Both sides of the couch: When a therapist goes to therapy

"What we do in therapy is we help to rewrite those faulty narratives," says Lori Gottlieb Photo / Lori Gottlieb / Facebook

By Jesse Mulligan of RNZ

All day, everyday, Lori Gottlieb deals with other people's problems as a clinical psychologist, agony aunt for the Dear Therapist column in The Atlantic. When she experienced an unexpected setback in her own life, she decided to get a taste of her own medicine and see a therapist.

She gives the view from both sides of the couch about the power of talking.

Her book is called Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed.

She tells Jesse Mulligan that people still feel a stigma when talking to others about their emotional lives.

"When something feels off with our bodies, we go to the doctor. But when something feels off emotionally, we often feel like it's not that bad or we're embarrassed so we just kind of ignore it."

She says there's no hierarchy of pain, pain is simply pain.

"I think we tend to feel like we have to be in a full blown crisis, something very traumatic has to have happened. The thing is that the quality of our emotional lives affects the quality of our lives every single day. It's to people's peril if they feel like they have to wait for something really difficult to happen.

"There's no shame in going to talk about your life, your problems, things you're struggling with. I think when people get most out of therapy is when they come to realise what patterns they have; their blindspots, the way they self-sabotage, the way they end up in the same unfortunate situation over and over. That's the magic of what therapy does and I feel like people instead associate therapy with something catastrophic."

She writes in the book: "It's not as if we're going to peer into those dark 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 and see it."

She explains that it's through our struggles that we move on, grow and change.

"I think people learn a lot about themselves when they get through a struggle. They learn to navigate their lives differently and become much stronger and resilient and I think they become richer as people for having gone through something that maybe they wouldn't have chosen to go through but it changes what they can do in the future. It opens up possibilities for them in ways they didn't even know were available to them."

She says that people need to be both vulnerable and accountable when they go into therapy.

"You have to be vulnerable to be able to look at yourself in a way that maybe you haven't been willing to. And you have to be accountable in that you're willing to make changes. It's not enough to say, 'I understand something about myself' you also have to say, 'now what? What do I do with this understanding? What tangible changes can I make out in the world knowing what I know now?'"

Gottlieb says therapy requires work and it's a misconception that you sit and talk while the therapist listens, she says it's a very active conversation.

"It's like physical therapy because you have to keep going and you have to work those muscles and sometimes it's uncomfortable - like physical therapy - but you come out so much stronger in the end.

"It's not that therapy has to hurt, it's that you might access different feelings that you normally don't. I think a lot of people feel like they'd rather be numb than feel a lot of pain, but numbness isn't the absence of feelings, it's when you're overwhelmed by too many feelings. Eventually, those feelings will surface."

Gottlieb recently gave a Ted Talk on the subject of faulty narratives. She says people often come into therapy seeking validation and will present a story that has pieces missing from it.

"What we do in therapy is we help to rewrite those faulty narratives. People aren't necessarily lying, but often they're leaving out big chunks of the story that would be really helpful for me to know."

She says our friends give us what's she calls 'idiot compassion' when we go through bad times. She relates it to a break up of a long-term relationship she experienced in which her friends all said things like 'he's a loser' and 'you dodged a bullet'. Her therapist, on the other hand, didn't do that.

"There was more to the story and I wasn't just coming in for the boyfriend issue as it turns out. I think that's really important to remember - the lyrics might of been there was this break up, but the music was what was the underlying struggle or pattern that got me into this situation in the first place. That's what the therapy was about."

As we approach the holiday season, Gottlieb says we should look out for family members who show signs of depression.

"It's really hard when someone in the family is struggling and I think we need to have compassion for them and understand that our way of dealing with it isn't necessarily what they need. We need to be open to listening and asking them how you can help."