Irv Yalom in conversation with Lori Gottlieb at Live Talks Los Angeles

welcome to another virtual live talks los angeles event we welcome irv yellow and lori gottlieb to our series we invite you to visit and subscribe to our youtube channel for over 300 conversations follow us on twitter facebook and instagram our handle is live talks la irv's book co-authored with his late wife marilyn is a matter of death and life he is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the stanford university school of medicine he has devoted his career to counseling those suffering from anxiety and grief and his books have been published in 30 languages he has written fiction and non-fiction and his classic textbooks are inpatient group psychotherapy and existential psychotherapy which have trained generations of therapists lori gottlieb is a psychotherapist and author of maybe you should talk to someone in addition to her clinical practice she writes the atlantic weekly's dear therapist advice column and is co-host of the popular deer therapists podcast i am ted haptigaber founder and producer of the series welcome everyone they will talk and towards the end i will pose some questions that came from you in the audience take it from here lori well hi irv it's great to see you hi laurie nice to see you so just to let people know you are about to turn 90 and even long before i became a therapist i had been reading your books and following your work and what you did in terms of sharing your humanity in the therapy room really revolutionized the field and i think it's safe to say that you have inspired and educated many thousands of clinicians around the world and by extension i think helped all of the clients who came to see them but i think more than that you've changed the lives of millions of readers who have seen themselves in your books so today we're going to talk about your latest book a matter of death and life and it's probably also your most personal and this is something that you co-wrote with your wife marilyn and she was dying of cancer and it is an absolutely magnificent memoir that is both a love story and a heartbreaking story of grief and i think more than that it asks us to ask ourselves the important questions about our own lives you you don't allow us to look away and so i think what's fascinating about this book a matter of death and life is that like in your other books you let us into your inner world but this time it's not in relation to your patients it's in relation to the most important person in your life which is your wife marilyn and just so that people understand the context for this book can you tell us a little bit about how you met back when you were i think 14 years old okay well i can't help noticing how labile i am as i hear you talking about i'm already tearing up it's quite amazing to me as i kind of watch myself and what i'm doing in in my time of grief but the the question you were asking about how this book began uh and there's a picture on the on the cover of marilyn and me walking along a path near a park right a block or two from our home that's the past and we were walking along just like that and um marilyn says to me you know i've been thinking i think you and i should should write a book together about what's happening now to me and to to my life and to this cancer so i think you and i should write a book together uh and uh i responded saying you know i think that's that's a great idea for a book for you marilyn i i'm just starting on another book of stories though so you know you go ahead and do this book uh maryland was only a hundred pounds uh but she's very tough and and quite uh quite staunch in in her her ideas and she said oh no no you're not you're not writing that book you're writing this book with me and um and so that's how this book started and from that point on until she died she and i wrote alternating chapters and after she died i wrote the last part of the book myself looking at uh what was happening to me and then studying my own grief the the interesting point though that i i wanted to make is that this that's only half the story the other half of the story took place so something like uh what like 70 years before that uh when i first met her the uh i first met her by crashing a party at her home and uh climbing through the window with uh one of the bowling alley guys that i used to bowl with i didn't know who she was but i saw her and it was the first woman i think i'd ever talked to we were both 14 and went over and i got her phone number and i called her the next day and we set up a date for the following day and we were meeting at an ice cream store near her home and and and we we and we met there and then she told me she was very tired because she had uh she had skipped school that day and i said you skipped school that day i knew she was an outstanding student she was always the valedictorian of class she said yes she'd stayed up all night reading the book oh what book was it a gone with the wind uh it's a long book uh and uh that's a movie with clark gable later on but she'd stayed up all night reading that book and she just couldn't go to school the next day and i was absolutely flabbergasted when i saw that the idea that she would so much love reading just appealed to me tremendously because i spent a lot of my childhood reading i grew up in a very very poor dangerous neighborhood it was not safe outside and spent a lot of time at the library and always reading so it's the first person i ever met who seemed to care as much about books that i do so our relationship started with that story and ends with the story of our writing this book together you guys grew up very close to each other but you grew up in very different neighborhoods so you had very different kinds of upbringings and you were drawn to her because she was somebody who shared your passion for reading was was um you know very interested in the life of the mind what do you think drew her to you i think it was books i i don't think she probably met anyone who i used to write a lot of poetry but for our first time that we were together when we went to visit my home i'm reading the things that i had had written talking about all the books i was reading books were so much a part of my life i think that's what drew her to me there wasn't much else i was very anxious i had really no manners i had hardly ever talked to a girl before she was always the most popular girl in her class i was pretty friendless until i joined a high school fraternity that was very helpful to me so i guess that's what drew her to me uh and i think the fact that we we shared this love of writing right from the beginning of our lives and and it turns out that that became a big thread through your marriage where i think she edited a lot of your work and you edited a lot of hers or at least gave feedback on it and you i think you matched each other book for book throughout your lifetimes um what has it been like so you wrote the first half of the book with her and she was editing your work what about the second half of the book after she had died what was it like for the first time in your life not having marilyn there as your editor especially because this material was so much about your marriage yeah that was a new experience for me she always read everything that i wrote and she was always my first reader and i was always her first reader although she was a better editor than i was she was the head of her of the high school uh newspaper too so she really knew her way around the editing so um trying trying to write this with without maryland was was was an unusual experience for me um and um what happened really after after she died i was entering into uh grief beginning to experience what that was like uh one of the things that i did to help me was to i looked at a whole row of my books in my bedroom of my own books i've never really re-read any of the books i'd written and i started reading them over again very interesting experiment experience for me in that it was so helpful and each time i read a book i said did i write this where did i get this idea from how did i do this and then i picked up a book that's called mama and the meaning of life the book of stories and i was astonished when i looked at i think the second or third story in that book which which is entitled uh something like eight advanced lessons in the therapy of grief a therapy of grief i've forgotten all about that and i reread that story with with uh with astonishment and it was it was an interesting story it was a story of a woman who had not only lost her husband uh she was a college professor at stanford but she'd also lost her her brother a couple of years before that she was in deep grief and i tried to uh to work with her uh but somehow she she she was very uh at times very combative with me and she keeps saying oh you you know you you don't know what i'm feeling you sit there in that nice pink striped shirt nothing's ever happened to you you've learned such a ideal life etc etc and and so we would we would we would argue like that i would say to her oh you mean i got to be depressed to treat a depressed patient or do i have to be schizophrenic to work with a schizophrenic patient well we have these arguments so you know almost shouting at one another but now that i'm i'm going through i've gone through a lot of grief about marilyn now i really know how she felt and now i think she was right uh i think i could work with a patient in grief so much better than i could now i really know what she was going through as she talked about her numbness and her depression so that was that was one of the experiences i had during the grieve of rereading my my own material i remembered that story and i remembered you know there's something very interesting about being a therapist where people often will say to us as therapists you can't possibly understand you're not going through this exact experience you don't know what it feels like and i think there is that knee-jerk reaction to say well i can imagine it but you can't really imagine it and i think that's what's so beautiful about your your ability to acknowledge what you know and what you don't know and and in this case um you know it wasn't until marilyn died that i think you fully understood what that patient meant because as you have gone through your grief and you write about in your book you experience all of these things that are quite surprising to you one of them is that um you start to think a lot about sex which was which was something that that i think you know wasn't what you had anticipated especially given how gutted you were after marilyn died can you talk a little bit about that yeah it was thinking about sex much more than i usually do it was also thinking particularly about women's breasts i somehow i got fixated on that in a way that i never had before i think it has a a lot to do with my with my mother with my needy nurturance perhaps but that that was one of a very strange experience but i knew a lot about that as i started to read some of my own work uh many many of the patients i saw who might have a coronary and start to grope the nurses in the ambulance uh as though they want to get re reunited with this vital force in life again as they feared the the ending of it so that was that was certainly one experience and and the kind of numbness that i felt was another and the kind of sessions that i had like the sexual obsessions i could not get him out of my mind i had this obsession of somehow thinking about tiananmen square in china and the tanks running over the students maybe that was because on tv there's some hong kong riots that were being in the news just at that time and maybe that made me think but i didn't want to think about those things but i could not get them out of my mind so i had a real education about what what grief was really like and i i could see the things that set me back one day i decided well we've got two cars i i'll sell one of the cars now i fill up the garage so they don't need it so i sold marilyn's car and i went out the next day and i just got thrown into a terrible depression as i saw her car was there uh that hit me so hard so uh i i i i knew from the very beginning that my prognosis was not going to be good i've rarely worked i worked with a lot of people who were in grief uh but i i never worked with anyone who had this kind of uh lifelong attachment to the person there was a time that i was leading groups of of of of women of women and men who had lost their spouses i i led that group for for for many years so i consider myself a rather an expert in working with grief but now i realize how much i didn't know about it at the time well i think what you're also talking about is comparative grief where a lot of people like you just said you know i had this experience where i was attached to this person for over 60 years and so my grief i knew i was gonna have a lot of difficulty with um but but i think that a lot of people would take issue with that and they would say well just because you spent longer with this person doesn't mean that your grief is more profound and um and i think that people tend to do that in grief and that comes up too where i think you're so um willing to lay yourself bare and say things um you know that i'm sure your patients have said to you all the time you know no one could understand because i had this relationship with this person or i lost a child and nobody could understand what that is like um and i think you also talk about anticipatory loss which is that grief doesn't start when after the person dies um you know in the case of some something like you went through with marilyn um i think that you were grieving from the moment you realized that this was going to kill her because when she first got her diagnosis i think both of you felt rather optimistic about her prognosis that she could live with this for quite a while and then things turned very quickly in a different direction um and so there's this moment where you know you're in denial about this and she is not and that's what's really interesting about the book is that you know when she's writing a chapter she's very clear about how much time she has left and you have this you know way of of not really not really facing it and at one point she says i wonder if i'll be around during the holidays and you say to her well what are you talking about of course you'll be around during the holidays and she writes in her chapter that she didn't quite know what to do with that because she knew that she might not be around during the holidays and she didn't know whether it would be kinder to you to indulge your denial or to help you to see reality and she she was sort of stuck about what to do about that and i imagine that that's a common experience for people who are dying and the person or the people around them who love them are in denial about it yes this is absolutely right on she was suffering a great deal i knew a little bit about her disease multiple myeloma i know that it's it's treatable many people live 15 20 years with it we tried everything with her every one of them failed but it was very hard for me to really acknowledge that the that she was not really treatable uh with that and then finally she she was suffering so much and and she decided that she want to have a physician physician-assisted death at that point and and we we were already involved with a hospice and in california if there are two md's who signed that she has a fatal illness and uh and that she's asking to have a physician-assisted death uh so she did that but there was a time that she said to me that this is it irv i i can't i can't i can't go on any longer uh so we called him and he came over that as quickly as he could with uh with medication and the laws are that the patient has to take the medication herself or himself um and and she did that he he ground up these pills and food the lotion and she she had to suff suck it up through a straw and i was with her she asked that her children her four children were there and so we we had to wait till they all arrived a couple of hours and so we were all with her at that point and and i watched her uh suck the medication through a straw and i i just counted her breasts after that and i counted about 16 breasts and and and she slipped away and i leaned over and and kissed her for a head at that point she was already ice cold it was something i'll never forget uh and i can't get it out of my mind either i'm not so sure it was a good idea for me to see that but it's a thought that i i keep on thinking and keep on seeing in my mind um and um but she did the right thing and if i were in her situation i i would too and it depends too on what state you live in the united states some of the states you can do that some of the states don't have that kind of law some of the states are perhaps a little bit more lenient like like oregon for example some of the countries uh like switzerland uh you know for example are the netherlands are you're much easier to get physician assistant death at that point i remember in the book when she first brought it up to you and you wrote the thought of suicide is a great consolation by means of it one gets through many a dark night and basically you were trying to humor her you were saying okay you know that that's okay um i give you my blessing when you really did it you were just trying to sort of mollify her so that she would know she always had an out if it got unbearable um and then you know one of the one of the things that comes back in the book a lot is nietzsche's quote die at the right time and marilyn was very aware of that she wanted to die at the right time and there's often a disconnect between what the person who's ill feels is the right time and what the people around them feel is the right time and there's a lot of that tension in the book as marilyn gets more and more clear about her condition and what she's willing to put up with in terms of quality of life where she really didn't have much quality of life at all at the end and what you know what her responsibility was to the people around her can you can you talk about the conversations that the two of you had around that well i i really was in in denial i really couldn't quite get my mind around how badly she really felt uh once i walked into the room the children were home she was in a room with all of our children giving away things to them jewelry things like that i'm astonished what are you doing you know she just casually gave away the things that we all treasured so much to the children and that absolutely astonished me so i was in denial for a long time but gradually gradually you know she couldn't walk out even out to the to the street uh a hundred feet to the mailbox and i it gradually became aware of the fact that that she was suffering greatly and when she said it's time to call the doctor i i did it immediately for her and i just wish that someone would be able to do that for me when my time comes one of the things that you talk about is the ways that memory play the what the role that memory plays and you know in people when we lose them and you were talking about how you're so afraid of your memories getting dimmer and dimmer um of of you know this incredibly long intimate relationship that you had um one of the things you talked about was going back to um i think it was a reunion at stamford and nobody from your original cohort of of clinicians that you had trained with was was alive and and what it's like to be sort of like one of the last remaining survivors of your group and um and and and part of that is not having them around now to talk to and part of it is that you're losing all those memories tell us more about that i i knew i was certain marilyn had an unbelievable memory i knew that when she died a lot of my past was going to disappear i had a good example of this last night i was watching the uh the ken burns hemingway series on pbs and i watched the final two hours of that and uh and it was about hemingway in world war ii and and then i i recall that marilyn hell and i wrote this article together i think my name is just on it but she helped me we went away for a long weekend somehow i don't know how this is what marilyn would have known she had gotten hold of xeroxes of some letters between hemingway and the u.s general who was invading who's invading friends at that point at normandy and we had those letters and we wrote i wrote an article about that for the archives of general psychiatry i know a lot about hemingway at that time but i started to think about maryland and i say well where did we get these letters from how could we have done it and what was the general's name i couldn't remember any of that oh if maryland were only here and and then right at the end about the last five minutes of that anyway show they mentioned buckle adam who was he who was the us general and suddenly i remembered that that was him and we had a series of letters that hemingway had written to buckle out him and that was what really was the meat of the article that i had written through the example but that's the sort of thing i meant she would have recalled everything about these letters where she got them from how she'd gotten this xerox of hemingway's personal letters i had no idea i would love to i'd love to know that story but i'll never know it now yeah there's all these things that you will never know and then also just the the personal stories between you or just the little moments between you like you you were talking about how you saw these photos and you were on vacation and you couldn't remember where you were on vacation or you know there's little things about your life that that you know when you say to your partner where were we or what was that restaurant we went to or what happened with that person on this trip she's not there it was always one way it was always asking her she had a phenomenal memory uh that uh that always was there um one of one of the memories that in my grief here that that came back to me was the uh was when we first we went to bellagio there was a writer's institute there and i got a rockefeller prize to go to this institute in bellagio in italy where uh where the the couple or the family went they had a nice apartment but then the the writer the person who got the award had this special writing room where he could he here she could write the book so while we were there marilyn was talking to me this was a long long time ago is that my first book and marilyn was talking to me about she'd been reading she was a french scholar french and german scholar that was her phd and she was telling me about the fact that she's been reading a lot of stories that have been written by eyewitnesses of the french revolution written by women and there and she more she talked about it to me i was saying to her you know she'd never written a book before and this is one of my first books and she was saying to me i was telling me that i said you know there's a book in there marilyn that sounds fascinating why don't we see if we could get you a a writing studio too so he went into the office uh at bellagio and and they said very currently you know we don't give offices for spouses wives our spouses husbands and uh just then the head of the bellagio had come through the room he said wait a minute there is an open office uh and it was uh in the woods about five or ten minutes away from the from the major building there we walked through the woods and they showed me there was a ladder going up to a tree house uh in a very large tree in the woods there and we walked up there and there was a wonderful little studio so sorry sorry so she absolutely loved it and that's that's how she wrote her first book and after that she matched me i think almost booked for book after that every time we were always writing books together she was always my first reader always my best editor i was her first reader all the time but not nearly the kind of editor she was so irv you know it's interesting i noticed that this in this conversation you've been particularly emotional um and i know that you've gone to therapy to help with your grief can you tell us a little bit about what it's like for someone like you who is known as the master therapist in many circles who has taught so many about the art of therapy what it's like in this really challenging time in your life to go and see a therapist who did you choose i mean not the person's name but what kind of therapist did you choose and what are those sessions like well i i chose a therapist a friend a couple friends of mine had seen her um and she uh i liked her so much i think it's because she works very much like i do but that but she's very open what do you mean by that she works like you do can you well she she's she's very open she's perfectly willing to talk about herself talk about experiences she's had uh she's uh she's quite a wonderful therapist and i i've i've really uh really treasured my my meetings with her for the past i would say maybe probably four or five months now i think so uh it's been quite comforting to me there are times i'm feeling it better and i think it's time to to stop it no no i'm i'm continuing to to meet with her it's it's kind of interesting for me to be in therapy i haven't been in therapy for a while maybe i don't know five or ten years i think so it's it's fascinating for me do you think so going back to that patient who said you don't really understand my grief the one who was in her 40s and lost her husband um do you think that she understands your grief i don't think she's had any particular personal experience with grief that i've heard but she seems to understand my grief very well uh and and she what i like about her is that she's she's quite open she's willing to express what she's feeling uh she's not concealing herself contrast this with my very first experience in therapy i was starting my residency i had my three years of psychiatric training at johns hopkins and the chief resident when i went into this class you know talked to me about therapy most most of us all got into therapy at the beginning he told me about his analyst who was a elderly woman in baltimore who had analyzed a lot of the other analysts in town so i started with her and i met with her four times a week for for three years that's something like 200 hours and um and she was very traditional analyst and she had her chair at the edge of the couch so i wouldn't really see her unless i wanted to really bend my neck back to see her and she never really talked about her own self in any way uh and it was always kind of looking at transference looking at my early life and i feel it was uh it was very unhelpful to me it was a lesson a very long and expensive lesson to me and how not to do therapy um so that that was that was my my first experience in therapy but since then i i've not been bashful about getting into therapy some of it had to do with anxiety about about death early on in my career i was approached by a woman who had breast cancer that was metastatic that it spread to other parts of her body and there was no treatment for that and she came to see me quite a remarkable woman his name was katie and she asked me to start a group of patients who had this kind of cancer i don't think it's the best of my knowledge there was such a group that had ever been done before at least not reported or so but i i gradually began to do that and we had a group of women who were all dying of metastatic cancer and every single one of them died and new people came in and um and that group went on for many years and it began to get to me my own death anxiety became stronger and stronger and i needed some help with that and i uh a very good psychologist who who knew something about his name rollo may had just moved to california then and i began working with him i think i met with him about a year and a half he helped me a lot but i learned later we became lifelong friends after that i was with him when he died but he told me later on that i had that he had helped me with my death anxiety but i had made his a lot worse he was i think 23 years older than i wasn't facing these issues long before i did um so i think that's the thing that that you know you do you you write about and i write about um is is how our patients hold up a mirror to us and and force us to ask these questions of ourselves and look at these issues in our own lives and and you were one of i think the first therapist to really write openly about self-disclosure and there's a great story about um recently when when you decided to retire and i want to put retire in quotes here because you're still seeing people i think for individual consultations but you decided to retire from ongoing long-term psychotherapy and a woman came to see you and she came from overseas and it was the fourth of july it was uh and there she is that you your office is actually on at your home and you come back from a celebration with your family at the park and there's this patient waiting there for you and you had no recollection of this and instead of faking it you told her that you had no recollection and and it was it was at first very upsetting to her because she had come from quite far away to come see you but it ended up because of the self-disclosure it ended up being a very productive session and very meaningful for her can you tell us about that session well i i had forgotten she was there and and she she was in i have an office that's just a 150 feet from my home so she was waiting outside there when i came and i was astonished and embarrassed of course when she was there and gradually as i began to talk to her it all began to float back into my mind this was a while ago a few years ago and um it was a very embarrassing time but but uh it it ended up being quite quite positive since i what's the sense of concealing anything you know i told her exactly what was going on and i'd totally forgotten it i was terribly apologetic uh apologetic for for what it had happened and it ended up i think being uh being quite quite a helpful session for her um it so i i tend to be for some period of time now i tend to be much more open than i ever expected to be uh it's not because i have nothing to to hide but i i just for one i'll give you one example of this i i started a group i was always interested in group therapy i had a lot of training in that because of a man named jerome frank at hopkins who was my mentor in that and from the very beginning of my training at hopkins i watched him do a group and then i went into the group with him leading leading groups but i i was i was quite interested in group therapy and began to organize a group therapy program at stanford and had a lot of students and i would lead a therapy group and then the the residents about eight or ten of them would be in this next room and they'd watch through a one-way mirror so they could watch the group of course i had to tell the group that you know they were being observed and that made them all edgy about that and they they didn't know what we were saying about them at the end and everything and i i could understand their feeling after a while after a while i just decided on the spot i was going to try and experiment and uh i i would i say i said to that i was already at that point being somewhat open with people because i would write a summary of the group and i would mail it to the patients after the group what what i was seeing in the therapy group so i was already kind of being a little self-disclosing but when they were complaining about the the people watching that was making them feel antsy i say listen let's try something at the end of this meeting i want you all to go into the observation room and i'll be in the other room with my students and we'll be talking about the group right right in front of you i don't know what gave me the courage to do that but i had no qualms about that and so for the rest of the life of that group they were watching me and the students talking about talking about them in the group and the group was galvanized it was extremely important they'd talk about how this particular person had it all wrong that was what they really saw so it was it made the residents very nervous i think but good they they would it was a good teaching lesson for them what it does is it breaks down that wall right where there's not this sort of wizard who's running the therapy and and the patient doesn't know about their own life and that somehow the therapist knows more about the patient's life than the patient knows and what you're saying is this is a collaborative process we're going through this process of discovery together and i'm reminded of that time you told me recently about you shared some of your early trauma with a patient who had experienced a lot of trauma and and and the the session hadn't been going well at all until you disclosed something to her at the very end you showed her where you grew up you had a book out can you share that story oh i forgot all about that story yes uh it was a a stanford student a woman about 23 i think she was a grad student then and just before she had come to my office i had gotten my first copy of the book uh called my memoir uh author i know what's the name of that memoir anyway i wrote i i got my memoir my memory is flaking away as i'm growing old now it'll come back to me in about three minutes but anyway she was i was reading that book i put the book away uh and and she came into my office and uh she she had looked at some of my books and thought that she was going to try once again she's been in therapy many many times she said and she told me about her life and it was a it was a terrible story she had been sexually abused when she was younger she had been on drugs uh many many times had been to lots of drug retreats where they were in the they were in the wilderness for a month or two lots of ways to kind of get herself off drugs and and she wanted to she wanted to to try that again and um and i i tried to talk her into starting therapy again told her i wasn't available i was no longer offering therapy i gave her the name of a very good therapist i knew she could work with and and she left the office as soon as she left the office i went back to looking at my at my memoir and i was flying through the pages and i was i was looking at a picture of where i lived in washington d.c it was really a horrible place over top of a grocery store with a kind of a rat infested neighborhood and then i heard a knock at the door and she came back into my office and said i forgot to give you this check so she gave me the check and she was going to leave it again and i i called her over to my i said as she's walking out there i said come come over here i want to show you something um i'm going to cheer up again as i say this but i i i pointed to this picture of where i grew up this picture of the little home over the grocery store and i said look at this uh i said that happened to be as open on my desk i was just looking at it so i said take a look at this this is where i came from and then i said to her you know if i could climb out of this you can too that's all that's all i said and she left and that had an incredible effect on her and me too as you see uh so she just entered therapy and i think had a major life change but the idea of that that's one of the stories that i may may put into this is actually just the beginning of i was starting to see patients in consultation but i just saw her that time oh i saw her one more time after that to choose a good therapist for her so that that was that story but again that's self-revelation and um you know i i i don't feel bashful about that i don't know why uh but uh but i was very willing to take a lot of chances like that early on in my career as a therapist i think that that's the that that's what's so different about your work i think you know when we think about therapy it was always this there was this veil of what was going on behind the scenes and you bring it out into the open and say here let me show you and you you're not afraid to show your humanity and so one of the things that i think in this book that comes out is this idea of being really aware of your age and um not only the people around you dying but the fact that um you have a heart condition and in fact at the time that marilyn had just been in the er for a bad reaction an almost life-threatening reaction to one of her treatments um you were told to go to the er because you needed a pacemaker and your doctor ordered you to go immediately um and so you have said that you feel like the way that you're going to die is the way that your father died which is of a heart attack that's your idea of how that's going to happen for you but one of the things that really moved me was and really made me think was this idea where you said you were there when your father died you were a young medical student i believe and um and you watched him die and there was nothing you could do about it and and then you talked about the fact that when people die um there are only a few generations of people who who know them who actually knew them and you said no one will have memories of him meaning your father as a material being and in a few generations no one will have memories of you as a material being right of yourself um what comes up for you when you think about about the end of your life how do you feel about it now having watched your wife go through it how do you feel about your own end of life well i am having a real change in for one thing i have had a lot of death anxiety in the past and it's very interesting to me now that i i see i have virtually no at no death anxiety now it it seems to have just vanished i'm so surprised at that um so so so what what's what's behind that you know for for one thing i have on more than one occasion have the experience of uh of joining maryland i think of my dying and then it suddenly occurs to me i'll be joining maryland now i'm i'm not a religious person i've been a pretty devout atheist since i was early age so the idea of joining maryland is preposterous i know it doesn't make any sense but nonetheless the idea of joining maryland when i die gives me relief it's it doesn't make any sense but still it offers me comfort and gives me a good idea a really good idea of what religions have had to offer to human beings since the beginning of time there's always a sense that there'll be it won't be ending there'll be a continuation in some way so so there's there's there's the idea of joining maryland um so that that's that's that's in part the answer to your question i think the other thing that you write about and have written about for so many years is this idea that if we live a life that where we feel fulfilled that we have less deaf anxiety which seems almost counterintuitive you think if you have a life where you're really engaged that you don't want it to end but what you're saying is that the more regrets you have about your life the more anxiety you have about dying because you didn't live out your life in the way that you had wanted yeah i i'm relying on that formula so much now and a lot of consultations i've been seeing a lot of people with with death anxiety and i almost automatically quickly go into the whole question of regrets uh in life um and i feel the the greater the more regrets one has about their unlived life the what they the kind of life they could have done they should have done i think the greater is the death anxiety so i almost always try to to take a look at at regrets about their life i i have very few regrets about the way i've lived my life and so fortunate to have spent it with this remarkable woman um as i go and look at the books i've written and i read them over again i'm so pleased with them i i've succeeded more than i possibly could ever have imagined doing that so i have virtually no regrets about the way i've lived my life and and i think that's that's becoming evident now and the lack of anxiety that i have about about my own death which can't be too far away i'm i'm older than anybody else i know older than those 12 young turks that started the apartment at stanford and i'm the only one left that's that's enough to shake me up let me ask you something perhaps personal but i i'm sure that you'll be game to answer um you know when i think about this book a matter of death and life i think that on the one hand it's this incredible meditation on on loss but i think it's also an incredible meditation on love and i you know in a way i think in your writing you've always put marilyn on a pedestal you know you've sort of idealized her and i'm sure as a therapist you would say to that patient if you were your own patient um you know nobody is a saint and so um i'm sure you had difficult times in your marriage and i'm wondering what lessons you can share with us from you know being together for over 60 years what was a difficult time in your marriage and how did you what would you say was the lesson about long-term love that that you learned from getting through that hard time and growing through it together with marilyn ah such a difficult question um [Music] i never was not in love with marilyn she had so much to offer but i'll confess to the world for the first time she was a terrible cook and did not like to do any cooking in the kitchen there were certain things that she didn't do she was a scholar and and alas her field of expertise was in french especially but also in german she had her degree was in comparative literature at hopkins uh and she often said and she was absolutely accurate about this that i have somehow managed to mispronounce every french word i ever encountered i've got i'm terrible in languages i was desperate to get straight a's in in my undergraduate school to make sure i could get into medical school very quickly and only have to go three years so i could marry maryland earlier um the only bee i got in undergraduate school was it was in german so i've always lamented that but it was enough to get me into into medical school so um i guess what i'm curious about is that you you had this this long marriage and and there was so much love between the two of you and you you lived your entire not only adult lives but starting as teenagers lives together and i'm sure that there were times when you know people go through things and because you share so much of yourself and i think one of the things that that makes your work and what you share about grief and love and death and loss and regret and all of those things um so relatable is that is that you're human and there's not this sense of you being the expert up on high but you being a fellow human in the trenches you you call people fellow travelers yeah and so i just i wonder and i feel like you're almost a little bit maybe skirting the question but um but you are um but i just wonder if if you could share maybe one example you know it doesn't have to be um you know too personal but just an example of something where you know what what did you and marilyn disagree about what was there ever a tough time in your marriage because it's such a beautiful marriage your book recounts this marriage as just being full of incredible it just it's it's love it's respect it's admiration um it's deep caring it's compassion and i think what what makes it even richer is knowing that you know there were also times of struggle can you can you recount just one example of a time of struggle and and how you how you two got through it yeah i think i can think of one time i could talk about there is something in me that doesn't want to say anything that's negative about her and i can't i can't quite overcome that right now but i just i just don't want anything to to think less of her but there's this one incident she she was a professor of french and uh at nearby university but then stanford offered her position to to come to come to stanford and sort of be in charge of the women's program there uh and there was a women's center at stanford so she began to transfer over to that and she was so engaged and delighted to be at stanford even though she wasn't in her own familiar territory of of of french literature but she was soon so engaged in that there were always groups of women at her home and she and i wasn't i wasn't getting much out of the marriage at that point and that was our worst point at all and i can remember i think i wrote about it in the book or maybe in another book but uh at that point i i we were drifting apart and i went to uh we were at a restaurant near our apartment that we had in san francisco and i i brought it up at the wrong place but i brought and i said to her you know marilyn i'm not getting much out of this out of this marriage any longer and i'm just wondering whether or not we should stay together uh or maybe even put it harder than that but what her response was it's hard hard to talk about she started to wail loudly in this restaurant everybody in the restaurant was turning around and looking and said she just didn't stop uh it went on and on we left the restaurant everyone was looking at us but that was perhaps a real crucial point taught me about what i shouldn't say and it taught to her what she shouldn't be doing and our relationship got much better after that and we weren't having quite as many uh meetings with 20 women over our house all the time and she began to spend a little bit more time and attention uh to me at that point thank you for sharing that i think it's so important to see the you know the nuances of a marriage um because this book is so much your love story and i think that that story that you just shared is another example of of a love story and what happens in a love story um i think we have some questions from some people in the audience or in our virtual audience um do we have that ted yes yes we do um first question the gentleman says every therapist i have had has mentioned your name and your books uh what does it feel like to have had so much influence in the field well that's that i that's that's a very good question that's that's really close to my interior you know we talked a little while ago about um about my own therapy and that's something that i i talk about a good deal in my therapy somehow i get uh it's very moving for me to hear people say like talk like that but i get about 30 to 50 uh 30 to 60 emails every day and a great many of them are saying that same type of thing and i look at them and i put a star by that and i put it in its file and someday i'll go back and read them all what happens is though that they don't go very deep you know it i wish they could go deeper i could hear that louder there's a part of me that is not able to quite hear that that's part of the things i'm working on in my own therapy and i think that it's probably a result of the the trauma i had in my very early life and how i how i grew up so i think i think that's related to that i wish i could wish i could hear this i hear it from so many people and of course it feels wonderful to me but i just wish it would go more than a half inch deep next question is sort of so that's that's the answer to that's the answer to what laura is asking me a little bit what am i working on in therapy that's a big topic a related question a lady says you're an esteemed therapist providing counsel to many people and now i read from your book that you are receiving counsel uh so what is it like as a therapist to set aside being a therapist and allow yourself to receive therapy well i like it very much it's a wonderful it's it's a wonderful experience with for me and um you know i'm i'm a writer as much as i am a therapist i i've been a writer all my life there are times i have fantasies oh should i have been a lot should i have been a novice did i go into the right field but i almost always say well if i had been a novelist i wouldn't have anything to write about you know my field is is getting me so much closer to the the real center of our lives so um so i i i do i do work on that uh you know uh a good bit in my therapy and uh um so so in my answer go back and ask me that question again this is what i mean by my memory flaking off so what was the end of your question the end of the question is is how do you allow yourself to not be the therapist and be the recipient of the therapist [Music] i have no problem with that it i i i'm very pleased with that i get all all the help i can i've been in a there's been another kind of therapy i've been in oh something like oh maybe 35 years ago i and one of my colleagues we organized a therapy group for therapists and there was no leader i was not going to be the leader and we got started with a group of about seven or eight of us and we've been meeting for an hour and a half for over 30 years and that's another kind of therapy i've done we all have profited by this and uh and and i i have a feeling that almost anyone can really profit from from looking at ourselves and always learn from always learn from from peers about how we're dealing with others and bringing up certain things so um i i have i have no problem uh trying to get some help from therapy at this point all right another question i feel often when a loved one is ailing and it's clearly is clearly not going to make a recovery that the grieving sometimes starts before they've departed i used to feel that was the healthy approach to dealing with the inevitable now i'm not so sure [Music] yeah well the spouse it gets ordinarily gets very much closely involved at the very beginning of the illness and we'll we'll we'll hear about the prognosis really from from from the patient's doctor i would certainly like that with marilyn i was ending myself and had a pretty good idea of this disease although until the very end i was hoping that she would be one of these people who would really respond to some of the new drugs that were out in the field and she did not um but um but i i think it's i i think it's necessary to to have someone else who knows about her illness or who knows about the the husband's illness uh it's it's a it's a terrible thing i think to face death all alone uh and uh i i really feel for those people who who don't have another person who they can they can share that to me that's one of the horrors to think about of of someone going to going to their death absolutely alone in that way can i can i say something about that um one of the things that you said um in another conversation we had was that your therapist said to you that losing a spouse is like an amputation oh yes and and and i was thinking about when it started to feel like an amputation and reading your book it feels like going to this person's question that you did have this anticipatory grief that you were feeling like um you were already grieving the future loss of marilyn once you realized what her prognosis was and there were lots of ways that you did that um but i think that it was after she died that you really felt the amputation would you say that was the difference between the anticipatory grieving and then the grieving you did after she died yes i think so and and i i love that quotation too because i was talking about i was thinking about for a while and then my own self of getting over this grief of getting working through it some way and and i don't know where i forgot where i first heard that quote was something that my therapist used but the idea that you really don't get over this kind of grief you don't get over it it's like getting over an amputation you don't get over an amputation you somehow learn to live with with the amputation and and for me that is perfect as i think about how you how you agree with someone that you really love this much you don't get you don't get over it you just learn to how to live with it and i think that's something that is very helpful what's helpful to me as i think about the grieving process i'm not going to get i'm not going to get over this i'm not going to return to some other state i'm just going to have learned to what it is to live with without without maryland next question there are several questions similar i'm just going to use one of them and and see see if you can help us with this one lady says i lost my husband of 44 years two months ago uh i was his caretaker for about a year which was vastly different from the previous years now i'm in limbo trying to see my next phase without rushing it any thoughts yes my first thought is immediately she she i i hope that she'll get some help with that and there are different ways to get help one is a therapist and there are there are such things as bereavement groups that would be very helpful to her if she can find a group like that in her community i i would i would urge her to to look at that that offers a great deal of assistance for that so it's it's hard to do that all all by oneself uh i hope she'll get some help with that we see that so much in therapy where someone was the caretaker and they didn't focus on themselves because they felt like i my needs aren't important because this other person has needs that are so much more pressing than mine and then the person is gone and they're lost because they haven't focused on themselves at all they haven't thought about themselves their needs their wants their desires in a very long time so i hope this person is able to get some help focusing on her needs and wants and desires that have probably been neglected for a very long time that's right and that person is not going to get much help from the ill spouse you know they've got to get some help from from someone else being close to someone else and i hope there are such people in her life or possibly a group for her two final questions um stories are such a wonderful way to celebrate and share our past any ideas on how we can use stories to better help those ailing do we want them to be telling them or do do we want them to be listening which do you think is more helpful my late father took much joy in telling stories when we gathered around him in his last months his memory was failing so there was serious factual issues with his stories but he seemed to do better when he had a chance to tell stories i'd love to tell stories and i love to hear stories as well uh and there's a long storytelling tradition back to the beginning of our species of recorded history so yes i'm i'm i i'm in love with telling stories and the book i'm writing right now uh i do see for the last year i've just been seeing single consultations and every i don't know at first it was every 10 maybe it's now every 15 or 20 consultations i do a story emerges that i feel will be so useful to other people who who could read about these stories or perhaps to other therapists so i've been writing a a book uh maybe pages maybe six seven page short stories that i think might be useful for therapists in their training are useful to others who who are in therapy too so there's a story trailing tradition i think since the beginning of our of our species our final question um gentlemen says i want to know if you and marilyn had any specific rituals you shared either things you said to yourself on a regular basis or things you did or was it a drink at night or was it a walk to a certain place uh or what is this was it was it a certain place you visited with some regularity i i feel rituals contribute to the health of a relationship well what kind of ritual i think about one of the great advantages of being in academia is that you get sabbaticals and uh i i took every spectacle possible and sometimes even extra ones without without pay but we would go off and and our own agreement with each other that she could pick where we're going to spend half of that time and i'll go and i'll pick the other half of time my choice was always to go to a beautiful island where i could go diving scuba diving or spearfishing so i love the beaches very much maryland did too but when she had her part of the choice was always to go to paris and so we we we combined these two and uh i wasn't in love with paris that she in the extent that she was but but nevertheless i i i spent half my time there and i was always writing a book and she was writing or meeting with her friends i had a little revival of that just just uh last night and the night before because i was watching the having i mentioned i was watching the hemingway series by ken burns on television and there are lots of shots of of of paris and it moved me very much to see these streets that we were uh i'd walk with with maryland so uh so maryland maryland loved paris and and i it grew on to me too so that was one real uh tradition that we had uh and marilyn never wanted to miss her her time in paris and i never wanted her to do that either as a final thought irv could you share you do have a ritual that has started since marilyn died and you talked about how it's hard for you sometimes to look at the pictures that you have around the house of her because it's very painful um but you go to this park bench um i think every day and and you sit on the bench and you kind of commune with marilyn right yes i hate to admit that i do that but i really do it uh there's a park up it's called bulls park for those of you who know palo alto it's just a couple blocks from my home but in there there are about eight benches and if you pay the city enough money uh you can put a plaque up on each of the benches and there were a couple of open benches that didn't have a plaque so i i chose to get one and i had this nice plaque that i wrote something on my my children wrote part of that too and i go and visit her every day usually after my days uh writing uh somewhere around five o'clock i i take a walk up there and i sit there and i just just kind of communicate to her uh sometimes i even talk to her a little bit when no one's watching uh and uh yes i i that has become very much a part of me i say to myself well i gotta take this walk it helps me sleep better at night i can't be sitting writing all day long uh but but the truth is i just wouldn't miss joining her for that for that short time yep well thank you to both of you thank you irv thank you lori and thank you to those of you who sent in some questions again erb's book is a matter of death and life and lori's latest book is maybe you should talk to someone you can purchase their books wherever books are sold go on gently you

Channel: LiveTalksLA

Views: 26,372

Rating: 4.9528022 out of 5

Keywords: Irv Yalom, Lori Gottlieb, therapy, Live Talks LA, Live Talks Los Angeles, TED Talks

Id: CDBH3df9nOo

Length: 65min 14sec (3914 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021