Free Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life by Margaret Moore Page B

might also be useful to include their definitions:
Anxiety (worry or unease about what may happen)
Sadness (a state of unhappiness, sorrow)
Anger (irritability, hostility)
    How do these common emotions manifest themselves in the situations that we’re dealing with in this book? You can feel anxious about the implications of your disorganization (“What is losing that important document going to mean when I get into work next week?”); sadness about the impact on your apparent inability to change (“Why can’t I stop losing things?”); anger about the challenges at hand (“I’m going to have go back and redo hours and hours of work because I was so stupid!”). I’ve had patients who have exhibited all three and who, in their respective quests to get a better handle on their lives, have had to wrestle with these basic emotions. Anxiety, sadness, anger.
    Let’s meet one of them.
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    CASE STUDY IN ANXIETY: THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR IS FEAR ITSELF (AND MAYBE XBOX, TOO).
    The woman in her late thirties who walked into my office—fifteen minutes late for her appointment—was clearly distraught. Her eyes were red, she looked as if she had been crying and her face was careworn. She appeared as if she hadn’t been getting enough sleep. Her primary care physician had referred her to me, apparently with good reason.
    â€œSo,” I asked, as she sat in the chair in my office, eyeing her surroundings warily, “did you find the office without any problems?”
    â€œNot really,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’m sorry I’m late. I made a wrong turn in Central Square and practically ended up in Somerville.” She laughed ruefully. “It’s just another example of the shambles my life is in these days.”
    I waited a beat, but she said nothing further. I tried to gently prod her.
    â€œCan you elaborate on that?” I said. “How so?”
    She sighed deeply and then related a tale of unhappy events. Eileen, as we’ll call her, had been divorced a year ago. Her son, the product of that marriage, was twelve years old—a “tween” as the demographers now call these early middle-school-aged kids because they are between their childhood and teenage years.
    The son, to hear her side of it, was struggling: in his first year of middle school, he had a heavier workload, and a bulging backpack to go with it. He had band practice, baseball practice, tests to study for, homework to do, friends he wanted to hang out with and video games he wanted to play. It sounded, to me, like a fairly typical schedule for a sixth grader these days—school, music, the arts, sports—but instead she told me they were one step away from everything falling apart, it seemed, almost every night.
    â€œThe other night, he was late to his baseball game,” Eileen said. “It was because I was behind on some of my reports at the office, and I got home a few minutes late from work. But then I couldn’t drag him off the Xbox game. This had happened a couple of times already, so the coach said he couldn’t start that night, and he had to sit on the bench most of the game.”
    I started to interject, but she was already off on the next of what became a litany of catastrophes: There were problems keeping up with his schoolwork. There were problems at her work (she was a physical therapist). There were problems with other members of her family and with her ex in-laws (or as she preferred to call them, “the outlaws”). She wasn’t whining; she just sounded weary and overwhelmed.
    She went on to tell me how she had responded to some of these crises: she talked to her son’s teachers. She got a tutor to help him with math, which seemed to be his most challenging subject and was not her strong suit.
    I had a sense that she and her son often worked things out reasonably well, but she still seemed to be operating in