About those therapy visits that require their own kind of recovery: I'm really lucky in that I live in a pretty "stable" home because everybody else keeps is stable. So, everybody in my family knows to be prepared for the possibility of A) a zomibe, B) an irritable and angry and mean monster, and C) someone who's spacey for at least all of Friday night and all of Saturday, sometimes longer.

The key for me is preparation: I know what the meals are going to be for at least two days--and they're going to be simple, and nothing that requires everyone to sit down as a family (like pizza, hotdogs, a casserole with all the food groups...), no events planned for Saturday, nothing I have to leave the house for--and if something has to happen that day, I am not the adult responsible for making it happen. Everyone has accepted, it by now, that I am, regardless of how the therapy went, going to need long stretches of time alone--probably in the morning, which, come to think of it, may account for why everyone else sleeps in so late on those Saturdays? Good just to leave the space to me?

Other coping strategies/grounding skills: if I can make myself do it----and this is sa BIG if----I take my dogs for a walk in the graveyard (No, not because it's morbid...well, not mainly that.....but because it's a fenced enclosure and I am sure they can't run into a street, AND there are rarely other dogs there, AND there aren't very many live peopel there. While I'm there, I have a "mantra" that my therapist gave me to recite. The mantra goes with a slide show--one saying per each very vivid photograph (all nature photos), and I have spent a lot of time with that mantra--watching it on my computer, writing down the lines.....anyway, I work on memorizing and reciting it while I am walking.

Another thing I do is research for my novels...right now, I'm working on a bipolar western--no kidding---set in the frontier West, even before Custer, but during European "expansion". So, lots of geology, botany, frontier arts, trade routes, Chinese immigrationg, farming, ranching, and mining techniques, hunting techniques......so, I always have something fascinating handy....it's a refuge. So, maybe that is a really good idea: a "hobby" that matters (not just moves your fingers and doesn't engage your fascinated brain).

That's what comes to mind as real right now. If I think of other things, I'll try to remember to pass them along.