Girl on the Couch

Journalist Lorna Martin had always thought that therapy was an outrageous con, a fraud designed for people to “whine about their weight/ self-esteem/ alcohol/ commitment problem while blaming their emotionally absent father and/or overly critical mother.” If you have a problem, Martin believed, you just deal with it–pray, get drunk, pop some pills, or listen to ABBA. But after yet another disastrous relationship and an embarrassing misstep at work, plus a spate of uncontrollable sobbing, Martin was running out of solutions for dealing with it. In an uncharacteristic move, she sat down on the couch of Dr. J., where she spent the next year talking, listening, and learning more than she ever expected. The result, Girl on the Couch, is Martin’s warm, funny, and intimate diary of her voyage into the world of therapy–what she calls “the strangest journey of my life”–and the incredible discoveries she made along the way.

Journalist Lorna Martin had always thought that therapy was an outrageous con, a fraud designed for people to “whine about their weight/ self-esteem/ alcohol/ commitment problem while blaming their emotionally absent father and/or overly critical mother.” If you have a problem, Martin believed, you just deal with it–pray, get drunk, pop some pills, or listen to ABBA. But after yet another disastrous relationship and an embarrassing misstep at work, plus a spate of uncontrollable sobbing, Martin was running out of solutions for dealing with it. In an uncharacteristic move, she sat down on the couch of Dr. J., where she spent the next year talking, listening, and learning more than she ever expected. The result, Girl on the Couch, is Martin’s warm, funny, and intimate diary of her voyage into the world of therapy–what she calls “the strangest journey of my life”–and the incredible discoveries she made along the way.