Top 150 Lori Gottlieb Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “But what are we so afraid of? It’s not as if we’re going to peer in those darker corners, flip on the light, and find a bunch of cockroaches. Fireflies love the dark too. There’s beauty in those places. But we have to look in there to see it.”

— Lori Gottlieb

52. “You’ll turn thirty or forty or fifty anyway, whether your hours are finished or not,” she said. “What does it matter what age you are when that happens? Either way, you won’t get today back.”

— Lori Gottlieb

53. “We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists.”

— Lori Gottlieb

54. “You’re going to have to feel pain – everyone feels pain at times – but you don’t have to suffer so much. You’re not choosing the pain, but you’re choosing the suffering.”

— Lori Gottlieb

55. “Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. – James Baldwin.”

— Lori Gottlieb

56. “You take a risk, you fall down, and you get back up and do it all over again.”

— Lori Gottlieb

57. “Sometimes “drama”, no matter how unpleasant, can be a form of self-medication, a way to calm ourselves down by avoiding the crises brewing inside.”

— Lori Gottlieb

58. “Changing our relationship to the past is a staple of therapy. But we talk far less about how our relationship to the future informs the present too. Our notion of the future can be just as powerful a roadblock to change as our notion of the past. In.”

— Lori Gottlieb

59. “Insight allows you to ask yourself, Is this something that’s being done to me or am I doing it to myself? The answer gives you choices, but it’s up to you to make them.”

— Lori Gottlieb

60. “If you stay in therapy,” I say softly, “you might have to let go of the hope for a better childhood – but that’s only so that you can create a better adulthood.”

— Lori Gottlieb

61. “We feel completely stuck, trapped in our emotional cells, but there’s a way out – as long as we’re willing to see it.”

— Lori Gottlieb

62. “Instead, you release them in layers, moving closer and closer to the tender core: your sadness.”

— Lori Gottlieb

63. “When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists.”

— Lori Gottlieb

64. “Losing somebody you love is such a profoundly lonely experience, something only you endure in your own particular way.”

— Lori Gottlieb

65. “I know how affirming it feels to blame the outside world for my frustrations, to deny ownership of whatever role I might have in the existential play called My Incredibly Important Life.”

— Lori Gottlieb

66. “Take a risk. Maybe our pasts don’t define us but inform us.”

— Lori Gottlieb

67. “Your feelings don’t have to mesh with what you think they should be,” he explained. “They’ll be there regardless, so you might as well welcome them because they hold important clues.”

— Lori Gottlieb

68. “But unlike neurosurgeons, we gravitate toward the sensitive area, pressing delicately on it, even if it makes the patient feel uncomfortable.”

— Lori Gottlieb

69. “When we dance, we express our buried feelings, talking through our bodies instead of our minds – and that can help us get out of our heads and to a new level of awareness.”

— Lori Gottlieb

70. “People want to be understood and to understand, but for most of us, our biggest problem is that we don’t know what our problem is. We keep stepping in the same puddle. Why do I do the very thing that will guarantee my own unhappiness over and over again?”

— Lori Gottlieb

71. “The grief psychologist William Worden takes into account these questions by replacing stages with tasks of mourning. In his fourth task, the goal is to integrate the loss into your life and create an ongoing connection with the person who died while also finding a way to continue living.”

— Lori Gottlieb

72. “Even in the best possible relationship, you’re going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you’re human. You will inevitably hurt your partner, your parents, your children, your closest friend – and they will hurt you – because if you sign up for intimacy, getting hurt is part of the deal.”

— Lori Gottlieb

73. “A supervisor once likened doing psychotherapy to undergoing physical therapy. It can be difficult and cause pain, and your condition can worsen before it improves, but if you go consistently and work hard when you’re there, you’ll get the kinks out and function so much better.”

— Lori Gottlieb

74. “Relationships in life don’t really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you’ve been close to lives on somewhere inside you.”

— Lori Gottlieb

75. “During an initial burst of pain, people tend to lash out either at others or at themselves, to turn the anger outward or inward.”

— Lori Gottlieb

76. “Almost is always the hardest, isn’t it?” she said one afternoon. “Almost getting something. Almost having a baby. Almost getting a clean scan. Almost not having cancer anymore.” I thought about how many people avoid trying for things 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.”

— Lori Gottlieb

77. “I once told Wendell that I’m a terrible decision maker, that often what I think I want doesn’t turn out the way I’d imagined. But there were two notable exceptions, and both proved to be the best decisions of my life. In each case, I was nearly forty. One was my decision to have a baby. The other was my decision to become a therapist.”

— Lori Gottlieb

78. “We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists. But if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place, in perpetual regret.”

— Lori Gottlieb

79. “Insight is the booby prize of therapy“ is my favorite maxim of the trade, meaning that you can have all the insight in the world, but if you don’t change when you’re out in the world, the insight and the therapy is worthless. Insight allows you to ask yourself, “Is this something that’s being done to me or am I doing it to myself?“. The answer gives you choices, but it’s up to you to make them.”

— Lori Gottlieb

80. “You want to mute the pain? You’ll also mute the joy.”

— Lori Gottlieb

81. “I remember reading a divorced woman’s experience of getting to know a new lover after her decades-long marriage ended: “I will never lock eyes in the delivery room with David,” she wrote. “I’ve never met his mother.”

— Lori Gottlieb

82. “You know what I love about Rosie?” he says. “She’s the only one who doesn’t ask things of me. The only one who isn’t, in one way or another, disappointed with me – or at least, she wasn’t before she bit me! Who wouldn’t love that?” He laughs loudly, like we’re at a bar and he’s just tossed out a breezy one-liner.”

— Lori Gottlieb

83. “Whenever one person in a family system starts to make changes, even if the changes are healthy and positive, it’s not unusual for other members in this system to do everything they can to maintain the status quo and bring things back to homeostasis.”

— Lori Gottlieb

84. “The three words women most want to hear from a man are, “You lost weight””

— Lori Gottlieb

85. “I once heard creativity described as being the ability to grasp the essence of one thing and the essence of some very different thing and smash them together to create some entirely new thing. That’s what therapists do too. We take the essence of the initial snapshot and the essence of an imagined snapshot and smash them together to create an entirely new one.”

— Lori Gottlieb

86. “I regularly made an effort to remember one of the most important lessons from my training: There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering – I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I’m lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins – or loses?”

— Lori Gottlieb

87. “The second people felt alone, I noticed, usually in the space between things – leaving a therapy session, at a red light, standing in a checkout line, riding the elevator – they picked up devices and ran away from that feeling. In a state of perpetual distraction, they seemed to be losing the ability to be with others and losing their ability to be with themselves.”

— Lori Gottlieb

88. “Certainly we all have our deal-breakers. But when patients repeatedly engage in this kind of analysis, sometimes I’ll say, “If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.”

— Lori Gottlieb

89. “Our training has taught us theories and tools and techniques, but whirring beneath our hard-earned expertise is the fact that we know just how hard it is to be a person. Which is to say, we still come to work each day as ourselves – with our own sets of vulnerabilities, our own longings and insecurities, and our own histories. Of all my credentials as a therapist, my most significant is that I’m a card-carrying member of the human race.”

— Lori Gottlieb

90. “The inability to say yes, however – to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program – is more about lack of trust in oneself. Will I mess this up? Will this turn out badly? Isn’t it safer to stay where I am?”

— Lori Gottlieb

91. “Typically, a patient might have a difficult session about a childhood trauma, then come in the next week and announce that therapy is no longer needed.”

— Lori Gottlieb

92. “One foot, then the other. Don’t look at all five feet at once. Just take a step. And when you’ve taken that step, take one more. Eventually you’ll make it to the shower. And you’ll make it to tomorrow and next year too. One step.”

— Lori Gottlieb

93. “John lowers himself onto the couch, kicks off his shoes, then stretches out, lies down, and adjusts his head on the pillows. Usually he sits cross-legged on the sofa, so this is a first. I notice, too, that there’s no food today. “Okay, you win,” he begins with a sigh. “Win what?” I ask. “The pleasure of my company,” he deadpans. I raise my eyebrows.”

— Lori Gottlieb

94. “But Wendell told me that by diminishing my problems, I was judging myself and everyone else whose problems I had placed lower down on the hierarchy of pain. You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can’t change what you’re denying or minimizing. And, of course, often what seem like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.”

— Lori Gottlieb

95. “The First Confession Allow me to get defensive for a minute. You see, when I told Wendell that everything was just fine until the breakup, I was telling the absolute truth. Or, rather, the truth as I knew it. Which is to say, the truth as I wanted to see it.”

— Lori Gottlieb

96. “I remember a quote from Einstein: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

— Lori Gottlieb

97. “Which all boils down to: Happiness equals reality minus expectations.”

— Lori Gottlieb

98. “Is Boyfriend unhappy with something in the relationship that he’s afraid to tell me about? I ask him calmly, my voice softer now, because I’m mindful of the fact that Very Angry People aren’t Very Approachable.”

— Lori Gottlieb

99. “Therapy elicits odd reactions because, in a way, it’s like pornography. Both involve a kind of nudity. Both have the potential to thrill. And both have millions of users, most of whom keep their use private.”

— Lori Gottlieb

100. “Erikson maintained that, in later years, we experience a sense of integrity if we believe we have lived meaningful lives. This sense of integrity gives us a feeling of completeness so that we can better accept our approaching deaths. But if we have unresolved regrets about the past – if we think that we made poor choices or failed to accomplish important goals – we feel depressed and hopeless, which leads us to despair.”

— Lori Gottlieb