“I think people get old when they stop thinking about the future,” Ric told me. “If you want to find someone’s true age, listen to them. If they talk about the past and they talk about all the things that happened that they did, they’ve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their aspirations, what they’re still looking forward to—they’re

There’s a quote from Paulo Coelho that I think about often: “Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything,” he writes. “Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.”

As I settled into the next phase of my recovery, I began to notice something I had never experienced before: I found more joy in being than in doing. For the first time in my life, I felt that I could be a good father. I could be a good husband. I could be a good person. After all, this is the whole point

One tactic that I’ve found especially helpful is called opposite action—that is, if I feel like doing one thing (generally, not a helpful or positive thing), I’ll force myself instead to do the exact opposite. By doing so, I also change the underlying emotions.

The practice of DBT is predicated on learning to execute concrete skills, repetitively, under stress, that aim to break the chain reaction of negative stimulus → negative emotion → negative thought → negative action.

It reminded me of this observation by Jacob Riis, the great Danish American journalist and social reformer: “When nothing seems to help, I go back and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the

Somewhere along the line, in a random airport on a long work trip, I had picked up David Brooks’s book The Road to Character.

One skill I worked on that is a bit more complicated is called “reframing.” Reframing is basically the ability to look at a given situation from someone else’s point of view—literally reframing it. This is an incredibly difficult thing for most of us to do, as David Foster Wallace explained in his now famous 2005 commencement address to the

As Terry had written: “Family pathology rolls from generation to generation like a fire in the woods taking down everything in its path until one person, in one generation, has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to his ancestors and spares the children that follow.” I wanted to be that person.