No one has been left unchanged by the searing attacks of September 11, 2001. The ongoing war in Iraq provides a steady news diet of the horrific. Headlines routinely induce involuntary cringes and shudders of disbelief in us all. Between terrorists and tsunamis, sometimes it really does seem as if the world is spinning out of control.

Bad things happen in this world, awful things, atrocities that sometimes involve children or other innocents. Focusing on the horrific can rapidly cause you to lose your sense of balance, your moral equilibrium. Whenever I start to feel overwhelmed by the terrible things that I see on the news or read about in the paper, my husband has to remind me that this is not an overly barbaric society. This isn't ancient Rome, where watching people being fed to lions or crucifixions is considered popular entertainment. But the media is such a constant presence and the sensational stories are given so much ink that it can soon start to seem as though we live in a world gone bad.

There's a great scene in L. A. Story where Steve Martin walks by a newspaper vending machine, gets a paper, glances at the headline, shrieks in horror, throws the paper back into the machine, then continues along with his jaunty walk. Not a word is spoken in the scene (well, except for maybe the shriek), but the message is loud and clear: who needs to ruin their day with this garbage?

Whenever you start to feel that "the world is too much with us," take a step back. Go on a news fast, to give your heart and mind a break from the rape, murder and pillaging. Give up Dean Koontz or Patricia Cornwell novels for a few months. Anything that makes you shudder or cringe or feel anxious, give it up, at least for a while, until you begin to feel more positive about the world around you. You don't have to watch the news on a daily basis to be reminded that bad things happen in this world. They happen, and when they do you can rest assured that the press will cover the monstrous events in excruciating detail. But that doesn't mean you have to read it, hear about it or choose to spend your time dwelling on it.

For several years I worked as an editor for the Central Intelligence Agency. My job was to read and correct grammatical mistakes in translated news reports that came out of Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and other countries of the former Yugoslavia. I had the distinct misfortune of having this job at the height of the Balkan war, when nice guys Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and their ilk spent a lot of time doing unspeakable things to their neighbors.

CIA analysts were focused at that time on atrocities. They wanted anything and everything they could get their hands on that provided evidence of human-rights abuses. And I was their filter.

I did okay for a while. Every few days I'd run across something particularly gruesome, then I'd go talk to a Serbian or Bosnian linguist, who did their best to assure me that a substantial amount of what I read was exaggerated or even falsified. "Disinformation," they'd say knowingly, as though they were certain. "No one in their right mind would really do such things to women and children."

"I'll bet over 50% of what you read every day is disinformation," a linguist told me one day, but his rationale backfired. If only 50% of it was false, then that meant that 50% potentially was true. My brain stalled. It was unthinkable.

One day, after reading an article about children being tortured with piano wire, I put my head down on my desk and felt the room begin to spin. And then I began to cry--huge, wracking sobs. It was beginning to get to me.

I went to my boss and asked to be reassigned. He patted me on the back sympathetically, "Of course, dear, of course," but within weeks I was back on the Bosnia account. The volume, it seems, was overwhelming. There was too much work to be done. They needed an experienced editor on that account, blah blah blah, and I was their girl.

Hindsight's 20/20. I later came to realize that no job is worth sacrificing your mental health. But I sighed resolutely and gutted it out. "If those people can actually live through a war," I reasoned, "then the least I can do is read about it. After all, this may be the only way I can help stop the violence."

Well, my cause was noble, if a bit self-aggrandized. It turned out that the only thing I did was work myself into what was later diagnosed as a relatively manageable case of post-traumatic stress disorder.

So I kept the job, and several months later my husband and I moved from Maryland to Dallas. We were expecting a baby--hooray!--and we wanted to be close to our families when the baby arrived.

And what genius thing did I manage to do next? I managed to talk myself and my CIA superiors into keeping my job and working from home in Dallas, where I would be a full-time telecommuter, an "off-site editor." Oh, joy! I could take care of a newborn and still manage to read about atrocities eight hours a day!

It turned out to be a really, really bad idea.

I had the baby and all was well for a few days, but my relatively manageable case of post-traumatic stress disorder morphed into a full-blown case of post-partum depression when Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. Rachel was a week old. Suddenly it was Bosnia down the freeway. I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, and soon I began to have disturbing thoughts of hurting myself or the baby.

After eight months I was a shell-shocked waif, a shadow of my former self. I struggled to "think happy thoughts," but every time I felt like I was beginning to get a handle on my fears something else would happen in the news that would send me into a tailspin of fear.

Susan Smith drowned her boys in North Carolina. I began to obsess. What if I snapped like Smith apparently did and drove my beautiful baby girl into a lake? My parents lived nearby, but I had to cross a lake to see them. I became phobic. I couldn't go anywhere near the lake, but I made excuse after excuse for why they had to come see me, or I arranged to meet them halfway--on my side of the bridge. I couldn't admit my fears to anyone. I knew they were irrational, but I was helpless to stop the downward spiral. I look back at pictures from the time and feel great waves of pity for the haggard new mom with hollow eyes and a thin, tightly stretched smile. I was losing it.

I responded to my obsessive fears with false bravado. I tried to think positive thoughts. I got an occasional massage. I went on lots of walks and even saw a pathetic excuse of a therapist. I befriended the nanny of a relative, a woman from Jamaica who was so poor she had left her infant daughter behind in Kingston with her husband so that she could work in the United States. Somehow being around someone with "real" problems much worse than my own eased my fears, but the fix was always temporary. No matter what I did to tell myself it would be alright, my fears and obsessions only got worse.

And then one day I simply couldn't carry the burden anymore. I broke down and told my husband and my parents about the torment I was in. And though I knew they didn't understand--how could they?--they helped me. My husband made me see our family doctor, who sent me to a psychologist, who referred me to a bona-fide shrink--a psychiatrist--who prescribed an antidepressant, and within weeks I was able to sleep.

The shrink referred me to a PTSD specialist, a guy who counseled police officers and firefighters who had seen and experienced traumatic events. He helped me see that my symptoms were indicative of a true disorder, a disorder that other people had, too. A disorder that could be treated.

Dr. Silver taught me to face my fears. If I was afraid of driving over a bridge, what did I have to do? You guessed it. I had to drive over that dang bridge, over and over again, until I found myself driving over it thinking about what I was going to fix that night for dinner instead of obsessing over the possibility that I would flip out and drive over the edge into the murky waters below. I knew I was well on my way to being "cured" when I drove over the bridge one day and didn't even realize it until five miles down the road. I hadn't felt any anxiety at all.

Next, I put myself on a total media fast. No news, no anxiety-producing movies or TV shows, no scary books. I was, as my best friend put it, a "turtle without a shell." One violent episode of ER or NYPD Blue could set me back for weeks.

And slowly I began to regain my footing. In the absence of violent news or entertainment I filled the void with positive stories and images. I know it sounds sappy, but it worked. I couldn't see The Sixth Sense (as much as I wanted to), but I could see Forrest Gump. I couldn't read Hearts in Atlantis, but I could read She's Come Undone and The Poisonwood Bible. I guess what I'm saying is that when you choose to filter what you allow yourself to be exposed to in this world, it doesn't necessarily mean that your life becomes any less rich or full. It's just different. Cleaner. Softer. A whole lot nicer.

On the morning of September 11 I had just dropped the girls off at school when I got a call on my cell phone from my husband. He wanted to tell me to turn off the radio, to not watch TV. He wanted to protect me from the tragedies, as if such a thing were possible, but it was too late. I was listening to the radio, and I heard it all. And a strange thing happened.

Like the rest of the world, I went into shock, then felt waves of sadness and grief. Like the rest of the world. I didn't become phobic, lose sleep for months on end, stop eating and go into a full-blown case of PTSD. I know thousands of people did. I've been there, and I understand it all too well. But I climbed out of the hole once before, and as a result of the attacks on September 11 I was terribly shocked and horrified and saddened, but I didn't fall back into the hole.

Why didn't I? I guess I'll never know for sure, but I suspect that it had something to do with the fact that I had spent the last six years or so carefully monitoring the amount of the world's bad news on which I allowed myself to focus. I spent too much of my life dwelling on the worst of man's capabilities, but for the next several years I filtered out the bad, and what was left? The good, mostly.

I still read the paper. I scan the headlines and pretty much skim past stories of murder and mayhem. What's left? Not much, you cynics are tempted to reply, but that's not quite true. I read the stories of people who have made great strides in business, medicine and art. I read about what the local boys did to earn Eagle Scout badges. I read about people who donate blood and organs to help others, I read about how the director of a homeless shelter has helped hundreds of people, I read about churches that feed the poor and crazy cat ladies who take in dozens of strays. So when a terrorist blows up a lot of innocent people, I mourn for the tragedy that it is, but I am also able to put it into perspective. Yes, there's a lot of evil in the world, but there's a lot of good as well. And I choose to focus on the good.

In hindsight I would say that my exposure to the horrific in this world was extreme. I wasn't reading scary stuff just for fun; these weren't novels that made me hear bumps in the night. These were real, bloody, cruel-beyond-your-wildest-dreams instances of torture, rape and murder.

There wasn't a single, effective solution that instantly solved my dilemma. There wasn't a pill I could take to make all my fears and phobias and world-weariness go away. What worked for me was a comprehensive approach, a combination of news fasting, drug therapy, counseling, and repeated exposure to the things I had come to fear. I came to realize that I had allowed the well of my soul to be poisoned. Cleaning the well took a lot of work.

Let's stick with this poisoned-well metaphor for a moment. I think it's apt. A well can be poisoned to varying degrees. It can be just a little dirty, with a little silt on the bottom or a discarded soda can bobbing on basically pure water, or it can become so befouled that the black waters roil with fetid, acidic waste.

Take care to guard your well. It's much easier to keep the waters clean than to purify them once they have been polluted.

Keeping your well clean means being vigilant about what you choose to focus on, what you read about, how you spend your time. You don't have to read stories of mayhem all day long to have your well poisoned; that can be accomplished just as easily by absorbing too much of something in which you don't believe, something that runs counter to who you are. If you feel sluggish and lethargic after a night in front of meaningless, stupid television, it amounts to having let a little bit of crud slip into your well. If you feel dirty after sitting through a movie filled with foul language and tawdry sex, same thing.

Your well won't be poisoned without your knowledge. When something foul is seeping in, you'll know it right away. It creates a sense of discomfort, a general sense that something's wrong. It brings a sense of unease; it makes you squirm in your chair. When you feel this, sit up and pay attention. It's your cue to guard your well.

If a particularly nasty news item causes you to feel undue stress, agonizing over the precipitous decline of civilization, then volunteering to help whatever cause that upsets you the most can be especially beneficial. For example, if you have been traumatized by hearing about abused children, then volunteering to read to kids at a local area hospital can give you a sense of helping, of doing something tangible instead of just fretting about how awful it is.

If you feel guilty passing by homeless men and women on the way to work each day, then spending a few hours in a soup kitchen each week can give you a sense of helping. There is power in feeling like a part of the solution, instead of internalizing the stress of one more social problem, one more terrible thing in the world that you are helpless to do anything about.

One woman in Dallas was determined to help her community deal with the problem of homelessness, but what could she do? She called the local shelter to ask. "We're so glad you asked," came the reply. "We have a local bakery who has donated bread to the shelter, but we need someone to pick it up and bring it to us every Saturday morning."

Bingo! The woman now loads her three sons into the car every Saturday morning and they go deliver bread to the homeless shelter. "Now I have a sense of helping, and my children have learned some invaluable lessons. Now they have seen real poverty, and they have an appreciation not just for nice toys, but for basic things, like our home, having nice clothes, and having enough food to eat." And the best part, she adds, is that both she and her children now know the value and pleasure of helping others who are less fortunate. "Before we began volunteering at the shelter I was frustrated by the problem; now I have the satisfaction of being a part of the solution."

We've already discussed the importance of nurturing old friendships and developing new ones, but when it comes to outwitting the stress of living in a sometimes-ugly world, I'll take the admonition one step further: when your soul feels tarnished by an ugly world, seek out those particular friends who remind you of what is good and healthy and dependable in the world. Find your unconventional friend, the one who doesn't care what anyone else thinks, the one who lives her life in a happy little bubble. Spend time with someone who has an uplifting personality, a positive person who sees the good in the world and contributes to it as well. And if you don't have a friend like this, you need to find one!

As you spend time nourishing friendships, pay particular attention to those friends who make you laugh, who make you feel good about yourself, who can find a reason to smile when the world comes crashing down around them. These are the souls who have the ability to remind you of the good that exists in the world in a tangible way.

When I feel overwhelmed by the crud in life, I call my old college friend, JoAnna. Her soul glows in the dark. JoAnna has been a bedrock of support to various friends and family members through a host of illnesses and various catastrophes, yet her general optimism and faith never budge an inch. She's a friend I can call in the middle of the night, and no matter how bad things get, JoAnna is never at a loss for a kind word or a positive spin.

We all have friends who fill different needs in our life; some friends are great shoppers, others make great golf buddies. Some friends are great at parties; others are just right for sharing a nice cup of tea. In the swirl of building and maintaining friendships, however, pay special attention to those who remind you of what is good and noble in the world.

On the other hand, some friendships are a drain. They sap you of energy and vitality; you inwardly cringe when you hear that person's voice on the line. These are the people who can talk for 20 minutes without letting you get a word in edgewise, the people who will call at dinnertime and ramble about their deadbeat spouse or difficult boss or wayward children, then never ask (or care) about how you are doing in return.

Take care to guard the amount of time you spend with these "friends." Spending an excessive amount of time listening to them or being with them out of a fuzzy sense of obligation, while it may amount to free therapy for them, will do nothing but cause you stress.

Pick your friends wisely. They are your anchors in life. Your family and even your colleagues are pretty much predetermined; you don't have any control over who those individuals are. Even your children are predetermined; they are born, and they are yours. The individuals you choose to call your friends, however, are totally up to you. In this world you get to pick your gallery of friends. Make them good ones.

In the aftermath of September 11, The Washington Post published a story that examined the ways teenagers were dealing with the tragedy. There was a substantial lag time between the event and the point where young people began to make tentative forays into using humor to defuse the tension and scariness of the event--about six months, in fact--but the emergence of the use of humor was totally predictable, according to language specialists. Once the event was safely in the past, the language of teenagers began to slowly co-opt the horror.

A general insult? "Osama yo mama."

Something outdated? "That is so September 10."

An unfashionable outfit? "What is that, a burqa?"

It seems that teenagers are particularly adept at doing something we all must eventually come to terms with: they take a scary subject then delicately weave humor into it, which has the effect of stripping the subject of some of its terror. The psyche rationalizes that it can't be terrified by something that it can laugh about. Terrorists aren't quite so scary if we can laugh about their clothes, their caves or their language.

Finding humor in the horrific involves treading a thin line, note linguists. It's hard to define what's funny and what's just plain bad taste, but language specialists do agree on the need to diffuse particularly horrific events through language and, eventually, laughter.

The horrific that occurs in this world doesn't have quite the same power over you when you rest assured at night that you are living your life the best way you know how, to the best of your abilities. Other people may screw up and hurt others in the process, but as for you, you bring good things to your little corner of the world. In the end, that's the best that any of us can ever hope to do.

If you find yourself upended emotionally by the horrible things that happen in this world, then take a step or two back and look hard at your own life. You can't do a single thing about a wacko mother who hurts her kids in another part of the country, but maybe you've always wanted to spend a few hours a week volunteering and somehow never managed to find the time. A general sense of unease and heartsickness over tragic events in this fallen world can be a clarion call to counteract the evil with good.

The heroic response that met the tragedies of 9/11 is a classic example of the innate need people have to counter evil with good. The selfless acts of thousands were recorded as surely as the collapse of the burning buildings; in New York, the attack and the immediate counterpoint, a breathtaking outpouring of love and support by thousands of New Yorkers, who until that point had been generally considered to be the most callous of Americans, was nothing short of astounding.

We can learn by their example. When the evil in this world threatens to overwhelm, you can find a measure of peace by helping others. It's that simple.

Box:

• Go on a news fast. You can't feel stress by horrific events you don't know about.
• Read a good book. Read something beautifully written, lyrical, soothing in both its message and its delivery. Dig out some old favorites, such as To Kill a Mockingbird or Gone With the Wind. A good book gives your mind a break, a rest from a reality that can be both harsh and disturbing.
• Get a massage. The soothing tranquility of a darkened room, peaceful music and a gentle touch can be a balm to the soul.
• Volunteer. Find a cause that you believe in and give them a call. Even if you can only afford an hour or two a month, most charities and nonprofits would be delighted to have the help.
• Help a child. Finding a way to change the life of a child is an investment in the future. By investing in a child your contribution is likely to accrue dividends for years to come.
• Mend a broken relationship. If there is a person in your life, a friend or a family member whom you once loved but you allowed a slight or a disagreement or a conflict to wreck the relationship, then take the time to give that person a call or write a letter. Life's too short to waste mental energy on lengthy grudges. Keep in mind the old saying, "Poison eventually destroys the container in which it is kept."
• Live consciously. If you really enjoy a good cup of tea in the afternoon, then make a small ceremony out of the act. If you love to read, then turn off silly afternoon sitcoms and spend the time with a good book instead.
• Maintain friendships. Make a concerted effort to stay in touch with old friends. Call, send an e-mail, or--even better--write a letter. Respect old friendships for the priceless treasures that they are.
• Go on a long walk--every day. Physical exercise is good for you, body and soul.
• Practice random acts of kindness. You've seen the bumper stickers--possibly even allowed yourself a snide smirk at the impossible naivete of someone who would publicly advocate such nonsense. If you've been one of the unbelievers, take a walk on the wild side and try performing an occasional RAOK. My New Agey friend says it amounts to practicing good karma, throwing pebbles of goodness into the pond of the universe, then watching the ripples spread.
• Nourish your spirit. Find some time each day to reflect of qualities or traits that you value and want to develop more fully in your life, then look for ways to incorporate those qualities into your day.