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.“

I used to believe the world was comprised of two groups of people: the mentally ill and the normal folks. That kind of thinking—an “us” against “them”—contributed to a jaded, bitter, resentful attitude toward my illness.

Why was this done to me? I bemoaned quite often.

One day my blindfold fell off and I began to see all the different kinds of problems in the lives of those around me: the friend who went to wake her baby after naptime and found her dead in the crib, one of those rare statistics of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome; the colleague raising two special-needs kids who will never be able to care for themselves or live independently; the countless mothers who have lost their sons to the war in Iraq.

The more conditions I contract and the more doctors I add to my address book, the better capable I’ve become of recognizing suffering in everyone’s life. No one is immune, even as some pretend to be. It’s like the tale that American Buddhist Lama Surya Das tells in his book, “Letting Go of the Person I Used to Be”:

The Buddha was once approached by a grieving mother who little child had just died. She pleaded with him for a miracle: She begged him to restore the child to her alive and well. The Buddha listened to the bereaved woman and finally said that he would be able to do what she asked if she could bring him a mustard seed from a home that had never lost anyone to death. The mother traveled far and wide, day after day, trying to find such a home, and of course she couldn’t. Finally she returned to the Buddha and said that she had come to realize that death visits everyone. It was a reality she had to accept. And in that acceptance she found strength and consolation.