Nick, thanks for your piece. It was affirming to read that after all these years I’ve have become more emotionally stable. I don’t think the process of emotional stability or maturity ever stops with “I’m done” I’ve graduated and there’s no more work to be done.

After having worked for over 25 years in alternative mental health and 40 years as a healer/shaman I can better understand emotions. I work on myself daily. Since November I’ve been working on releasing long term stuck grief issues and have made some surprising progress.

In my 30s I was a constant worrier about bad things happening. One incidence was a flat tire on the way to work. One day I had one — a flat tire on the way to work. After changing the flat to the spare (before the time of cell phones) I was angry at myself and I decided to change my obsessional thinking pattern.

If a negative thought / feeling popped in I would allow myself to sit with it for a minute or so. Was there any information I could glean from the thought. Next I’d see it on my own personal movie theatre screen and use my imagined eraser to eliminate the worrisome thought. I’d replace it with a positive thought — such as with regard to flat tires, engine problems, car related difficulties, accidents I’d “see” myself arrive safely to my destination without incident. Eventually all my flat tire scenarios fell away. I applied the same blueprint to my other kinds of negative thinking and its worked well over the years. Now I acknowledge the thought and replace it immediately with something positive and neutral. The emotions associated with many worrisome or entitled thinking is often associated with anger and / or fear. Here I use some breath work to calm my body and that in-turn affects my emotions to return to a neutral or positive space.

I rarely offer advice to friends anymore who are having difficulty unless they ask. I remind myself that what I would do will always be different than what they will do, so I no longer tell people what I would have them do. Sometimes people need to vent, that’s okay. But if they continue to vent and ask me what they should do I’ll either say “I don’t know” or “You could find a therapist.”