Back when I was in college, I remember the Maoists used to say, “Women hold up half the sky.” Although I was never a Maoist, I always loved this image of women, muscled arms upstretched, supporting at least half of this wide world of ours. As we approach International Women’s Day, it continues to shock me that girls and women can still be prohibited from going to school; imprisoned and even killed over what they wear, or their reproductive decisions in 2023. In some parts of the world, perhaps more than others, the sky is falling.

In honor of International Women’s Day, I want to memorialize a quiet and powerfully important woman who equally quietly slipped away on February 3, 2023. She was only 79, and I say only because the numbers seem smaller and smaller as I approach them myself. And I say quietly because after hearing through the grapevine, that she had passed, I systematically combed the web and all my accessible resources, turning up nothing: no obituary or substantial biographical material. Finally, an article written by her husband made the rounds and landed in my inbox. The woman is, or was, Sue Othmer, the valiant matriarch of neurofeedback. 

I am moved to write about Sue, not only because neurofeedback is so powerful as a way of working with developmental trauma, neglect, and many other afflictions, but also because she epitomizes the polar opposite of the neglectful mother. Her life and career were inspired, shaped, and compelled by her fierce attention and commitment to the thriving, healthy, and safe development of her children. 

Born in Boston, Sue, then Fitzgerald, grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and later Bethesda, Maryland. A superior achiever in school, she later studied physics and then neurobiology at Cornell and then at Oxford, where she met her husband and later professional partner, Siegfried Othmer. They were married for 52 years. In 1968, their first child, Brian, was born, followed in 1973 by their daughter Karen, and then in 1975, their youngest, Kurt.

What I remember best about John F. Kennedy’s assassination is the looping image of the president’s little son, “John-John,” saluting. In 1963, I was eight, and we lived in South Bend, Indiana, where the winters were fierce and long. I was hunkered down in the basement, with the heat blasting and unending coverage of the memorial and the national tragedy on TV non-stop. That image of John-John must have replayed a million times – or maybe it is the distortion of my young memory and my profound identification with the grief-stricken child. I don’t remember much else about John Kennedy Junior through the rest of my life, but I never forgot when he was, I guess, three. What happened to him?

The Kennedys were iconized, as tragedy and martyrdom often are, and it was years before I knew some of the unsavory politics and aspects of JFK. I was surprised a few days ago when I heard a story memorializing his sister Rosemary Kennedy on the 18th anniversary of her death. I did not know there was a Kennedy sibling who had been lobotomized for being “slow.” It got me thinking about the neglect, even seeming annihilation, that often comes with political or other kinds of “greatness,” large and small.

Our dad was not a major celebrity or famous, but in his way as a religious and community leader, he was a figurehead or centerpiece of sorts. I remember when we were growing up, sometimes when we met someone new, someone he knew, or someone noteworthy perhaps, he would say, “Do they know who you are?” The emphasis on “are” meant, “Do they know you are my daughter? The cantor’s daughter?” Evidently, that was all that I was. There was no me.  

When our mom died, we each had a list of people to call and notify, and one of the people on my list was the teacher of Dad’s autobiography writing group. He had been in that group for perhaps five years, writing and sharing his memoir. Everyone loved him. Apparently, the group format was that participants would read aloud and comment on each other’s work, so they knew each other quite well after that long. When I identified myself to the teacher, she said, “Oh! I didn’t know he had a daughter.” Rather shocked, but not really, I said, “Yes. He has three.” As ever, my existence was an ongoing question. In this case, it was all three of us, I guess. 

I remember early on feeling I had to justify my existence somehow, earn my right to occupy a patch of ground to stand on, on this earth. Much of the time, I felt like a puff of smoke or shadow that was perhaps punctuation in his screenplay. Or a prop or extra in his movie. Perhaps that is why I excised the word “deserve” from my personal lexicon, and to this day, I bristle when I hear it. There really is no such thing in this world as “deserving,” or perhaps more accurately, getting what one “deserves” – so I believed.

In the mind of the neglected child, existence is a mystery, or it was to me. Worthiness, merit, privilege, specialness, responsibility, “luck,” – how do they all fit together? How is it determined who gets what? And why me? Or why not me? And what on earth to do about it? I remember early in my exploration and study of neglect, I could spot a child of neglect quickly by the signature shrug, deep as the ocean, of “I don’t know what to do!” Or, “There is nothing I can do!”

When I was in kindergarten and first grade in New York City, teachers had not yet made the rule that we had to give Valentine’s cards to everyone in the class. We all had our little art project mailboxes made out of decorated brown paper bags perched expectantly on the sides of our desks. The “popular” kids’ bags brimmed over with the bright red missives of “love.” Invariably mine was, as Tony Soprano would say, “a little light.” I felt like a “reject” or a “queer,” back when that word was not associated with sexual orientation but rather with being weird and outcast. By the time they made the rule, it was way too late for my battered ego. And I knew that the kids only stuffed my mailbox because they “had to.” But I would have felt like a reject anyway because that is how a child internalizes neglect. I am ignored because I’m worthless, or worse.

As I got older, I was so used to being a misfit, an introvert, and later a rebel, that I did not get caught in the romance around Valentine’s Day. But I certainly saw the big build-up and letdown among so many of the kids around me. Valentine’s Day can be a dreaded nightmare for many who are unpartnered and often even worse for those that are. 

As a couples’ therapist, working with many clients who have histories of childhood trauma and neglect, I am faced daily with major disconnects and misunderstandings between them about “what makes me feel loved” and giving and receiving. Valentine’s Day can be a veritable hornet’s nest for both, resulting in major ruptures and hurt feelings that endure like the ghosts of Valentine’s Day past. Oy vey.

This year I had an idea to help my struggling couples. In anticipation of the potentially spikey day, I thought, how about if we head it off with a conversation or two about “what makes me feel loved.” I still feel shame about my ungracious response to a beautiful gift my husband had picked out and bought for me over 25 years ago. I was convinced he bought that instead of the printer I wanted for my computer out of stinginess. It was only much later that I learned that the gift he had bought me, a set of Italian ceramic canisters for my baking ingredients, cost at least five times as much as the lowly printer I had requested. I still have the canisters, and besides being a lovely home for my various flours, they are a ready reminder that I do have the power to inflict great hurt.  

The child of neglect can readily believe that only someone who “matters” has the power to inflict harm, to be mean. Someone inconsequential is not important enough to injure another. Not! It is a myth essential to be corrected and healed for the sake of all involved!

For many, it is a hard question to answer, even about oneself. What makes me feel loved? And if I don’t know, I certainly can’t communicate it intelligibly to my partner, who may be “trying,” failing, and lapsing into hopelessness, impatience, frustration, and even ultimately anger. If pleasing me is enough of a moving target, of course, they will give up in fatigue and despair. Then I can insist I was “right!” I am simply not worth the trouble. I have the insidious power to fulfill my own bitter prophecy.

WARNING: This blog includes graphic content that may be disturbing to some readers.  

I suppose by now it is naive to be shocked by yet another traffic-stop murder of a young Black man. The death of Tyre Nichols, however, flooded me with feelings. We have been virtually barraged by mass shootings here in California, with a tally of 19 dead in the space of 44 hours this month. But in this case, as in the case of George Floyd, the murder was flesh on flesh: knee to neck, flying fists, feet and batons against body – something about how visceral, how undisguisedly vulnerable, human and inhuman it was, is particularly chilling about Nichols’murder. I most intentionally do not watch the videos, but what others tell me is how fiercely, vividly out of control the five officers seemed, like the frenzied scenes in the classic novel Lord of the Flies that haunted me back when I first read it, probably almost 60 years ago. And in this case, it was Black flesh on Black flesh, which makes about as much sense as parents or spouses brutalizing their own flesh and blood or their intimate partners.

There is a legacy, heritage, of centuries of brutal beatings in this country, remembered in the Black body: centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, Rodney King in 1991, so many traumatic generations of transmission. The fact that this murder was perpetrated by African American officers does not make it any less a racist crime. This case shows us how the lack of trauma-informed healing, education and policy morphs into more crime. It is a horrifying reminder of the essential nature of our work. As we know, trauma is not remembered but relived, and tragically often re-enacted. Not always, of course, and thankfully, but often enough – way too much, really.

Although I am committed to zero tolerance, no rushing, I am rarely successful. I am always trying to do too much in a day; the time gets away from me. I wind up feeling disappointed about all that I did not get done and wondering, where does the time go? I have no idea where it went, and there is never enough. It is hard to remember the long, lonely years when the time weighed so heavily on my hands as to be unbearable. Getting through the day was like pushing Sisyphus’ leaden boulder, invariably feeling it refuse to move. I thought there was something wrong with the clock. Now I know the amygdala has no time.

Neglect is a bleak, empty cavernous void. I imagine an infant lying alone in a darkened room, helpless, with no way of “knowing” if anyone will ever come, let alone when. I am often visited by that image when sitting with a client who describes their days as interminable, desolate, powerless, and hopeless. I have no doubt that is how it was. What is so insidious about trauma healing is that experience is not remembered but relived. The neglect story being one of absences, holes in time, empty space, and no story to remember, is a reliving of that. Often accompanied by a panoply of somatic mystery symptoms, it is puzzling. People often ask me, “Why do I feel so much worse than ever? When is this going to end?” The very musing of the young child, I imagine, who, of course, does not have the words.

I remember watching out the window, counting cars; I must have been six because that window was at the house in South Bend, and I knew how to count. Counting and waiting for Daddy’s Chevy to pull in and for him to bound in the door, calling out, “Ho ho!” Why did I look forward to that? I don’t know… I know it was invariably a long wait. I remember one time when I fasted for two weeks, with only a bit of water now and then. I called it “the Long March.” I would count the hours as “meal times” would come and pass. There was lunch, check. There was dinner, check. Day one, day two, up to fourteen. How did I do that? I don’t remember. I remember watching the clock not move, waiting to get to the magic hour of 4:45 when I could crack my bottle of Old Crow, $6.95 a quart rotgut bourbon. But it worked. Getting through the day. I remember that old song by John and Yoko, “Whatever gets you through the night, is alright, alright…” 

It is true, the healing years can be slower, longer, and arguably even worse than the original trauma experience, especially because it makes no sense. “I am worse than before! Is this therapy making me worse?” I wondered, and people ask me. It is hard to provide an answer that makes any difference. The best I can do is hold the certainty that I know it will. And I do. That is why I always say everything I have ever been through serves me.

We saw so few movies when we were growing up that the ones we did see stick in my mind, like the 1968 film, “Oliver!” a musical adapted to screen, based on the classic Dickens novel, Oliver Twist. The bits I remember about it were how the boys, victims of child slave labor, shared beds, where one slept during the other’s 12-hour work shift, and then they switched, and the song “Food, Glorious Food!” The boys were so hungry they dreamed of food and sang joyously about what they craved. I remember a bittersweet feeling about that song. Although food was certainly plentiful enough in our house, it was, to me, anything but glorious. It was more on the order of a protracted, hideous, recurring nightmare. 

I was always “dickkopf” (fathead) and a “bad eater.” Right from the start I did not like meat, which made for an ongoing power struggle. Now I am not a “formal” vegetarian, meaning I have no ethical, political or spiritual rationale, simply my age-old distaste/preference to avoid meat.

Meal times were not much fun, anyway. Our dad, who had been a chef before becoming a cantor, repeatedly told Mom with a smile, “I did not marry you for your cooking,” but really, it was no joke. When he cooked, he required a fair measure of adulation for the uppity French dishes he made, which were never my taste, apart from the meat issue. There was also a truly unsavory period of at least several years that I think of as the “Kosher wars.” Our dad wanted to keep a kosher kitchen, and Mom wouldn’t do it. He lived on nightly Hebrew National hot dogs until she finally relented with “OK, I will cook what you buy.” I don’t remember how they resolved the part about two sets of dishes. Mostly I remember the long and bitter tension that hung heavily over our family table. No great surprise when my trauma expressed itself via, among the many other symptoms, a near-fatal anorexia that spanned my adolescence, but really much more. In 1967, anorexia and eating disorders in general were even less understood than they are now. There was no treatment to speak of, and I was simply viewed as a “bad girl”, creating headaches for my parents. I somehow got to a healthy-ish weight eventually, but the agony of obsession persisted for decades.

After many years and all sorts of somatic approaches alongside my depth psychotherapy, I can say food is one of the truly glorious and great pleasures of my life. I love it and am grateful to say I eat whatever I want. I love making food, too. I am a home cheesemaker, a sourdough baker, and I aspire to grow vegetables when I can make the time. On a particularly bad day at the office, I might rant to my ever-patient partner, “I’m done! I am going to retire, be a cheesemaker!” until I calm down. We do, however, love our food.

Anyone who has known me more than a minute has heard me, probably ad nauseum, reference the renowned relationship researcher John Gottman. Gottman, originally an MIT-trained mathematician, changed direction to a study of psychology, mostly to try and figure out why he couldn’t get a date. The result – 40 years of longitudinal data about what makes relationships work and the predictive factors of separation and divorce. He also wound up with his long-term partner and collaborator, Julie Gottman, although I don’t know the story there. 

I have great respect, admiration, and gratitude for good researchers. I certainly would not be able to do it, and probably wouldn’t care to, but research changes history, makes our work credible on a larger scale, and also can serve as an often much-needed guide, especially in something like psychotherapy which hovers somewhere between science, art, and some think alchemy. 

One of my favorite tenets of Gottman’s research, which is central to my work, is the simple and undeniably well-proven principle, that in a relationship, to break even – not make progress and not backslide, but simply maintain equilibrium – the ratio of positive to negative is (drum roll) 5:1. Just to break even. That means appreciation, compliments, smiles, and gestures of affection. It can be most anything positive to the other, measured against complaints, criticism, grumbles, etc. 

Certainly, in the neglect experience, these random shots of positivity are glaringly absent. Our best hope may be to exist, which may not be such a positive thing… So I am always looking to inject positivity whenever I can, which is not always easy in the bleak landscape of trauma and neglect. As we know from operant conditioning, the principle on which neurofeedback is based, the brain responds most favorably and learns from “reward,” so positive feedback is, by nature, re-enforcing. An additional win! 5:1 or better is a quick and sure way to change the “weather” in a relationship. A positive spin on “climate change!”

Gottman also reminds us, perhaps reassuringly, that evolutionarily speaking, relationships are significantly different now. It was not much more than a hundred years ago that our species did not live long past our reproductive years. Once the mandate to preserve the species was accomplished, monogamous partnership was not, at least biologically, essential anymore. Now we live decades beyond child-bearing and are challenged to maintain harmony, let alone eroticism, until death do us part. We are in a slow and trying process of changing nature’s design. 

In the neglect household, as in much of the world, really, sex is not talked about. Certainly not in any kind of constructive or instructive way. In the world of trauma, and in general, we mostly hear or speak about sex in its worst light: abuse, exploitation, trafficking, harassment, commodification, and aggression, both micro and macro.

I thought, how about ringing in this new year with something positive about sex? Next week is Chinese New Year, the Year of the Rabbit. A lover of animals, I appreciate the tradition of each year correlating to one or another species. Besides their reputation for liberally proliferating, I also like the idea of jumping, rabbit-like, into this year.

What a strange and wacky concept, finding and hiring a stranger with certain credentials, telling them everything about myself, and paying them huge amounts of money to sit and listen to me. The icing on the cake: calling it a relationship? Oy vey. To an extra-terrestrial, and a lot of other beings, really, it would sound insane. When I first started therapy, back in the stone age (when I was so traumatized as to truly be something of a Neanderthal,) a well-meaning friend who could see I seriously needed something recommended that I try seeing her person. I was 23.

After several years of sessions, the blur in the distant chair in the corner of the office actually coagulated into a person. I have no visual memory of her other than a blob of color. I was so convinced that she would forget about me completely when I was out of her sight, that I did not exist outside of those hours. I tried giving her things so evidence of me might remain to jog her memory. And she encouraged me to come several times a week – a good idea because every single session, for a long time, was for me, starting all over from scratch. It rather astonished me when she actually remembered things I had told her. 

What kept me going back, day after day, week after week? Who can say? All of my money went straight to her, and I did pretty well as a waitress, back in the day when tips were not taxed. But I had “nothing” to show for it until years later, I realized that all that money had been a bonanza-like investment in myself. All those years of my unthinking feet walking the half mile to that little building on Berkeley Way simply felt like do or die. There was nothing to decide. I remember when she relocated to a “nicer” office up the hill. I was afraid she was moving up in the world and would leave me behind. Now that I think about it, I wonder how she got through those hours with me. I imagine it was like sitting with someone who was underwater, with a mouthful of marbles. I have no idea what I talked about. I had even less idea of what was wrong with me.

Many years later, when I became a therapist, I had a client with a devastating trauma and neglect history. I recall her saying, “I don’t remember anything about my childhood, really, just bushes. Bushes and the dog.” Perhaps I was like that? Our dad had a drastic and graphic story. I did know some of that. In those days, we mostly had “the talking cure.” I do remember some talking to empty chairs; I have no memory about what. And my therapist, always ahead of her time, got me to some adjunctive body-oriented work as soon as she could. Eating disordered and driven by numerous compulsions, I was definitely a candidate.

I voraciously read self-help books and, when I got into alcohol recovery, 12-Step books. However, I continued thinking, “Self-love is a crock…” Only years later did I learn from my therapist that one becomes able to love through the experience of feeling loved. Before that, it was the stuff of fiction and dreams. What I knew best was self-hatred, never being good enough, categorically un-likable. Those beliefs were the very air I breathed, an unconscious default. Default. Little did I know then, that that was the word.

I’ve never been much for the New Year’s resolution thing. It seems for most people to consist of grand declarations and promises of way too many changes, usually about losing weight, lasts about a minute, and then goes to the back of the drawer for another year. I do like the idea of vision and intention, especially around milestone dates, and I always recommend making modest, doable commitments. A sure way to freeze and fail is by promising too much. The AA founders got it right teaching one day at a time. A goal too big is guaranteed to overwhelm.

Our “Gregorian” or western calendar year begins in January, although the solstice makes a lot more sense to me as a marker of new beginnings. The longest night of the year giving way to the gradual return to light is a natural demarcation. Although we are still a ways out from spring, it is a turning of the corner.

Although I have, as ever, myriad changes small and large I want to make, only one intention is worthy of making formally, which is to write a layperson’s book about neglect. I entered the field of trauma when the PTSD diagnosis had barely made its quiet 1980 appearance in the DSM. The field of psychotherapy took years to recognize and understand that trauma was an assault on the brain, body, and nervous system and required specialized treatment approaches, many of which took years to be elaborated upon, let alone taught. Not uncommonly, my older clients lament or curse all the lost time in unhelpful or insufficiently helpful (and sometimes even damaging!) therapies, with often well-meaning therapists who just didn’t know. Now the larger world liberally uses the term, and even is, “trauma-informed.” The medical, education, and even legal worlds have become aware, as has the general public to a large extent. I am so glad. 

What will it take to make the larger world “neglect informed?” Well, my intention is to continue my mission about that, with the hopefully achievable goal of writing a book that will help the child of neglect learn to recognize themselves, so they better understand what is “wrong.” The larger world outside of them must learn to identify a set of problems that require attention, empathy, and a certain, specialized kind of help. Part of the commitment is to not neglect my husband, the cheese, or my own self-care in the process! Oy vey, am I slipping into too many intentions?