Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, from Lori Gottlieb
A therapist’s journey of therapy, listening to other people and coping their own.

• World is full of idiots, argument, even if we change our way, it won’t change other people, true, but those difficult people is us from Chapter 1: Idiots.
• Therapists hold a mirror to patients
• You are behind a jail, and clutching at the bars, but you can always walk out of that prison on either side. The struggle is once you realize that there are prison bars and that you are holding yourself hostage behind them, and that you could have walked at any time outside, how much work are you willing to put to actually get out of there.
  • Thinking the above point connects to Viktor Frankl’s releasing the pressure, when they are no longer part of the camp, the sudden pressure release didn’t go well with a lot of folks, they were stomping on flowers, other people’s crops, coz they went through a lot of injustice and felt they have the right to wrong other people now.
  • Connecting it with Stockholm Syndrome (a reach)
  • Connecting it with the quote, better the known devil than devil unknown.
• If I screw up my own life, I can engineer my own death than have it happen to me, having the false sense of security of having control.
• The speed of life is outdated by the speed of want, we want things fast enough.

All are dotted line connections.

I wanna do justice to this book and write all my learnings here, but two blog deadlines have already passed and although two and half hours of the book is still left to read. I wanna churn out some of the curdling insights.

There are four ultimate concerns, that makes us miserable:
* Death
* Isolation
* Freedom
* Meaninglessness

Before you break any habit or take any action, you go through these phases:
* Pre-contemplation (lightly in your subconscious)
* Contemplation
* Preparation
* Action
* Maintenance

From another podcast, I have been listening to Multiamory, Morgan Housel’s book The Psychology of Money, also has a piece on it, it’s the concept of Reactance (mentioned in my previous blog). When we feel our freedom is being taken away, we have a strong reaction to it. For example, you see a blank wall and it’s written “Please don’t write here”, you will some resistance but it’s a suggestion or a request, but if the note says “Please absolutely don’t dare to write here” even in a non-provocative way, with strong words, seems to trigger us. It used to happen a lot to us, when we were kids, me and my brother would be just about to do some chore out of our own free will and mom would shout from the kitchen “hey! finish this chore” and Reactance would take over.

TODO: @calra
Expand more on the four ultimate concerns and maybe expand this blog once we are done with the first pass of the book.

Singular Note from My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman
Don’t apologize for provoking people, they not getting a handle on their emotions, it’s on them.
(Elsa getting scolded by the school headmaster for provoking the boy, who hit her, coz boys will be boys, she shouldn’t have provoked, at this point, the granny has thrown the globe at the headmaster coz he provoked her.)

Cheers,
Calra