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" There’s a term we use in therapy: forced forgiveness. Sometimes people feel that in order to get past a trauma, they need to forgive whoever caused the damage—the parent who sexually assaulted them, the burglar who robbed their house, the gang member who killed their son. They’re told by well-meaning people that until they can forgive, they’ll hold on to the anger. Granted, for some, forgiveness can serve as a powerful release—you forgive the person who wronged you, without condoning his actions, and it allows you to move on. But too often people feel pressured to forgive and then end up believing that something’s wrong with them if they can’t quite get there—that they aren’t enlightened enough or strong enough or compassionate enough. So what I say is this: You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn’t one of them. "
― Lori Gottlieb , Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
95
" Typically therapists are several steps ahead of our patients—not because we’re smarter or wiser but because we have the vantage point of being outside their lives. I’ll say to a patient who has bought the ring but can’t seem to find the right time to propose to his girlfriend, “I don’t think you’re sure you want to marry her,” and he’ll say, “What? Of course I am! I’m doing it this weekend!” And then he goes home and doesn’t propose, because the weather was bad and he wanted to do it at the beach. We’ll have the same dialogue for weeks, until one day he’ll come back and say, “Maybe I don’t want to marry her.” Many people who say, “No, that’s not me,” find themselves a week or a month or a year later saying, “Yeah, actually, that’s me. "
― Lori Gottlieb , Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
96
" She hadn’t expected to experience this pleasure in her grief, to find it invigorating, in a way. But even as she’s dying, she’s realized, life goes on—even as the cancer invades her body, she still checks Twitter. At first she thought, Why would I waste even ten minutes of the time I have left checking Twitter? And then she thought, Why wouldn’t I? I like Twitter! "
― Lori Gottlieb , Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed