Top 150 Lori Gottlieb Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Until you tell me what’s really on your mind, you’ll stay stuck exactly where you are.”

— Lori Gottlieb

52. “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

53. “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

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

— Lori Gottlieb

55. “But feelings are actually more like weather systems – they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week.”

— Lori Gottlieb

56. “Uncertainty, I’m starting to realize, doesn’t mean the loss of hope – it means there’s possibility. I don’t know what will happen next – how potentially exciting!”

— Lori Gottlieb

57. “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

58. “Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.”

— Lori Gottlieb

59. “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.”

— Lori Gottlieb

60. “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

61. “What people don’t like to think about is that you can do everything right – in life or in a treatment protocol – and still get the short end of the stick.”

— Lori Gottlieb

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “Modern man thinks he loses something – time – when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.” Fromm was right;.”

— Lori Gottlieb

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Lori Gottlieb

74. “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

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

— Lori Gottlieb

76. “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

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

— Lori Gottlieb

78. “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. – Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

— Lori Gottlieb

79. “With aging comes the potential to accrue many losses: health, family, friends, work, and purpose.”

— Lori Gottlieb

80. “Our younger selves think in terms of a beginning, middle, and some kind of resolution. But somewhere along the way – perhaps in that middle – we realize that everyone lives with things that may not get worked out. That the middle has to be the resolution, and how we make meaning of it becomes our task.”

— Lori Gottlieb

81. “Might it feel safer to stay in jail?”

— Lori Gottlieb

82. “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

83. “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

84. “Because life happens and therapy helps us confront our demons when they pay a visit. And visit they will, because everyone has demons – big, small, old, new, quiet, loud.”

— Lori Gottlieb

85. “But I got a second chance too. Wendell once pointed out that we talk to ourselves more than we’ll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren’t always kind or true or helpful – or even respectful. Most of what we say to ourselves we’d never say to people we love or care about, like our friends or children. In therapy, we learn to pay close attention to those voices in our heads so that we can learn a better way to communicate with ourselves.”

— Lori Gottlieb

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

— Lori Gottlieb

87. “Sometimes the changes you want in another person aren’t on that person’s agenda.”

— Lori Gottlieb

88. “I think of a Flannery O’Connor quote: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

— Lori Gottlieb

89. “Sitting with Rita, I was reminded that the heart is just as fragile at seventy as it is at seventeen. The vulnerability, the longing, the passion – they’re all there in full force. Falling in love never gets old.”

— Lori Gottlieb

90. “So much of what I’m doing to help him relies on our in-the-room interaction. Say what you will about the wonders of technology, but screen-to-screen is, as a colleague once said, “like doing therapy with a condom on.”

— Lori Gottlieb

91. “The more you welcome your vulnerability,” Wendell had said, “the less afraid you’ll feel.” This isn’t how we tend to view life when we’re younger. Our younger selves think in terms of a beginning, middle, and some kind of resolution. But somewhere along the way – perhaps in that middle – we realize that everyone lives with things that may not get worked out. That the middle has to be the resolution, and how we make meaning of it becomes our task.”

— Lori Gottlieb

92. “Your misery doesn’t change their situation. You can’t lessen their misery by carrying it for them inside you.”

— Lori Gottlieb

93. “The price of loving so deeply is feeling so deeply – but it’s also a gift, the gift of being alive. If we no longer feel, we should be grieving our own deaths.”

— Lori Gottlieb

94. “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

95. “For many people, going into the depths of their thoughts and feelings is like going into a dark alley – they don’t want to go there alone.”

— Lori Gottlieb

96. “There is something likable in everyone. And to my great surprise, I found that she was right. It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not to come to like them.”

— Lori Gottlieb

97. “Will you see the human in my being?”

— Lori Gottlieb

98. “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

99. “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

100. “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