Title: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
Author: Lori Gottlieb
There are books that make you think.
There are books that make you feel.
And then there are books that somehow make you feel seen.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone did all three for me.
Lori Gottlieb writes about something I know from both sides: being a therapist while also being a person who sometimes needs therapy herself.
And I loved how raw and human that made this book feel.
As therapists, we spend so much of our time sitting with other people's stories.
We listen. We ask questions. We notice patterns. We help people make sense of things that sometimes don't make sense at all.
But when we leave that room, we don't suddenly stop being human.
We have relationships. We experience grief. We get hurt. We question ourselves. We make mistakes. We sometimes need someone else to sit across from us and help us make sense of our own stories.
I loved that this book didn't shy away from that.
I've experienced therapy from both chairs.
I've been the therapist listening to someone share pieces of themselves they may not share anywhere else.
And I've been the client sitting across from someone, trying to put my own experiences into words.
Because of that, there were parts of this book I related to professionally and others that hit me much more personally.
It reminded me that therapy isn't one person who has everything figured out helping someone who doesn't.
It's two human beings sitting together, one bringing their training and perspective and the other bringing their story, trying to understand something together.
But what I loved most were the stories.
They were emotional. Messy. Funny. Painful. Sometimes heartbreaking.
They felt human.
And once again, I found myself reminded why stories matter so much to me.
Every person who walks into a therapy room has lived an entire life before they sit down.
So has the therapist.
We all carry grief, love, mistakes, fears, relationships, hopes, and chapters we'd probably rewrite if we could.
Maybe that's what stayed with me most about this book:
Needing help doesn't make us less capable of helping others. Being a therapist doesn't make us immune to being human. And sometimes, all of us need someone to talk to.
I've sat in both chairs.
I'm grateful for what I've learned from each of them. 💜
Have you ever read a book that made you feel understood in more than one part of your life?
