Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed - Lori Gottlieb

Do I need therapy? Does everyone need therapy? I'm not sure but I feel like I want to go to therapy after reading Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. I suppose we are all carrying around pain and hurt in our lives. Perhaps childhood trauma or adolescent trauma or adult trauma. Maybe we're carrying around all these things and a therapist is there to help carry that load.

Now really, the author chose her poignant and successful patients here. Maybe therapy doesn't work out for everyone. But there's real heartbreak in this book and it is a heavy read at times. But also hopeful. Whether its the standoffish oaf who tries so hard to push everyone away, the elderly woman dealing with her loneliness, the terminal patient facing impending death, the lonely woman making all the wrong partner choices, or the author herself who faces a devastating breakup- all their stories author insight into the depths of our despair to where hope and growth might lie.

The book is well laid out between the author's own experience and that of her patients. Each patient grows and works along with the author to meet their goals. The cadence is well written and the patients are revealed to the reader as they become known to the author - slowly and through the building of trust.

4/5 Stars. 

Perfectly Yourself - Matthew Kelly

I saw author Matthew Kelly speak at our church earlier this year as part of Dynamic Catholic's Living Your Life With Passion and Purpose series. I came away from that event feeling re-energized about my relationship with God and the things I could do with the limited talents and time I have here on Earth. 

Perfectly Yourself was this year's Best Lent Ever book and I didn't read it at the time so I thought I'd pick it up now and use it as a boost of adrenaline to get me back in that space I was in following the February program. On the whole, this book was not as dynamic and energizing and Matthew Kelly's live presentation. I did take away some very good nuggets of trying to attain a more perfect version of myself, but overall I found the book repetitious to the point of tedium in some places which made it a much slower read than its 210 pages would suggest. 

I'm really glad I read the book because I believe some of the things I picked up are going to be life-long lessons - or at least life long language that I apply to lessons. For example:

When work is approached in the right way and with the right frame of mind, it helps us to become more perfectly ourselves. Who you are is infinitely more important that what you do or what you have.

Um yes, possessions mean nothing, work titles can mean nothing if WHO you are is not a person worth knowing, or not being value added. 

I also liked this nugget from St. Augustine:

Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you. 

It's not enough to pray. You have to put in the work. I think this message is lost a lot today, about putting in the work in order to see results. People want the easy fix, the magic pill. There is no magic pill. Results in any arena require work. 

And lastly, Kelly makes a distinction early in the book which I have thought a lot about over the last month - the difference between happiness and pleasure. Pleasure is the feeling you get from a good piece of cake, or a entertaining movie, a moving song. But it's not happiness. Happiness is not a thing that can be sought an attained. Happiness is a by-product of living your life in a way as to try to be perfectly yourself. Happiness is sustaining and life changing and deep. Pleasure is momentary and shallow. So now when I find myself doing something or saying yes to something, I want to make sure that I know whether my motivation is for pleasure, which is perfectly fine, so long as I'm not looking for it to fulfill my need for happiness.

3/5 Stars.