Last week we went to see the museum exhibit of Monet in Venice. It was beautiful, all the soft muted colors of water lilies and more. I do love the gentle pastel colors, and I do love my pink. But admittedly, I will take Diego Rivera any day. I prefer the hard lines of realism and the brilliant primary colors. I think of color as one of the great pleasures of life, and even with food, I am often partial to the colors over the combination of ingredients. In June in San Francisco, USA, where I live, the streets are alive with bright waving rainbow flags to celebrate Pride. They show up vividly against the perennially grey foggy summer skies. We even have a rainbow search light beaming off the Civic Center building, fog permitting. Although I am an old straight married lady, I am proud that our city is relatively sex positive and LGBTQI friendly. I was proud when our straight white mayor led the charge for same sex marriage both locally and beyond. It is so important to me that everyone be able to freely love who they want without shame or sanction.
I remember when same sex marriage was first legalized here in 2004. As it happened, we were at a Melissa Etheridge concert at the historic Fillmore Auditorium that night. Melissa was one of the first openly lesbian rock stars, at least as far as I knew. The atmosphere at that show was wildly euphoric, and for a while, there were long lines of couples outside the Civic Center, the very same building that projects the beautiful lights. Finally, they could get that legal validation that their union existed and was accepted, to some extent, in the eyes of the world.
I know many think of the institution of marriage as being just one more trapping of capitalism that they don’t particularly endorse. I for one, have always loved it, once I got over the hump of feeling at least nominally safe enough to go through with it. I remember after being married, the first time I went to the bank and deposited my money. I had the perhaps astonishing thought, “this is for us!” What was astonishing to me, was to actually have an “us.” It was perhaps the first time ever, I felt a sense of affiliation, of belonging, of being part of something. A missing experience for the child of neglect, who feels rather lost in space without a tether. Some feel yoked by it. I feel connected.
We are certainly not out of the woods with sexual justice by any means, here or anywhere as far as I know. Same sex marriage went through some zigs and zags before it stayed solidly on the books here. And it is indeed a question whether anything is solid these days, especially where equality and justice are concerned. Trans people are perhaps some of the most victimized of minority groups in most of the world, and there continues to be great ignorance and prejudice, even among more the more “enlightened” among us. I continue to learn more and more all the time, and I am humbled by some of the mistakes or questions I still stumble with. The same is true for other non “cis” relationship configurations. But nonetheless we have made some progress in the US. It was not that long ago that same sex activity was punishable by prison or worse, (and in some countries it still is.) And homosexuality was listed as a diagnosable mental disorder. We do have something to be proud of, and despite the commotion in the local Major League Baseball world, where some team members rebelled against the team issued rainbow adorned pride baseball caps, I am mostly proud of the local community. We live near the acclaimed SF Castro District, always lively and alive with color!
For many of us, the opposite of pride is shame, a feeling all too familiar to the child of neglect. Being by nature self-referential, a child readily concludes, if I am ignored, overlooked, unseen, unknown, essentially invisible, it is because I don’t matter. I am unimportant, inherently worthless and therefore “less-than.” Everything is my “fault,” as there is no other, and the impulse is to hide and withdraw. Recently I have been making a study studying about violence, inspired or compelled by the state of the world, and certainly my long personal journey of political outrage and activism.
One of my most trusted experts on the subject of violence, has been New York University psychiatrist James Gilligan, whom I first encountered at a conference shortly after the publication of his groundbreaking book Violence (1997, Knopf.) That book has become a staple reference and cornerstone of my exploration. Gilligan identifies shame as being one of the key precipitants of violence. The experience of being treated as, or feeling less than or inferior, of inhabiting less power, agency and dignity, of not mattering fuels the rage that impels violent action. The glaring disparity between “haves” and “have nots” and the injustice of that, drives it, resulting in perpetration and the victimization of others. Turning against others who may be still “weaker” than oneself or striking out against those who have or appear to have more. “It’s not fair!” is a child’s refrain, which is of course true, excepting for the fact that life rarely is.
Gilligan worked with and studied the most violent of convicted prisoners, inside maximum-security US prisons, and psychiatric hospitals for the “criminally insane” for over three decades. In the prisons. What he encountered was that certainly inside that system, the worst insult to dignity, or the greatest point of shame, was to be weak, or not a “man,” to have one’s manhood diminished or denied. The prison system, which for the most part deprives inmates of their natural and customary sexual life, whatever that may be, in his view is categorically emasculating, and creates a culture inside not only of sexual hunger and “horniness,” but increased shame.
Gilligan, married 64 years to feminist philosopher, Carol Gilligan, is no stranger to questions of where the non-male fits into the picture. Violence was written decades before awareness of non-binary or “other” genders, and he would probably update his views to account for this. Perhaps he already has, and I simply have not found the updated work yet. In the binary cultural gender construct, non-males (in his model, women,) cannot begin to compete, are by nature even more “less than.” In the history and literature of at least Western cultures, a woman can only challenge or dishonor a man’s superiority or “manhood,” through sex. Either overwhelming his desire with the strength of her erotic attraction or betraying him sexually with another partner. Either defies his manhood and casts shame upon him.
Gilligan describes in painfully graphic detail, the exaggeration and resultant violence of all this inside prison walls. Sexual violence is vicious and rampant, prison staff ignores or even condones, sexual violence and the ostracizing of the “weak,” and there is no help or protection for the victimized and exploited. They are thus further “dishonored” and “weakened,” not to mention traumatized and often even injured. Gilligan calls it institutional homophobia, in addition to the notorious racism inside these walls.
What am I getting at here? Shame begets violence. Our system of punishment institutionalizes and perpetuates shame which then produces more violence, and of course trauma. Those who do manage to exit the prison system – in effect, get out alive – are anything but less inclined toward violence as a result. And again, shame is a profound and ubiquitous result of early neglect. Oy vey. I call it a “gordian knot.”
This is supposed to be a weekend and an article about pride! Yes, there have been incidents of violence at some of the weekend’s pride events, but for the most part it has been joyous, at least here. Gilligan speaks of pride as a powerful impetus for creativity and purposeful, meaning-making work. Feeling good about oneself inspires agency and action. I matter and I have value. What I do has value. A default and an echoing refrain among neglect survivors, is the shame ridden belief, “I don’t matter.’ It is a ready and sorry explanation for the experience of being invisible, unseen, ignored, forgotten or abandoned. Another powerful reminder of how we must make it stop: stop the feedback loop trauma and neglect-shame-violence-more trauma, neglect… We must make it stop. And today I heard a program that put another, new spin on the cycle. It described the now apparently frequent experience of artificial intelligence, AI, evoking a feeling of “I don’t matter…” by replacing human jobs and even creative endeavors, and seemingly in no time. Oh no…
Recently I learned a new word. Although a 50-year proponent of body-oriented practice, admittedly I do love words! This one, when I encountered it, at first, I thought it was a typo, but a large and prominent typo in the NY Times seemed unlikely, so I looked it up: respair. At first, I thought it was supposed to be repair or despair. I looked in my trusted American Heritage Dictionary, always by my side when reading. Not there, so I looked in Google which located it in the Oxford English dictionary, archaic English defined as “the return of hope after a period of despair.” As a verb, respair means “to have hope again.” Time to resuscitate that word, and the feeling it describes. Last night the fog cleared, and the rainbow search lights off City Hall were brilliant and visible well into the night. Only today, I was reminded that the anniversary of same sex marriage in SF was 25 June, just a couple of days ago, and long lines of couples again lined the courthouse steps to tie the knot on that historic day. Happy Pride everyone, and let’s all observe and generate respair!
Although our mom started the reminders about her Mother’s Day wishes at least a month in advance of the day, Father’s Day was never much of a “thing” in our family. As an immigrant/refugee with mixed feelings about everything “American” our dad was somewhere between dismissive and contemptuous about all the customs and holidays that were not decidedly “ours.” Father’s Day was one of them, which was something of a relief to me, since my feelings were similarly mixed about him for many years. So now, as my husband is not a father, and both of our fathers have passed, it is easy enough for us to ignore the day. Except perhaps that there is a new generation of young fathers in our family who seem to take the passage and the role very seriously. I want to honor and nurture that. And being for many survivors, part of the trauma story, I though it would probably make sense to write something about fathers here.
As has become my practice in these times of transition in the world, I want to acknowledge the poverty of our language which is starkly binary in its characterization of gender and family, acknowledging male and female, and nuclear family as the norm. I do my best to avoid the pitfalls and I am sure I continue to fall short, so I hope you will bear with me.
Recently I heard an interview with a local physician named Christopher Choukalas, about his recent book Even the Darkest Night: A Father’s Journey of Hope and Healing from Paternal Depression, (Harmony, 2026.) It sounded like a book I should probably read, especially as I am immersed in study about male violence and male development in general. I wondered about any connections there. And if nothing else, perhaps it would offer something of relevance to our topic of Father’s Day. So, I proceeded to order the book.
As I began to read, I noticed my own critical attitude rearing up. It almost resembled my dad’s snarky-ness about “alien” ideas, which rather embarrassed me. I found I did not particularly like the author. Something about his tone, which seemed to have a sarcastic or ironic edge did not evoke sympathy but rather guardedness, or my arrogant quickness to write off whatever seemed too much like “pop psychology” or “pop” science.
Choukalas began the book recounting his own childhood, which sounded like a classic neglect story. He described his own absent father, and increasingly his story sounded like countless neglect stories I had heard. He wandered around invisible in his family, taught himself to read at an early age, and unseen, he was not encouraged in any of his interests. His parents were unaware of his extraordinary aptitude in school, and sadly so was he. Although all his test scores were far above the average. He was encouraged to go to college only by teachers and counselors at school, with the same later being true about the recommendation that he pursue a medical career.
“For whatever reason,” his first interest and master’s degree was in psychology, certainly not unusual for neglect survivors unwittingly trying to figure out what is “wrong.” It was only later that he changed course from psychology to medical training and became an anesthesiologist, and quite accomplished, ending up here in San Francisco’s highly regarded University of California Medical Center, where he is both a physician and a professor. From the outside, like many the child of neglect, he looks like he has it all. Meeting his wife Lindsay, completed the picture.
Lindsay sounded like the “perfect” woman and mate, and the marriage seemed idyllic and wonderful at first. But as it progressed, it sounded increasingly like a neglect narrative. He described himself mired in what I call the “one person psychology,” simultaneously appearing to be acutely focused and aware of the feelings of the other, while living in a solitary siloed world, utterly self-reliant. Until he was awoken out of his dissociative oblivion by his wife’s complicated pregnancy, which brought her close to death before his very eyes. His helplessness terrified him, and although she survived it, it awakened in him a terrified anxiety that persisted throughout the remainder of the pregnancy and beyond.
The remainder of the book is a description of what the author characterizes as Paternal Post Partum Depression. The couple “welcomed” twin girls who although significantly premature, thrived and grew. However, Choukalas found himself increasingly anxious, unable to connect with the infant girls or his wife, for that matter. He was irritable and moody, resentful and even more withdrawn than before. The marriage was badly on the rocks, and they turned to couple’s therapy and he also began individual therapy where with the help of his therapist and in a decidedly medical model kind of way, evolved his description of what he calls Paternal Post Partum Depression, PPPD, a “new” iteration of “Three P’s of Neglect.” The more he talked with other fathers, the more he discovered how very ubiquitous he finds it to be. I guess I had to admit, he reminded me of myself when I began to compile what I came to call the “neglect profile,” and people seemed to come at me from every direction, saying “OMG, that is me!” So of course, I could slowly come to believe that maybe I was on to something. Clearly, he was describing something that ultimately seemed to help him and others. And I slowly became able to summon some humility and see if there was something here that was of use to me.
John Gottman, the marriage researcher, identified the transition to parenthood as the single most challenging and precarious juncture for couples. He described that very often the downhill cascade toward divorce begins there. That was certainly the danger that the author clearly felt when his two daughters arrived. And as sweet and adorable as everyone else found them to be, he had a terrible time connecting with them, even spending time with them. Experiencing the two infants as being the ones who most occupied their mother’s attention and her body, readily awakened resentment, rejection, feeling left out and unimportant. It sounded to me like florid activation of unknown latent neglect trauma.
Gottman reminds parents that this is a time when special attention to their relationship with each other, including if not especially the sexual partnership, is essential. That was certainly true for this couple, and appears to continue to be, as the book ends. But I began to wonder about something else…
It occurred to me that perhaps the transition to parenthood, and the arrival of helpless, vulnerable infants, is a potent trauma stimulus. Infant neglect has no narrative, being the story of “nothing,” or what did not happen. Could it be that the arrival of these infants awakens memory material is that is so early that it is only sensory, somatic and emotional, or implicit memory? Perhaps PPPD is another name for trauma activation. As we know, trauma is not remembered but relived. Perhaps the appearance of vulnerable infants is a potent unconscious reminder of a lost part of the self. At the very least, if the PPPD diagnosis or designation makes any parent(s) more conscious, makes any blindly neglectful young parent, more aware, that is a win for our larger mission.
Meanwhile, I find myself remembering my dad and view him through all these various lenses. He had a terrible trauma story, much more than I will ever know. Some of it he passed on to me, and I had to spend years healing from. But also, some of my greatest and most cherished strengths came from him and are in his image. Wishing you a gentle Father’s Day, if such a thing exists in your country.
In 1996, The Vagina Monologues first appeared in San Francisco. It was an amazing work of theater, combining some of my most passionate interests: trauma, politics and art. It was a brilliant work of theater illustrating in short scenes, the many faces of the ubiquitous sexual exploitation and victimization of women and girls in the US and around the world. It was the courageous and bold work of Eve Ensler of whom, at the time, I had never heard. But she became one of those unforgettable icons and touchstones of my development as a therapist and recovering person, a woman and a sexual being.
In 2014, I eagerly read the next book that I knew of by Ensler: In the Body of the World, (2014, Picador) again, gutsy, self-revealing and unnervingly explicit. In it, Ensler described her severe run with cancer, as well as her work with sexually abused women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I am no shrinking violet, and have certainly read my share of accounts of sexual trauma. But the horrors described in that book, of damage and violation to women and women’s bodies, was the worst I had ever encountered anywhere, and almost unbearable to read. If I had that much trouble even imagining the haunting images and emotions, thinking of Ensler sitting with and seeing those women and their ravaged bodies, I was awed. How can she do this? (Now probably the same people are being ravaged by Ebola, but that is another subject.)
In 2019, Ensler did it again, this time with The Apology (Bloomsbury). Forgiveness and apology and are powerful topics, deeply meaningful, and hold a major spot on the bucket list of books in my head waiting to be written. I was compelled by both the audio and the print versions, could not decide which I liked better. In this unusual case the actor reader on the audio was so talented and compelling that uncharacteristically I almost preferred the audio, and determined it had to be both. But I bought stacks of the slender volume and gave them away, to make sure they got into everyone’s hands. By that time, Ensler had changed her name to “V”.
In the final days of COVID when we were still locked in and conferences were still online, I remember again, being moved to hear Ensler speak in conjunction with the movie Cracked Up. Although I am not a movie person by any means, that one gripped me in its portrayal of trauma, neglect and addiction, and not only because it was endorsed by V.
Have I been star-struck this past 30 years since The Vagina Monologues? Admittedly like many survivors of neglect I cleave to role models and heroes, or was I simply grateful and filled with admiration for another great mentor, role model and teacher?
Fast forward to 2026. I am swamped with work and commitments of every kind. And I received an invitation to participate on a panel at the 37th Annual Boston Trauma Conference, with you guessed it, V Ensler. The Trauma Conference also has been an annual fixture in my life for probably all of its 37-year existence. I was to say the least, flabbergasted, if also terrified and unspeakably honored. Yesterday it happened, and there were six of us in total including V, women who had different backgrounds and different perspectives, and different practice. But we all share a passion for sexual and gender justice, social justice, and the whole panoply of sexual values. What a privilege and what an experience.
It was also a testament to the hard work of dogged trauma healing, that the young therapist sitting in the front row at the American Conservatory Theater in 1996, was now occupying a seat at the table on the stage. How could this have happened? So much has been flying by in the whirlwind of the past two months, that I have much to integrate. I guess this is a reminder to stay the course. Times can be hard, and progress slow, but the “hard work miracle” is worth it, if we have the good fortune to do the work.
I never dreamed I would live to see age 29. Blessedly I landed in the office of a patient, persistent and brilliant attachment-based psychotherapist, and we had and have the advantage of ever new and better trauma theory, practice and modalities. We are constantly updating our files and we must. That is one of the unspeakably valuable aspects of this conference, and why it is and has long been a centerpiece in my development as a therapist. It keeps us all updating our files, so we can do our best work, and as effectively and quickly as possible.
I am going to keep this a bit shorter today. I am behind in so many things, and I don’t want to miss too many sessions holed up in my room banging on the computer. I promise I will make it up to you, and I want to get out there for the next session. I hope this does not sound like bragging to you. I don’t mean to toot my horn but rather sound the trumpet for staying with the work. We simply cannot imagine how our lives will change. I know V feels that way too.
And yes, she does have a recent book, another memoir updating her files, The Reckoning. Again, breathtaking and inspiring. And I was also delighted to discover, that unlike some idealized others, she is a delightful and truly lovely human being. I might add, I am constantly reminded that our self-image, is the last thing to change!
PS One of the perks of my travel in wider circles and meeting lots of new people, is that we have some truly interesting podcast guests in the pipeline! Just a teaser for now, but you can look forward to that!
Today’s Song is about how time passes and things change:
On May 25, it will be six years since the tragic murder of George Floyd. It seems like just a flash moment since I wrote my blog marking the one-year anniversary. “Pandemic time”, like “trauma time”, has a quality of hazy unreality to it. And much as we are better coming to understand the mechanisms of traumatic memory, it nonetheless continues to feel summarily weird. I frequently hear myself say, whether in response to another or myself, rattled by some traumatic activation, that “trauma is not remembered, it is relived.”
I do find myself afraid that Floyd will be forgotten, will evaporate into irrelevance or simple non-existence. That is perhaps my own feeling being relived. Floyd being so neglected, with a constellation of experiences: poverty, color, addiction and so many additional insults and atrocities, it is not an unreasonable concern, even in real-time. I don’t want the cataclysm of Floyd’s death washed away in the undertow of these dramatic years.
The nature of trauma is also a strange pendulation of remembering and forgetting, another mysterious alteration of traumatic memory. I have always found it perplexing that I have so little memory of my life. I have observed the same in many survivors of trauma and neglect.
I remember years ago in a trauma conference, hearing a lecture about this strange phenomenon of remembering and forgetting, even with “grand” historical scale trauma. It is as if we would prefer to erase events from awareness, whitewash or re-touch our story to make it more palatable or bearable. Imagine denying the holocaust, and yet there are those that do! More often, we don’t know we do this. Many survivors of severe trauma are surprised and shocked by memory that arises unbidden later in life, in a process that is so confusing and feels so out of control, that it is hard to know what to believe.
Neglect is so riddled with the feeling of being forgotten, and the predominance of emptiness, of there being nothing to remember or forget, that it becomes a kind of Gordian knot or koan. I have many, many years of journals, ragged and faded. I have toted them with me through the seemingly discrete phases and decades of my long life, from place to place. Yet, I have never opened a single one, no would I consider throwing them away. Perhaps they are a kind of evidence that I did exist or have a past, perhaps they symbolize the ambivalence of remembering and forgetting, knowing and not knowing. I do know that with each passing anniversary of a major event, such as the death of George Floyd, I fear anew that it, that he will be forgotten, that any lesson will be lost, or his life and death in vain.
In a fascinating book I read some years ago, Denial by Jessica Stein, she describes her own elusive trauma story. As a young teen, she and her sister were violently sexually assaulted by a stranger. They were together, so she had the atypical experience of having her trauma witnessed and shared, from beginning to end. The assault was reported to the police, so their story was formally documented and filed with authorities. However, in spite of the precise record of the event, both with the police and her sister’s memory, the entire experience vanished from the author’s conscious memory. It simply evaporated.
Interestingly, Stein grew up to become a scholar and an expert on the subject of terrorism. She graduated from a prestigious university with advanced degrees and travelled the world researching and interviewing, writing and teaching about terrorists. She had no idea why she had this abiding interest in these horrifying and despicable individuals- until, in her 40s, she “remembered” her trauma. The rest of the book is about that. I highly recommend it.
I do harbor the fear that the way memory can be of use, like to prevent a recurrence, or to honor the sacrifice of the sufferer, will be lost. I did hurriedly buy the recent biography of George Floyd, timed exquisitely for release right around the anniversary date. I have not finished it, but so far, I find it to have an unsavory opportunistic flavor, as if the authors stand to advance themselves by memorializing him. Uggghh.
This complex tangle of remembering and forgetting can raise for me the evocative question of forgiveness. Where does that fit? I so admire John Lewis in his ability to forgive George Wallace, who’s resounding historic words, “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” stained and shaped the racist US national climate for some years. When Wallace sought his forgiveness, Lewis granted it, later saying, “When I met George Wallace, I had to forgive him because to do otherwise — to hate him — would only perpetuate the evil system we sought to destroy.” How do you do that? And yet adamantly, Lewis adds, we forgive but never forget.
I don’t suppose I am ready to forgive the sadistic and brutal murder of George Floyd. But I do fervently want to keep the memory alive and breathing, and redouble the effort to eradicate trauma and neglect on every scale.
My first real love was a “bad-ass.” He was, wildly good-looking, European and chain-smoked “Gitanes” which were very strong, unfiltered cigarettes. When he moved out of the apartment we shared for 10 years, the previously white walls were grayish black, and it took a while for even fresh paint to extinguish the smell. He was an athlete, could have been a really good serious one if not for the smoking and drinking. But he was irreverent and tough. And I loved that. Like many a child of neglect, I craved a protector: someone who would fight if necessary, on my behalf. In my family that was unimaginable. First of all, because I barely existed. But secondly because it was, at least allegedly, “not our nature.” My father would at times bellow, “He’s just a louse! They are just lice!” But it was in reaction to someone slighting him, certainly not me. I don’t think I even realized that I was drawn to men who were somewhat mean, but protective. Mean on my behalf. Except perhaps, various iterations of Mick Jagger.
Not much of a television person, there was one program that I did love and watched religiously. I would record it for my friend on the old VHS because his TV did not get the channel it was on. It was Sopranos, which ran from 1999-2007. When that show went off the air, I turned off the TV and have never turned it on again. The main character, Tony, was a gangster: boss of an organized crime mob. What made Tony so compelling for me, was that he was in therapy, nominally for panic attacks. So clearly there was some conflict about “whacking,” essentially eliminating anyone who interfered with his agenda, and perhaps his misogyny and mistreatment of his wife.
My favorite scene of the whole 8 years was after his therapist, whom Tony was quite attached to, had been brutally raped in the parking structure of her therapy office building. She was understandably shaken, and massively traumatized by the assault, and her husband was painfully unresponsive and minimizing, which compounded her trauma. Much like the all too common sexually abused child who tries to tell someone and winds up blamed or further abandoned. This experience is often as traumatic as the actual event, or even more so, compounding the shock with betrayal. Especially if there is a prior history of abandonment and neglect.
The most poignant scene in that episode, is in Tony’s session. The therapist has returned following a brief hiatus after the rape. She of course had not told her patients what had happened to her. And you see her in the session, struggling with herself. She knows who the rapist was, and she knows that Tony would be that longed for bad-ass protector that like me, she had never had. That guy would have been a “mark,” Tony would have had his head in a bowling ball bag at the bottom of the ocean, in a hot minute. She knew that.
The therapist did not say anything, but that inner struggle of hers powerfully evoked the deep longing I had always had, for someone to have my back in that way. Instead, everything was “my fault.” For survivors of neglect, that longing and the blame, are anything but unique.
It continues to amaze me, the mysteries of memory: what sticks and what evaporates, simply fading away like smoke. Among the literally hundreds of books I have read, some leave a lasting mark – even the author’s name. Probably when they strike a historic an important personal chord. One of those was George Lakoff’ 2008 book The Political Mind. Lakoff was a linguistics professor at UC Berkeley. I have no idea what prompted me or even led me to a linguistics book, except perhaps that the mind and politics are both core passions of mine.
Lakoff’s theory about how it is that we end up choosing and following autocratic, powerful leaders, is because of how many of us have wished and longed for a protector who would stand up and fight on our behalf, who would insist: ”Leave my kid alone or I will destroy you!” Or, “My kid is the BEST! Don’t mess with my kid! Or else!” I don’t mean this literally of course, but how many of us have had a fantasy or wish that I might matter so much, that someone would actually go to the mat for me. Looking around at the world today, I wonder, does neglect, and the gaping void of anything even vaguely resembling protection, create a vulnerability or a gravitation toward charismatic, autocratic, powerful “spiritual” or religious “influences” or political leaders? Certainly, it is not conscious. But I am curious about this.
Another of my lingering literary memories was of a book by someone I heard speak at the Boston Trauma Conference, probably in the late 1990’s: James Gilligan. I have not seen or heard much from him since, although according to AI, he is still teaching, now at New York University, and still writing. His book, Violence: A National Epidemic was first published in 1996. It was probably around that time that I heard him in Boston. A truly remarkable human being, Gilligan worked with the most viciously violent convicted maximum-security criminals, and the “criminally insane,” in prison hospitals. These are individuals who have committed some of the most unimaginably heinous, brutally gory crimes. It amazes me that Gilligan has the courage, and the heart, let alone the interest, to be locked in with these men. He has some extremely valuable things to teach us, some of which are painfully related to our themes of trauma and neglect.
Because they feel so empty, so numb, so utterly dead, these men seek for something to feel a spark, to feel alive. I see it to a much lesser degree with some of my neglect survivor clients; what I have come to call “hand grenades,” provocative, often self-sabotaging but dramatic verbalizations or actions to awaken something, anything at all, to interrupt the excruciating boredom, the activating stimulus of nothing. It could be rousing a political argument at a family holiday meal, an enraging comment tossed out off-handedly in a couples’ session, even an insult to the therapist: anything might be better than nothing.
Gilligan adds that often the prisoners do unthinkable things to themselves, inflicting dramatic, even life-threatening injury and pain to their own bodies: as vicious as the crimes that landed them there. To many, literal death seems preferable to the seemingly endless living death they are enduring. It sounds frighteningly like the agony of disconnection, and agonizing emptiness of neglect trauma.
Much of my life, I was painfully aware of who “got” what, and how much; most significantly with attention and affection, but everything really: a running tally of comparison. Of course, I anticipated and expected to come up short. Neglect is a universe of scarcity. There is categorically not enough to go around.
Says Gilligan, the extreme of violence correlates much less to actual poverty, than to relative poverty. The wider the disparity between “haves” and “have-nots,” the higher the incidence of violence. He cites that during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, when virtually everyone had nothing, the level of violence in the US was lower than ever, significantly lower in the US than in times, perhaps like now, when the gap is widening. His explanation for violence is it is a way to restore justice, to avenge violence suffered, and to alleviate shame. Being or having less, inspires shame and envy, which can readily inflame a vengeful rage, and a righteous urgency to reclaim what is rightfully “mine.”
Injustice, scarcity, shame, and the agony of nothing, are painfully familiar to us as we delve more and more deeply into the study of neglect trauma. I am ever chillingly reminded of the insidious feed-back loops that stimulate and perpetuate the violence that traumatizes and perpetuates more trauma and neglect and on and on and on. Again, my redundant rallying cry, we must work together to heal both: developmental dysregulation, and the out of balance larger world.
I Hope to see you in Boston!
One of these rainy nights, I happened to hear an interview with a woman I had not heard of, named Annabelle Gurwitch, an actress, activist and author. With wry humor and comedic irony, she was talking about her new memoir, The End of My Life is Killing Me: The Unexpected Joys of a Cancer Slacker. Her story begins in rough days, early in the Pandemic of 2020. Those were strange and challenging times for all of us, particularly so for those, like Gurwich, who worked in the entertainment world. In addition, at that time, she was wrenching her way through a painful separation and divorce from her husband of 20+ years. Then, truly out of the blue, she was shocked with everyone’s nightmare. She received a diagnosis of stage four lung cancer.
Gurwich was in her fifties at the time, and under the impression she was in pretty good shape. Not perfect, but pretty good. She had never smoked, had reasonably healthy habits in terms of diet, exercise and all the “right” things we are supposed to do to take care of ourselves. The devastating news caught her completely by surprise. Lung cancer is one of those hellish fates, from which no one seems to come out alive, and stage four seemed to be an unquestionable and ominous looming death sentence. Getting news like that, seems to be a mandate to tidy up one’s affairs, hunker down, and wait for the end. In Gurwitch’s case, the cancer was far too metastasized to attempt any sort of surgery.
Those were particularly lonely times for all of us, with forced isolation, people dying by the thousands of COVID every day, pervasive fear about the virus itself and all other ubiquitous uncertainties and unknowns.
Gurwitch, being a comedic actress, brought amazing humor and grace to the heart-wrenching story. To me that was particularly amazing as I grew up on a steady diet of bleakness and tragedy, and for the most part an absence of laughter and fun.
The exception was that our dad, occasionally would play entertainer. Being a cantor, he was a public figure of sorts and sometimes performed publicly in other capacities. For that purpose, he would practice carefully curated and honed jokes. I remember finding Jewish comic of the time, Henny Youngman’s Take My Wife, Please, lying around, usually in the bathroom, which was most likely where he went to “study”.
Dad had a quirky way of telling jokes at home. He would almost get to the punchline, and then he would start laughing, laughing so hard that he could almost not get to the punchline, but by then the punchline did not even matter. The contagion of his laughter had all of us in stitches. Then he finally got the punchline out, and we all laughed at that. Those moments of levity were precious and few and far between.
When my sister had stage four ovarian cancer, now almost 10 years ago, I was beside myself. For two years we hovered, posed between fearing for the worst and hoping for the best. I changed my whole schedule so I could be at every single chemo appointment, I was baking and making packages of bread and cheese, doing all I could do to ward off my own devastating terror. The core of neglect trauma is loss and I was walking the delicate tight rope between grief and hope. A stage four designation is like a death knell. But I did not want to believe that, so I hovered, and spent as much time with her as I could.
Nowadays in the cancer world, all the metaphors about “fighting” cancer or being “warriors” in combat with the deadly foe, are being cast off by many cancer patients, in favor of something more on the order of restoration of health and balance. My sister lost all her hair, and first chose to wear scarves to hide it, then opted to simply wear her baldness publicly and own the cancer before the world. She wrote about it. She seemed to be staunchly positive and hopeful, and clearly did not want to talk about the possibility of dying. I remembered my childhood best friend who died of AIDS in 1992. He lamented that no one wanted to talk with him about death, which made him lonelier. But we did. I don’t remember how we talked about it, but I know it was candid and he was comforted by being free to talk about it. In his case, there was no cause for hope. I was glad I could do what no one else would, with him. My sister wanted none of that. She staunchly occupied the hope side of the scale, as did Gurwich for the most part, with a fair measure of often snarky humor. I worked hard to join my sister in her optimism. At least in her presence. But when not in her presence, it dissolved and I was steeped in existential grief. I could not seem to find equilibrium anywhere else. So much like the tug of war between grief and hope that so many survivors of neglect and abuse grapple with, in straddling the feelings about estrangement or impending death of parents or other perpetrators.
It seemed as if my sister was able to dwell on the positive side of the valence. We went on walks with her energetic dogs; we sat in her beautiful blooming yard and watched the birds. She and her husband nursed and bred Monarch butterflies. All I could do was change my whole schedule around so I could be there, and make bread and cheese, my idea of Jewish Penicillin. And follow her lead. Nearly ten years have passed, she lived to see not one but two grandchildren come into the world. Now her cancer seems, much like the Pandemic, to be a distant hazy dream. What is the role of hope and beauty? And laughter?
Of course, we cannot side step grief, or like Pollyanna, wish away or deny it. Grief being the core experience of neglect trauma, it happened. We cannot change what happened, but grief enables us eventually to find a new equilibrium to live with the loss, to find some modicum of peace about what has undeniably happened: change or loss that has occurred. I was amazed when I went to hear Salman Rushdie speak not long ago. He survived a brutal knife attack that involved being stabbed 19 times and losing an eye, after a relatively long life of significant trauma. He looked pretty darn good, with a patch over the missing eye. Aged 78, about 18 months post knife attack trauma, he just published a new book. The memoir chronicling the year following his knife attack may have been the vessel for his grief. When I saw him, I was stunned by his humor, energy and creativity that refused to be extinguished. Certainly, part of what sustained him was the loving and ceaseless presence of his partner. And I am guessing, the same undying positive determination.
Not everyone makes it, of course. And those with the privilege of resources and accessibility of care, loving others and information have a better chance. Grief and hope are not binary either/or choices. We need to know how to have both, and wisdom and support in both knowing and understand the place for each. I am 99% healed from my agonizing hip injury, certainly not to be compared with a life- threatening illness, but a good opportunity to test the hypothesis about hope, determination, connection and of course time. Patience and time. I always. wondered why in English, sick people are called “patients,” because I have none when I am the patient. But it is also a requisite input for any kind of significant healing.
Gurwich received her diagnosis in 2020. She was very much alive on the interview I heard last week. I have not yet finished the book, but her elixir of humor, support and treatment have gotten her from the apparent kiss of death to here. As Angela Davis emphasized, we must generate hope. We can’t endeavor to “find” it, we must produce and disseminate it. Perhaps that is part of the therapist’s task. And she is quick to emphasize, without hope we can’t make change. And she of all people should know.
When I started college in 1973, it was a time of great political and social ferment in the US, and in a lot of other places too. I barely had time for the whole new academic life that I was starting, because I was steeped in all kinds of activism. On Saturday mornings our regular routine, almost like a social event, was to picket the local Safeway. A large and powerful supermarket chain that persisted in selling non-union Iceberg lettuce, and Thompson seedless grapes. California, which is one of this country’s rich and abundant agricultural centers, is the destination for a large and necessary pool of laborers to harvest and pick our wealth of food crops. Farm work is back-breaking work, long hours exposed to inclement weather of all kinds. The kind of work that no one wants to do that largely falls to immigrants. The majority of our farm workers came from Mexico, and although the wages and conditions of farm work in this country are shamefully low, it was more than they could earn back home. Whole families of Mexican migrants worked the fields and lived in deplorable, slave-like conditions, migrating from region to region, following the crops.
I once had a client who came from Holland, way back in the early days of my study of neglect. He grew up on a tulip farm. The scene sounded so picturesque, except that by the age of five, he was working in the field for three hours before going off to school in the mornings, and three hours more in the afternoons when he got home. Somehow children have readily been included in this labor. And from him, I learned still more about the never-ending requirements of farming and harvesting.
In 1962, two Mexican Americans, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, had the courage and the audacity to begin to organize the farm workers, and try to win collective bargaining power to gain fairer pay and humane living conditions. Chavez was born on March 31, which happens to be the day I am writing this, in 1927. His parents owned a small farm when he was small, but they lost everything in the great Depression of the 1930’s. Left first without their source of income and then without their home, Cesar, his parents and five siblings joined the ranks of migrant workers, trudging like vagabonds from one harvest to the next. Of course, education was hard to work into the laboring life of children. By the time Cesar dropped out of school, demoralized, after eighth grade, he had attended 35 different schools and was often bullied for his poor English as his family largely spoke in their native tongue. Poverty, racism, inaccessibility of education and a long life or hard labor were the defining qualities of his growing up. Organizing the United Farm Workers, which became national in 1966 was a monumental and heroic accomplishment.
Chavez was a hero, as was his collaborator, Dolores Huerta, and we admired and idealized them both. They were perhaps the first iconic Hispanic big names and iconic faces, until Carlos Santana came on the scene in 1969. Chavez’s picture and name have become part of our progressive and left-wing culture, ever since…well until now.
It was with shock and profound dismay, that I heard the news this week, that survivors had come forward and reported being sexually abused as children by Cesar Chavez. Even Huerta herself reported having been raped by him. She never spoke of it until now, for fear of damaging the union. I was heartbroken. Being a long-time champion of survivors of childhood sexual abuse, I could not bear the thought that this seeming symbol of goodness, was a perpetrator. I simply had a hard time reconciling, holding those pieces, those parts together. How could this be? I remember being distressed in a similar way when I learned that Mahatma Gandhi, always a hero of my mother’s, was harsh and controlling of his wife. Not sexually abusive or overtly violent as far as I could tell, but extreme, controlling and harsh. Again, I found it unbearable, this gentle soul who taught the world about non-violence resistance and civil disobedience, could be so extreme and demanding of obedience, at home. How can it be that someone who seems so “good” can also be so “bad?
The recent story of Gisele Pelicot captured the news not long ago. The brave woman whose husband regularly drugged her and made her available to be raped by several hundred men while unconscious. It was shocking and painful news. In reading her memoir, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides (Penguin, 2026) Pelicot describes learning about what had happened to her, from a detective. In effect, she was informed that her 50-year marriage to the man she thought she knew, the father of her children, was completely other than what she knew. She describes the idyllic first years and decades of their life together. The shock was overwhelming, the shame, incredulity, confusion and immense loss. She describes her powerful journey of reconciling the incompatible pieces.
Many of us, and our survivor clients, to a greater or lesser extent wrangle with similar questions about our/their own parents and perpetrators? There may be great love, respect, admiration, and gratitude alongside pain and rage about trauma and neglect. Which is it? How do we hold it all?
I have come to call this fierce confluence of feelings, the Bermuda Triangle, named for a mysterious mythical spot in the Atlantic Ocean, where, as the stories go, ships and planes were mysteriously and dramatically crashed and wrecked, then vanishing without a trace. The violent feelings that collide irreconcilably, often about perpetrators and loved ones, is a similar, and similarly unhomogenized clash of rage, grief and guilt, that cannot seem to find a homeostatic balance. They roil around inside, refusing to harmonize for a long time. Ultimately through long and diligent trauma work, we make our peace with all being real and having their place. Not a smooth voyage by any means.
This day, Cesar Chavez’ birthday has been a holiday here in San Francisco. Its name was changed to United Farm Workers’ Day. But there are streets named after him, murals bearing his image, large and small monuments to his achievement and contribution to the plight of immigrant and migrant agricultural workers, a plight which is once again commanding our concern and attention. There is debate in town about how we handle this. Does the reality of his heinous abuse of children and women eclipse his good works? Does it erase them? I find I am painfully conflicted about this. Holding positive and negative in the same frame? Some of us have found a way to do this, or to co-exist with the contradictions in our own lives and families. Others continue to suffer the loss, or the battle simply refuses to be quieted.
For many with neglect trauma, comparing becomes an insidious habit. Never quite knowing where I stood, I was always scanning for who got what, and how much I got by comparison. Invisible, I tried to assess what the other had that I didn’t have that compelled attention when I couldn’t. Who has the “worst worst?” Even, “who is the thinnest in the room?” Comparing invariably makes us feel worse, more deficient, more less than. We always come up even shorter. I try to work with myself and others not to do it. So how do we work out this question? How do we measure or assess the valence? Or is there an answer? I guess I don’t know.
What do you think?
Since time immemorial I have had a complex relationship with my body. By age 11, I was in the grip of what I later came to learn was anorexia, a baffling interplay between control and utter loss of control. I was ferociously “disciplined” and able to resist food while having no effective will to eat even when at least part of me knew I was doing something very dangerous. I was driven. It was the early 1960’s and one of the great influencers of that time, although we did not use that term then, was the supermodel Twiggy, who was tall and willowy like a stalk of bamboo, with dramatically eye-lashed eyes. She was the icon of the times. We all wanted to look like her, and I was getting close, although I would never be that tall. As I shrank away no one appeared to notice. I floated about ghostlike, in the universe of neglect.
When the “will power” flipped on me and I was gripped by ice cream in massive doses, I discovered running. This, my next compulsivity, came to be the daily ritual, hardly ritual, more like executive order, and went like this: wake up at the crack, creep like a silent mouse out of the house, run twenty miles in the dark streets, and upon return, after hiding my sweats in the back of the closet, surreptitiously slip back into bed, so no one knew I had ever left. It was a fierce training regimen, but I had to do it, in flight from the vast army of calories I had compulsively consumed the night before, dreaded weight gain nipping at my heels. One morning I actually did literally get bitten in the butt by a bullish German Shepard.
Of course, skeletal, the tragically undernourished vehicle of war, my body got injured at times. That was of course terrifying, throwing my whole defense system into jeopardy. Injury became a desperate secret. Once, not surprisingly I had a broken leg, a fatigue fracture from running on cement with those bamboo-like bones. It hurt like mad and I secretly limped around on it, until finally after about six weeks told my mom and got an X-ray. By then I had begun a ritualized swimming regimen which I did not like at all, but it was something…And it kept the enemy pounds at bay.
I had my first boyfriend when I was 13. He was 24. No one seemed to think that was weird. I was with him for seven years. He was old enough to introduce me to alcohol, although he himself was a pot smoker. Marijuana did not work well for me, it seemed to make me frighteningly paranoid, so I did not take to it. I also found him and his friends, all of whom were artists, intellectuals, and self-styled poets, to be excruciatingly boring when they were all high and I wasn’t. The wine was a solution to many things. Alcohol soon joined my eating disorder in the arsenal, in my undying quest for who knew what? My body was the battle ground, the vehicle, the container for what I now understand as the war on dysregulation.
In 9th grade Advanced Placement English, we learned to write research papers. I remember I chose the topic of rape. At that time, my early sexual abuse a deeply hidden yet to be excavated dissociated part. I only remember the title of my paper: “An Inquiry into Forcible Rape.” What inspired me to choose that topic at the time? I did not know. I wish I could find that paper, I’d be interested to know what I wrote.
I continued to be very busy, a rat on an eternally spinning wheel. As I got older and my desperation landed me in therapy, I found I had a fascination with the body: bafflement curiosity, wonder, even awe, and admittedly rage and resignation. It was the locus of my various compulsivity’s. As much as I feared and hated it, I also had a sense there was a something there to learn. My therapist recommended a friend of hers who practiced a body approach called Self-Acceptance Training (SAT), a combination of Gestalt Therapy and Bioenergetics, a body approach that emerged out of the theory and practice of Wilhelm Reich, author of The Function of the Orgasm, a book that fascinated me then and to be honest, still does. It was 1979, the world of somatic psychology was a marginal minority then. I don’t remember much about SAT. The group sat in a circle for three days and there was a lot of emotion and catharsis. The SAT teacher used to say to us, “You are a body with sensations, that’s all.” I didn’t really buy it, but I went to all the workshops I could.
My teacher’s son Kevin was an accomplished Rolfer, a method of body work, also called “Structural Integration,” developed in the 1940’s by biochemist, Dr. Ida Rolf. The idea was to manipulate the body’s fascia so as to improve posture and body alignment and harmonize with gravity, whatever that meant. In those days I was game to try most anything that might help me, I undertook the standard 10 session sequence with Kevin, where I made an unexpected discovery. Kevin worked the energy and I remember lying face down on the table, with Kevin barely touching my back. I guess I must have been talking about something emotional, that I don’t remember. I only remember Kevin softly saying to me, “come back…” I did not know what he was talking about. I had no idea that I was “going away,” leaving my body. But he could feel that I was gone and call me back. We began the practice of noticing when I in effect dissociated, which I had never been aware of before. What a discovery! The ghostlike child of neglect in her invisibility, got seen. And I had a visceral experience of how emotion, whatever it was, was the catalyst of the powerful sweep of numbing. I wonder what happened to Kevin. He was a gamechanger.
Fast way forward to 2026, much history in between. By now I feel like the cat who has progressed through a sequence of lives, perhaps like the Rolfing protocol? No, much messier and less orderly. After 4 decades in the trauma field and a deep immersion into the study of attachment trauma and neglect, I was invited to the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium to speak. The Networker magazine had been in my life my entire professional career and it spanned the entire gamut of the psychotherapy field. What an opportunity to advance my mission, to a wider, more diverse professional community, my first time in effect, preaching to the non-choir. In my still somewhat OCD way, I have been wildly preparing and undeniably moving too fast. About a month before the conference, I had a freak accident in of all places, my own beloved kitchen, where I all too often try to do too many things at one time.
Carrying my laptop, I slipped on our beautiful but undeniably rock-hard tile floor, and fell. A year after a similarly freaky fall that ended up with a complex fracture in my right wrist that required surgery and a measure of pain and nuisance, I was careful to protect my arm and my computer. But I landed hard on my hip and my head banged on the cabinet. As a neurofeedback and brain-oriented person, I worried most about my head, with visions of traumatic brain injury that would wipe out my Networker presentation and leave me dissociated. Blessedly there was no bump, and no observable brain consequence. What I did silently notice however, was that a week later, my hip was still sore. And revisited by the compulsively driven running girl, who never told a soul about her various injuries, as if that would keep them from being real, I kept it to myself.
When a client told me about a friend of hers about my age who had a fall and broke her hip and required not only surgery but protracted rehab, I began to feel worried. It was not getting better. As it happens, I am in a process with a wonderful trauma informed yoga teacher, De West in Boulder, Colorado. I always hated yoga or any isotonic exercise, preferring the sweat and friction of all kinds of cardio. I can honestly say, although I still don’t much care for yoga, I love my teacher so much that I stay with it and reap the benefits. And I have had another major discovery: the fear made the pain and disability undeniably worse; and inversely the connection and the mutual love: feeling heard, understood, honored and helped by an attentive other, facilitated function and healing, as well as pain management. Not that it can magically remove any pathology or bodily disruption, but what a difference.
A colleague of mine, a super intelligent scientist and researcher, has been working through terrible grief from a precipitous and profound loss. I asked her how she was doing with her grief. Her answer really surprised me, well not the answer itself, but the fact that it was coming from her. Her un-hesitating response was “the greatest help for me has been body work.” She said grief work is best done on the table.
I write this on the plane to Washington DC for the Networker Conference, filled with excitement and passion. I am on a mission, even though I hobble a bit and slowly through the airport and have to arrange myself very carefully when I sit, stand or walk. I promise I will get an X-ray when I get home. I have not been to DC since probably 1990 to attend the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS). It was all we had back then, and I floated around there, what seemed like a tight club of white guys in suits with briefcases, scurrying around with no time for a little ghost like me. Everything has changed.
The last time I was in DC the biggest van Gogh exhibit ever in the US was at the National Gallery. Admittedly that is what I remember best. If you are at the conference, please introduce yourself! I would love to meet you!
As far back as I can remember, I longed for a best friend. I guess a best friend represented the equivalent of a beloved partner or even parent who placed me first and loved me differently, more than any other. Something about being chosen and special; some of the major things that are missing in the neglect experience. I felt the opposite: invisible, unimportant, forgotten, or simply “a pain in the neck.” I’m not certain she exactly said I was a pain in the neck, or I need this like a pain in the neck. But it hardly matters. I felt like I didn’t, matter that is. That will certainly make a child feel hopeless. “I don’t matter” became kind of a signature I repeatedly heard from trauma and neglect survivor clients. The other day I heard a program with an author being interviewed who recently wrote a book about what he called “mattering.” He was citing his research that showed that the experience of feeling like one matters and has value in the eyes of an important other radically affected people’s scores on scales about mood and motivation. I was reminded of Bob Dylan’s timeless line about how you don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows. How well we know that! All too often I see that the ennui that comes with the pervasive feeling that “nothing matters” goes back to precisely that. I don’t matter.
In fourth grade I finally had a best friend. I was in heaven. Her mother was a tennis player who I thought was fun, if somewhat eccentric in her ways, although I did not know that word then. She made great sandwiches for us, very American. I think it came out later that she was hooked on “mother’s little helper,” valium. But I just knew that she took us out regularly for tennis lessons, probably mostly to keep my friend’s weight down. My friend and I were inseparable. She did not have a TV at her house, so she loved coming to our house and we sat together in front of our old black and white, during the wet winter months. For years I joked that fourth grade was my best year ever, and it’s been all downhill ever since. It was really only half in jest for many years.
The bubble burst in fifth grade, when my friend dropped me, preferring another girl, who was a tiny blond with her perfect hair in a “flip” and a super-fast runner: always picked first for the kickball team. She was an amazing kicker too. But more than that, she had a canopy bed, a pink princess phone and her own TV in her room. I could not begin to compete with that. I was heartbroken.
From there on my life was back to being a desert of emptiness, aloneness and feeling like another species, unsure whether I even existed at all, and if yes, what for? There was a popular song around that time about the end of the world: “it ended when I lost your love.”
Friendship for whatever reason, seems to be something of an underrated “stepchild.” When there is a death, everyone seems to have great sympathy and condolences for the parents and the intimate partner or spouse. I have noticed that when a parent dies, the majority of the time the children of the deceased are forgotten in the flood of empathy for the widow or widower. Friends seem to fall off the map completely. Only those who may be ejected or overtly rejected by the family they nominally grew up with seem to have a category for “chosen family.”
My friendship trajectory was one failure after another. Mostly because of what I call the profound interpersonal ambivalence that comes of the neglect experience. The deadly fear of abandonment, makes the longed-for intimacy too risky. The attempts to be both closely connected and safe invariably sank, with neither objective achieved. Oy vey. For me the most common mistake was “over-giving,” trying to earn value in the eyes of the other, by dazzling them with what I could offer or do for them, which was of course unsustainable, and they never signed up for it in the first place. When I found myself depleted, or did not receive reciprocity that had never been agreed to, I felt short-changed, used and resentful. I did not get it about consent, or making “deals” with people that they did not even know about. All this has become part of the “Neglect Profile,” which has evolved over many years, because it characteristically or often shows up in my neglect survivor clients.
I learned my lesson most graphically in 2000 when I was in my Sensorimotor Training in Boston. I had the privilege of being in a group taught by Pat Ogden herself. The assistant teachers were Deirdre Fay and Janina Fisher. Can you best that? It was worth commuting from San Francisco to Boston monthly for five years. It was one of the great experiences of my life to date. And I had a best friend in our group. One of our group members even referred to us as “the popular girls.” Unheard of in my experience. Fortunately, it was after the training ended and I was happily certified, that I blew that relationship up. But my friend was angry enough to say to me “It is not safe to receive from you!’ And I learned the hard way, “If I over-give and then resent, it is on me!” I try to teach this whenever I can.
Fast forward many years of hard work on my trauma and neglect. Many people have friends going back to early childhood. I don’t have that. But I have a best friend who dates back to 1983. We have had our storms, but found our way through together. Although we live on opposite sides of the Bay Bridge, we manage to get together without fail every month. I am so grateful. There is no substitute for an old friend, and it is also said there is no mirror like an old friend.
Back in the old Sensorimotor Training days, I never imagined that I would be close friends with Janina. And now I am. She is an extraordinary clinician, human being, long-time social justice activist, and friend. I feel again so privileged and grateful to enjoy her friendship. And she has embraced my husband as well, and he her, which is an additional plus.
It is with great pleasure that I celebrate with Janina the recent publication of her most recent book, Embracing Our Fragmented Selves. I am thrilled and excited to welcome her to our video series next week. Do watch your inbox for it! You can find the book, wherever you usually buy your books. Let’s blow her away with five-star reviews, which are well earned. And do keep doing the work on your trauma and neglect. It takes a while, but the rewards truly matter! It is worth it!
My course with Quantum Way is now available for registration!