Lori Gottlieb: Understanding pain, therapeutic breakthroughs, and keys to enduring emotional health

We like to say that insight is the booby prize of therapy, meaning you can have all the insight in the world, but if you don't make changes out in the world, the insight is useless.

Therapy is like getting a really good second opinion on your life from somebody who is not in your life ... The people in your life—they're too close to the situation, so if you really want a good second opinion on your life, go to a therapist who can look at you from the perspective of not having all that other information.

Why do people need a terminal diagnosis to really pay attention to what they want to do in their lives? We shouldn't need that ... We all have a terminal diagnosis—life has a 100% mortality rate.

Be aware. Be aware of the gift of your life today when you wake up be intentional about how you want to live your life. What are your priorities? Are you living those?

All these studies will tell you if you look them up that the most important factor in the success of someone's therapy is the relationship that you have with your therapist. It matters more than the training the therapist has, than the modality that they're using, than the number of years of experience. Not that those things don't matter—they absolutely do, but the thing that matters the most is that relationship.

I don't think there is a greater ROI that a person can make than investing in their emotional health because without it, all of the other things don't matter.

Humans are ridiculous. And I mean that in the most compassionate way that I think that we as humans we say one thing and we do another all the time. And I think that's funny the ways that we act the ways that we try to protect ourselves, which actually don't protect us.

When the story of my life is gonna be told, the people who are going to have literally saved my life are going to be the people who helped me with my mental health, and I don't think that can be overstated.

Most big transformations come about from the dozens or even hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible steps that we take along the way.

So many times people come to therapy and say, 'Tell me what to do,' and what I want to help them do is find the answer inside because it's there—they just can't hear it yet.

Before diagnosing someone with depression, make sure they aren't surrounded by assholes.

I think those moments in life when you feel like you really didn't want something to happen are often the moments when something really transformative is about to happen.

That's why... change is so hard—because we cling to the familiar. We cling to what we know. So, even if you're making a really positive change, sometimes we fight that because we don't like uncertainty.

I feel like I went from telling people stories as a journalist to helping people change their stories as a therapist.

A lot of us would rather blame other people or other circumstances for why we can't have happiness or joy or meaning or whatever it is in our lives than to say, 'Oh, now I'm responsible for that, and if it doesn't work out, that's on me.'