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.”
In his book “We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love,” Robert A. Johnson distinguishes human love from romantic love. When we yearn for a passionate romance full of dopamine highs (the rush you get from cocaine and infatuation), we are often blinded to the precious, committed love that is with us every day, the “stirring-the-oatmeal” love. Johnson writes:
Stirring oatmeal is a humble act–not exciting or thrilling. But it symbolizes a relatedness that brings love down to earth. It represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks: earning a living, living within a budget, putting out the garbage, feeding the baby in the middle of the night. To “stir the oatmeal” means to find the relatedness, the value, even the beauty, in simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama, an entertainment, or an extraordinary intensity in everything.

I take this concept one step further. Whenever I’m tempted to choose a more exhilarating or intoxicating path–be it posting a blog about Britney Spears’s mental health that will guarantee nice traffic numbers but makes me feel a tad cheap or going on an afternoon talk show that might help my career but hurt my home life–and get fooled into thinking that the glitter will stay shiny forever, I think about the oatmeal.
And I go back to stirring it.
As recovering addict, this is one of the hardest parts of my recovery … to forego the high, and to continue upon the true but sometimes boring path to freedom and peace.

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