective armor that you wear around you all the time, and you're allowing enough in from your therapist that you're willing to just poke at it a little bit. And that can be revelatory for so many people. And someone who fosters the conditions of comfort and vulnerability and trust such that they even lead you to ask that first question feels like such a wonderful pressure test.
09:56
Speaker 2
Right.
09:56
Speaker 3
And I love the way you talked about what it feels like to be in a therapeutic relationship that is working well.
10:05
Speaker 2
There's an expression that I love. It's feeling felt. The experience of feeling felt.
10:11
Speaker 3
And it's not my expression, but it's an expression that we use in the therapeutic world.
10:16
Speaker 2
It's hard to articulate, but.
10:17
Speaker 3
It's feeling like, seen and heard and held and understood in all aspects of yourself. So the idea of feeling felt, we don't get that a lot in the world because even with the people who love us and whom we love, we have our own agendas. We have our own reactions. We have our own ways of seeing the world and people. And there's something very unique about seeing someone just in this particular context. And I think this idea of being able to sit in a room with another person, especially in today's world where we're always looking at our phones or we're distracted by things, where there's just nothing but two people in the room getting curious about something really important together. Yeah.
11:11
Speaker 4
You're on the same team.
11:12
Speaker 1
You're channeling that curiosity towards the same item, which is very empowering, right? To feel like, okay, I got a buddy in this. I'm not alone on a desert island trying to figure out my trauma or whatever it is.
11:24
Speaker 4
Yeah.
11:24
Speaker 3
And it's not, I think people think therapy is a little bit navel gazing. Like we're not sitting here doing that. We're trying to understand what is the gap between what you say you want and what you actually do. And so many of us are prone to that. We say one thing, but we do everything in our power to make sure that won't happen that way.
11:44
Speaker 2
And we're completely unaware of it.
11:47
Speaker 1
I'm curious to know, Laurie, when you look back at your early years as a therapist, if there are certain patients or challenges that people brought to you that taught you something important and interesting.
12:01
Speaker 3
I'm thinking about the very first person that I saw when I was training to become a therapist. So when you're training to become a therapist, you go to a clinic and you have supervision with licensed clinicians, but you walk into that room and it's you and this other person that you've never met before. And so my very first patient came in and you get an intake form and there's a little bit of information, but there's not really even time to look at it because you're rushing around and you're so nervous and you don't know, like, is this person going to believe that I can help them?
12:37
Speaker 2
And can I believe that I can help them?
12:39
Speaker 3
And this woman comes in and from her intake, it seemed like young woman, maybe struggling with a few things, living with her boyfriend. Okay. She sits down and takes some breaths. And I ask her, tell me what brought her in. And she starts crying. And when I say crying, I mean, it's not like a buildup. She went from like zero to 60. And I have no experience. I've never done this before. And she is sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. And I'm not sure, you know, in our lives, if you sit across from somebody who's crying, I think our instinct as humans is we get uncomfortable.
13:21
Speaker 4
Of course. In general.
13:24
Speaker 3
And so, you know, I don't know, should I say something? Should I not say something? What would I even say? We haven't said any words to each other yet, other than my asking her why she came in.
13:34
Speaker 2
And so finally I say what I.
13:36
Speaker 3
Think is the most idiotic thing that has been ever said in the history of therapy, which is, you seem really depressed. And then I'm like, oh God, I have to quit my internship immediately after this session because I am clearly not cut out for this. What a moronic thing to say. This woman is clearly struggling and upset. And I said, you seem really depressed. So she just stops crying.
14:04
Speaker 2
She looks up at me. She takes a deep breath and she says, thank you for saying that. I am so depressed. depressed.
14:15
Speaker 3
And nobody in her world, now I get the story, like can understand this or see this because her life looks so perfect on the outside. She's beautiful with this amazing job and she has this amazing boyfriend and she has this amazing family. And no one can understand that she is white knuckling it, can't function. She's pretending. She can't sleep. She can't eat. She's got a mask on the whole time. And she thinks about whether she even wants to be alive, right?
14:44
Speaker 2
And no one knows this about her.
14:46
Speaker 3
And so she came into this room and just had this space to let it out and then to be seen, to feeling felt, we were talking about, where someone could give voice to something that she couldn't even really give voice to, that she kind of thought, but thought, maybe I'm crazy. Of course, I'm not depressed because I have all these things in my life. I can't possibly be depressed. And after the session... I said to my supervisor, because you have to then go and talk about the session, and I said, I thought I said the most stupid thing I could possibly say, but she responded really well to it. And my supervisor explained to me why that was so important for her to hear. And what I realized was that was the therapy. What happened was the therapy. And it really shaped how I thought about what my role was.
15:39
Speaker 1
And when you say that was the therapy, you mean creating the conditions under which she felt heard and seen by you. That box has to be checked before any other work can happen.
15:52
Speaker 4
Is that right?
15:52
Speaker 3
Right. Okay. Right. So study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of someone's therapy is the relationship with their therapist. It matters more. It doesn't mean these other things are not important. It matters more than the years of experience, the kind of training they had, their theoretical orientation. That matters, but it doesn't matter as much as the relationship. If the relationship isn't there, nothing good will happen.
16:19
Speaker 1
Given the very unique relationship that does exist between client and therapist, what are some pitfalls that people should be mindful of maybe falling into? So For example, the minute I felt comfortable with my therapist and I liked them, I would really want them to like me back. So I'm curious what your observations are around things to be mindful of. All of the things that we think about in relationships outside get reenacted in the therapeutic relationship if it is a strong therapeutic relationship. So for example, if people hide something from me, they tend to avoid having conversations hard conversations with the people in their lives. And so one thing that is really helpful is learning to have those conversations in therapy so that you get the experience that the world didn't end. That it's okay, the world didn't end and here's how to have those conversations. And now you can go and practice that.
17:18
Speaker 2
Out in the world.
17:19
Speaker 3
Again, our whole goal is to help people leave therapy. We want people to go and do these things out in the world with the people in their lives. And we are a very safe place to learn and grow and practice and discover. And on the therapist liking you, I think every single person who goes to therapy wants their therapist to like them. And I remember when I was training to be a therapist, one of our clinical supervisors said to us, there's something likable about everyone. It's your job to find it. And all of us interns kind of looked at.
17:52
Speaker 2
Each other like, ah, everyone? I don't know. Something likable in everyone?
17:57
Speaker 3
But the fact she said, it's your job to find it, That was profound because then every time I was in the room with someone, even if it was a couple and one person in the couple seems like, oh, wow, like, please divorce this person, right?
18:13
Speaker 1
Yeah, totally.
18:14
Speaker 2
It's not.
18:15
Speaker 3
It's like, oh, I see the lovable little child in that person now. Yes. I see the vulnerable parts of that person. Oh, I want to give that person a hug. Oh, I see that. Oh, that person is so wounded right there. Oh, that person actually.
18:30
Speaker 2
you know, has the capacity to empathize. Look at that.
18:34
Speaker 3
In the right conditions, that person is really complimentary. Oh, look, that person took the other person's hand.
18:40
Speaker 2
That is beautiful. Look at that person's capacity for growth.
18:43
Speaker 3
So you find the things, there are likable things about every single person if you are going to make an effort to find them.
18:55
Speaker 1
After the break, Lori goes to therapy. We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans. Lori spent her early years as a therapist developing her clinical philosophy and practice. But then a breakup landed her in the patient's seat and the experience reshaped her own work as a therapist.
19:35
Speaker 3
So I was with a boyfriend and we had been together for a few years and we were about to move in together. He was divorced with teenagers and I had my son who was at that point eight years old. We're in bed one night and we had been talking about what movie we were going to see that weekend. And he just, it was very quiet, but not in the quiet way that people are really comfortable in that silence together where it feels very connecting. It felt off in the way that when you're with someone for, you know, in a very intimate way, you know that. And then I said to him something like, you know, what's going on? You know, like, I don't know, just like, hey, what's, what are you thinking about? And, and basically in this conversation, as he denies that anything is up, and his foot is shaking under the covers, it comes out that he has had the revelation that he does not want to live with a kid under his roof for the next 10 years. In other words, until my son went to college. This is news to me. And I'm thinking like, Did he have a stroke?
20:53
Speaker 2
It was just so out of the blue, seemingly.
20:56
Speaker 1
Yeah, and you talk in the book hilariously. You're like, it's not like I was hiding my son. It was not this big reveal. Boyfriend was very aware of my child's existence for the duration of our relationship.
21:06
Speaker 2
Who was in the next room, yes. And from date one, by the way. He knew that I had this young child.
21:13
Speaker 3
And so the narrative, when we talk about story, the narrative amongst all of my friends was, You dodged a bullet.
21:21
Speaker 2
He's a jerk. He's a kid hater. And so he became the villain.
21:26
Speaker 3
Like very quickly he became, it was absolutely like I was a victim and he was a villain. And there was no other possible way to interpret this story.
21:37
Speaker 2
And so then I start falling to pieces, right?
21:39
Speaker 3
And I'm like, I can't believe this is, you know, I'm grieving. I don't understand. I don't even know how to make sense of this. And I'm not functioning very well. I'm overtly functioning on the outside. I'm functioning just like that patient who came to me who was functioning on the outside, but not on the inside. And then when I was just really like not able to like function in the way that I wanted to, a friend of mine who is a therapist said, you know, maybe you should talk to someone. And so- I find this therapist and you can't see someone that you already know. And when you're in the therapeutic community, it's like you kind of know everybody. So you have to find someone totally outside of your circle.
22:19
Speaker 4
And I want to interrupt you for a second.
22:20
Speaker 1
When you were told, hey, Lori, maybe you should see someone, was there a part of you that felt resistance? Because you know the whole we are unreliable narrators element to your own therapy. Were you worried, oh, damn it, They're going to challenge my own beliefs about this horrible boyfriend, my now ex-boyfriend. Or were you thinking, yeah, that's a really good idea.
22:42
Speaker 2
I'm down. I thought that's a really good idea.
22:45
Speaker 3
And in fact, I specifically was looking for someone who was about the same age as the boyfriend.
22:53
Speaker 2
Who had kids.
22:54
Speaker 3
About the same age, who, like if a person who was like the boyfriend could say, yes, he's an asshole, right? If that person could say that, then I would feel totally validated.
23:07
Speaker 4
But you didn't want pushback, right? You were like, okay, yes.
23:10
Speaker 2
No, I didn't think there was pushback. I didn't think there was any other version to this story.
23:14
Speaker 1
Which is so funny and it's like worth pausing on because you, the therapist, whose whole practice is, is to help people revise their own narratives. When it happened to you in your own life, and I love the humility baked into this story, went into this therapist's office thinking, okay, well, there's only one actual version of this story. So buckle up. You're about to agree with everything I'm about to say.
23:36
Speaker 2
You're going to.
23:37
Speaker 3
Agree and you're going to help me through my grief and I'll go here for a few weeks and then, you know, I'll just, I'll move forward with, you know, my grieving process. So I find this therapist, and because he has these characteristics, I am sure that he is going to validate my version of the story, just like everybody in my social circle is, friends, family. And so my therapist, I call him Wendell in the book, and our relationship actually becomes the backbone of the book because of the way in which my story changes the over time repeatedly, not just about the boyfriend incident, but about several other things that are going on in my life. And the real reason that I'm in therapy that I do not know is the real reason I'm in therapy in that first session. Although Wendell pretty much calls it out in that first session.
24:24
Speaker 2
And I'm like, are you kidding me? I'm here for a breakup.
24:28
Speaker 1
What does he say in that first session that gets you annoyed?
24:32
Speaker 3
I start talking about, you know, now I'm in my 40s and half my life is over and he wasted all of my time. And Wendell pauses on the half my life is over. And he says, I think you're grieving something bigger. And I am not happy with that at all. I'm incredulous. I'm like, what kind of, you know, in my head, what kind of therapist are you? Like, clearly this thing just happened. Everybody in the world can see it. And I'm grieving something bigger. The rest of my life is great.
25:09
Speaker 2
It's fine. It's totally fine. It's fine. Plus, the only thing that happened is this.
25:15
Speaker 3
And this has been really discombobulating and confusing. And then again, I say the thing, my whole future. And he keeps coming back to that. You Now I'm going to work. I'm going to be a therapist. And so I have to like get the mascara off my face and get myself together and get in a different mindset. And I'm talking to myself in this dialogue and it comes up again.
25:43
Speaker 2
Half my life is over. And I think, oh no.
25:47
Speaker 3
But then I completely block it. I completely don't want to deal with that. I just want to deal with the breakup. I don't realize that. that the breakup is an important part of this half my life is over thing, which is what I'm really there for and what brought me there. So the story underneath the original presenting problem is something generally deeper. We're not looking for more problems. We're not excavating for something. We're not interviewing for pain. We are simply trying to understand how the situation came to be And maybe there's something bigger that has contributed to it. And if we can find that, then we can help you not get into these types of experiences of pain in the same way. People will always experience pain in their lives in different ways. But maybe you will have some agency over doing things differently so that you don't end up in these kinds of situations because of something you chose to do.
26:40
Speaker 4
Yeah.
26:41
Speaker 1
Why do you think it is, Laurie, that we instinctively resist pain? that bigger explanation, the deeper roots of the problem. I can at least theorize two. One is, hey, by you saying that this is me being afraid of my own mortality or having wasted my time and my life away or half my life away, you're undermining the actual pain that this man caused me by breaking up with me in the first place, right? By saying it's about this other thing, you're invalidating that, no, actually, this was a really crappy thing that he did and it's worthy of me coming into therapy. Another reason could just be that if it becomes about something bigger, there's just more work to do. There's deeper work to do. And so, yeah, just reflect on that. Like, give me your expert opinion on my psychobabble.
27:29
Speaker 3
I think those are really astute ideas about why people do that. I think that one of the biggest ones is that we are really reluctant to take responsibility for our own lives.
27:42
Speaker 2
And Makes a lot of sense.
27:43
Speaker 3
If we start to notice that there's something that we're doing that's contributing, not causing necessarily, but contributing. For example, what I come to learn is that I knew he wasn't excited about being with a young kid. That was very, very apparent, but I chose to ignore it at all these different junctures. And that comes out over time where I'm not even aware of it. And then when I start to become a little bit aware of it and remembering certain moments or scenes that in the history.
28:12
Speaker 2
Of our relationship.
28:13
Speaker 3
And it's like, oh, wow, it seems so painfully obvious. And so, yes, he avoided, but I was avoiding too. So did he handle things well? No, I'm not excusing his behavior. Nobody's excusing the behavior the way it happened. But I was also responsible for part of it, which was avoiding something in the relationship that we both knew, despite how much we liked each other, We knew that there was something that was not workable here. Neither of us wanted to acknowledge it because neither of us wanted to really end the relationship.
28:43
Speaker 4
Yeah, yeah.
28:44
Speaker 1
And it's so important to identify when there is a bigger issue, what that bigger issue is, because to your point, if you understand what is at the root of your grief, that you're not just grieving the loss of this person in your life, but you are grieving, for example, years of your young adult life lost, or.
29:02
Speaker 4
Maybe you're grieving.
29:05
Speaker 2
camaraderie.
29:06
Speaker 4
On a day-to-day basis, nesting.
29:07
Speaker 1
If you don't know what is at the root of the grief as a whole, then it's very hard to try to work on those things.
29:15
Speaker 4
Right.
29:16
Speaker 3
It became less about the boyfriend and that whole situation and more about this deeper sense of what is my purpose? What kind of meaning have I been craving and looking for in all the kind of superficial wrong places? When Wendell really paid attention to when I made what I thought was a throwaway statement, half my life is over. We were really talking about my fears and my fears of not having a partner and my fear of what it meant about me and my life. And it was so important for me to face those fears. But once again, the truth came out, which was I was terrified of not necessarily not being with the boyfriend, but not being with someone at that time in my life. I think you get to a certain place and all of a sudden you're at midlife and you've been doing all the things that you think you're supposed to be doing and checking all the boxes and doing all those things. And then you step back and say, wait a minute, what is my purpose? Where is the meaning in what I'm doing? And how do I focus on those things? And this thing about taking responsibility, at one point Wendell says to me, you remind me of this cartoon and it's of a prisoner shaking the bars, desperately trying to get out. But on the right and the left, it's open.
30:37
Speaker 4
No bars.
30:38
Speaker 2
Often what happens is people come to therapy.
30:40
Speaker 3
You asked why we don't want to take responsibility or why we feel like.
30:45
Speaker 2
We don't want to look at something.
30:46
Speaker 4
Yeah. We want to resist going deeper.
30:48
Speaker 1
Yeah.
30:49
Speaker 3
Right. And it's because when people come to therapy, usually it's, I want something to change, but I want someone else or something else to change.
30:57
Speaker 2
And then I will be good.
30:58
Speaker 1
The guard needs to come and open the door so that I can be released.
31:03
Speaker 3
Right.
31:03
Speaker 4
Right.
31:03
Speaker 3
And so, but really like, you know, yes, there are difficult people in the world, by the way.
31:07
Speaker 2
So nobody is disputing that.
31:09
Speaker 3
We often say before diagnosing someone with depression, make sure they aren't surrounded by assholes. Right.
31:14
Speaker 2
So, so yes, they're difficult people.
31:16
Speaker 3
But the question is, you know, do you just want to sit there shaking the bars or do you want to do something different? Do you want to respond differently? Do you want to set some limits? Do you want to You know, what do you want to do about it? Or do you just want to sit there all day and say, I am trapped and there's nothing I can do? And so if we walk around the bars, we have to take responsibility for our lives and our choices.
31:37
Speaker 2
And I think that that's really scary to a lot of us.
31:40
Speaker 1
Yeah, much easier to just blame the other person and say they sucked and they ruined my life and that's that. I'm curious to know about the evolution of your relationship with Wendell. At the highest level, What was it like to be a therapist in the patient's seat?
31:58
Speaker 4
Was it hard to see control?
32:00
Speaker 1
Did you find yourself trying to impress him with your ability to self-reflect and analyze your situation and rewrite your narrative? Did you ever think, dude, you're doing this wrong. You're bad at it. I could do this better than you. You know, I'm so curious about the richness of that very unique dynamic, which is therapist on therapist.
32:17
Speaker 3
Yeah. I think when I first came to him in that first session, I was in so much pain because that I, on the one hand, didn't want to seem so vulnerable. I wanted to seem like, you know, he's going to think I'm a therapist and how can I be such a mess if I'm a therapist, which obviously people experience grief. So it doesn't matter that I'm a therapist. I, you know, I lost something that was important to me. And on the other hand, it was very hard to keep up the facade. You know, and I think that we know when people have a mask on, we know when we can't quite make contact with somebody. And so it was kind of a fool's errand to think that I could pretend.
33:00
Speaker 2
To be kind of more put.
33:01
Speaker 3
Together or less vulnerable than I really was. I did think many times, and I talk about this, you know, when I'm writing about our experience together, you know, there are times when I think, I would never say that, or I would never do that. Or on the other hand, that was really interesting.
33:23
Speaker 2
I didn't know I could do that.
33:24
Speaker 3
One thing about Wendell that he really helped me do as a therapist was he helped me, he brought his whole self into the room.
33:30
Speaker 2
And I don't mean self-disclosure.
33:32
Speaker 3
It was that how he responded to me, what he was feeling as I was talking about something. You know, I think people think of therapy as just you talk and talk and talk and talk. But there's so much in a pause. There's so much in an expression. There's so much in raising your eyebrow. You can bring those things into the room. And I didn't know you could bring them into the room in the way that he did. And it allowed me to find my own way of expressing myself in a way that would resonate with my patients on a deeper level.
34:02
Speaker 4
Yes.
34:03
Speaker 3
At one point, he actually got up and kicked me, not hard. And it sounds weird if you don't know the context in which it happened. But he was basically talking about the difference between pain and suffering because I was Google stalking the ex-boyfriend. And I was like, oh, look, he was at a restaurant. He took a picture of a salad. How can he even eat, right? He must be fine. I meant nothing to him. And so it was just not helpful. So he was saying, you know, you're creating suffering by doing this. You're going to be in pain. Something painful happened to you, but you don't have to contribute to your suffering.
34:38
Speaker 4
Yeah.
34:40
Speaker 1
I'm wondering if it's possible to distill.
34:45
Speaker 1
Any big elements of the therapeutic process that have enabled you to change your mental patterns or your behaviors and to narrow the scope, just what that looked like over the course of your therapeutic relationship with Wendell. What did it look like for Lori to come in the room feeling despair, feeling overwhelmed by grief, villainizing the ex-boyfriend, taking no accountability to the evolution you talk about in the book, which is hey, actually, maybe this is about something bigger. Maybe there are things I can do in my own life.
35:17
Speaker 3
I think what Wendell did so well was he could plant a seed. And then, you know, we do this a lot as therapists. I like to talk about sort of timing and dosage, that you want to introduce something at a really opportune time.
35:35
Speaker 2
So, you know, and that matters.
35:36
Speaker 3
Are you introducing it, not just the time in terms of how long you've been seeing them, but in the moment, in the session, what is happening. I was a competitive chess player when I was younger, and I loved chess because of the strategy. You know, it's like you have to think five moves ahead, 10 moves ahead, and you do the same thing in therapy. And while people are a little bit less predictable than a chessboard, you still think about, you know, if I say this now, what will happen? Or do I want to hold this? So I might think, oh, I could say it this way. I can make this chess move. Or... I can make this other chest move and get to the same place five moves from now.
36:15
Speaker 1
Yes.
36:17
Speaker 2
So it's how am I going to introduce this?
36:20
Speaker 3
And I think Wendell was masterful with that with me because I was very resistant to looking at things in myself, partly because of feeling like, well, and this is, again, ridiculous, but I'm a therapist, so I don't want him to think that I'm unselfaware, but of course I was unselfaware because I'm human. I'm very self-aware in other contexts, but when you're in pain, sometimes you're not that self-aware. In the book, there's this young woman, Charlotte, who keeps dating men who will disappoint her and she can't see that. It's kind of like those things where everyone can see it, but, but this person can't.
37:01
Speaker 1
Right.
37:01
Speaker 3
And, and so with her, um, I would introduce something with a very small dose.
37:10
Speaker 4
Can you give me a specific example of what that might look like?
37:12
Speaker 2
I noticed that when you were with this person, you felt this way.
37:24
Speaker 4
Right?
37:24
Speaker 2
That's all I'm going to say about it.
37:25
Speaker 3
I'm not going to say, and by the way, let's talk about the pattern of the last 10. Right?
37:29
Speaker 2
So, you know, let's not talk about.
37:31
Speaker 3
Your parents at this moment because she didn't like that at that moment. She's very resistant to that. And then I increase the dosage. Like I might say, so I noticed that you felt this way. And that reminds me of how you described feeling with this other person. So we're just going to keep kind of upping the dosage and see how she tolerates it.
37:47
Speaker 2
Are there any side effects?
37:49
Speaker 3
Oh my gosh.
37:49
Speaker 4
I love that. I love that metaphor.
37:51
Speaker 2
Yes.
37:52
Speaker 1
And I'm also thinking... Yeah, when you increase the dosage of a medication too quickly, what happens? You might literally just vomit it all up. And there is symbolism in that, which is you don't want a rejection effect. of whatever you're planting whole cloth, right? You want to just let it germinate a little bit. Maybe they reject the idea down the road, but at least give it a chance to grow and see what happens. And I love your approach of grounding that idea in concrete examples that are hard to dispute. So unless that generalization is, I just think you're so fabulous, Lori, all the time. You might not first love it. Any other generalization we make about patterns, it's jarring. It feels invasive. You get defensive. You're like, oh my God, am I beyond the point of repair? You know, it's just very discouraging. And so when you said, I noticed you felt this way with this person, it's a very gentle stroke, right? It's okay, I'm going to sit with that. And then maybe from your vantage point, the patient will start to connect those dots and identify the pattern themselves rather than being force fed it, right?
39:00
Speaker 4
Right.
39:01
Speaker 3
And I think there are times when you choose to have a more direct approach. You know, Rita in the book is this woman who is estranged from her adult children. And she feels so much guilt around how she treated them. And she wants a relationship with them. And I think what she truly wants is to be forgiven.
39:24
Speaker 2
But what I come to help her.
39:26
Speaker 3
With is that she needs to forgive herself, which is mean not be accountable for what she has done, but to find a way to hold both the accountability and the forgiveness. And so at one point I said to her as a more direct intervention, I said, how long do you think the prison sentence is for this? Is it a year? Is it a decade? Is it five decades? Is it a life sentence? And she said, it's a life sentence. And I said, well, then that's what you've given yourself. And so the intervention there was not to tell her what the sentence should be. It was for her to notice that she'd given herself that. And then she could feel like, but that's what I deserve. But then as different things started happening in her life through the other work that we were doing, she started to think maybe it's not a life sentence.
40:22
Speaker 2
Yeah.
40:23
Speaker 3
Maybe there's a different kind of way to hold myself accountable for this that doesn't involve a life sentence.
40:30
Speaker 4
Yes.
40:31
Speaker 1
You know, there's been a message circulating, Lori, especially on social media, that everyone should be in therapy. But then a recent New York Times article actually pushed back on this. Oh, I don't think everyone should be in therapy.
40:44
Speaker 4
I mean, on a.
40:44
Speaker 1
Personal front, other than a short course of cognitive behavioral therapy that I did in my early 20s, I haven't done therapy. And I will say that I received a wee bit of judgment from some of my therapy-going friends.
40:59
Speaker 4
Oh, I disagree. Can you please make me feel better about my life choices?
41:03
Speaker 2
I'm not saying this to make you feel better.
41:04
Speaker 3
I just, I don't think that there's a reason that everybody needs to go to therapy. I think that there are people who understand how they move through the world and they have certain tools and they had certain modeling and, or they picked it up somehow and And that's great. And there are other people who feel like, you know what, I need some support with this. I need some understanding. There's something going on here that I can't solve on my own. And I need almost like a second opinion on my life from someone who's not in my life.
41:38
Speaker 2
And I think that that can be so helpful.
41:41
Speaker 3
I do see in terms of preventative therapy, so many couples who who are not having problems at all, but they're about to, let's say, get married, or they're about to have a baby, or there's some new development in their lives. And they say, you know, we haven't really learned how to talk about certain things. How do we make room for the otherness, for difference? Because I think a lot of people do not understand otherness. And that's where a lot of couples get in trouble with each other is You think that?
42:11
Speaker 2
You feel that? You experienced it that way? I don't even know you.
42:14
Speaker 4
Yeah, totally.
42:16
Speaker 3
Right? As opposed to, wait, that's a completely separate person with a completely different makeup.
42:21
Speaker 4
Yeah.
42:23
Speaker 1
In what ways, Laurie, did your experience being in therapy affect how you approached your patients moving forward?
42:33
Speaker 3
I was just saying that I don't think everybody should go to therapy, but I do think every therapist must go to therapy. We have to do it for our license. So we have to do a certain number of hours for our license. You cannot do this job if you have not had the experience of being in therapy. And when you see, and maybe you should talk to someone, all the ways in which I respond to Wendell, it's one thing to intellectually understand something. It's another to have the emotions and thoughts and feelings and discomfort and things that I didn't want to say or I was embarrassed to say or how I felt about him and how I felt about me and how I felt about the work that we were doing and the ways at which sometimes I would be angry with him or sometimes I would feel really connected to him. You have to understand that from having gone through it. Yes.
43:25
Speaker 1
And I think it's so perfectly exemplified by the fact that as a therapist, you are fully trained in this whole field.
43:34
Speaker 4
You are trained in.
43:37
Speaker 1
The misconceptions we can have about self and the narratives we can write that have faults in them. But the mere awareness of that doesn't rewrite the story automatically. You have to put in the work to actually figure out how to alter the narrative, right? What are the new ingredients that I can add or What are the things I want to take out, right? That's the thing that therapy helps you actually execute on. And it's not enough to just know that you might be laboring under maladaptive beliefs, right? You need to actually put in the effort to change that narrative. And I imagine doing it for yourself once is a wonderful way to build empathy for all the patients that you're demanding that of.
44:16
Speaker 2
I think therapy can be really challenging at times. It can also be life-changing.
44:23
Speaker 4
And when you.
44:25
Speaker 3
do it yourself, you see how challenging it can be. So that when you have a patient who's resisting, or you have a patient who, you know, is like making jokes, or a patient who is doing all kinds of things to distract you from seeing them. You know, if you, you know, people always say, I don't want to bore my therapist. And I feel like the patients who are boring are the ones who won't let me see the truth of who they are. So they're trying to be likable and entertaining. And that's really boring because it's not you. I mean, it's like, yes, you're maybe an entertaining person or you're a funny, smart person, but it's not, you're hiding something from me. And I find it just You know, like I can get that out in the world. I don't, you know, and you can get that out in the world, but we're here to do something different.
45:18
Speaker 4
Totally.
45:19
Speaker 3
And once you show me the truth of who you are, I have never not felt like, oh, there's nothing boring going on here at all. One of the things that I truly believe about therapy and about life is that people do better with the truth than without it. Hmm. We think that sometimes we might do better without the truth. If we can just ignore it, distract from it, not pay attention to it, it's too painful, don't want to go there.
45:47
Speaker 2
Inevitably, no matter.
45:48
Speaker 3
How difficult the truth is, people do better with the truth than without it.
45:53
Speaker 2
And I see that time and time again.
45:55
Speaker 3
And one thing that I try to help people to do in therapy is to stop hiding from the truth. Can I help you stop hiding? Can I Take your hand and can we walk together and can we head toward the truth in a way that feels comfortable to you?
46:12
Speaker 2
That's the path to freedom. Thank you.
46:35
Speaker 1
Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed my conversation with Lori, make sure you share the episode with a friend. You might also enjoy our conversation with Julia Samuel, Lessons from a Grief Therapist. We've included a link in the show notes. As always, please remember to follow A Slight Change of Plans and review it wherever you listen to podcasts. Doing so really helps us continue to build this show and make new episodes. We'll be back soon with another episode of A Slight Change of Plans.
47:05
Speaker 4
I'll see you then.
47:06
Speaker 1
A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me, Maya Shunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner, Alexander Gerriton, our editor, Daphne Chen, our lead producer, Megan Lubin, our associate producer, Sonia Gerwitt, and our sound engineer, Erica Huang. Luis Guerra wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there. And of course, a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee.
47:59
Speaker 3
Thank you.
The Host
