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 daughter, Katherine, is very farsighted. Her adorable, coke-bottle glasses correct her vision well enough for her to be able to color fairies, bead necklaces, and watch “SpongeBob SquarePants” on the tube. However, you take away the glasses and she panics.
Hyperopia, the technical term for farsightedness, is an inability to focus on near objects.
Although I don’t wear glasses or need contact lenses, I totally understand this vision problem because I have great difficulty seeing the things that are right before my eyes. Instead I concentrate on signs 100 feet away. I take a project, a goal, a dream, and I view it 20 years away.
Not surprising, then, I get overwhelmed before I even start.
So, as a cognitive behavioral exercise, I picture myself wearing Katherine’s coke-bottle glasses, and try to focus on something that’s less than three feet from me. I take a few steps around the base of the mountain I’m trying to climb, or piece off a mere slice of the task I want to accomplish … like recognizing and untwisting one of 2,345 distorted thoughts in my head, or attempting three minutes versus three hours of mindful meditation, or saying no to just one thing that I don’t want to do but feel like I should because I love that word, should, so much.
Forget about all that stuff in the distance, I tell myself, and focus on the fairies.

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