One Saturday last fall, I had occasion to go to the Union Station after the Saturday meeting. Harriette and I were going out of town to visit her parents. As Harriette was working, I was to meet her at the station before train time.

I left the Recovery office around five o'clock which was plenty early as the train didn't leave until six. I walked over to the bus stop to get the Jackson Blvd. bus. I expected one to arrive in a very few minutes. A number of buses passed and I was beginning to get a little anxious and tense. I still had plenty of time but it was growing shorter. Then I started looking toward Michigan Blvd. where the bus should turn from the South. I noticed that numerous buses passed along the Boulevard but none of them turned; all continued going North. The endless procession of North side buses went on. Now twenty minutes had passed and I really was worried because my time was running short. I began to think I would take a cab. Just then a person who had also been waiting for a bus for some time came up to me and asked me what bus I was waiting for. I said, "I am waiting for the #26 Jackson Blvd. bus." This stranger said, "If I am not mistaken I believe that that bus turns on Jackson Blvd." I was dumbfounded. Here I, a man who has lived in Chicago for 35 years, had waited a half hour on Adams for the Jackson bus.

By the time the stranger had straightened me out there was so little time left that I scurried about and got a cab. I was too taken up with this business to notice any symptoms but a couple of minutes later when I was seated in the cab I noticed them. I was extremely tense and was sitting on the edge of my seat, my stomach was knotted up, I was so disgusted with myself that I almost felt like crying, I had an acute headache and my vision was blurred. A few minutes before, I had been in good spirits and now I was deeply depressed. I kept thinking, over and over to myself how stupid I had been, not knowing the difference between Adams and Jackson after 35 years.

More symptoms developed. I got chest pressures and numbness in my legs, and my thoughts were racing a mile a minute.

Soon I spotted what I was doing. I was working myself up by continuously blaming myself and by dwelling on the fact that I had stood on the wrong corner. I decided that the working up process had to stop. I remembered that it is average to make mistakes. And that countless people must have waited on wrong corners as I had done. In fact, I then recalled that I had done the same thing several times before. I also recalled that on the train I ride every night it practically never fails that there isn't at least one person who has taken the wrong train by mistake. I began to relax, sat back on my seat and waited until we reached the station.

By the time I met Harriette at the station, my symptoms had evaporated. I told her what had happened and she just laughed. Sometime later when we had returned from our trip I told several of the Recovery members about the incident. None of them seemed to regard the incident as a cataclysmic event. I later told a fellow at work and he didn't seem a bit astonished either.

Before I had my Recovery training, the fear of making mistakes was, with me, the preoccupation of my every waking moment. It was an obsession with me, my every waking moment was devoted to past, present and future mistakes. I ate, slept and breathed mistakes. The result of this never-ending preoccupation with mistakes were constant symptoms such as: poor sleep; poor appetite; fatigue; depression; my thoughts were the dreariest and most pessimistic kind; palpitations; tremors, night sweats; confusion; indecision; self-disgust; lack of self-confidence and constant tenseness. Today I get symptoms but spot and stop them quickly. I can do that now because in Recovery I have learned to have the COURAGE TO MAKE MISTAKES in the trivialities of daily life.

Frank R., Chicago, IL

Dr. Low's Comment: After reading Frank's example Dr. Low declared that Frank gave such an excellent description of his sabotaging and subsequent spotting and self-control that no further comment seems to be called for.

From Selections from Dr. Low's Works , page 107