Q&A with lori gottlieb
REDgen was able to chat with New York Times bestselling author, Lori Gottlieb, about parenting and youth mental health.
REDgen: In your experience, what is the importance of youth mental health?
Lori Gottlieb: I think youth mental health is so important for a number of reasons. The first is that people learn about their emotional health and how to take care of themselves when they’re growing up. I think it’s really important to give people the tools to handle the vicissitudes of our emotions, to recognize warning signs when they feel like they need to reach out and get help, to take away stigma around getting help, to normalize struggle – that we all go through things – and I think that young people especially feel like they’re the only ones going through whatever they’re going through because people don’t necessarily talk about it. There’s a lot of maybe they’re embarrassed, maybe they’re ashamed, and especially I think in this world of Instagram and social media […] of course, intellectually they realize “Oh, that’s a curated version of somebody’s life.” But I think it’s really hard when they’re seeing all these images of everybody’s seemingly perfect lives and they’re experiencing something else. So I also think they need to learn about being able to find a person that they can talk to, and knowing that the longer that they wait, the harder it’s going to be. It’s a prevention model; if something feels wrong with their bodies they’re not going to wait until they’re very, very sick before they tell someone or they go to a doctor. But we want them to do that with mental health problems: “Something feels off. It’s not a crisis, but I’m having a hard time.” That’s when you want them to be talking, and you want it to be ongoing conversations. You don’t want it to be like people never talk about this. You want it to be an environment where people talk all the time about what’s going on with them, and how they’re feeling, and how they’re struggling, and how they’re getting through it.
R: Everything you just said aligns well with what REDgen is all about: really getting ahead of it and starting the conversation early so that when youth get to the point when they’re like “Something’s off!” they know who they can go to. They know some things that they can do already.
LG: And they know that it’s normal! To have times in your life when you struggle, and that it will pass. I think people, when they get to that point, they think they’re never going to feel better. “I’m always going to feel like this.” I mean this is where, when you’ve had some suicides in your community, it’s that feeling of, “I’m the only one. It’s never going to get better.” They can’t see things clearly. So when the conversations are always there, when it’s a normal part of life, people struggle and then they get through it, I think that people are much more likely to come to somebody much earlier.
R: Many in the REDgen community are parents of children who may or may not be struggling with their mental health. In what ways is your book for parents like them?
LG: I think what it does is it helps people to start having these conversations. I think that adults are the best model that kids can have, around what it looks like to be emotionally healthy. And I think that what the book does is it helps them to see themselves, to see their blind spots, to see the places that maybe they have some work to do, so that they can grow, so they can change, so they can be more self aware, so they can be more aware of their children as well. I also think the book just normalizes the human condition. When parents see their kids struggling they worry so much. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” And I think that what the book does is it will help them to relax a little bit and not be so anxious around what they or their kids might be experiencing.
R: Yes! When I read your book, I went into it thinking it was going to be a great book about therapy, and at the end of it, I felt like the book was about life and what we all experience!
LG: Right, I mean even the title “Maybe you should talk to someone” doesn’t mean everybody should go talk to a therapist, it means we need to talk more to each other. We all need to be talking more to each other. And I think that parents fall into the same trap as our kids, which is we aren’t talking to each other. I see a lot of couples in my practice, and I see they’re what we call “co-computing” at night. They’re on their respective screens sitting next to each other, but they’re not actually connecting. So I think if anything, the book is so much about how we grow in connection with others. And as parents sometimes, we aren’t necessarily connecting with our kids because we are doing the same things that they’re doing, which is we’re looking at our phones and going, “Uh huh.” I think that sometimes we forget, what is it like to just sit in a room without devices with your child and hang out? What does that look like? They will talk a lot more to you and you will learn a lot more about them just by hanging out with them, as opposed to, the rush of this activity and that activity, when there’s that down time. There’s a chapter in the book called “The speed of want” and it’s really about how we need to slow down and really be intentional about making time for just being with each other. And in a realistic way. It doesn’t mean don’t go to activities. It doesn’t mean don’t use your technology. It means if we don’t intentionally say, “Ok, we’re going to put our phones in a basket at dinner time,” or what ever it is, then it won’t happen. And kids aren’t going to talk to you when you’re like “Hey, tell me about your life!” They’re going to talk to you in the spaces between things. When you’re in the car and they’re going to talk to you or you’re like hanging out with them and playing a game, or you’re watching TV and it’s a commercial. And that’s what people do. They don’t want the interrogation.
R: What do you hope readers, and particularly parents, feel at the end of this book?
LG: I hope that they feel inspired and I hope that they feel encouraged to pay attention to the life that we all have, to be more aware of the patterns that they might be in in their lives that are taking up a lot of emotional real estate. I think that they will very grateful at the end of the book, for the self awareness, and inspired to live in a way that is consistent with how they want to live and examine a little more what they can do to feel more connected in general, with their partners, with their friends, with their families, with their children.
R: What is one piece of advice you would give to parents who want their children to be mentally and emotionally well?
LG: Make sure that you are mentally and emotionally well. The best thing that you can do is to make sure that you are walking the walk, that you are practicing what you preach. And that means that if you are talking to your child about what I like to call “emotional hygiene,” which is how we take care of ourselves: are you getting outside? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you connecting with people in a way that feels nourishing? Are there certain patterns that you have or things that you haven’t worked out? Self-talk is a big thing, how unkind we can be to ourselves, all of the self-criticism. If you aren’t modeling those kinds of things in your lives: being kind to yourself, having compassion for yourself. When you make a mistake and you say, “Oh, that was so stupid!” your kid hears that. Or do you say, “Oh! I made a mistake. Ok, now I know what to do.” Modeling all of those kinds of things that will make them emotionally aware and also emotionally resilient.
R: I’m so happy you brought that up because I feel like in our work there’s so much focus on the kids, the devices, the activities, and the pressure that’s going on in their lives, and I feel like sometimes we do forget to step back and ask how we are modeling this for our children. We forget how impressionable they are based on how we act.
LG: Kids are paying a lot of attention to not what we say, but what we do. And kids are the best hypocrisy meters we will ever find, because they’re going to call you on all of your inconsistencies.
R: Is there anything else that you would like to touch on?
LG: Just that point that we discussed earlier which is the book is not about therapy, it’s about being able to see ourselves more clearly so that we can live better lives. […]There’s a theme that permeates this book that is, “What are we waiting for?” We have this one life and sometimes it can feel very long, but I think especially as parents it goes by very quickly. How do we want to live our lives? We really need to pay attention. We can’t put it on the back burner and say “I’ll deal with that later.” Life is happening now.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Every year, nearly 30 million Americans sit on a therapist’s couch—and some of these patients are therapists. In her remarkable new book, Lori Gottlieb tells us that despite her license and rigorous training, her most significant credential is that she’s a card-carrying member of the human race. “I know what it’s like to be a person,” she writes, as a crisis causes her world to come crashing down.
Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.
As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients’ lives—a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can’t stop hooking up with the wrong guys (even one from the waiting room)—she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.
With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb reveals our blind spots, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply personal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.