Last night I talked to my daughter in New York...she is a certified art therapist. I was asking her about what I should do when I am triggered by things that set me off and send me on a temporary journey of craziness.

She somewhat understands my dilemma, since I spent an hour or so a few nights ago, telling her about my fears, my thoughts, my crazy feelings.

That is when she told me about Ants...that is an acronym for Automatic Negative Thoughts....and she said remember it this way...when you see an ant (you know the insect) you can assume that there are more ants to follow...You know how you can often see a line of ants doing there own thing?....maybe following the scent of food.

So when you recognise the first ant (or negative thought), notice it and stomp it out before you have a whole line of ants. She also told me something that can be used as a tool...Visualize the negative thought as a picture on a tv screen...(this sort of separates you emotionally from the thought) and then assign a channel number to that screen picture...call it channel 88, for example...and then purposely change the channel in your head to a safe channel. Like maybe channel 27 is where they show all your favorite good thoughts. On Channel 27 maybe they play all my favorite experiences...

Like she said, a lot of our negative thoughts are not really true thoughts, but just a perception...a way we have trained our self to look at things. They may be lies we have been telling ourself. She said that our brain creates a path or map...and we often need to create new pathways in our thought processes...we are actually changing ourselves by changing the pathways.

Is it easy to do? I don't know but I think it is worth the effort to help yourself become a healthy person. In the novel I am writing, one character...an elderly lady who is a therapist tells the main character, "you must have the will...I can't give you the will". And by that she means..."I can't give you the will to overcome...only you have within yourself the means to overcome...the will to push on, to not give up...to press forward...within yourself must be the will".