Review: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Lori Gotlieb’s, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, was given to me as a gift. My friend who gave me this gift is the same person who listens to all of my problems, receiving my grievances with an unrelenting humor and a calm which I in no way possess, even when the problem started out as her own, and inevitably morphed into my own. So upon receiving the book, I let out an audible laugh and told my friend that the message had been received and thanked her graciously not only for the book itself, but for always listening to me.

What was additionally ironic about the arrival of this book into my life is that I had recently sworn off self-help books. These are the types of books that have historically catalyzed change in my life without offering me any suggestions for how to go about effecting these changes in a sound way and at a rational pace. I had to cut self-help books out of my life because they would spark in me an idea for change, which, given my impulsive nature, I would act on immediately and without warning, straining relationships in my life and encouraging me to cut out or evolve potentially the wrong thing. (Like having low self-esteem and deciding that getting bangs was the only logical solution). However, I would come to find out that Maybe You Should Talk to Someone diverges from the typical self-help book (despite its quintessentially self-help-book title) in one specific and all be it integral way: its humility. I did not know the importance of humility until I first encountered life without it: in college.

College is a world stripped of humility by design. In a one square mile radius exists one group of people pontificating to another, each person so enamored by the place in which and the people from whom they learn, they think that they, above all others, deserve to be there. Although college was meant to be a place in which curiosity drove forward innovation and collaboration, it has, on the back of the notion of deservedness, morphed into a place where people are afraid to make a mistake or admit to the fallacies of their own understandings. As if admitting that we don’t know something is the same as stripping us of our place in the university entirely. So, in a place devoid of humility, I begrudgingly began reading a book which predicates itself on just that.

The suggestion that is the book’s namesake, that maybe you should talk to someone, is universally applicable. The sample of patients from which Gotlieb pulls, which includes herself, each finds themselves in therapy for a different reason. And, as Gotlieb suggests, and eventually finds out for herself, the reason for going to therapy, or the “presenting problem” as it is deemed, ends up only being part of any patient’s motivating factor that lands them in therapy. For Gotlieb, the catalyst for returning to therapy was being spontaneously dumped by her boyfriend (aptly named “Boyfriend” in the book) and the man she thought she was going to marry, although Boyfriend ends up just being the “presenting problem”, the tangible thing in a Gotlieb’s life which seems to be falling apart. For John, a middle-aged man working in the entertainment business in Hollywood and a patient of Gotlieb’s, his trouble sleeping was caused by his constant frustration with being surrounded by “idiots” compounded with family tragedy. For Julie, a young and active newlywed who was dying of cancer, therapy was prescribed as part of her end-of-life treatment. For Rita, therapy was a means by which to delay the inevitable: death. Despite their different reasons for going to therapy, the thing universally realized by all of these people in Gotlieb’s book was pain. Gotlieb writes, “there’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest.” And with this, Gotlieb demands of her reader the same humility which she offers in her own personal anecdotes, the freedom from the belief that we are above or even entirely invincible from experiencing pain ourselves.