Andreea Ciocan's Key Ideas from Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
by Lori Gottlieb

This is the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.

Numbness is in the absence of feelings.

It’s a response to being overwhelmed with too many feelings.

It refers to the part of the mind that holds ancestral memory, or experience that is common to all humankind.

Freedom involves responsibility.

And there’s a part in most of us that finds responsibility frightening.

There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked because pain isn’t a contest.

You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it, you get through it by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it.

You can’t change what you’re denying or diminishing.

Many people avoid trying for what they really want in life because it’s more painful to get close to the goal but not achieve it than not to have taken the chance in the first place.

To people, going into the depths of their thoughts and feelings it’s like going into a dark alley and they don’t want to go there alone.

People come to therapy to have someone to go there with.

• Counseling is getting advice.
• Therapy is acquiring more self-understanding.

Privacy is good, but secrets are toxic.

• A therapeutic alliance is a trust that is needed before work can be done. Patients need to feel heard and understood.
• But therapy work is an intricate dance between support and confrontation.
• Therapists help patients see themselves better and ask the right questions until something happens internally or externally.