When I was perhaps as young as four years old, my mother taught us a little apology ritual. I don’t know how she devised it or where it came from. Whenever we had a tangle or disagreement with a sister, play mate or friend, we had to rhythmically shake hands, in time with the handshake saying …
Amending Our Process: Crafting Apologies that Heal Read More »
“Now, too much of nothing can make a man feel ill at ease One man’s temper might rise while another man’s temper might freeze In the day of confession, we cannot mock a soul Oh, when there’s too much of nothing no one has control… Too much of nothing can make a man abuse a …
As a perennial bookworm each year approaches its end, I peruse the stacks and contemplate, what was the best book I read this year? It is like my own little Nobel Prize for Literature, and likely many will receive it as their holiday gift from me. This year it was easy to choose, a slender …
After much reflection, I’ve made a decision about my next book project. I thought I could write a book intended for therapists about how to work with clients who had been neglected as children that, using accessible language, would also be valuable to non-therapists. The audience would have also included “children of neglect,” as well as …
1. Introduction In the long and arduous journey of healing from childhood trauma and neglect, sexuality is often the last frontier. It is particularly complex and challenging in that sexuality is a place where body and psyche, nervous system and emotion, vulnerability and attachment intersect and entwine with perhaps everything that is essential to being …
Coming Home to Passion: Restoring Loving Sexuality After Childhood Trauma and Neglect Read More »
In my work as a couple’s therapist one tool I rely on, is the structured “Intentional Dialog” of Harville Hendrix’s Imago Relationship Therapy. I find it particularly potent for couples with histories of childhood trauma and neglect, whose childhood experiences so readily intrude on their current lives and confuse their relationships. And generally speaking, adult …
The Practice of Empathy: The “Validation” Step of Intentional Dialog Read More »
This is a repair tool for those times when you and your partner are both triggered, seem to be stuck in a place of disconnection, and are saying to each other “How do we get out of here?” Although I am not a fan of cute acronyms I am resorting to that here, because reconnection …
“In normal, optimally interactive dyads, only about 30% of their time together is actually spent in the affectively positive, mutually coordinated interactive state. The rest of the time is spent in mis-coordinated interactive states, accompanied by negative affect, attempts to get back to coordinated states, and positive affect. There is a constant oscillation between matched …
Out of the Tempest: The Challenge of Interactive Repair Read More »
In the past ten or so years of burgeoning progress, the growing subfield of traumatology has come to identify and elucidate much about the physiology of trauma. From the start it was undeniably obvious that trauma was a “physioneurosis,” (van der Kolk, McFarlane and Weisaeth, 1996) directly afflicting the body even if there was no …
Body Oriented Psychotherapy in the Treatment of Trauma Read More »
“The loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy.” – Adrienne Rich On a dark November afternoon, I received an unusual phone message from a woman in Southern California. She had gotten my name from her daughter, and she wanted to come and see me. When …
