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!
I often ponder the question, of how it can be that parents can be so oblivious or thoughtless about their children. How can this happen? I have wondered this since childhood, and like all children of trauma and neglect I had to conclude it was somehow because of me. Either it was my fault, or it was about my worthlessness, or that I simply did not really exist. I certainly could not imagine that I existed in anyone’s mind. Nor did I “deserve” to, a word I came to despise since in this world there seems little correlation between people’s goodness or worthiness, and what rewards they receive in the world. Let’s say, it was completely consonant with my view of myself, that there was no reason to remember me. Remembering this reminds me yet again, of how wondrous and transformative good therapy can be, because I can happily say, I rarely feel that way anymore. Although I can’t say I never do!
All this is to say, I have been compelled by questions of how some people can be so unthinking, so relentlessly cruel, or at the very least oblivious and thoughtless about the humanity and subjectivity of others, be they human or some other species. Especially more recently as somehow, it seems as if things might be worsening in that regard, that it is more acceptable to lie and threaten and haplessly murder and pillage, but then looking at history that is probably not really true, just my disheartened lens.
As a child I remember my father’s diatribes about what it was like for him being on the receiving end of hatred, and it was frightening and also made me feel guilty for my good fortune. My first strong compulsion was always in the direction of justice and sticking up for the “underdog” which both my parents taught us, although admittedly too much of the time I felt like one myself.
When my original life plan to make my life, (and probably death) about liberty and justice fell apart, and I got swept up in a world of dysregulation (eating disorder, alcoholism and depression), I found my way to work of healing, first through my own. I have been deeply compelled by this work with trauma and neglect for four decades, and as is often the case, I am increasingly finding my way back to earlier iterations of myself. Or perhaps it is becoming increasingly impossible to view trauma and neglect apart from the macro levels of cruelty in the larger world. This large-scale feedback loop of inequality and injustice in the larger world, harming us all in ways that our next generation resonates to our dysregulated brains and then go on to act out of dysregulation that wreaks havoc on others, on a large or small scale, and on and on. We must address both!
Years ago, I remember hearing a speaker at the Trauma Conference named James Gilligan. He was one of these amazing humans who was able to compassionately work with the most frightening of perpetrators in a maximum-security prison somewhere. I remember going home from the conference and reading his book called Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. Published in 1997, Gilligan identified shame as being a key factor underlying impulse or the “habit,” the cool or oblivious numbness to the suffering of others. I have been trying to connect dots.
Shame is a ready and understandable reaction to neglect trauma. For an infant, the primary caregiver(s) indeed are survival. This is not metaphor. The helpless infant relies on that other for everything: food, warmth, protection, shelter and regulation. Without those things we will die, and an infant, although they lack language and cognition, they do “know” this in their bodies and emotional experience. The loss, abandonment, rejection or simple absence of this source of everything needed to survive, is experienced first as life-threatening terror. Terror and the frantic attempt to “get them back” somehow, which often results in an exhausted collapse and freeze response. An under-stimulated brain, the result of being left alone too much, results in numbing, what I have come to call “nothing.” Because there is indeed nothing to remember. It is all about emptiness. And of course, if there is no feeling about oneself and one’s own pain, it is easy to imagine that one might be unmoved by the pain of another.
As the large scale trauma in Chile and Latin America are so much a part of my story, and I recently read a new book about long delayed fact finding about what really happened there, I attempted to find background information about the monstrous dictator, Augusto Pinochet. Not surprisingly he was the oldest of six children, born close together. The next sibling was born before he was one, and the others followed in rapid succession. His mother was described as strict and authoritarian, he attended military schools and his wife was described similarly, her parents tried to dissuade her from marrying him as they were convinced she was marrying “down,” and he was below their station.
It has always irked me, that many believe, you cannot love another if you do not love yourself. As it took me years and decades to even like myself, I simply did not buy it. And attachment theory seems to be on my side. When the infant looks up into the eyes of the longed for and needed other and sees a loving and joyful reflection of “me!” that is where the positive self-regard begins to germinate. There is also a neurobiological component, where the most primitive part of the reptilian brain is stimulated. That is where the sense of self resides.
I remember in the bad old days when my husband and I first went to couple’s therapy. We finally after numerous failed attempts found a therapist who seemed to be able to help us. He practiced Imago Relationship Therapy which was what I later got trained in because it actually worked. The first step in the Imago dialog, was mirroring, where each partner had to reflect back the very words of the other. I remember how utterly dazzling it felt to have my very own words coming back to me, to be listened to that attentively. Experiencing that kind of presence was obviously a first for my famished brain. I can see how receiving it early in life, would sow the seeds of worthiness, and self, mind and heart. That is so much of what our trauma and neglect survivor clients come to us for, although it may take a while before they can take it in. That was certainly true for me.
Recently I had one of those “aha moments.” I was on the receiving end of the kind of hatred that I only remember my father talking about. Blessedly and gratefully, I can say I do not experience it often these days, at least as far as I know. Suddenly in one of those powerful moments, perhaps where we channel the presence of a needed and cherished other, I heard the echo of a voice saying the words “without a self, there is no other…” I was Ruth Lanius, the renowned trauma researcher, in one of the webinars that was a lifeline to me in the early days of the COVID pandemic. Before that I was not much of a webinar person. The Pandemic came and I was glued to the screen. Spending hours in my kitchen with colleagues far and wide, alone and isolated, unable to do our work as we ordinarily did. It is in the eyes of the beloved, longed for other, that we in fact come into existence, and that stimulates those deep, reptilian brain regions where the sense of self begins, develops and grows. Without that, and without the capacity to from there feel oneself, the ability to feel, and thus to feel for another fails to emerge. There can be no empathy. In effect there can be no other. The is nothing but the persistent raw need to be seen. The raw need to be seen, is that not the seed of limitless narcissism and perhaps thus a potential for blind cruelty? In one of those vicious but blessed moments, important dots connected. “Dignity” says the Oxford English Dictionary, is the inherent, inviolable, and universal right of every human being to be valued, respected, and treated ethically, regardless of circumstances. Respect is to be earned. Dignity is our birthright, the birthright of all beings. Mirroring is a truly essential function. For therapists, for parents, for all.
Gung Hay Fat Choy! Happy Ramadan, a time of fasting to have more to give, and Mardi Gras! A time of Revelry. All marking a new lunar year.
Today’s Song: Caution, this video contains images that may be disturbing to some:
I am no scholar of poetry, but I do remember that my grandmother (who was), often quoted the famous line of John Keats: “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” I have certainly always felt that way. Sometimes even a glimpse of something beautiful, an orchid, a painting, a photo, an exquisite dress or a well-made cheese, can lift a flagging spirit. Although I deeply love music, if I had to choose, I would say my sense of sight might be my most precious. Fortunately, I have not had to choose, although advancing age admittedly dims them all.
As with many things, there is a downside to this powerful experience of sight. The visual also cuts both ways for me, meaning that scenes that I have seen, like horrifying videos of murder and torture, burn themselves seemingly indelibly into my mind’s eye and can haunt me for years. That is why I have learned to get most of my news from radio and podcasts.
Although I preach about generating hope, lately I have to keep reminding myself to remember my own words and stay positive. The trauma/neglect brain can readily default to the old bleak view, those lonely old circuits never being completely extinguished. That is another reason why we need others, which is also unfortunately what is not remembered in such moments, when our tendency may be to hide out. Fortuitously however, my dysregulated sleep enables me to catch inspirational podcast stories that I might otherwise miss.
Times being as they are I also remember my grandmother’s quoting William Wordsworth “…the world is too much with us…” Certainly true for me if I am not careful these days. More than perhaps ever, I cannot afford to slide into the mire of despair. Just when I needed it most, I happened upon the story of a young artist named Bianca Rafaella. Her story compelled me out of the depths.
When Bianca’s mother was pregnant with her in 1992 in London, she contracted a parasite called toxoplasmosis which is of minimal consequence to most healthy adults, but a serious condition for those who may be pregnant. As a result, Bianca was born blind, or what is known as “registered blind.” She had a tiny bit of blurry, staticky vision that flickered and might momentarily hover and disappear. The right was different from the left, so her spatial perception and balance were skewed, and any vision at all was in the immediate range of about one meter or less. All her birth records and subsequent legal documents classified her as blind.
Bianca’s parents despaired and went from specialist to specialist urgently consulting as to what if anything could be done for her. They finally encountered one doctor who was the gamechanger. He said the words that became the lifeline for the young parents and later Bianca. He said, “See what she can see, not what she can’t see.” Those words became their north star.
In art, I was always fascinated with artists like M.C. Escher, and his seeming optical illusions of figure and ground. Their focusing on the positive or the seeming subject of the image, creates one picture and focusing on the negative or apparently “empty” space creates another entirely. The positive and the negative space combined to make a fascinating and sometimes quite beautiful whole. I liked his brain-twister drawing of a hand drawing itself drawing itself…When I learned the sensorimotor definition of “mindfulness,” it was quite similar: one part of the brain engaged in the sensory experience, and the other observing the experiencing brain and body. For me a, never a meditator, this was an important learned skill. And one of the ways we know that the brain is recovering from trauma, is because the observing, thinking prefrontal cortex goes offline during trauma, and again when a trauma state is activated or “triggered.”
Similarly in Gestalt psychology and Imago Relationship Therapy, both loosely based on the 1935 writing of German philosopher Martin Buber, the focus is on the “space between.” Relationship is about navigating the opening between two beings, which in relationship is certainly not “empty space.” It is filled with meaning, form and substance. Like neglect trauma, it is not nothing! Anything but.
In reconstructing the narrative of childhood neglect, we are searching for and excavating missing experiences, not making something out of nothing, but starting with what we can see, and searching from there. That is what Bianca and her family endeavored to do. Bianca’s mother was a painter and she “always wanted to be like mommy,” although I don’t know much about her attachment story.
At age 11, Bianca was sent to a special boarding school for blind kids. She became an accomplished braillist, learning to see much with her fingers. But she had a very hard time at school. She does not say why in the interviews I read, but much like myself at about the same age, she became severely anorexic. She had to go home, where the family went in search of treatment for that. It took a long, long time, she struggled with severe anorexia, off and on for some years. I felt an immediate affinity with her for that. And she began to paint.
Much of Bianca’s language as she describes her work, reminds me of how I describe neglect trauma. She said she “hovered between visibility and disappearance.” Ghostlike, I always felt rather like that, wondering if I existed. Or was I a shadow, smoke, or nothing at all. Bianca’s minimal vision, being impressionistic, variable and often abstractly disconnected, fractured, reminded me of how dissociative memory can be. Although she does have some irregular and inconsistent sense of color and light, amidst what she called the “visual static,” primarily she works from “accessible sensory recall, supplemented with a vivid imagination.” Painting became an active pursuit, and her work is quite remarkable. (You can see it and find out more about her on Instagram, or at https://www.biancaraffaela.com). I especially love her paintings of flowers, which she knows intimately through touch, and exquisitely portrays their texture and shape.
Bianca studied in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, graduating with honors in 2007. In 2016 she graduated from Kingston University London, with a First-Class Honours degree in Visual Arts. She was the first registered blind student to graduate from Kingston. From there she tried her hand at fashion design, but found that the fashion world pitched her back into her anorexia which had continued to plague her off and on. She similarly made an attempt at architecture, but ultimately returned to painting, which like her mother, she has most loved.
There she has remained, Now happily married to a man who also is also her business partner, assistant and all-around champion, living in London. Interestingly, what finally healed her of the persistent anorexia, was her pregnancy with her first child. Losing control of her body and its shape bringing such an awe inspiring and joyful result, perhaps love, was apparently the “cure.”
In 2025, Bianca Raffaella was awarded Overall Winner of the Women in Art Prize. She was also the recipient of Women in Art‘s Printing Prize. She continues to advocate for accessibility in the arts, has shared her insights as a speaker at the Goethe Institute’s Beyond Seeing project and as a panelist at the Tate Modern’s Please Touch the Art. She is a member of Layers of Vision and in 2025, participated in an All-Party Parliamentary Group for Eye Health and Visual Impairment, developing policy recommendations to guide the improvement of access and inclusion programs for BPS people in UK-based museums.
In last year’s Boston Trauma Conference, Harvard attachment research Karlen Lyons-Ruth gave an eloquent keynote lecture on attachment trauma and most specifically early childhood neglect. She talked about how exquisitely intergenerationally transmissible neglect trauma is. One of the conference attendees asked her, how do we begin to break the chain of intergenerational transmission of attachment trauma and neglect. Her first response, to the complex question, was to acknowledge everything they did “well!” Much like John Gottman’s advice to couples, “Catch you partner in the act of doing something right!” Like the Pavlovian concept of operant conditioning, when we reward the desired response, it is re-enforcing, it is likely to be repeated. We are hard wired for positive re-enforcement, and being pack animals, when we complete an act of altruism, we are rewarded with a dopamine hit.
So, what am I trying to say? Well, the negative space is very much part of the picture, no doubt. I am the last to ignore the agonies micro and macro that devastate us, our clients, and people near and far. Like Bianca and her family, we must start with what we can and see where that takes us.
It is a new year, and I thought it would be fitting to start us off with a “feel-good” blog. You might ask “feel good? Judging from the title, I don’t think so!”
Jealousy is one of those unsavory emotions, that feel awful from either direction. It is miserable to feel jealous, and often the feeling itself is a source of shame and humiliation heightened inferiority, even worse when we are jealous of someone we love. And it is not much better to be the object of jealousy – feeling that the other resents me for what I have or have earned can be painful. Again, especially if we are envied by, or the jealous other is someone we love. We might feel as if we must withhold or hide our accomplishments or good news, and that can be painful, or make one feel cagey or dishonest.
Many survivors of neglect are plagued by envy and jealousy, accompanied by shame. When someone suffers from jealousy, the first place I am inclined to look is in the sibling relationship(s). In some cases, the neglect, or the remembered part of the neglect, began with the birth of a sibling, or being the youngest in a great crowd of others, so there was never enough of anything to go around: attention, time, touch, and in many cases money and even food. All the necessary resources of surviving, thriving, and a sense of self and value.
I find the following story, (I heard it on the BBC podcast Outlook) heart-warming, because it is a story not only of jealousy, but of rupture and repair, and it is also normalizing, even universalizing of the experience of jealousy. Certainly, for me, being a jealous middle sister.
My younger sister was born when I was two and a half. My older sister, three years older than me, started talking when she was about 10 months old, and the story goes that she charmed shoppers, having whole conversations with them, as she sat in the front of grocery cart, while our mom shopped. She was lively and vivacious, and commanded a lot of attention.
My little sister was simply beautiful. She looked like our dad, who was classically handsome, which delighted him. And she had gorgeous big eyes. Passers-by would peer into the baby carriage, and she seemed to command endless admiration. I looked like my mom who was plain and rather nondescript. And by the time the “baby” came along, our mother seemed more at ease with being a mother, at least to me, so the little one was less of a challenge and less of a burden or strain, than I was or had been. Neglect being all about deficits, I was acutely aware from early on, of all that I was not. And the habit of looking around to see what others had, and what others got, began early for me.
So now for our story, the story of Julia and Arturo. Julia was born in the US but when she was 8, her family moved to Guatemala where her father completed his graduate work in anthropology. An only child, it was a big transition for her, and her dad did not want her to be lonely, and brought home a yellow-naped Amazon parrot. Julia was instantly in love with the bird, whom she named Arturo. They became inseparable friends. Arturo spent much of his time on Julia’s shoulder, and was also “free-flying.” When not with Julia, he was free to fly outside at will and he always came home. He had perches around the house and only had a cage for sleeping which they covered, so he could sleep in darkness, which he preferred.
When it came time to return to the States, Arturo went in the car, with the rest of the family, and they embarked on the long drive north. Arriving at the Guatemala-Mexico border crossing the border agents asked Julia’s father for everyone’s papers, including Arturo. The man had no papers for the bird, having no idea that they would be required. And after a fruitless argument with the border guard, they were forced to let Arturo go. Julia was heartbroken. Until some time later as they continued driving, they saw that amazingly Arturo had followed the car, and alternated flying with sitting on the roof of the car or perching on the passenger side where he enjoyed looking at himself in the rear-view.
Some miles later, when they reached the US border, Julia’s father, preferring to take no chances, let Arturo go again, figuring they would wait for him to re-join them. Apparently, there was no “red tape” for entry into the US. This time, however, they waited over half a day for Arturo to catch up. Julia again was devastated, thinking her friend was gone. Just when she had given up hope, Arturo landed on the car. They arrived together in their new home in the rural state of Iowa. Everything was fine until Arturo ate something poisonous and tragically died. By now, Julia was 11 years old. Julia’s father was able to find another parrot of the same species, and brought him home. Julia named him Arturo, after his predecessor, and they similarly became fast friends. Julia learned to play the guitar, and Arturo would sit on the neck of the guitar, while she strummed and sang.
Fast forward and Julia is in college, now 20. There she met her husband to be, a Swedish man named Max. Max had grown up on a farm, and readily took to Arturo. The young couple married, and as he had always planned, returned to his home after graduation. So, the three packed up and moved to a little house on the farm, next door to Max’s parents. There was no problem bringing Arturo into Sweden.
Life in Sweden was idyllic, at least at first. Julia travelled on buses with Arturo on her shoulder, practiced her guitar, shared her meals with Arturo on her shoulder. Arturo also became fast friends and family with the in-laws next door, and continued his free-flying life, often visiting them as well. Everyone was happy and harmonious, and Julia became pregnant with her first child. As the family anticipated its new member, Julia talked to Arturo about it, as she did about everything.
When the couple arrived home with the new baby, everything abruptly changed. They walked in the door, and Arturo flew at Julia shrieking, and bit her. Shocked, Julia sheltered the baby. After 10 years of being best friends, she never imagined that the bird would be jealous. But it did not abate, and the couple soon saw, that they could not keep Arturo in the house and keep the baby safe. What were they going to do? Friends assumed they would simply “get rid of him.” Julia was adamant, “you don’t get rid of a family member, you certainly don’t put him down.” They ultimately opted to have him move next door to the in-laws. He continued to be free flying with their house as home base, and only Max and his father could get close to Arturo or pet him as they had all been accustomed to in the past. He did not warm up to Julia, who was broken-hearted even as she rejoiced with her new baby. Years passed, with Arturo continuing to be angry, hurt and distant. The couple had three more children and Arturo continued to live next door.
Years and decades passed. The couple’s four children had grown and moved on to start their own families. Max’s parents had passed away, and Arturo, now caged, came back to live with Julia and Max. Julia went through a time of immense grief. Her beloved mother with whom she had always been extremely close, was dying. Julia was making periodic journeys to the States to see her in her final year and days, and her father was failing as well. When they passed and Julia, now nearly 60, was orphaned and bereft, she withdrew into a deep grief depression and felt hopelessly mired there.
One bleak day, Max had the sudden idea to let Arturo out of his cage. When he emerged, they were at dinner, and the bird gingerly, gently approached Julia, and stole a few bites of pasta from her plate, before hopping up onto her shoulder. After 43 years of jealous rage, Arturo was back. Julia felt as if this were a message from her mother. And she steadily emerged from her grief into the light of repaired attachment rupture.
Arturo was now in his sixties as well. When they inquired, the veterinarian said that apart from a bit of arthritis, the bird was in excellent health and had another good twenty years in him. So that is my New Years’ story. It’s true! Jealousy is apparently quite natural, and not only for us.
Angela Davis, the now 82-year-old Black Power activist, said we can’t have change without hope. Hope is imperative. And we cannot be looking for hope and trying to “find it.” Davis adamantly proclaimed we have to generate hope.
Happy New Year!
Hope and health, and peace in 2026!
When I heard that my tech team is out for a hard-earned vacation next week, I realized I would not be able to send out a video. I thought about what I might do instead. One thing I was reminded of by my husband, who works with a largely unhoused population, is how rough it is on people when during perhaps the most difficult time of year, many support services are closed, so their hard-working staff can have a break and a holiday. So, I knew I wanted to send out something. Thus, you get one more blog in 2026. Admittedly I am a scrooge about most holidays, especially these winter holidays and the way they are observed here. So, it is not as if I am making a great sacrifice. And my head is so full of thoughts, that the blog is almost like that magic writing where the words appear autonomously on the page.
Although I am not fond of how the new year is observed here, I am very interested in all sorts of cycles, so the ending and beginning of the year do have meaning to me. It has been a turbulent time in this world, in so many ways. But thinking about my own cycle this year, it has been a very good year. And when I think about it, the highest of high points is the number of truly wonderful new friends I made this year. Who would have imagined that at the ripening age of 70 I would make more wonderful new friends perhaps than ever? Certainly not that little match girl child of trauma and neglect that was for so long my identity. And it seems that virtually all my new friends, are as passionate about giving something to this world as I am. What a blessing!
Interestingly, yesterday I had a most wonderful gift: a text I received from my sister. My sister has a passionate interest in studying our family history, and is combing wide geographically and long historically, and finding people in places and times that fascinate her. I find it interesting that she has such a profound interest in our diasporic ancestry and relatives, when I have had next to none. I do politely listen when she tells me about people in eras long past…it kind of reminds me of the old days in religious school when we had to read the old-testament and there were long sequences of who begat whom who begat whom. But this text was different. She wrote “I have been reviewing translations of letters from Oma [our grandmother] to Germany. I found this written in 1974…she was comparing you to her father, Robert, who was a lawyer who was deeply committed to social justice. She wrote ‘It may interest you that my second granddaughter [me] here, nineteen years old is studying law. She believes that poor people do not have enough rights. On weekends when other students go on excursions into the beautiful countryside, she visits prisons and gives prisoners advice and practical help. She resembles her great grandfather the most…’”
I was so moved, both that my sister thought to send me that text, but more than that, that my grandmother really saw who I was/am in a way that I did not imagine anyone in my family did. And even though I decided through a series of twists and turns that law was not my direction, the social justice gene that probably went back to my great grandfather Robert, whom I never knew or even knew of, was transmitted through the generations. My heart swelled to feel so seen by both my grandmother and now my sister.
When I went to hear Angela Davis last week, I went with a new friend. Angela Davis, now 82, is an icon of the Black Power Movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s in the US, long before George Floyd was born. She was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List and did a stint in prison. She is quite a person. She started out as a philosophy professor at UCLA, and evolved into a militant activist. Like myself, she has aged into a pacifist stance. In those days, we fiercely believed that armed struggle was the only way to change this world. Even though I have to acknowledge in retrospect, that it must have been a false self or some split off part of me, that believed that I could actually tote a firearm and use it. But she definitely walked the walk.
She is a gorgeous 82-year-old, lively, strong and still smart and sharp as a whip. The crowd must have spanned at least four generations. She laughingly said, “I knew I was getting older when after I spoke, people would come up to me and say, “I remember hearing about you from my mother…” and then she began hearing, “I remember hearing about you from my grandmother…” Then of course, she said “now I hear ‘I remember hearing about you from my great grandmother…’” Most importantly however, she stressed, that the work we do today, may not bear its fruit for some time. I think of my newly discovered great grandfather, Robert…What we do now may be for the unborn some four generations hence. Davis continues to be tireless, perhaps in different ways, ever an inspiration to me.
My crazy sleep issues enable me to hear some remarkable programs in what for me are the wee hours of the morning. Perhaps my nervous system lives in the UK or Australia. This morning I heard a most remarkable talk (https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m002nhld) by another brilliant Dutchman: Rutger Bregman, historian and author. He is another one, like many of my new friends, where I wonder in amazement, how can he be so wise and deep-thinking at his young age? Born in 1988 makes him 37. He gave this lecture, of all places at Stanford Business School, in the heart of Silicon Valley, the mecca of technology, just down the road from me where many of the billionaire, even trillionaire moguls were spawned and continue to generate the companies that increasingly dominate our world. I do recommend you listen to it. The lecture is about 30 minutes and the Q and A is the remaining half. He said a number of things that reverberated powerfully for me, most significantly he said we humans think we have prevailed because we are so smart. But actually, the real law of evolution is not survival of the fittest, but “survival of the friendliest.” What enables us to thrive, grow, develop and proliferate, is our ability to co-operate, to work together. What a great reminder. It is so much of what is lost and/or missing in the world of trauma and neglect, so much of what we strive, often agonize to accomplish in Neglect Informed work. We are taking on the archeological layers of history, that make it so challenging to connect.
I had the privilege and the good fortune to have a therapist that could withstand the challenge and the stasis, the generations of trauma that lived fossilized inside me, and insulated me from her, from my great grandfather, from the world of wonderful friends that I did not know how to have for years. And it is not too late!
Bregman, while no luddite, was also concerned about how tech is making us increasingly disconnected. It is “easier” than ever for the self-reliance prone survivor of neglect to stay more siloed than ever, screens being the norm now. Teenagers spend 70% less time in live social time, than in his teen years. He laments, “we search for meaning and find distraction…”
Angela Davis reminds us that we must generate hope! And Ruth Lanius, neuroscience researcher reminds us that hope is a neglect recovery achievement. We require new brain connections to emerge from futurelessness into a world where hope is possible.
The Chinese New Year will be the Year of the Horse. Says Wikipedia: The Year of the Horse signifies freedom, independence, energy, and forward momentum, representing strength, perseverance, and ambition, encouraging bold actions, travel, and pursuit of dreams.
Much to aspire to in the coming year. Let’s do it together.
Happy Holidays!
One of my few childhood memories is from when I was probably not quite three years old. We were on some sort of family outing, walking through a park in New York. We reached a spot where the path led to a green area. I took a closer look at what had initially appeared to be a bright spring carpet of fresh grass, and I saw that the whole patch was moving, swirling around like some kind of optical illusion. I bent down and looked a little more closely, and shrieked. It was not fresh spring grass as I had initially thought, but an undulating mass, a crowd of creepy crawly bright green caterpillars, squiggling all over each other. I was horrified, and terrified, realizing I could not take a step in my little Sunday shoes without squashing them. I am sure my older sister was there somewhere. I have no idea how she felt about them. I have never thought to ask her. She was always a little bolder and wilder than me. What I do remember is screaming, “Daddy, carry me!” I guess he must have, but I don’t remember. The scene goes dark, leaving behind only a creepy, slimy feeling about the multitude of little squirming creatures.
Fast forward about 50 years to 2017. My older sister, yes, the very same, had stage four ovarian cancer. For two years, I precariously hovered in a delicate balance between fierce and tenacious hope alternating with immobilizing fear and grief. All I could do was bake bread, and be with her. I changed my whole schedule, and we probably spent more quality time together, including in the chemo room, than we had spent together since we were kids.
My sister has a beautiful garden and yard. She and her husband not only have a paradise of flowers, vegetables and fruit growing and thriving out there, but they draw a wealth of all kinds of birds. We would sit out there together, and watch the birds. There was a whirring of hummingbirds, and I learned about the white-tailed kites who when they partner, the pair spends the season flying together as they build and prepare their family home. In my sister’s garden was a couple that visited often, we would watch their graceful pas de deux. They seemed to be building a nest in the peach tree. It seems now a blessedly long time ago. Seemingly miraculously my sister pulled through. She got well and before too long had a wild head of hair again. She is still going strong, although admittedly I can never forget those two long years of the pain of hovering in the in between.
One the most devastating sequelae of neglect trauma, is the loss of hope. Many therapists and loved ones, or survivors themselves might be disheartened and even impatient or judgmental about what seems like a reflexive pessimism or hopelessness, criticizing them for being a downer, or having a “negative attitude.” Perhaps however, they truly cannot help it. The core of neglect trauma is loss, in one or another of its iterations: the caregiver fails to be present whether it be a function of distraction, dissociation, preoccupation, abandonment, death or simple absence in the first place, the earliest infant experience is life-threatening terror. The source of their very survival is gone. Lacking the brain development to make coherent meaning, only the emotion, sensation, somatic experience, the implicit memory is logged. In the future, plagued by activations, they may very well not “know” what sets off the cascade of dread. Only that the world becomes charged with dangerous uncertainty, the unknown is unlikely to hold anything good. Paired with an accompanying sense of helplessness, it is not surprising that proceeding with suspicion, vigilance and low expectations of others, would become a ready default. It does make sense, however unsavory and tiring it might be. I understand it to be part of the neglect informed therapist’s job description to be a willing and able carrier of hope.
Increasingly over the last few years, I have heard more and more about the majestic monarch butterfly being endangered. I love symbols of transformation of all kinds. After all, transformation is all of what this dramatic endeavor of healing from trauma and neglect is about: literally becoming a person out of the unformed mass we seem to have been before. I love the image and the idea of spinning a chrysalis, inhabiting it for a time, and emerging a glorious and beautiful creature that can then fly free. The idea that the monarch might be disappearing from the planet was a sad one indeed.
My sister and her husband intentionally made their garden a refuge and then a breeding ground for monarchs. They planted milkweed, which is what the caterpillars love most to eat, and as in the vintage baseball movie, the caterpillars came. They began to proliferate and then there was a flurry of flapping orange and black in the very garden where my sister and I had sat and hoped and nourished her transformation. It was beautiful.
It has now gotten to where when we go out to dinner, my sister shows the grandma pictures in her phone, while her husband’s phone is filled with dramatic green and squirmy shots of various developmental stages of caterpillars. I have had to “update my files” from the terrifying slithering creatures of my memory, to a generative and essential part of the transformation process. The ugliness is indeed a part of the transformation. Admittedly, I prefer the butterfly or baby pictures over dinner, but it is a wonderful continuation of the transformation that unfolded out in that yard. And I understand that the monarchs are doing better out there in the larger world. In 2024 they advanced from endangered to “threatened.” Better, but we are not there yet, their transformation is incomplete. Meanwhile, they continue to be a powerful symbol of transformation.
I recently heard a lovely program on BBC (https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/w3ct6wht) which featured three stories about monarch butterflies; all three beginning with loss, that was transformed into something new. One was the story of a woman who lost her mother to cancer, far too soon. Her mother had been a prolific gardener and the two had spent some of their most precious time together working in and enjoying her mother’s copious herb garden, often accompanied by a gaggle of monarch butterflies. As the beloved mother was dying, she consoled her daughter, “whenever you see a monarch, it will be me, reminding you of my love for you.” Sometime later, as young woman was working through her grief, her overzealous young cat somehow swiped the chrysalis of an emerging monarch, resulting in a tragically torn wing. Of course, especially in light of her mother’s dying words, the young woman was again bereft. But somehow, she found the inspiration to undertake a delicate surgery, and with an embroidery needle, contact glue and tiny tweezers, she repaired the rupture. At the end of the story, the healed, transformed butterfly disappears in the spring sky.
The second story was of a woman, this one with early father loss. After a lonely early childhood, the abandoning, alcoholic father she had never known, reappeared when she was 13. That was when she first met him, and her experience of him was an angry, erratic and abusive man. Much later after his death, she learned he was an accomplished naturalist who even had a butterfly species named after him, a discovery that inspired her subsequent and exquisitely satisfying career in photography.
The third story was about a young man, also a photographer, who in the throes of a serious cancer, developed an elaborate methodology for photographing butterflies in flight. No small feat, and another powerful transformation.
I was going to make these three stories, the essence of this week’s blog, this my final blog of 2025, until I was startled to hear that Jimmy Cliff had died at the age of 81. I always loved him. Once again, I take loss very hard. I was terribly sad, replaying some of my old favorites.
Scratching the surface of Cliff’s life, I learned that he had plenty of trauma and loss. Born in Jamaica, the eighth of nine children. Soon after his birth, a major Jamaican storm, not unlike the one that recently swept through Jamaica, blew away his childhood home. His family escaped, but his single mother from what I could piece together, was most likely overwhelmed. By the age of 13, young Jimmy ventured off to the “big city” on his own and was pretty much independent and from then on, and began playing music. His transformation was dramatic. He became a world phenomenon, introducing reggae to the whole world. He won accolades and awards, and brought much liveliness and joy to all of us, certainly to me.
At this time, when there are so many raging storms, torn wings, disease and loss, we must “…try and try, try and try. We’ll succeed at last.”
Growing up I wondered if everyone has a constant musical backbeat playing in their heads like I do, a DJ who never takes a day off, always keeping me company. I rather enjoy the accompaniment, and rarely have a complaint about the choice of songs. Interestingly, the sense of hearing is one of the earliest developing sensory brain areas, preceded only by the sense of touch. And we now know that the unborn are soothed even in utero, parents should be starting the lullabies and gentle melodies early. My memory of Harry Belafonte crooning Day-o, the Banana Boat Song and Burl Ives’ Waltzing Mathilde go back as far as age two. I am not aware of what came before that!
Since I have been working with neglect trauma where there is no known narrative, clients have no story to verbally tell, and I must stay keenly attuned to whatever might be going on inside of me, as it might be some sort of nonverbal communication from them, through the “field.” Perhaps this kind of communication sounds a little “woo woo” or magical, but the psychoanalysts wrote about it decades ago, with the psychobabble designation of “projective identification” (eg Melanie Klein’s 1946 paper “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27:99–110 – I am certainly not suggesting you read it!). I am not sure what the neuroscience is of these communications, but they do resemble the wordless discourse between infant and caregiver, before they share a verbal language. Although my early classical clinical training was not always resonant with my own developing thinking, it was like practicing scales and classics on the piano as scaffolding before I got to play the music I liked.
Projective identification is powerful stuff. It is non-verbal experience in the therapist’s own body, emotions, sensations, images, spontaneous memory of one’s own or of something the client might have told me previously, and yes, for me songs. In retrospect I am grateful for having had to wade through those mind-numbing texts, because the processes are so relevant to neglect-informed work. Of course, this all requires the therapist to be vigilant, ever on the watch to sort out what is mine and what is not. A central missing experience of survivors of childhood neglect, is “simply,” and accurately: being and feeling heard, let alone remembered. Recently, out of seemingly nowhere, I found myself repeatedly visited by an old favorite song that I had not heard or even thought of, in years. It did not seem to come from a client…
I have always loved Latin music, especially starting in my 20’s when Latin America was an important part of my world, Latin music was what I listened to most, and it was the burgeoning time of what was then called the “New Latin American Song” movement: music that was very political and included folkloric instruments and influences. I loved it. Especially I loved Puerto Rican and Cuban music, and I still have groaning shelves of battered vinyl that I have no phonograph to play but will never throw away. The song that was recently inhabited my internal air space was an old Puerto Rican song called Temporal, which means tempestuous storm. I could hear it clearly in my head, but I could not even remember correctly who the musician was. Thanks to the wonders of modern search engines, I was able to find it, after repeatedly looking under the wrong musician’s name. I had no idea why it was lodged, on repeat, in my mind. And this started before the recent catastrophic “Melissa” battered Jamaica, another Caribbean island struck.
I found a video of the song and watched it. Perchance the video I found on YouTube included a little re-enactment which I also curiously watched. The rhythmic bouncy accompaniment begins, as the narrator walks along knowing a big storm is coming. He arrives at a gathering where a group of women, perhaps some sort of a party, dressed in matching traditional costume, are happily dancing. He proceeds to describe all the predictable disastrous impacts of a big storm: homes blown apart, lost crops…tragedy. The refrain repeats “todo es ansiedad…” All is anxiety. “Que sera de Puerto Rico?” What becomes of Puerto Rico when the big tempest arrives? Yet, all the while the people continue dancing. Their facial expressions may change and change again. The words describe battening down, trying to secure the buildings, people huddling together, holding on to each other (also enacted) as the lively music continues. The people keep dancing. Finally, the wind and rain begin. The dancers cover their heads and begin to scatter, some holding onto each other. Yet the music continues sounding bouncy and joyful, ultimately fading out. I watched it again and again, trying to understand it. What was it trying to tell me that was relevant to my own process? What was my inner DJ trying to get me to understand?
Yesterday I heard on the news of the day, the unsurprising but nonetheless jarring and terrifying “executive order du jour.” It seems to be a daily contest here in the US, what outrage can shock even more than the last. We must carefully regulate our news consumption here, so not to be paralyzed by it. At least I do. This time, although not yet a “done deal” the order proposed that the US courts would only recognize two “legitimate” and therefore legally recognized genders: male and female. US passports would only be issued stating the bearer’s gender “assigned at birth,” essentially boiling down to a travel ban for the non-binary of this country. I thought of the trans and non-binary friends and acquaintances that I have met in Oxford over my last three years of going there. Would those from the US simply disappear from the conference? Let alone all the other non-binary individuals that I don’t know…Already a population poorly understood and underserved by our field, they would be even more invisible, less heard and understood and learned about and from?
I, a lifelong sex positive, inquisitive and fairly well-educated citizen of San Francisco, USA, still have a ton to learn. I felt my stomach and then my whole body seize up with a familiar feeling of enraged powerlessness. The age-old infantile cry of “It’s not fair!!” This time, it was neither infantile nor even injustice against me personally. But the feeling is primordial in this old body. I remembered it since time began. And it revisits all too often these days, hearing the absurdities, the daily injustices coming down from “up high.” Like the child of neglect, the ignored, uncared for and unprotected are most at risk for subsequent trauma and abuse. Many of our clients who come in presenting incident and shock trauma, have a base layer of early neglect that left them more vulnerable to attack. And the neglect brain, prone to the freeze response, collapses into powerlessness.
It is a familiar refrain of the child of neglect, including our adult clients, to lament “I don’t know what to do! What do I do? There is nothing I can do!” I have learned over the years that in therapy these clients are not in fact asking for our suggestions, even though we may think we have some very good ones. What they are really pleading for is understanding of the despair, of having nowhere to turn and no one to ask. I also know that these rulings require more than a collapsed freeze response. But my insides were still frozen in outrage.
A little while later, I heard a report of US NBA hero Magic Johnson partnering with a major health organization to promote mental health (CBS News.) Although I truly have no interest at all in professional sports, I have an inexplicable fascination with professional athletes. I remembered Magic Johnson’s winning smile, which I had never taken notice of before his appearance on the cover of Life Magazine, with the “shocking” headline that he had tested positive for HIV. It was November of 1991, almost 34 years ago to the day. The AIDS scourge was in full “bloom,” referred to as the “gay cancer.” Of course, Magic was immediately assumed to be gay, although he wasn’t/isn’t. But that did not work in his favor either. Nor did the sensational allegations of his supernumerary sexual exploits. As I listened to the story today, Magic seemed to be smiling again.
My mind wandered back in time; I remembered the AIDS epidemic here in San Francisco in the 1980’s. Initially I only knew of one friend I had lost, my childhood best friend Donny, who had later “grown up” to become an internationally acclaimed fashion model. Donny died at age 24. I had felt the same enraged helplessness. However, after gathering myself up from the freeze, I scrambled until I found what I could “do.” First, I found a local therapist AIDS project, where we provided free therapy to people with AIDS. I was not so good at that, loss being the core of neglect trauma, I was not a good candidate for working with a person I would likely lose soon, as in those days, AIDS was a virtual death sentence.
Ultimately, I found the California AIDS Ride, which later became AIDS Life Cycle. It was a 545-mile (877 KM) fundraising bicycle trek from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Like a traveling party, pedaling down the coast together, 3,000 of us eating, camping, sweating together for seven days. We were like the Puerto Rican dancers, who, not ignoring the impending storm, kept the beat. It reminded me of the 1975 song by Holly Near, where she referenced the murder of New Song Movement icon Victor Jara, by the military junta in Chile in 1973. First, they cut off his fingers, so he could not continue playing his guitar, but Victor continued to sing while they “shot his body down…” As protest singer Holly Near sang it, “You can kill a man, but not a song, when it’s sung the whole world round…” (It could Have Been Me, 1975 Anthology What Now People? Volume 1).
The Ride became an annual fixture of our lives for ten years, taking up months of weekends consumed with training. A straight, monogamous, married couple, my husband and I felt a vital connection and sense of belonging to this diverse and motely traveling community. We raised about $16 million dollars a year and funded much of the city’s AIDS research and services. We can proudly say that AIDS is pretty much history here in this town with the Ride being an important part of that victory. Sadly, in many parts of the world it is not over.
So, what is the message of song mysteriously playing and replaying? The dancers who keep dancing as the storm nears? Maybe that we must band together and keep dancing and keep pedaling, keep singing? And not collapse in cringing outrage and let the storm sweep us away. That is easy to say as I sit here in my cozy San Francisco home with power and internet and food, not a war torn, or storm ravaged battle zone. I certainly do not mean to minimize or over-simplify the complexities we all face. Nor am I willing to sit by idle and let my trans and non-binary friends be banished form a larger world cast back into the darkness and nothingness of lonely neglect. Perhaps the dancers are harbingers of hope. Perhaps that is what I can hope to be…
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