I recently read a best-selling book called “Maybe You Should Have a Chat with Someone”. The author is Lori Gottlieb. She is a psychiatrist and a TV show planner. Now this book is being adapted into a U.S. drama, and Lori will also participate in the production. Maybe in two years you will be able to see the U.S. drama of the same name.
The book “Maybe You Should Have a Chat with Someone” is mainly about the stories of four of Lori’s visitors, but she is also a main character herself. When Lori was in her early 30s, she wanted to be a mother, and gave birth to her own child using sperm from a sperm donor. Later she met her boyfriend, who was slightly older than him. The two people had reached the stage of discussing marriage, but one day, her boyfriend suddenly said to her, I like you, but I can’t bear to have another child in my family. My child is going to university, and I finally managed to be clean. After a while, if you marry you, your 8-year-old son gets up in the morning and asks me to play Lego with him. I can’t bear it. Lori said, when you dated me, you knew that I had a child, so why did you say you couldn’t stand it now? The boyfriend said, I want to be clean anyway, I love you, but can’t stand your children. As a result, the two broke up, Lori was shocked, so, as a psychologist, she also needed a psychologist to solve her problems.
Everyone’s life is full of fragments of experience, for some people they are very harmonious, for some people they represent a split personality.
The author Lori wrote about the process of receiving psychological counseling in the book. This book is mainly composed of the stories of five characters, each of whom’s stories are interspersed and told, and the progress of the story is controlled in a timely manner. After all, Lori has participated in the production of American dramas and is very good at script writing, so she writes very well. The technique she often uses is to delay, strengthen the sharpness of the conflict, and strengthen the audience’s expectation.
When I read this book, I remembered another book written by American psychologist Evan Boss called “Story Healing”. He used novels as an example to provide a mental framework for psychologists. The book says that it is the most basic task of novelists and therapists to use unusual keen feelings to experience the “clues” in life. The psychologist is talking to the visitor, and what he said needs special treatment by you. Need your keenness. In psychology, the identity of the story creator is more obscure than in the novel. The story clues developed in psychotherapy are co-created by the psychologist and the visitor. They are co-authors. Sometimes, the psychologist is like the reader of the novel. He is receiving life stories told by visitors. He should guide and encourage them in a timely manner. He should recognize the three characteristics of a good story—organization, directionality, and affordability.
Everyone’s life is full of fragments of experience. For some people, these fragments are very harmonious. For some people, these fragments represent divided personality. The therapist must integrate the contradictory places. These fragments are just It can be experienced as an effective part of complex human nature. This is rationality.
In the process of psychological counseling, both the therapist and the client need to feel the direction they are advancing. To see the progress step by step, this is the directionality.
There is also a characteristic called tolerance. Some visitors are deeply in pain, and other aspects of life are covered up, such as humor, diversity of interests, sense of adventure and mystery, and love. These elements are all in life. I can’t see it, just like a novel that is painful except for pain. The psychologist must have sympathetic support, find the dawn of possibility, observe with a sense of humor, and let the story unfold gradually.
From this perspective, part of psychological counseling is psychology and part is narrative. When we read psychological self-help books, we can also treat it as a novel. If we can look at psychological counseling from a narrative perspective, it will help to integrate our life experience. The master of psychology Owen Yaron once wrote a book called “Existential Psychotherapy”, in which the main topics are loneliness, sense of meaning and death anxiety. These topics are precisely the topics of literature. Lori said that the job of a psychologist is to erect a mirror to allow visitors to look at themselves from the previously avoided perspective. When we read psychological self-help books or read some literature books, we are actually looking at ourselves in the glasses by the way.
