The surest sign that you’re incredibly ambitious is a complete and total lack of ambition on all fronts.

Dialectical behavior therapy is a type of cognitive-behavioral therapy that combines strategies like mindfulness, acceptance, and emotion regulation. […] In DBT, the patient and therapist are working to resolve the seeming contradiction between self-acceptance and change in order to bring about positive changes in the patient.

Therapy can be hard and make you feel worse because 1) it’s uncovering feelings you’ve never before processed, 2) it’s wearing down defenses, and 3) your therapist *might* be making a mistake about your treatment. In any case, it’s important to keep attending sessions and talk about the difficulty directly with your therapist.

Bibliotherapists Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin prescribe fiction for healing and self-exploration. … Berthoud and Elderkin are also the authors of “The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies,” which is written in the style of a medical dictionary and matches ailments (“failure, feeling like a”) with suggested reading cures (“The History of Mr. Polly,” by H. G. Wells). First released in the U.K. in 2013, it is now being published in eighteen countries, and, in an interesting twist, the contract allows for a local editor and reading specialist to adapt up to twenty-five per cent of the ailments and reading recommendations to fit each particular country’s readership and include more native writers. The new, adapted ailments are culturally revealing. In the Dutch edition, one of the adapted ailments is “having too high an opinion of your own child”; in the Indian edition, “public urination” and “cricket, obsession with” are included; the Italians introduced “impotence,” “fear of motorways,” and “desire to embalm”; and the Germans added “hating the world” and “hating parties.”