Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Part of why this website exists is a belief that it helps to know your therapist as a person, not just a professional. That is exactly the gift of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone — it opens the door of the therapy room from both sides.

What the book offers

Gottlieb is a psychotherapist in Los Angeles whose life abruptly cracks open, and who finds herself — with great reluctance — in a therapist's waiting room. Alongside her own sessions, she introduces four of her clients: a self-absorbed television producer, a newlywed diagnosed with terminal cancer, a sixty-nine-year-old artist who plans to end her life on her seventieth birthday if nothing improves, and a young woman who keeps choosing the wrong partners and drinks to cope.

None of them are who they first appear to be. Watching each story unfold, you quietly learn how therapy works: the pace of trust, the usefulness of resistance, the way change sneaks in sideways.

Reading it as a clinician

I smiled in recognition through many chapters — and winced in recognition through others. Therapists cry in their cars, doubt themselves, and need help too. That is not a weakness of the profession; it is the proof that therapy rests on shared humanity rather than superiority.

For clients, I think the most healing chapters are the ones where Gottlieb is a difficult client herself. If a trained therapist can dodge, minimize, and cancel sessions — and still grow — there is real permission in that.

My takeaway, in one line: we grow in connection with others — insight without connection rarely changes a life.

Who I would hand it to

Anyone who has hovered over a "book a session" button and closed the tab. This book will not push you — but it will quietly show you what is waiting on the other side of that first, awkward hello.