Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,57
on what matters most to them?
The regret I felt about having not done the parenting book was compounded by the fact that I continued to get weekly reader mail and speaking-engagement queries about the “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy” article. “Will there be a book?” person after person asked. No, I wanted to reply, because I’m a moron.
I did feel like a moron, because in the interest of not selling out and cashing in on the parenting craze, I agreed instead to write the now-dreaded, depression-inducing happiness book. To make ends meet as I launched my practice, I still had to write a book, and I thought at the time that I could provide a service to readers. Instead of showing how we parents were trying too hard to make our kids happy, I was going to show how we were trying too hard to make ourselves happy. This idea seemed closer to my heart.
But whenever I sat down to write, I felt as disconnected from the topic as I had from the subject of helicopter parenting. The research didn’t—couldn’t—reflect the subtleties of what I was seeing in the therapy room. Some scientists had even come up with a complex mathematical equation to predict happiness based on the premise that happiness stems not from how well things go but whether things go better than expected. It looks like this:
Happiness (t) = w0+ w1
γt−jCRj+ w2
γt−jEVj+ w3
γt−jRPEj
Which all boils down to: Happiness equals reality minus expectations. Apparently, you can make people happy by delivering bad news and then taking it back (which, personally, would just make me mad).
Still, I knew I could put together some interesting studies, but I felt I’d just be scratching the surface of something else I wanted to say but couldn’t quite put my finger on. And in my new career, and in my life more generally, scratching the surface no longer felt satisfying. You can’t go through psychotherapy training and not be changed in some way, not become, without even noticing, oriented toward the core.
I told myself it didn’t matter. Just write the book and be done with it. I’d already botched things up with the parenting book; I couldn’t botch up this happiness book too. And yet, day after day, I couldn’t get myself to write it. Just like I couldn’t get myself to write the parenting book. How had I gotten here again?
In graduate school, we used to watch therapy sessions through one-way mirrors, and sometimes when I’d sit down to write the happiness book, I’d think about a thirty-five-year-old patient I’d observed. He’d come to therapy because he very much loved and was attracted to his wife but he couldn’t stop cheating on her. Neither he nor his wife understood how his behavior could be so at odds with what he believed he wanted—trust, stability, closeness. In his session, he explained that he hated the turmoil his cheating put his wife and their marriage through and knew that he wasn’t the husband or father he wanted to be. He talked for a while about how desperately he wanted to stop cheating and how he had no idea why he kept doing it.
The therapist explained that often different parts of ourselves want different things, and if we silence the parts we find unacceptable, they’ll find other ways to be heard. He asked the guy to sit in a different chair, across the room, and see what happened when the part of him that chose to cheat wasn’t shoved aside but got to say its piece.
At first the poor guy was at a loss, but gradually, he began to give voice to his hidden self, the part that would goad the responsible, loving husband into engaging in self-defeating behavior. He was torn between these two aspects of himself, just as I was torn between the part of me that wanted to provide for my family and the part of me that wanted to do something meaningful—something that touched my soul and hopefully others’ souls as well.
Boyfriend appeared on the scene just in time to distract me from this internal battle. And once he was gone, I filled the void by Google-stalking him when I should have been writing. So many of our destructive behaviors take root in an emotional void, an emptiness that calls out for something to fill it. But now that Wendell and I have talked about not Google-stalking Boyfriend, I feel accountable. I have no excuse not to sit down and