Notes from Your Therapist
When Allyson Dinneen was a young child, her mother died in a plane crash. “No one ever mentioned her again. We were supposed to silently close the door like nothing had happened. Forget all about pain or loss or tragedy, including people you loved,” she recalls. “You definitely didn’t talk about feelings.”
Years later—having learned, little by little, how to talk about feelings—she became a therapist. And then her husband died suddenly as well, leaving her to raise their daughter on her own. In her grief, she remembered the little girl she had been when her mother died, and was determined not to be silent this time. Not with her daughter, and not with the world.
What started with a single Instagram post eventually grew into the phenomenon that is Notes from Your Therapist, a page with nearly 400,000 followers. Now, Dinneen has published a beautifully designed book by the same name (from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
The book reproduces many of the handwritten notes on scraps of paper that have been popping up in Instagram feeds over the past few years. Interspersed are short essays that explore grief, relationships, and feelings—all from the perspective of a therapist who has been there and knows how hard it can be to navigate life’s pain.
While making my way through this book, I was reminded of what the late great Frederick Buechner had to say about the stewardship of pain. Like Buechner, Dinneen has done the long, hard work of paying attention to her grief. Rather than numbing out or getting bitter, she has been courageous enough to lean into the pain—inhabiting it, letting it do its work on her. She didn’t silence it. She didn’t keep it to herself. She gave it words. And that has been a tremendously generous act. This book is the proof.
