Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Oh man, this book. This was an emotional wrecking ball. I lost count of how many times I've cried and teared up while reading this book, and any book that makes me confront these emotions and thoughts automatically gets 5 stars.

When I first picked up the book, I almost DNFed within the first few chapters because it seemed a little flippant and superficial. We have Lori talking about a client who is constantly complaining about how everyone around him is an asshole, and then Lori herself venting about what a sociopathic asshole her ex-boyfriend is. It all felt a little mundane and almost like high school drama. As the book progresses, however, my impression of it changed dramatically. More and more stories are revealed about not just the clients that Lori sees, but also about Lori herself. We see the rawness of her clients in her practice, and herself when she goes for her therapy sessions. I appreciate the structure and the pacing of the book, as if we are also put in Lori's position, being both therapist and therapy client at the same time to Lori. We hear Lori at first like a new patient, barging in with an immediate and seemingly superficial problem (reeling from the anger of a breakup), but then as the book goes on, we get to know her better and understand how it stems from much deeper fears and anxieties that many of us can very much identify and relate to.

All the stories of the clients talked about in this book touched me in some way or other and made me cry, but it was especially John, Julia, Rita, and Lori's own story that hit the hardest. By the last few chapters of the book, I again felt like DNFing for a completely different reason: I felt exhausted that it was making me confront so many of my own fears and anxieties and hitting so many raw spots. I reminded myself, however, that this is the discomfort that therapy is supposed to make you feel, and confronting them will eventually help me deal with it better. That's not to say that I think this book is a replacement for therapy, of course, but it might make give you some introspect into some deeply hidden raw spots that you have been running away from for so long that you barely realise it's still there anymore, and which may then serve you to bring to therapy in the future.

So overall, I highly recommend this book (and therapy) to just about everyone. It does deal with many triggering topics which can be hard to deal with for a lot of people, but I think that that is the whole point of it. This book is likely to make you feel uncomfortable, pensive, and even pained, but it also offers some hope and commiseration - you're not the only person who deals with these fears, and these are stories of people and how they've pieced themselves together after some truly horrible experiences.