I have decided to dedicate a post on Thursday to therapy, and offer you the many tips I have learned on the couch. They will be a good reminder for me, as well, of something small I can concentrate on. Many of them are published in my book, “The Pocket Therapist: An Emotional Survival Kit.”
My therapist swears to me that you can’t unlearn your progress.
And I’m holding her to it.
She says that just because you have a day or week or year where you flop on building better personal boundaries, or silencing the inner critic, or identifying and replacing the old tapes, that you still have all the right stuff inside. You haven’t lost any of it.
Nada.
Man, is that comforting in the hours I know my footprints are going in the wrong direction, when I seem incapable of making myself turn around toward healing, when I fret about losing it all–the knowledge, the insights, the discipline that I procured in my recent past–as my strides reverse.
She says your progress is there, stuck in your neural passageways along with instructions on how to ride a bike, even though the dusty thing has been stored in your garage for ten years or more.
So, though we may feel like we’re spinning around in circles, lacking the gravity needed to pull us in a certain direction, we’re really just learning more. We’re exploring … as T. S. Eliot so beautifully said: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

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