I happened to catch an interview the other day with US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. I had heard him before but I was in the car, and there was nothing else on right then. He wrote a book not long ago about the “epidemic of loneliness” in this country, and when I heard him that first time, I proceeded to order the book (Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, 2020 Harper.) curious to know more about what he might have to say. Admittedly I did not get very far into it, finding it annoying and obvious in a superficial self-help kind of way. I tossed it aside in favor of the groaning pile of what I really do want to get to. However, this time, I did hear him say something that I thought was of value, not that it was profoundly new or different, but that it was validating of my own experience and belief. He suggested that a valuable antidote to loneliness, and a perhaps “endangered species” in the way of general practice/behavior, is the category of “acts of service.” I began to ponder that: the idea that emerging from one’s own self focus and be not only a relief but a gift or blessing that reverberates outward, that benefits all. I remember learning long ago that being pack animals, we are hard wired for interdependence, so acts of altruism and generosity are “rewarded by a dopamine surge, a shot of endogenous feel-good chemicals. As my husband and I enjoy saying to each other, “what a great arrangement!” A win-win. Acts of service are nature’s design.
As we know the nature of trauma is to fixate on the trauma. I also remember a book I read in graduate school, I only remember one thing about it besides the title, (The Body in Pain,) and that is it said, that pain categorically becomes a pre-occupation: when in pain we can’t think about anything else. No wonder the seemingly endless litany or “organ recital” as one of my clients used to call it. It is clearly hard to listen to when it is someone else. I remember my father, ever the stoic and martyr used to say, “no one wants to hear about your bad day!” Clearly, he did not want to hear about ours…
But I do remember that acts of service were a respite for me, and a source of comfort or relief in some ways. I think I was constantly trying to earn the right to existence, somehow compensate for occupying a patch of ground to stand on, on this earth, or balance out the blight or bother that I was. I also recall that in many ways, trying to do things that would help our mom, might “manage” her in some way. Either neutralize her irritability about disorder or burden that she might feel, which may change her feelings or behavior toward me. It was a hope anyway. I remember feeling that the only way she registered my leaving home to go to off college, was that she hired a housecleaner.
I also remember our dad, setting the good example for acts of service, spending many a Saturday afternoon visiting congregants in the hospital, as it is a “mitzva,” a good deed to “visit the sick.” We often felt as if we mattered less to him that they did, a not unusual way to feel for kids of clergy, activists and the like. In effect acts of service beyond a certain point, can constitute another whole category of neglect. I know the kids of many esteemed heroes and martyrs have felt slighted or sacrificed in this way. Nonetheless I do agree with Dr. Murthy, that doing for others is a good way at least sometimes, to climb out of a trauma state, and to feel better.
Getting back to the “yes!” pile: books that I look forward to and do want to read, I turned to To Be Loved: A Story of Truth, Trauma, and Transformation by Frank Anderson (2024, Bridge City.) I especially love reading books by people I “know.” I can’t say I really know Frank, I met him briefly in Boston, and I was introduced to him by a friend with a wacky sense of humor, so I can’t say I have really had a serious conversation with him. But like most of us in the trauma world, I have heard his name and seen his offerings for a long time, and have always been drawn to know more about his work. I was pleased to see his book was also a memoir, so it incorporated not only information but his own personal story, which I always love.
In a not unusual way, although perhaps less so than in the past, I viewed Frank through a particular lens: a good-looking white guy with an anglo sounding name, an MD, and Harvard Medical School among the fancy letters after his name. I figured he was “not in my league,” and there would be some sort of silver spoon in his story. The book was a good reminder that perhaps we are all in the same “league,” that trauma is a great leveler, and also has the potential to be the seed of the most profound of transformation. Besides being a humble reminder of my still around tendency to compare my insides with other people’s outsides, it was a great opportunity for me to examine my quick assumptions, probably absorbed from my dad, of always feeling not quite good enough, or not as good as… The truth is that Frank had plenty of his own obstacles, apart from a fierce history of abuse and neglect, the additional trauma of being a sexual minority, and the attachment trauma that all too often goes with that in families, plenty of his own immigrant story as Anderson is his married name and the name he grew up with was the unquestionably Italian Guastella, and that his educational laurels were hard earned from slave-like, devoted effort and relentless study and determination.
This is also a story of the power of therapy for healing and moving from despair into joy and satisfaction. In the vein of “acts of service,” Frank’s experience was much like my own in that discovering that “this stuff works, I am getting better…” made me feel as if maybe I could do this work too. It enabled me to find meaning in what had been a great vacuum. And Frank reminds us, that even the most gifted of healers return to therapy perhaps again and again in the course of a lifespan.
Perhaps the most moving part of the book for me, is the significant portion where he details his journey into and in parenthood. Because I lacked the courage to be a parent, so hell bent on not visiting the experience of my own childhood on some unwitting innocent children, I left that endeavor alone, contributing to breaking the chain of intergenerational transmission at least in part in that way. For Frank as a gay man and father, the challenges and the courage involved is multiplied. Our culture is pronouncedly prejudiced in favor of hetero-sexual parents, and significantly biased in the direction of mothers. One of my ongoing social justice concerns has to do with reproductive equality, and the formidable obstacles and expense for same sex couples to become parents, especially men.
Frank takes us through his journey, detailing the emotional, time and financial challenges involved, and the amount of love and grit required to acquire a child or children, let alone raise them. In describing his experience, he makes palpable how much love is involved at every step, especially as he painstakingly monitors his own behavior so as not to replicate his own abusive father, catching it, owning it, repairing it and working on it (including returning to therapy when he sees he needs it-) promptly when he slips. It is a heartwarming account, and reflects such profound love.
Perhaps as the book’s title suggests, what is most salient of all, is the reminder that what is most damaged by trauma is the world of relationship and attachment. Like myself he has the good fortune to find and cultivate deep and rewarding love with a partner in life, and also to bestow and transmit it to a blessed generation. It is a good read! (And it even has a play list of songs!) We are indeed all in the same league. Thank you, Frank.
Before closing I wanted to mention that Monday is Memorial Day in the US, where we remember and honor the veterans, and generations and misbegotten history of war and its many its many repercussions. I remember the grainy old black and white films of hobbling men returning from war with the label of shell shock and battle fatigue and back before we had the nomenclature let alone treatment for PTSD. Many of the veterans I worked with in the VA hospital back in the 90’s still wander around talking to their buddies, invisible to us, in Haight Ashbury near our home, and sleep in Golden Gate Park. Thank you for your service…
Today’s song:
(Apparently a fave of Frank’s)
It was 2020, the COVID 19 Pandemic hit, and like everyone else, I could not meet face to face, and therefore could not practice neurofeedback with my clients. All of us were making every imaginable adjustment to the changing times. It was also quite soon after my father died, and I was trying to write a book, so all this is to say, it was a time of great stress and transition. I was no whiz at technology so Zoom was a whole new universe to me as with so many of us. And “surprisingly,” at least it seemed so initially, all of my clients chose to continue their sessions remotely, so I had to learn. Of course, it was no surprise. All of us, and certainly all of my clients, were scrambling for how adapt to every imaginable and unimaginable sort of change. Thinking back on it now, it seems surreal, and distant, like remembering a science fiction movie viewed long ago. Occasionally I have that same feeling when I walk over faded sidewalk markings that say “six feet…”
Blessedly, we have a big enough house, so there was a room that readily adapted to an office for me. It was enough out of the way that I did not bother my husband and our then two dogs with my Zoom sessions. I set up shop at home, something I had never imagined I would do. In reality, the Pandemic was very kind to us. We stayed healthy, were able to stay pretty much “undisturbedly” employed, and had the resources to discover the vast universe of having things delivered. I missed doing errands, but really never wanted for anything, except of course freedom, and freedom from worry. And I was not in a great state of mind. I don’t remember if it was that I was feeling out of sorts physically, from being couped up, or if it was feeling a relentless pressure from deadlines. But I needed something. I remember somehow it came up in a consultation with my esteemed colleague Ruth Lanius, that there was a modality, new to me, called DBR, Deep Brain Re-orienting, that could be administered remotely.
I had never heard of DBR then, now it is somewhat ubiquitous, at least in the growing neurofeedback and trauma communities. Originated by Scottish neuroscientist/psychiatrist Frank Corrigan, it is a somatic therapy procedure targeting deeper and more primitive brain structures than what we had previously been working with. I was most familiar with the trauma responses in the over-active right amygdala trauma activations. Frank’s work went even earlier, even further outside of conscious awareness to reptilian brainstem regions, with unpronounceable names like periaqueductal grey (PAG.) These areas, located in the area at the foot of the scull, implicated in what Frank called “attachment shock,” a vivid and powerful nomenclature for attachment trauma that resonated intuitively with me, and with my work. So, I was intrigued. And I also needed something.
Perhaps due to the times, I had the good fortune of being able to do a series of sessions online with Frank himself, a privilege that I am sure would be much harder to come by today. For a number of months we had nearly weekly sessions that were at the interface of somatic and psychological. To be honest, I don’t remember them well, except on the sensory and emotional level. I remember that Frank was so utterly kind and gentle. Although he did not go as far as to sport a cardigan sweater, there was something attractively Mr. Rogers-like in his bearing and his care. I remember that the sessions were “hard,” kind of reminding me of when I was wildly anorexic and way too weak, and trying to work out with the junior high school water polo team. I lasted two weeks because during the workouts, unable to keep up, all I could think about was wanting them to be over. It was not quite that bad, but somehow that long lost memory was jarred loose. And I discovered what I had not really experienced before or allowed myself to feel, which was physical pain. Particularly my neck and back ached.
I remembered the work of Allan Schore, the first attachment researcher that ever compelled me. He talked about the essential need for the infant’s head to be supported. It is far too heavy for that scrawny little neck, certainly at the beginning. I remember him describing how that lack of early support, even in that blatantly physical expression, results in a flopping back, a disorientation, even dissociative experience for that unformed creature. I don’t know if that was my early experience, but my neck and emotions seemed to be telling such a story as I worked with Frank. It was enlightening, although admittedly not much fun, during an already difficult time.
When the pain continued mounting, and again, I was unaccustomed to consciously feeling, let alone acknowledging physical pain, Frank in his undying and merciful kindness, suggested we bring in his colleague and often collaborator, Martin Warner, an advanced practitioner of the longstanding modality of Alexander Method body work. I had some familiarity with Alexander from graduate school years ago, but had probably never experienced it. For a period of months I had the luxury of online sessions with Frank and Martin together, e rather remarkable arrangement with Frank in Glasgow, Martin in London and myself in San Francisco. Again, the memory is blurry, so I honestly can’t describe what happened, but I do remember coming away from the probably six months of work feeling inspired to study DBR when I can clear the time and band-width. Meanwhile, there had burgeoned a growing bandwagon in the neurofeedback community and admittedly I suffer from FOMO, not being able to join the important study at this time. But at least I am learning some version of regulation in not hopeless and self destructively overloading myself with yet another compelling undertaking.
That does, however, bring us to the present. In recent months, increasingly I began to notice, the pain in my neck and back, rearing up again, but much more than before, I became aware, it was harder to turn my head, harder to straighten up my back, and a seizing up in my neck seemed sometimes to even wrap around to the front. It was suggested to me, among other things, that perhaps Alexander work would help. Fortunately, I knew who to call.
In my first reunion session with Martin, as with many a potent somatic methodology, while working with the body, an awareness came to me, right out of the neck pain. My neck spoke to me and said since my father’s death at the end of 2019, I have become much more public and self-revealing about his/our story in my writing and speaking. In a way, I have “stuck my neck out” differently. My there be ambivalence, relief, guilt, the shipwreck of the Bermuda Triangle all thrashing around in y neck and back? Some part of me impelled to constrict, collapse, hide again? Curious again how the body throws out these profound questions. In my first return session. Oy vey! What would be next?
In our second session, I had the water polo feeling again. It was hard. Martin had me doing a sequence of movements in my neck and shoulders that were not necessarily strenuous, per se, and yet something about them made me unable to think about anything else but “when will this be over?” Martin asked, “Have you ever been diagnosed with scoliosis?” No, I answered. The he proceeded to describe that there was a pull backward and leaning forward at the same time. He instructed me in putting my attention toward the weight going forward. I was however, so very struck by his words, pulling forward and back at the same time, sounds insidiously like, you guessed it, the old Dilemma Without Solution, so much the heart of neglect trauma, where the source/object of comfort, longing, love; and the source/object of terror, loss, distress, are the same person. So the infant, child, even seasoned adult are in a tug of war between the simultaneous impulse to reach toward and pull back. This dilemma is at the heart of my teaching work, here it is again, at work in my own body.
The saga continues. Clients ask me, when is this work ever done? Maybe never? But that is OK. The journey is fascinating, much more so than painful. Thanks Martin!
Today’s Song:
My mind has been swimming with so many thoughts, and so much inspiration since I returned from Boston. I can’t honestly say I have really returned. I wish I had time to stop and watch all the recordings of the many invaluable presentations. Or even time to think about them. I guess this is all to say, I am sorry to be late with the blog! I have prided myself in never missing a week, and I don’t want to fall down on my commitment! I certainly want to be true to my word.
Sunday was Mother’s Day in the U.S., and neither my husband nor I have living mothers, although both of us have plenty of living memory of our mothers that made us feel gratefully off the hook on this day. Other than sticker shock at the jacked-up prices of the week’s flowers; and sticky memories of Mother’s Day brunches from my waitressing days, getting dipped in Hollandaise and splashed with Mimosas while tending to dutiful families. Oy vey, happily, for us it was simply another Sunday. Yet in the world of attachment, the mother is so profoundly important, that not addressing her/them. at least in my blog would seem a glaring oversight.
It has also been on my mind that it will soon be the fourth anniversary of the unforgettable murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. It is hard to believe that four years have passed already. Although Floyd’s death is not particularly unique in the history of this country, there is something iconic about it, and about him, at least for me. And most especially his haunting cry as he struggled for his dying breath of “Mama”, it occurred to me that perhaps a way to acknowledge both of these dates, would be to see what I could learn about this mythical Mama.
Why Intergenerational Transmission Matters
Larcenia Floyd, George’s mother was already two years deceased by the time of George’s death. Like many a martyr, she is somewhat “beatified” in the literature that I could find, and portrayed in an idealized way. But she was also the quintessential, overly burdened single mother with the additional weighty burdens of poverty, racism, and the profound social injustice endemic to the American South. She was not unique but also remarkable in raising five children alone, working at a burger stand. Active in her community, she also did what she could to help her neighbors’ kids. She supported George in his superior athletic achievement and got him to college. According to autopsy reports, Floyd had his mother’s name tattooed on his stomach.
George Floyd’s attachment story from what I can piece together, or at least hypothesize, was that he was the victim of a “neglect,” that was a function of his, his mother’s, and his family’s circumstances. It was precisely because of her superhuman effort, to be everywhere and cover everything, that her children could not have possibly gotten enough of what infants and children need. I am guessing that her self-reliance was of necessity and probably lifesaving for herself and her family, well until it wasn’t. It is no wonder that so many people come to me after learning about my work, and what sticks with them so pronouncedly is the violence of what I call the “Bermuda Triangle;” the shipwreck of crashing emotions toward the parent/s who did not or could not provide enough: grief, rage and guilt. Devoted to his mother I can imagine that somewhere inside, perhaps beneath the disguise or comfort of drugs, George Floyd must have wrestled with all three.
How much attachment trauma, how much neglect, how much “nothing”, and how much trauma of all the iterations is the product of social, political, and economic forces? How can we possibly imagine healing trauma one survivor at a time, without at least attempting to look and work upstream? How can we hope to really proliferate healing, when the world continues to be so cruel and unjust, victimizing and abandoning, even brutally murdering young and old? My entire life has been plagued by these questions; how to find balance, realistic ways to focus my energy, humility, time… It is an endless puzzle.
My mother was a “poor little rich girl,” before her family lost everything in the war. Her upper-middle-class intellectual Northern German mother was cold, distant, and anything but affectionate. I am guessing she was raised by nannies in those early years, although she did not talk about much. But she was certainly cold and distant, critical and unaffectionate, at least that is my recollection. It was that extreme of loneliness that informed my decision before I was five, “I will never be a mother.” I did not want to make anyone feel like that. And I did not think I could do better.
Our mom loved Mother’s Day. She loved breakfast in bed and began describing her hopes and wishes for gifts and for the day, well in advance. This year, my husband and I have a lovely and gentle Sunday.
Prairie Voles
Prairie voles are adorable little rodents that look like guinea pigs or hamsters. I have never known much about them, except that they are monogamous and mate for life, which is highly unique among mammals and certainly many of us! At the Boston Conference, I had the pleasure of spending a bit of time talking to someone whom I have followed and admired for years, but never gotten this close to: biologist Sue Carter, also affectionately referred to as the “Oxytocin Queen!” is also a high compliment, certainly in my world. Oxytocin is the bonding chemical, secreted in moments and interactions of attachment and connection. I have plans to have some in-depth conversations with her as her biological research sounds like precisely the evidence basis I hope to be able to put underneath my largely anecdotal work about attachment trauma and neglect. I know there is much more out there that I have yet to read and understand, but what she seems to be uncovering is fresh and striking.
Sue is a long-time student of the prairie vole, and in her most recent work, she made a powerfully interesting and important discovery: one incident or event of neglect, attachment shock, be it withdrawal, abandonment, loss, or absence of the beloved other, leaves a profound, enduring, even lifelong impact on the behavior and physiology of our furry little cousins. Said Sue, “We discovered years ago that disrupting prairie vole families by simply picking the family or offspring up one time for a few minutes on the first 1-2 days of life was followed by periods of intense care and lifelong changes in social behavior… I look forward to continued conversation with Sue, and to reading her important research as well as that of her collaborator Jessica Connelly.
Meanwhile, I look at the upcoming anniversary of George Floyd’s murder with the entire Bermuda Triangle of stormy emotions. Intense, grief and rage, and a measure of guilt and shame that my country is still capable of committing such atrocity. Rest well George and Larcenia too. You are not forgotten.
This week’s song:
I’ve just returned from the 35th Annual Boston International Trauma Conference. What is lodged in my head is the very old song by Pete Seeger and the Weavers:
Wasn’t that a Time! You are probably tired by now, of hearing me brag that I attended almost all of them. And until the Pandemic, all of them were live and in person, so my pilgrimage to Boston was a regular recurring event. I am also proud to be a veteran of the trauma field having come in virtually at ground zero. The PTSD Diagnosis arrived in 1980, and I was graduating and starting out as a therapist in 1988. So, I feel as if I grew up in this field, both as a clinician and concurrently as a healing person. I am so grateful. That conference was something of a North Star for me because every year I learned not only about the research and methodologies that were emerging in labs and consulting rooms around the world but also rubbed shoulders with people who became professional icons and mind-opening champions in my world. Every year I could not wait.
This one was very different for me, though. Historically I was a silent lurker. I felt so small and under-educated. Without fancy letters and schools after my name, I felt like a hungry sponge. I have always bristled against popular jargon like “impostor syndrome”, but admittedly it fit. I certainly felt out of my league, and that I had no right taking up space, but that was how I had always felt anyway. I floated around silently and unobtrusively like a billow of thin smoke. In the mornings I would slip in as early as the conference rooms opened, and stake out my seat, front, and center, or as close to the front as I could. Usually, the first row or two was reserved with signs or paper memos on the chairs, for speakers and other important people. So, I would reserve my seat with a notebook or jacket and silently slip out. I always wanted to be as close to the front as I could, so I would not miss a word or a breath. I knew if I did not get up at the crack, and claim my spot early, the world would crowd in and I would end up in the back.
This year I found myself for the first time, a speaker myself. There was so much to do, that I was unable to get to the meeting room early. I rushed in almost at the very minute that the first session I attended was to start, and the monitor who let me in said, “There are some reserved seats for faculty in the front.” Ambling in at the last minute, I was in the very first row, center, sitting on the reserved sign. I did not even remove it from the chair. What a strange, ethereal, and wonderful shock. I thought this must be what they meant by a “place at the table.” But I knew what I was really experiencing was the years and decades of doing my own trauma work, and how that truly transforms the organism, the self, and certainly identity. They say “self-image is the last thing to change.” But feeling that piece of paper under me that said Reserved, felt like another somatic therapeutic modality.
A few weeks ago, listening to Public Radio in the wee hours, I came in late on an interview with a local neuroscientist, so I did not catch her name. She worked at UCSF and specialized in psychedelic research. She said, with all due respect for neuroimaging research and already existing findings, she questioned whether she agreed with the assumption that psychedelics interact in particular ways with specific brain regions or if as she hypothesized, they interact more with brain chemistry. So she had the idea of testing her hypothesis on an organism that did not have the brain regions we have. She selected a distant cousin, the octopus! She recruited seven octopi and administered MDMA to her slippery subjects.
Lo and behold, the octopi responded much like humans, not only did they become more playful and social, but they reached for and touched each other. I was tickled and fascinated. Admittedly had one of the proud moments ofwhere else but San Francisco would someone study octopi and psychedelics. Imagine my surprise when I found the neuroscientist who did the research, Gul Dolen, who was a speaker at the Boston Conference! I had the honor of meeting her the night before she spoke, and I eagerly asked her, “Will you be speaking about the octopi?” She said she was not sure. Hadn’t really planned to. I said, “You must!” And happily, she did.
Her talk was more importantly about work with “critical periods” which I found fascinating. Apparently, there are developmental periods where there is a window of plasticity, where change or “manipulation” can be facilitated. For example, if a baby is born with cataracts, there is a critical period where if cataract surgery, a commonly successful surgery that resolves cataracts, is performed, the cataracts will be healed as cataract surgery most routinely does. However, if that period is missed, and the window closes, the child will likely be blind for life. Researchers are finding that MDMA can reverse critical periods, and reopen closed windows!
What excellent news! As ever, I find new avenues of hope for seemingly “lost causes,” to be profoundly inspiring and exciting.
As a sex therapist, I encounter many “closed windows” of various kinds. I had to wonder if MDMA has properties of both stimulating and activating connection and touch, and re-opening windows, I wondered about sexual function long locked- even with hopelessly thrown away keys, could open again! I have the good fortune to live in the same town as Dr. Dolen. I have requested a consultation. Hope she can tear herself away from the octopi. I would like to ask her what if anything has been done in the area of MDMA assisted sex therapy.
During the conference, while sitting in the front row, I read the news about a hero of mine: the iconic First Nation athlete Jim Thorpe. I have written about him here before. Thorpe was the super-athlete who, after miraculously winning an unheard-of streak of gold medals in the 1906 Olympic Games in Sweden, was unjustly stripped of them all. It took 50 years before, until some time after Thorpe’s death, his medals were restored. On May 3rd, while I was in Boston, the president of the US posthumously awarded Thorpe the Presidential Medal of Freedom; the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Recipients of the medal are “individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, world peace, or other significant societal, public or private endeavors,” a press release from the White House stated.
Yay!! Isn’t it about time?!
This past week in Boston, our ancient ancestor, the under-estimated octopus, Jim Thorpe and I all got our place at the table! Wasn’t that a time indeed?!
This week’s song:
When I was working my way through graduate school, my last waiter job was in a cute little restaurant near Berkeley Repertory Theater. The chef Johnny, unlike so many chefs, was good-humored, funny, and uncharacteristically gentle and kind with us, the waiters. One of the things Johnny routinely said when we ran out of something, was “That’s all she wrote!” I liked that; it reminded me of the old TV show Murder She Wrote which I had always liked. When Johnny’s business partner, also named John, died of AIDS, all of us were devastated. John was quirky and difficult but wildly charismatic and a brilliant businessman and we all loved him. Before too long, in his grief, Johnny sold the place, moved back to his home in Baltimore, and opened a new place. One time serendipitously when I went to a conference of the US Association of Body-Psychotherapists I ran into Johnny on a path on the Johns Hopkins campus and he took me to his new restaurant which was much like the one I knew. I never forgot his old expression “That’s all she wrote.”
Years passed, and I had a ritual with our beloved dog, Angel. Angel, in her own idiosyncratic doggy way, loved the crunchy stems of broccoli and other green vegetables and some other colors too. She would hang out expectantly, hoping for her quota of stalks from me as I made dinner every night. Our ritual was me giving her, for obvious reasons, the measured quota of roughage, and that was it. I would say, “OK Angel, that’s all she wrote.” Her part of the ritual was to linger with pleading eyes. I would say, “Angel, you know what that means. Don’t pretend that you don’t.” She would continue to hang around plaintively, hoping, until she saw my husband start on the salad. Meanwhile, he would never laugh at our repeated routine. Until at the ripe old age of 16, Angel finally was the one to say, “That’s all she wrote.” In all her grace she left us for the next world. But not without leaving behind an important reminder or lesson.
Loss is the core injury of neglect. The neglect story, or non-story as it were, is the story of nothing, of colossal loss. Abandonment, rejection, absence, all the iterations of nothing, are a compendium of loss. The reminder/lesson was that any loss large or small can be a traumatic reminder, an activating stimulus, or to use a word I deplore and avoid, but which everyone seems to understand, it is the ultimate neglect trigger. I found to my dismay, that I was exhibiting some of my most outdated symptoms of withdrawal, disconnection, inward focus, mistrust, and numbing. Of course. It was how I had always coped with/avoided grief. I was dismayed that after all this time, I could still go unconscious that way. Humbling. Fortunately, I awoke to it before long. I was used to neglect survivor clients getting painfully activated by my long and short absences. And recently my closing the Oakland office that many had been coming to for multiple healing years, years, evoked a wave of backlash, and loss reactions. It was a sad reminder that all loss, besides the often-substantial sorrow in its own real-time right, can elicit the potato bug-like constriction, closing up tight. Thanks, Angel. Do rest well.
In my usual quirky way, I plow through even the heftiest of biographies, especially athlete biographies. Don’t ask me why I had a fascination with pro athletes, even though I never ever watched any sort of professional sports or any spectator sports for that matter. Although I was an activist in the world AIDS charities and research for over a decade, and I knew that Magic Johnson was an iconic basketball star who contracted AIDS, I really knew nothing more of him, except perhaps that renowned, magnetic smile. So this bulky new-ish biography, Magic: The Life of Earvin “Magic” Johnsonby Roland Lazenby (Celadon, 2023) called out to me. I knew he was a bigger-than-life talented athlete. And I was intrigued to know more.
I am now close to the 832-page end. Whew. It could probably have happily been a satisfying (to me) 350 pages without all the play-by-play descriptions of countless important and even famous basketball games, that were admittedly lost on me.
Earvin was already 6 feet 9 inches (205.74 cm) by the time he was 14 years old. He grew up in a poor working-class family in Lansing, Michigan in the early 1960s when the experiment of integrating public schools by busing to distant districts to mix up the races, was barely beginning. It was rather horrifying to read about how it was done. I guess I never really knew. Kids were merely thrust upon each other without any help to actually integrate. Earvin was one of the first schools in his town to “try,” it.
Earvin discovered spontaneously that he loved basketball. And he had a special talent for making his team better. Passing balls to teammates in such a way that they could readily score. More interested in winning, for the team, than scoring himself, he made everyone improve. His love of the game defied race, as well as facilitating racial harmony. Almost in spite of himself, he became something of an ambassador and leader, while also evolving into an exquisitely talented player. His success in college and then the NBA is legendary. And in the model of similarly notorious basketball star Wilt Chamberlain, he became known as a prolific and unabashed womanizer, scoring numbers shockingly in keeping with his basketball scores. However, although his activities predated the “me-too” movement (and at least according to this book were with willing, even eager women), it was at the height of the AIDS epidemic before safer sex practice had become a norm in the first world. His testing positive for HIV shocked the world even more because it was contracted through heterosexual, unprotected sex.
Although being diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease, and in his day (1992), HIV was considered a death sentence, is a wallop of not only shock but devastation. And for someone who lived even more than the rest of us, by his body, and who loved that almost more than life itself, it was a devastating loss. It was not yet generally understood that testing positive was not the same as contracting the disease. And we did not yet have the wealth of life-prolonging medicines we have now.
It appears, at least from this book, that Johnson was blessed with a securely attached background and truly loving parents who supported him unconditionally. If we find people to be irrationally blaming about COVID, AIDS has been even more wildly villainizing of its sufferers. Especially as it was for years thought of as a “gay” disease. In reality, a vast majority of the international numbers of AIDS sufferers are heterosexual. When he found his feet again, Johnson once again became an ambassador and a pioneer, as well as a tremendous liaison and conduit of AIDS awareness, using his charisma and his established esteem to influence and change attitudes. He became an impassioned and impressively successful fundraiser for AIDS research, as well as a fervent advocate for safer sex practices. And to the chagrin of some, (and my admitted appreciation), he did not preach abstinence as the “best safer sex practice.” He rapidly regained his contagious and notorious smile, and although he made a brief comeback to the game, he ultimately decided to hang up his shoes and devote himself to philanthropy and business. He transformed his profound and devastating loss into something positive. That’s magic.
Which brings me to me! Although mine is a modest story, nonetheless it is a story of lost and found. I am on my way to present at the Boston Trauma Conference. It is the 35th year and as I have been touting for some weeks now, I have been to most of them. For years I was a silent lurker, the quintessential child of neglect, I was uncertain of my own existence, let alone existence in anyone else’s eyes or mind. I remember when I first learned the term “object constancy” which means, staying connected even when not in the presence of the other, what? It seemed like one of those weird concepts in physics that were similarly hard to fathom. I remember when my husband laughingly transposed it to “object incontinence,” which made almost more sense. Seems like a long time ago. The Cubans say “Seremos como Che!” We will be like Che! We will be in our own way like Magic. I am the poster girl for trauma and neglect healing and much of it I learned at this conference. I never thought I would believe I had something to say. But I guess I do. Neglect is the story of nothing. And nothing is NOT nothing! Nothing is something! And nothing matters. Perhaps that is all she wrote!
Today’s song:
I remember back in 2013, being in a book signing line with my three copies of the then-new book Cooked, by Michael Pollan. Pollan, a local treasure, was/is one of my great heroes, the author of one of my favorite books of all time, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. If you have not read it, you must, although it is not a trauma book. In those days, you could go to a Pollan reading for free and even get a parking space, which is no small thing in my town of San Francisco, USA.
When I got to the front of the line, I was able to tell Mr. Pollan, that it is a rare occurrence, certainly it was then anyway, for me to read a book that truly changes my mind about something, that leaves me thinking about things in a whole new way. Michael Pollan could change my mind! For someone who reads as much as I always have, that was a meaningful and all too rare experience.
Some years passed, and in 2018 Pollan’s blockbuster book about psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy hit the stands. I was delighted, and even more so when I learned that it was entitled How to Change Your Mind! I had only recently first heard of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD at the Boston Trauma Conference, where it is not at all an uncommon experience for me to get my mind blown wide open by whole new-to-me paradigms. protocols and possibilities. As I excitedly anticipate this year’s conference, I find myself visited by memories of standout presentations by practitioners, researchers, writers and thinkers, of whom I most likely never would have heard, and some I have never heard from again. But amazingly my not always reliable hoary old memory has retained mind-changing ideas and even names. Some of them, I often refer to, teach and/or practice. And I still have their books that I would buy from the cherished and eagerly awaited conference bookstores. I will call up a couple of remembered highlights, as I imagine or fantasize that maybe I could leave a similarly lasting mark on a least a few people’s brains.
Many a client has come through my practice, survivors of trauma and neglect who have spotty, unreliable or simply “unbelievable” memories. Perhaps they don’t understand or know what “happened to them.” Or “it” fades in and out of being credible to them and finding its place in the autobiographical narrative. Since I heard Jessica Stern speak at the Boston Conference, probably around 2010 as that is when her remarkable book Denial (Ecco, 2010) was published, I have been able not only to recommend her book but even sometimes help them with their confusion.
Stern and her sister suffered a brutal violent sexual assault together when she was a young teenager. So, her trauma was closely witnessed, shared, later reported to authorities, and documented. Still, with all that living evidence, she was able to completely “forget” that it had occurred. Although she for “some reason” developed a fascination and ultimately made an academic research project and later career in the study of terrorism, she still did not remember the trauma for many years, and when she started to suffer from symptoms and later fragments of memory, it took years for her to believe herself. Even with that much-proven history.
Stern was racked with doubt and shame about the thoughts of it. I found her story and the well-written book to be of help to many. If even with concrete and unquestionable evidence of her traumatic experience, she could doubt herself, and doubt the veracity of her terrifying recall, my clients’ confusion about their memories did not mean they “made it up,” or it didn’t happen. I never forgot Stern’s name or talk. And her dusty book is still on my shelf.
Another Boston speaker whom I had never really heard about before nor have I since, was James Gilligan, a psychiatrist who spent his career working with maximum security prisoners. These were mass murderers, serial killers, perpetrators of the most heinous acts of violence imaginable or not. These are people I imagined never wanting to get near, let alone have compassion for or help. In fact, before hearing and then reading Gilligan’s book, I could not imagine a shred of empathy for anyone capable of what they had done, let alone being locked in with them to do the work. Gilligan found, not surprisingly that without exception these people, these patients were victims and survivors of some of the most hideous trauma themselves, I found his book and his work moving and surprising in that it even evoked some compassion and empathy for such people, in me. I could never do what he does and that is for sure. But I have deep gratitude and admiration for a man who has the heart and stomach to do the work I could never do, and he painfully reminds us, should we even need to be reminded, about how essential it is to break the insidious chains of intergenerational transmission of trauma and neglect. Thank you, Dr. Gilligan. His then-new book, when I heard him speak in Boston, is called Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (Vintage Books, 1997), I have not read it again since I got it, but it is on the shelf and maybe I should.
Spoiler Alert: I do Reference This in My Own Boston Talk
I have no idea what conference year it was, but I remember the name and the presentation of this crusty old guy with a thick Irish brogue: Seamus Sinclair. I remember him because his work was so striking that I have made use of it readily over the years. Sinclair worked in the San Francisco County Jail with convicted domestic violence perpetrators, and it was ironic that I had to go to Boston to learn of him! He showed videos of his work with the cons in their orange monkey suits, large, strong, menacing-looking guys. I shuddered to think what they had done to their partners and families, that landed them there. Sinclair, was teaching them to learn to track the impulses in their bodies, the mounting sensations, and arousal that lead up to an episode of violence. If the men could learn to notice and feel the preliminary communications in their bodies, they could prevent the loss of control that resulted in the abuses. The videos showed the men practicing: when they felt the first indicators of that arousal in their bodies, he instructed them to place one hand on their heart and one hand on their belly, and breathe, with a long exhale. Here were these burly guys doing that in the jail, and calming themselves down.
When a parent holds an infant to comfort and soothe them, the child’s body makes contact with the parent’s body in those areas: the heart and the belly. For somatic therapists, this practice is a no-brainer, but utilizing it with that population seemed radical, and seeing the men take him seriously and settle right down, stayed with me all these years. I wonder how many spouses and children were protected by their learning this. It certainly stayed with me, and I have taught it many, many, many times. I don’t know if Sinclair is still around. He was not young then, whenever that was.
As I have said, I first learned of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy at the Trauma Conference some years ago now and was amazed by the films of veterans with seemingly intractable trauma symptoms, recovering so powerfully and quickly. Not to mention Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Neurofeedback which became staples of my work. So many years of invaluable memories, I am so excited about this 35th year, and I wonder if I can leave a memory with even one person, But I am certain the memory will be indelible for me! Perhaps I will see you there!
Today’s Song:
I am unquestionably a scrooge about pretty much all holidays. Most of them are riddled with nightmarish childhood memories, partly because many of the Jewish holidays had traditional foods and food rituals, and often involved a lot of eating, which was of course my nemesis. And later because as a young adult and then a therapist, I was painfully reminded with each returning holiday season, whatever it was, mine or other cultures and traditions, of the expectations and seeming pressure to have happy harmonious family relationships and shared celebrations. The Norman Rockwell image, for any culture. And in this melting pot country, it seemed and seems there is always yet another feast day rolling around. Admittedly, Passover, although it was no exception in terms of dread and distaste, had one unquestionable redeeming aspect. The Passover seder, the ritual dinner/service prescribes four glasses of wine. Traditionally it was Manischewitz “concord grape” as I recall, and sweet like syrup. And even though it was supposed to be a “thimble-full” for kids, I did end up not quite under the table, and I did love that part. Since I stopped drinking in 1983, there has been no remaining selling point (although everyone loves my macaroons, a traditional Passover treat). And I do like the holiday’s symbolic meanings: spring, renewal, and freedom. There are many other ways however, I would now prefer to celebrate them. Like the Boston Trauma Conference, which became if not exactly a holiday, an annually recurring event and milestone to look forward to and anticipate. This year it comes right after Passover ends. Yay! And Lechaim!
This year marks the 35th year of the annual International Boston Trauma Conference. I am proud to say, I have been to most of them. It has been for me a beacon of direction, lighting the way for my trauma education and the next steps in my thinking, theory, practice, and certainly in my own development and healing. So many of my most cherished mentors and teachers, most of whom of course I never knew personally, I was first introduced or exposed to in these rooms. And ideas that might have been unfathomable, like EMDR, more elaborated somatic approaches, neurofeedback and then psychedelics were presented with enough seriousness, evidence basis and science, as to become part of many of our daily vernacular, vocabulary and lives. I am so grateful. I am so thrilled and excited that this year, like an eager descendant, I will get to be on the roster.
I am not sure if I first made my acquaintance with the work of Peter Levine, in Boston. I would not be surprised, but I admit I can’t remember. In any case, with great admiration, I have followed him for many years. Although I am not certified in his Somatic Experiencing, having pursued certification in cousin-methodology Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, I have taken many trainings with Peter over the years and decades.
One of my greatest and most dramatic life-changing therapy experiences was a “one session wonder” I had with Peter in California’s Esalen Institute at a workshop he and Bessel gave together in 2000. I always say, “If you want to work with the best therapists in the world, volunteer to be a ‘demo client’ which is exactly what I did that January day in the early Millennium. In front of a group of about 40 people, Peter in some 40 minutes worked his magic on my brain. I had not been able to focus my lifelong bookworm mind, and read a page, let alone a book in about 5 years, blankly reading and re-reading the same meaningless sentence over and over again. I was in grief about my lost world and respite. After that one session, I went home and read Allan Schore from cover to cover and have not stopped reading since. (If you have ever read Schore’s brilliant work, you will know that it is anything but light reading!). I have no idea what Peter did, although I do have the VHS recording of the session, but from there he found his place on my eternal short list of great heroes. And admittedly I have always said, with great respect for his many students and trained SE therapists, that Peter’s work cannot be taught. It is simply him. Thanks, Peter!
As I prepared my talk about Neglect Informed Psychotherapy, one of the concepts I included is the complex and, to me, fascinating projective identification, which is important to understand in working with the developmental trauma of neglect. As I am sure I have mentioned, my original psychotherapy training, as well as my long personal therapy, were an updated and evolving psychodynamic. Projective Identification is a mysterious interaction that I learned of from there. Essentially, what it means is a child (or therapy client) in effect “puts” a feeling or experience that they have no words for or even no memory of “inside of the other” mother, therapist, or even intimate partners. The story, desperate to be known and told, inaccessible to the experiences, is given to the other to be “interpreted, translated, felt, comprehended and articulated.” With many a child of trauma and/or neglect, who may flounder largely without a coherent or known autobiographical narrative, it is a highly adaptive and often enlightening default. And when successfully navigated can be exquisitely productive and even connecting, valuable, and challenging. As therapists, we must be scrupulously aware of our own story and our reactivities, so we can discern between our own and the other’s feelings. So many of us trauma and neglect-informed therapists have our own histories, and so we must be all the more committed to doing our own work, so we can be the effective and helpful “mother bird”.
As I was preparing my talk, and attempting to explain projective identification, I provided the story of a client who was struggling without words in one of our sessions. Spontaneously, in my own mind’s eye, I had a pop-up visual flash memory, unbidden, of an early memory of my own, waking up alone in the pitch dark, cold, terrified, in pain untethered, lost. It was so vivid, that I wondered if it was some sort of “transmission”, or communication from the client’s unconscious to mine; a projective identification from this client’s wordless story. I asked him, “What do you know about what was going on in your mother’s life when you were an infant? What might you have heard from older siblings or relatives, that would shed light on your early experience?” Sure enough, the infant image took us to some important details about his mother’s depression during his infancy, her family’s poverty and the discord in her troubled marriage with this client’s dad. Careful and not leading curiosity took us to a wealth of context for unremembered neglect, which seemed to lead us fairly quickly to more actual memory than he had had before. Listening and attending to communication through the “field” is an invaluable skill for the neglect-informed psychotherapist.
As I reviewed this section of my talk, I was gripped by a blast of worry. I already feel like something of an impostor to be speaking at the Boston Trauma Conference. Was this anecdote, this idea too “woo woo?” for Boston? Would it make me sound like an old hippie from Berkeley, California? I hesitated. I tabled the question for the moment…
Warning, the following, Spoiler Alert!
As a devoted follower of Peter Levine and a great fan of memoirs and autobiography, it was with great enthusiasm that I learned, now almost a year ago, that Peter Levine had written a memoir! Of course, I pre-ordered it in a hot minute as I’m wont to do, and about a week or so ago, it came! I am delighted. When I say “Spoiler Alert!” I mean, I am sharing with you a brief section, but I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing! Peter is a self-described introvert and extremely private person, so I have never heard him talk much about himself, certainly not about his own significant trauma story. I won’t spoil too much, only this one snippet that helped me settle down about expounding on energy fields at the Boston conference.
Peter is a serious scientist and scholar, in addition to all of his other geniuses. I knew that he had earned his doctorate in medical and biological physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and even worked a stint for NASA (the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration), so certainly no academic “slouch” or “woo woo” type, Berkeley or not. So I was fascinated to read this anecdote about him.
While a student in Berkeley, he had a favorite restaurant, Beggar’s Banquet, in town, that he frequented on a regular basis. A self-proclaimed and bookish loner, he generally went by himself, well… not entirely. Peter had an imaginary friend who kept him company, that friend was an apparition of the famed genius Albert Einstein. Peter had gotten to know the waitress there, and a regular fan of their homemade soups routinely ordered a second bowl for his “friend.” Although the waitress offered to keep the second bowl warm for him until he finished the first, Peter would decline the offer, and enjoy his conversations with Einstein. They made perfect sense to him.
No one really knew about these outings, until one day on a visit with his parents in New York, Peter chose to tell them about his regular and recurring apparition and time with Einstein. His mother was completely unsurprised and without missing a beat, said “Peter, I know why this happened to you…” She proceeded to tell him a story she had never told him before.
When eight months pregnant with Peter she and Peter’s father were on a picnic and an idyllic afternoon canoeing jaunt when they were overtaken by storm winds and their capsized vessel pitched them into sea. Struggling to find their way to safety a small sailboat appeared, in it an old man and a young girl rescued them, pulling them to shore. Once all were stable on terra firma, the two introduced themselves. As it happened, they were, you guessed it – Albert Einstein and his stepdaughter! It made perfect sense to her that all these years later, Einstein would be visiting Peter, the young college student, through the field. As I read, I felt as if Peter was coming to me through the field and telling me, “It is OK to talk about projective identification and communications through the field, in Boston.” Generations of geniuses have been communicating in these ways, why not us?
Oddly, I had another one of those flash memories from when I first moved to Berkeley in 1976. There was a local dairy in town called Berkeley Farms whose redundant catch phrase was “Farms. In Berkeley?” Followed by a refrain of loudly lowing cows: “Moooooooo.” I found myself thinking “Fields in Boston?” Well, why not?! Hope to see you there!
Today’s song:
I have often told this story, as a perhaps amusing illustration of attachment terror: I met my now long beloved husband in 1990, and after about 10 months of courting, and much at the urging of my wise old cat, Marti, we decided to move in with him, however, with all the ambivalence of a severely attachment disordered child of trauma and neglect. But we did it; emptied my Berkeley apartment of 18 years, packed all of my worldly possessions and trundled them over the Bridge to our new San Francisco home.
The house was/is plenty big, but in my semi-frozen state I was still very torn about whether I would “stay.” I was on a looping auto-replay of the old Clash song, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” So, I emptied the vehicles loaded all my unopened boxes into one upstairs room and shut the door. For five months. One winter’s day, I don’t remember much about it, I ventured in there and unpacked. Thirty-four years later, here I am…
Once again, that same upstairs room is filled with boxes, and much of the time, with the door again tightly closed. But this time, there is no ambivalence involved. Having made the slow and thoughtful decision, and planned for it for almost a year, I have closed my Oakland office and am consolidating my work life, to my home office. And this time, I am intentionally taking my time to unpack. Partly because I don’t have huge swaths of time. And partly because this is an integrative and meaningful move, and I want to be present and thoughtful about how I inhabit this new life phase, and even enjoy it! The irony is being in and out of that same room, squeezing and stepping around piles of stuff, crushing cardboard, and reviewing my past. The view out the window is largely unchanged, although perhaps the San Francisco skyline has grown taller and more jagged over these years and decades. It is lovely and refreshing to be un-ambivalent, only grateful about this change. Outside, my home office window, seeing my car parked outside unmoving, is another great relief. Ahhh…
However, I am not without chaos! Where, most weeks, I would wake up from a deep sleep with a mostly coagulated, nearly fully formed blog in my head, and simply must bang it out on the computer, this week my mind was also crowded with “boxes,” and disarray. Competing ideas, or should I combine them, find common themes or narrow the field?? George Floyd, Angela Davis, a total eclipse, a sense of self? Dizzying…
I was excited to learn that the interview with Angela Davis that I had been wanting to hear, was being re-broadcast. I could listen to it while I was unpacking. Davis, is a long-admired, enigmatic cultural icon to me. She is now 80, and I had heard somewhere that she had re-directed onto a path of non-violence, and I was very curious to hear the story about that. I have always been intrigued by knowing that she had a brief love relationship with Mick Jagger (!) which admittedly I was quite curious about. But all in all, I am a great fan, even a glutton for memoir, autobiography and biography, endlessly curious about who people authentically are, perhaps in that elusive quest to answer that question for myself. I was excited to hear Angela’s story.
As I tuned in, I was distracted by the reading of a dramatic passage from Annie Dillard’s dramatic essay, Total Eclipse. It was the day before the by many greatly awaited 2024 total solar eclipse this past week. Although I am not unduly moved by astronomical and astrological events, except perhaps in the aesthetic sense, I was more aware and interested than at other times, because my best friend traveled all the way from Berkeley to Mazatlan, Mexico to see it, so I could not easily dismiss it. I was jarred alert by the reading I heard:
…From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lit from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams,
At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky… (Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters Harper Perrenial, 2013)
I could not help but listen. The darkness and the screams shook my memory. The vivid image of the sudden total darkness, and the screams, swept me back to a long-ago story that I had not thought about in some time but recently told in an interview. I was not much older than two years old. Plagued by repeated, deafening and agonizing ear infections (I remember feeling like there were men shooting guns in my head.) It was decided that treatment would be a tonsillectomy, an overnight stay in the hospital for a very small person!
I guess in those days, it was not understood yet that little, little kids needed a parent, or someone, to stay nearby, with them through such an ordeal. I remember waking up in the night in that hospital room, to a scene resonant with the eclipse landscape. The world had gone dark, and a natural impulse welled up to wildly scream. I remember the thick blackness in that little room, the cold emptiness it seemed to generate, the terror. Much like the eclipse scene, it seemed apocalyptic, existential, and deathly. I imagine the withdrawal of the mother/the attachment to “other” is as terrifying to the small child as the disappearance of the sun, even for brief moments. Similarly, there is something organic, primordial, in the spontaneous unison of screaming that erupted amidst the crowded eclipse-witnessing throngs.
I emerged from my reverie when the interview with Davis began. Admittedly it was somewhat disappointing.
Angela Davis, not surprisingly I suppose, questions, why anyone would want to know her personal story. In fact, the interviewer jokingly remarked that she rarely utters the word, “I.” Once in the interview, she made sure to point out when she did. And although she spoke some about being in prison at age 28, it was more in the context of the larger social problem of massive incarceration of people, especially of color, and especially of men and boys. All of that is vitally true and important. However, in my quiet disappointment, I thought of the question of why I was so curious and fascinated to learn personal stories, why I have this insatiable quest to read about the lives of people I love and admire. (I pre-ordered Peter Levine’s memoir when I first heard he was writing it, almost one year ago! It arrived this week, and I can hardly wait to finish what I am reading so I can get to it! An Autobiography of Trauma, A Healing Journey. Simon and Schuster 2024).
What is that? I think for me, as for many a child of neglect, the absence of a sufficient mirror, that widely vacant sky, leaves a vast, blackened void, a cavernous empty space where an authentic self would be: darkness. First screams, then confusion, then rooting for some light, some direction, who shall I be? It seems to take years and years of dogged work to answer.
After the eclipse, I asked my friend, “was everyone screaming when the sky went black?” She said yes, they were, and that she cried a little. But it was beautiful. I am glad she is on her way home. And I know I am glad I am home!
Today’s Song:
“I didn’t marry you for your cooking!” our dad would routinely say to Mom, only partly in jest. But there was no question about his admiration and regard for her in perhaps all the other ways, and he truly went to pieces when she died in 2000. I remember his often quoting the verse from proverbs, especially if we were particularly ungrateful or somehow disrespectful of her, at least from his point of view: “A woman of valor, who can find? Her price is more precious than rubies.” Strange how these things lodge in one’s memory, even when so little else does, and float back spontaneously unbidden.
March is Women’s History Month here in the States, with March 8th being International Women’s Day. I meant to write a blog on that theme, and as I pondered whom to spotlight, I heard a profile of Angela Davis and thought she would be a fitting subject. (I’ll get back to her!) Then as March stealthily washed away in a wave of busyness, I received an email announcement, enthusiastically congratulating the Psychotherapy Networker’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Janina Fisher, a woman of tremendous valor well-known to all of us in the trauma and dissociation fields. I was thrilled by this news.
I can’t remember the first time I encountered Janina, probably in the early 1990s at a conference of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation (now the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation). Janina is exquisitely smart and one of those gifted speakers who can present complex clinical or physiological concepts in a language and style that is accessible, not “dumbed down” and even interesting. Dissociation was a “new” and readily confusing aspect of the already young and growing trauma field. She made sense of it. And warm and approachable, she was immediately likeable.
When I enrolled in Pat Ogden’s Sensorimotor Psychotherapy certification training in Boston in the early 2000s, I was delighted to discover that Janina was one of my two instructor assistants, so I had the privilege of studying in close proximity with her for almost five years. She was an invaluable resource and I loved her. Again, not only at articulating elaborate ideas but also talented in somatic applications and explaining them as well.
After completing the training in 2005, I rarely saw Janina for a long time, even though she by now she was almost a neighbor to my Oakland, California office, at least part-time. I remember one time after a traumatic bicycle accident which had left me with unrelenting depression due to a long reverberating concussion, Janina came to my office for a one-time sensorimotor session. I don’t remember anything about that session really, except being in her healing presence and the gentle music of her voice. I know it helped. In subsequent years, I saw Janina mostly at a distance at conferences and the like and certainly followed her books. Until last fall in Oxford, we reconnected and found we both live in San Francisco now, I have had the pleasure of hanging out with her a few times since. It was exciting to hear that Janina had been acknowledged and honored by the Networker in this way. She seemed like a fitting subject for my belated Women’s Day trauma blog.
Of course, I was delighted when Janina agreed to a Sunday afternoon interview with me. I realized that although I had known Janina for years, and heard her speak probably hundreds of times, I knew little of her personal story. So, I shyly asked her, how she grew into the amazing trauma therapist we all now know. Like me, Janina came into the nascent trauma field right at the beginning, also out of a psychodynamic training background. For Janina, a decisive moment was in 1989, hearing the pioneering trauma expert Judith Herman speak in Boston. Ahead of her time, Dr. Herman eloquently declared that people suffer because of terrible things that happened to them, not because of infantile sexual fantasies. This made phenomenal sense to Janina and re-set her professional direction.
And concurrently, as is true for many of us, the most severely traumatized, dissociative and often self-destructive of all clients seemed to be “drawn to me like a magnet.” I asked Janina, “How do you understand that?” She responded, “I was born into it.” Ahhh. Intergenerational transmission. But she did not know this until some 10 years after being “woke” by Judith Herman.
At the age of 85, approaching the end of his life, and seemingly out of the blue, Janina’s father approached her for a different kind of conversation than they had ever had before. He proceeded to tell her his personal story, the most unbearably heart-breaking saga of traumatic attachment imaginable. While she knew that her father had had a “terrible relationship with his mother since his birth”, she did not know specifics. When Janina’s father was but one year old, his mother placed him in a foster home in Chicago, some 800 miles (approximately 1,300 KM) from her New York home. He was wrenched out of that home at age 2 and a half and “forced to return to living with them.” At age four (!) he was sent to boarding school and was yanked out of there by age 5 and sent to a foster home in France, alone and without knowing a word of the French language. The French foster mother, however, fell in love with the little guy and kept him until he went to boarding school at age 16.
In this long conversation, Janina’s father mentioned in passing what he assumed she had known. Janina’s mother had a severe childhood trauma history as well. And although Janina had always experienced her mother as cool and aloof, and clearly her parents’ marriage was a miserable one. Janina was never close with her mom, who died in a car accident in her sixties. Although her father travelled three weeks out of the month for work through much of her growing up, she felt close to him. Somehow, he came out of all that attachment hell a kind, warm and charismatic person, and Janina believes she learned or inherited her loving warmth from him.
Janina did not realize until she was in her teens, that he surreptitiously drank alcoholically throughout her childhood. He ultimately stopped drinking in AA, and when he died, he was 56 years sober, and his funeral was crowded with AA comrades and generations of sponsors and sponsees. Says Janina with a laugh, “I guess, I learned to co-regulate complicated people from the ground up!” I say, “What an inspiration!”
Janina had her first child by the age of 25. “That was what women did…” just a little ahead of the Women’s Movement of the 1970s. As a young undergraduate at Harvard, “I had no idea how to take care of a baby,” she exclaims. By the age of 27, she had two little boys. Overwhelmed she wondered, “How many thousands of women are in this same boat?” She decided to become a therapist and work with young mothers. All the rest is history.
I asked Janina, how she became interested in somatic therapy. She responded without hesitation: “Because of Bessel.” Much like myself, Bessel has been her north star in her study and practice of trauma and dissociation theory and practice over the past 40 years. And also, much like myself, she does not practice Sensorimotor Psychotherapy per se, but it is in our bones and informs how we think, feel and work every day.
The program that Janina has developed Trauma-Informed Stabilization Therapy (TIST) is quite remarkable. She also speaks to my deep social justice sensibility with a profound antiracist, sex-positive and gender equality commitment. She has an empathic and cutting-edge expertise about addictions and is copiously generous with what she knows. Can you beat that?!
Janina of course is everywhere and I don’t have to tell you where to find her. I am infinitely grateful for all I have learned and continue to learn from her, and for the glowing example and role model of human being, and Woman that she is. Far more precious than rubies! Congratulations, Janina, and thanks!
Today’s song:
My course with Quantum Way is now available for registration!