Good Vibrations
Good feelings carry a good charge, and sour ones carry a sour charge. Suppose the people are right who say those vibrations reach the people around you. What signal would you be sending, to yourself and to everyone nearby? Think about the news for a second: how much of it lands as good, and how much lands as bad? When your neighbor's name comes up in conversation, are you mostly complaining or picking at faults? And on the occasions you pray, is it thanks for something you have, or a running list of what you lack?
The way therapy works has shifted over the years. These days a lot of the attention goes to the content of your thinking and the habits behind it. The older approach dug into the bad things that had happened to you and traced how they still pressed on your present. Keep circling those old wounds and, at the very least, you turn into a bore. People who love you start finding reasons to be elsewhere, and the rehearsing can make the hurt heavier instead of lighter. None of it is carved in stone. Treat the past as something to walk past, and in some cases something you can rework.
Aiming your attention at the fix instead of the wound tends to pay off. Say you were hurt as a child. Running the memory again and again does not undo a single minute of it. Count how often the words "I can't" come out of your mouth, each repetition pinning you to the trouble instead of the way through it. Whatever was done to you, refuse to pass it along. Teach kids to work problems out, at the kitchen table, on the job, anywhere you happen to be.
Problem-solving skills are one piece. The other is simply spending more of your hours on good things. That imagination you ran on as a kid, where did it wander off to? Back then you could picture all kinds of marvelous stuff without effort. How quickly can you drop yourself into the perfect hideaway and live it with every sense you own, the smell of it, the sound, the warmth? Trading a steady diet of bad vibrations for good ones is a welcome change.
Then there is humor, and it earns its place at the end. A joke lands fine with any of us as long as there is no cruelty in it. Laughter may do real good for people with cancer, and some patients have folded funny movies into their fight against the disease.