What was Lori Gottlieb’s illness? Does Lori ever get a diagnosis of her symptoms?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lori Gottlieb’s mysterious illness opens up a whole pandora’s box of her deeper psychological concerns. In discussing her symptoms with Wendell, she realizes that what she is really afraid of is uncertainty. Since she doesn\u2019t know her diagnosis, she doesn\u2019t know how it will impact her life going forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Read about Lori Gottlieb’s illness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
In one of her sessions with her therapist Wendell, Lori Gottlieb opens up about her mysterious illness. She was suffering from painful rashes, fatigue, muscle tremors, and weakness. She\u2019s visited numerous doctors, but none have been able to piece her symptoms together into a diagnosis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One specialist believed that Lori Gottlieb’s illness was the result of anxiety, a condition called conversion disorder<\/em>: so-called because the patient\u2019s anxiety is \u201cconverted\u201d into physical symptoms. Conversion disorder is the modern name for hysteria, or any number of other absurd diagnoses given to women throughout history (such as \u201cwandering uterus\u201d). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Furthermore, many of her lab tests and scans came back with results that were not consistent with conversion disorder. Effectively, Lori Gottlieb’s illness was diagnosed as hysteria, and she was rightfully offended by it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In discussing her symptoms with Wendell, Lori realizes that what she is really afraid of is uncertainty. This uncertainty doesn\u2019t just apply to her illness, but also to her fears that she won\u2019t find a new partner, her anxiety about her writing career, and her advancing age. Wendell believes that Lori has been trying to cope with that uncertainty by sabotaging herself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to uncertainty, Lori is also dealing with several fundamental human concerns. The four fundamental concerns all people share are mortality, loneliness, freedom, and futility. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Lori is concerned about death due to her illness and what she perceives as her advancing age. She also explains that she is concerned about her freedom. While she\u2019s free in every practical sense, she misses the emotional freedom she had when she was younger. Lori says that her therapy\u2014and the entire crisis she\u2019s going through\u2014may be about recapturing that emotional freedom, and opening up instead of shutting down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She also has to grapple with another fundamental concern: futility. <\/strong>Sometime after this appointment, Lori finds her old grad school coursework, including her studies about the psychologist Viktor Frankl, whose work was all about how people\u2019s primary drive was to find meaning in their lives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The part that Lori finds especially relevant is Frankl\u2019s discussion about how the only thing a person will always be able to choose is how to respond to his or her circumstances. Lori hasn\u2019t thought about this concept in years, but she sees now how it applies to her and every one of her patients. The trick is finding and using that in-between time to respond, instead of just react\u2014to act deliberately instead of reflexively. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What was Lori Gottlieb’s illness? Does Lori ever get a diagnosis of her symptoms? Lori Gottlieb’s mysterious illness opens up a whole pandora’s box of her deeper psychological concerns. In discussing her symptoms with Wendell, she realizes that what she is really afraid of is uncertainty. Since she doesn\u2019t know her diagnosis, she doesn\u2019t know how it will impact her life going forward. Read about Lori Gottlieb’s illness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":29062,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,9],"tags":[233],"class_list":["post-29061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health","category-psychology","tag-maybe-you-should-talk-to-someone","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Four Fundamental Concerns<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n