Reading maybe you should talk to someone
之前是读书笔记，持续更新中...
现在试图通过我和每个病人的“共情次数”（即“好词好句”highlight次数）匹配一下自己的问题，更像那个病人，并从他们身上借鉴对策。
John's therapy sessions
It must be so hard to be John
1. We can't have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.
2. Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties.
3. People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn't the absence of feelings, it's a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.
Before diagnosing people with depression, make sure they're not surrounded by asshole.
4. People who are demanding, critical, and angry tend to suffer from intense loneliness. As hard as he is on others, he's probably triply hard on himself.
5. Acknowledging their attachment makes them feel too vulnerable.
6. What if the people who are pissing you off aren't trying to piss you off? What if these people aren't idiots but reasonably intelligent people who are just doing the best they can on a given day?
7. 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. If an addict stops drinking, for instance, family members often unconsciously sabotage that person's recovery, because in order to regain homeostasis in the system, sombody has to fill the role of the troubled person.
8. Anger is the go-to feeling for most people because it's outward-directed—angrily blaming others can feel deliciously sanctimonious. Of course, anger serves another function—it pushes people away and keeps them from getting close enough to see you.
I’m a parent. I have two girls. I won't let them down. I will not be a basket case and ruin their childhoods. I will not leave them with two parents who are haunted by the ghost of their son. They deserve better than that. What happened isn't their fault. It's ours. And it's our responsibility to be there for them, to have our shit together for them.
9. 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.
Julie's therapy sessions
It's my party and you'll cry if you want to
1. Welcome to Holland, to enjoy him and love him for who he was and not focus on who he wasn't.
2. There would always be somebody whose life seemed more—or less—enviable.
3. People tend to dream without doing, death remaining theoretical. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive.
4. She imagined doing work where she could see tangible results in the moment—you pack groceries, you cheer up customers, you stock items. At the end of the day, you've done something concrete and useful.
5. Could our hestation also be that we were both, in a strange way, envious of Julie and her conviction to follow her dream, no matter how odd it sounded?
6. The vows say "in sickness and health" and "for better or worse" and all that, but that's kind of like clicking okay to terms and conditions when you download an app or sign up for a credit card. You don't think any of that is going to apply to you.
7. I‘m also going to miss myself. All those insecurities I'd spent my life wanting to change? I was just getting to a place where I really like myself. I like me. I'm going to miss Matt, and my family, and my friends, but I'm also going to miss me.
Rita's therapy sessions
1. The opposite of depression isn't happiness, but vitality.
2. For Rita, joy isn't pleasure; it's anticipatory pain.
3. I point out to her that pain can be protective; staying in a depressed place can be a form of avoidance. Safe inside her shell of pain, she doesn't have to face anything, nor doesshe have to emerge into the world, where she might get hurt again. Her inner critic serves her: I don't have to take any action because I'm worthless. 4. Maybe our past don't define us but inform us.
5. 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. No matter how jaded you are, how much suffering love have caused you, a new love can't help but make you feel hopeful and alive, like that very first time.
Charlotte's therapy sessions
1. The pull toward that feeling of home makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parent who in some way hurt them.
2. 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.
3. The inablilty to say no is largely about approval-seeking—people imagine that if they say no, they won't be loved by others. The inability to say yes, however—to intimacy, job opportunity, an alcohol program—is more about lack of trust in oneself.
Lori, the therapist
1. "Maybe what you're grieving isn't just the breakup, though I know this experience feels devastating." He pauses, and when he speaks again, his voice is softer. "I wonder if you're grieving something bigger than the loss of your boyfriend."
2. You're not choosing the pain, but you're choosing the suffering." So he suggests, if i'm clinging to the suffering so tightly, I must be getting something out of it. It must be serving some purpose for me. Maybe. Is it a way to numb out so I don't have to think about the reality of what happened? Possibly. Is it a way of avoiding what I should be paying attention to in my life but I don't want to.
3. Don't judge the feelings, notice them. Use them as your map. Don't be afraid of the truth.
4. Therapists talk a lot about how the past informs the present—how our histories affect the way we think, feel, and behave and how at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past. If we don't accept the notion that there's no redo, much as we try to get our parents or siblings or partners to fix what happened years ago, our past will keep us stuck.
5. Then there's the fact that losses tend to be multilayered. There's the actual loss (in my case, of boyfriend), and the underlying loss (what it represents).
6. We all have a deep yearning to understand ourselves and be understood. 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 don the very thing that will guarantee my own unhappiness over and over again?
7. The therapist explained that often different parts of ourselves want different things, and if we silence the parts we find unacceptable, they'll fine other ways to be heard.
8. Part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you've told yourself about who you are so that you aren't tarpped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you've been telling yourself about your life.
"No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." —— Einstein （保持原先的心智/状态/学识的话，问题永远无法得到解决。想要解决问题，那必先提升/改变自己，陷入固有的思维模式是无法解决这种思维模式下产生的问题的。）
9. Sometimes we imprison ourselves with a narrative of self-punishment. If we have a choice between believing one of two things, both of which we have evidence for—I'm unlovable, I'm lovable—often we choose the one that makes us feel bad. Why do we keep our radio tuned to the same static-ridden stations (that everyone's-life-is-better-than-mine station, the I-can't-trust-people station, the nothing-works-out-for-me station) instead of moving the dial up or down?
10. I think about how I wish everyone could do this more in daily life, simply be together with no phones, laptops, TVs, or idle chitchat. Just presence.
11. Is there anything that makes us feel more vulnerable than asking someone, Do you like me?
12. It's easy to conflate the intimate experience of romance or sex with the intimate experience of having somebody pay undivided attention to the details of your life, accept you fully, support you without competing agendas, and know you so deeply.
13. The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.
The more you welcome your vulnerability, the less afraid you'll feel.
14. 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. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep. We talk about how hard it can be to get attached and say goodbye.
Lori, as a therapist
1. Presenting problem is the issue that sends a person into therapy. It might be a panic attack, a job loss, a death, a birth, a relational difficulty, an inhability to make a big life decision, or a bout of depression. Sometimes the presenting problem is less specific—a felling of "stuckness"or the vague but nagging notion that something just isn't quiet right.
2. He needs to help the patient replace the defense with something else so that he doesn't leave the person raw and exposed with no protection whatsoever.
3. People create faulty narratives to make themselves feel better in the moment even though it makes them feel worse over time—and that sometimes, they need somebody else to read betweent the lines.
提问：Why would we choose a profession that requires us to meet unhappy, distressed, abrasive, or unaware people and sit with them, one after the other alone in a room?
4. Because therapists know that at first, each patient is simply a snapshot, a person captured in a particular moment. It's like a photo of you taken from an unfortunate angle and with a sour expression on your face. There might also be a photo in which you are glowing, caught opening a present or mid-laugh with a lover. Both are you in that fi\raction of time, and neither is you in your entirety.
5. I once heard creativity described as being the ablity 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.
6. Our experience with this person (patient) are important because we're probably feeling something pretty similar to what everyone else in the patient's life feels.
7. Before successful therapy, it's the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it's one damn thing after another.
8. Our work is an intricate dance between support and confrontation.
9. No matter the circumstances, there seemed to be this common element of loneliness, a craving for but a lack of a strong sense of human connection.
10. Erikson's stages continue throughout the entire lifespan, and each interrelated stage involves a crisis that we need to get through to move on to the next. They look like this:
Infant (hope)— trust versus mistrust
Toddler (will) — antonomy versus shame
Preschooler (purpose) — initiative versus guilt
School-age child (competence) — industry versus inferiority
Adolescent (fidelity) — identity versus role confusion
Young adult (love) — intimacy versus isolation
Middle-aged adult (care) — generativity versus stagnation
Older adult (wisdom) — integrity versus despair
11. Just as parents raise their kids to leave them one day, therapists work to lose patients, not retain them.
12. There's no hierachy of pain. Suffering shouldn't be ranked, because pain is not a contest. What seem like trivial worries are often manifestations of deeper ones.
13. Therapists get depth but not breadth.
