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.”
A few weeks ago I took David to a Navy baseball game. It was the fourth inning and Navy was losing, 9 to 2. A Navy guy gets up to bat and hits a double, steals base, and after the next hit was able to run home. Next thing you know, the bases are loaded and wham!, the batter hits a home run.
“Isn’t it wild that just one run can alter the energy of the game?” another parent said to the guy yelling behind me.
I thought back to July of last summer, when I couldn’t stop crying for a few days. I was scheduled to go to New York for an interview with a magazine and wondered if I should cancel. I went and got through the interview as best I could, escaping afterwards to St. Pat’s Cathedral, where I continued to sob.
But then that night I went out with some friends and laughed harder than I had in a very long time–they were all telling St. Peter jokes, but the kind you wouldn’t find in a Catholic manual–and I felt the momentum shift. In that healing laughter, I knew I was on the mend.
I explained this to a friend of mine who was there that evening, and he said, “Isn’t it great when we can catch the snowball and throw it back in the right direction?”
I guess that’s what happened.
Somewhere in between the calamari and buffalo wings, I caught my snowball, before it was too heavy to lift … before I would need the intervention of my doctor or a medication adjustment.
When I can–and there are plenty of times I simply can’t, I admit that upfront–I try to catch the snowball, to nip my anxiety in its bud … to shift my energy from the problem to the solution, from the infirmity to the remedy, from disorder to good health.
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