I remember the first time I went to New Orleans. It was probably 2000 or thereabouts, for a sex therapy conference. What a perfect venue for a crowd of sex therapists to get together. You know what they say about sex therapists: “people become sex therapists because they already think about sex 24 hours a day.” I certainly could not deny it at the time. For me it was love at first sight in New Orleans. From the moment I got off the plane, it seemed the place was vibrant with primary colors, like walking into a Diego Rivera mural, but with much more upbeat faces. Lively music, spicy delicious food. It was alive! I loved wandering around the bustling French Quarter on our breaks from the conference, visiting the wide range of unique and interesting shops. I even bought clothes: a little jacket embroidered with peacock feathers in primary colors, a pair of fancy jeans with a camo print; I called them my “chic Sandinistas.” I thought I was so cool. I still have them. This week marks 20 years since Hurricane Katrina assaulted New Orleans.

I don’t remember much from when Katrina happened. Terrible, sad photos of people trapped on rooftops watching cars float down river-like streets. The news was an endless barrage, as is often the case when there is a dramatic life event somewhere. What I remember best, was that I was seeing an SE (Somatic Experiencing) therapist adjunctively at the time. She suddenly became very busy and then absent for a while, which of course triggered me. I was hurt, mad and confused, with the abandonment rage of an unrecovered neglect survivor. I did not know what was going on, until I later found out that the SE community had sent a cohort of volunteers to help with the trauma of Katrina. Of course I was beset with the Bermuda Triangle of emotions: I continued to be angry. But also felt grief for missing her, and grief for the massive destruction and loss of the countless victims of the tragedy. And I felt guilt for being so “petty” as to be angry. It was admirable that she and the SE community stepped up in this way. Loss is the core of neglect trauma. Planned and unplanned losses of any kind can unleash the cascade of feelings, like the water flooding down New Orleans’ canal-like roadways.

The news world being what it is, we were inundated with news of Katrina for a minute, and then it was no longer news. As is regularly the case, once the shock and drama are less acute and thus “newsworthy,” and the long arduous healing and recovery begin, the story and its people fade from our screens, essentially forgotten.

Several years later our sex therapy organization returned to New Orleans for another conference, to help the city get its mojo back, to help the handicapped tourist industry recover. The city was like a shadow of what I remember, like a semi-healed trauma survivor, dolled up in clothes and makeup but still with the hollow eyed, shocked face of trauma. I have not been back since then.

Body

Aging also contains a lot of loss. Shortly after I discovered distance cycling in high school, I was dubbed the “Fastest Girl Uphill,” a far cry from the nearly dead anorexic girl who could not even walk down the hall to the bathroom by myself a mere 5 years prior. My mom gave me a little bell at the time, to ring when I had to go to the bathroom. I still have it, although it has a piece missing now, almost 60 years later.

When I was 19, I loved going to the gym and outlifting the men. It was the height of the women’s movement of the 1970’s here, so we all had something to prove. I felt so strong and so hot in that tight little 19-year-old body. I could lift five times my body weight on the leg press then. Now my weight is about the same, but I hate to think… and it is hardly the same body, or so it seems.

In my middle thirties, in my fervor of weight training, my beloved trainer said to me, “pound for pound you are the strongest person I have ever known.” I never forgot that. He was quite an accomplished athlete himself, so his words meant a great deal, and he actually helped me discover my identity as an athlete. Up until then, I had simply thought of myself as an obsessive compulsive trying to calm down.

As time went on, being an endurance distance cyclist became a cherished identity. My husband and I traveled all over doing bike trips and it was a glorious way to see more of this vast world. Beginning in 1998, the California AIDS Ride cum AIDS Life Cycle became a centerpiece of our lives. It was a 565-mile fundraiser where 3000 of us pedaled down the California Coast as a traveling village, riding, eating and camping together for a week, from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The ride raised approximately $16 million a year for AIDS charities. San Francisco was a leader in AIDS research and has proudly managed that lethal epidemic, at least locally. We did the ride 10 times and were training ride leaders for about seven of those. It was perhaps my first real experience of being part of a community, and I always said, “I am hetero-sexual, female and married, and I have never felt so much a part of something.” This year the ride pedaled its last. We were not on it, and although it was somewhat of a triumph that it retired, I think I don’t know the whole story. But I believe the number of new cases of AIDS here in SF is close to zero. Still, it feels like a loss, even though we have been away from it now for some years.

The aging body is replete with losses. Somehow neurofeedback made my gray hair disappear, although I honestly cannot explain that, and please don’t ask me to replicate it, but it is true. But my body has grown crooked in ways that I never expected, my balance has changed, and my energy is different. Hearing aids, blood pressure pills, seeming insults. One can forget that old age is a privilege. I never dreamed I would make it to 20 and here I am at 70. Yes, there are losses.

And I could have never imagined all of the gains. My treasured long-time therapist gave me a card for my 35^th birthday that said, “those of us who travel further than the obstacles, will have a different kind of life from that time on.” I could not have dreamed it. I still have that card…somewhere. And interestingly, even though I don’t work out anything like I did in the old days, I still have something of the definition of that long-outlived body.

I remember some years ago I read a book, The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger as Your Brain Grows Older, (Gotham Books, 2006) by Elkhonon Goldberg. I don’t remember much, although it is still on the shelf. But I do remember that one of the brain capacities that does improve with age, is pattern recognition. And I have found that to be true as I get older, which is of course a wonderful advantage when working with couples and looking for their repetitive patterns of activation and escalation. And I am sure it helps me as I observe myself as well. So yes, I grieve the losses. Even needing a hand with something as simple as hoisting my bag into the overhead bin on the plane is a humiliation. But thankfully now I am able to accept, even graciously, the help. That is a gained capacity.

Living Well

I got a call from my beloved now long retired therapists some weeks ago. She said “you are turning 70 next week. Let’s have a Zoom.” So, a few days later we had a call. We stay in touch so it was not so out of the ordinary, but I guess I did not realize how long it had been. Maybe close to a year, I am not sure. She is about to turn 96, and I must say she looks great. To me she looks the same as ever.

Remarkably she lives alone, still drives, swims daily and is very active in a community of aging and retired people in town. I had to admit, that I still have the terrified avoidance of losing her. I think I am so unwittingly terrified of losing her, that I stay out of contact. The whole thing is unbearable, and admittedly, mostly unconscious. I feel the same way about my husband. Like the whole world of neglect survivors, healing from that primordial original loss, unwittingly I avoid the whole thing like the plague. She helped me to identify it, again. So even though I am no longer her therapy client, she knows me so very well, that she can point things out to me and I can see. And she reminded me “I’m not dead yet!” And I could certainly see that. She proposed, how about we have a Zoom once a month. I gulped, “yes! Let’s do it!” so we scheduled our next call.

A couple of dear friends both gave me similar gifts. One was the scaly shed skin of a snake. It is nature’s design for the proverbial snake to shed its skin, implicit is that there will be a new one. Similarly, the other friend gave me a pair of shed deer antlers. I had not known it, but young deer have adolescent antlers which as they mature, they shed, no longer needed, as they grow new adult antlers. I have the scaly shed snake skin in a little bowl beside the antlers, alongside the little bathroom bell from my mom, all on my little altar-like table. They all remind me of cycles of life.

When I was a child, starting back as long ago as I can remember, our mom always said, “you should always kiss everyone goodbye before you go out, because you may never see them again.” What a frightening message for a little kid, although I can certainly understand where she would get that idea. And for many it was and is, tragically true. She also always said “We have to live well. We simply don’t know what will happen.” And she was right. She died precipitously when she was not much older than I am now. Although she seemed to be the picture of health, she surprised us all, not least herself, with a lurking metastasized cancer. Five weeks after diagnosis she was gone. So yes, we must live well. And not waste time.

Long out of sight, the recovery of New Orleans is not over, even as many other disasters and tragedies have and continued to abound. With all my mixed feelings about it, I asked ChatGPT where New Orleans got the name The Big Easy. It replied in its customary, astonishingly friendly way:

• The nickname “The Big Easy” is closely tied to New Orleans’ history, culture, and reputation for a relaxed way of life. The phrase likely emerged in the early 1900s, used by musicians to describe New Orleans as a place where it was “easy” to find work, compared to other cities where gigs were scarce. Jazz players especially found the city welcoming and full of opportunities.

Not so much anymore, am I afraid. Not usually so keen on my mother’s advice, let us strive heal this sorry world and remember to live well!

I had a hard time choosing a song for today. Ringo Starr, who recently turned 85, has a wonderful song called “It Don’t Come Easy.” At 85 he is still touring, and cherishes his friendship with the one other remaining Beatle, Paul McCartney, who is the only person who can truly share his memory. Then there is my favorite song of all time, “Tengo” by Pablo Milanes, recounting all the blessings that I do have. I ultimately settled on this one by Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa, a favorite singer of mine who died in 2009. I recently heard about a new book, which I have ordered and not yet received, about the grandmothers of the disappeared political prisoners in Argentina, now 50 years ago. They still grieve and mourn for loved ones who were never found.

Like most of us who were young women in the early 1970’s, I was swept up in the fervor, passion and perhaps euphoria of the Women’s Movement and the “Free Love Generation,” while also admittedly swept up in my own sexual compulsivity. Like most survivors of neglect and trauma, I was on a never-ending quest to regulate my ever amped up nervous system. And those were potent sexual times. In the US we got Roe v. Wade in 1973 legalizing abortion, the year I started college we got “the pill,” and it was an arena of idealism and ferment. The US – Vietnam War ended in 1975, the AIDS Epidemic had not yet begun, and I had finally left the parental home.

1973 also brought the blockbuster book Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong. It was on the order of a “basic text” for all of us liberated US women at that time, I don’t know about other countries. For us it was tantamount to “required reading”. Years later my friend and sex therapist colleague, the late Gina Ogden, wrote a book called Women Who Love Sex, which could very well have been its sequel. I can’t say I have thought about it in years, and to be honest, I don’t remember a thing about the book, except the cover, which showed a lascivious image of a semi-unzipped zipper; and the also the catch phrase (what would now be called a meme,) introduced by the book: “the zipless fuck…” I think it meant an unencumbered free-wheeling expression of the female sexual impulse and desire, with no strings. But I am not even sure about that.

Not long ago, I heard the tail end of an interview with Jong’s daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, about her recent memoir. Given my insatiable appetite for memoir, I heard just enough to know, I was interested in reading it. As it turned out, the book was even more interesting than I might have imagined, exquisitely and with wit, (and even well written!) addressing some major neglect issues. It is called How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir (Viking, 2025). I recommend it!

Narcissism

One category of neglect that I have not explicitly addressed much, is the neglect resulting from a narcissistic mother or primary caregiver. Probably because I tend to resist diagnostic labels, and their loose and often damning over-use. But there is certainly a category of neglect where the problem is a parent so self-concerned as to literally crowd the child out of existence. My father used to say fairly immediately if I met someone new, “Do they know who you “are?” which of course meant did they know I was his daughter. Of course, I concluded that that must be my only identity or existence, an extension of him. I remember reading in Whoopie Goldberg’s memoir, that her daughter dreamed of a world where no one had heard of her illustrious and charismatic mother. My husband described his mother very simply: his only identity growing up was as a “fur coat” for his fashionable self-obsessed mother. Erica Jong, however seemed to make all these others pale by comparison: she was of suddenly and wildly famous, and in a way that garnered every kind of attention. What was particularly confusing to Molly and to many children of these self-absorbed parents, is that they might describe and effusively express how they adore their child, but the hapless child simply cannot feel it, in Molly’s case not at all. And she readily got lost in the parade of her mother’s husbands and boyfriends; and exhibitionistic tendencies. Molly added that probably every friend she ever had, had seen some version of her mother semi-clothed, if not naked. Of course, she stopped bringing anyone home.

Idealization

Similarly, Molly, perhaps in spite of herself, idealized her famous, spunky and even in some ways elegant mother, who was also a prolific and continued to be a popular writer. I could certainly identify with that confusion. My own father who probably hurt me more than anyone else in my life, was also in many ways a hero figure in my psyche. I credit him with all the most prized aspects of my character: strength, determination, relentless drive, intensity, endless curiosity, responsiveness to music, and identification with the “downtrodden.” He raised us with the ready advice: “You should always go to sold out concerts. You’ll get in!” I proceeded to make that my practice, and I mostly have! He became, at least in some ways, a role model, as well as the template for my long and uncanny attraction and often obsession with very smart, narcissistic and somewhat mean men.

However, my father also never felt quite good enough. He suffered in that way too, which I also absorbed. I imagine, it is the underside of the narcissism. Jong had it too. She wanted to be more famous, and ever wealthier, which kept her endlessly striving and thirsting, never satisfied. And Molly, like myself, was never quite sure if she existed, or had any reason or right to exist.

Dementia

Like many of us, certainly in my generation, Molly watched her mother age and observed her cognitive decline. It is painful, frightening and can also be immensely frustrating to watch and go through with any aging person, but particularly a parent, and a parent who was both brilliant, and also wildly inattentive or absent. When my father started to disappear into dementia, I would go and visit him weekly. His wife would get right in his face and loudly call his name, and exclaim “Ruth is here! Ruth is here!” He might not even look up. There was a way that it was hauntingly reminiscent of my childhood experience of feeling invisible, unseen, unheard, non-existent so much of the time. Molly’s experience was similarly annihilating. Again, she questioned her own existence, but by now could feel her anger, as well as her grief. As with many of us survivors of trauma and neglect, the Bermuda Triangle: the irreconcilable confluence, internal shipwreck of anger, grief and guilt that storm and roil around inside. One of the painful legacies of aging parents.

Loss

The core of neglect trauma is loss. The withdrawal, abandonment, unreliability or simple absence of the primary attachment figure, are all variations on that theme. For the infant, that loss is not only experienced as, but in fact is life-threatening. That primary other is in fact survival: the natural source of sustenance, protection, safety and regulation – if we are lucky. Without them we experience a profound and lethal terror, which is why neglect is so utterly devastating and enduring. And why attachment researcher Karlen Lyons-Ruth has named this early neglect trauma as the “primary threat.” It is like the base layer, leaving its scars on the most primitive “survival brain,” the brain stem.

Molly is faced with her mixed feelings of loss, as she watches her mother losing her mind, and navigates her mother’s demise. She pretty simultaneously navigates the possibly impending loss of her beloved husband, who is stricken with pancreatic cancer while only in his forties. All of these are life passages many of us have faced or are facing now. Here in the US, we neglect, shun or simply avoid both aging and the aged, and advance largely unprepared into “elderhood.” I myself have felt blindsided by some of the indignities and perhaps insults of natural aging, after over 50 years of blessedly good health. I hear stories of age discrimination in the workplace, and I know my husband has had a terrible time attempting to find a knowledgeable geriatric doctor, in a progressive and privileged part of the world, known for quality medical resources. Even as our generation grows to a bulging percentage of the population. Molly touches on the issues of aging and loss as well. All the way around, it was a good read. And in many more ways than I expected.

On the subject of loss, you may have noticed I have been struggling with what has at times seemed to be my own elusive sanity as I attempt to keep up with my various commitments, which of course include the regularity of my blogs and videos. My apologies! I am not sure if it is lost capacity to handle more tasks than I used to be able to, lost humility as to what I could humanly complete, or my father’s example of always striving to do more, particularly when faced with so much need in this sorry world. I am making my best effort to move through the back log, with your indulgence. Thanks! 

Looking ahead we will have some pretty cool guest speakers on the YouTube Channel. I am excited about that!

Often, I feel like a large block of cheddar. The day of mixing and stirring, heating and cooling, seems to be the big day in which it is made. But the real artistry, when flavors mix and grow and ferment and magically become the delicious result, when it becomes ready to eat – that all comes in the protracted ripening, aging process. And you can rarely age a cheese too long, most only get better, as long as the conditions are good, mostly keeping it safe and at a healthy temperature, and protected from predators, like unwanted mold, or God-forbid an uninvited rodent. Sometimes homeless roqueforti, the delicious mold that gives bleu cheese its distinctive bite, which is airborne, is floating around perhaps too freely in the “cave.” And it may give a different cheese the unintended stink of Roquefort, which often only enhances or distinguishes it, although it then becomes perhaps transformed into a different genotype. You can rarely age a cheese too long. I once let a cheddar age over a year, and it was amazing. My record was a 26-month Parmesan, which was the best ever. Cheesemaking is an adventure. I miss it as I have been entirely too busy for my own good! But as I was saying, lately I feel like an old (not a “big!”) cheese.

I have been back from Boston barely over a month, and I feel myself metabolizing, integrating, and creating my own distinctive blend of so many ingredients that I heard and learned, that I add to the vat I was already stirring. Much of it was marvelously validating research that confirmed what I have anecdotally observed in the vat, in the trenches over these 30 plus years of studying neglect. Some elements I always intuitively “knew,” and also pieced over time from uncovering and slowly recalling client histories, and tracing intergenerational transmission. But getting the evidence basis, the legs to put under our work, was/is tremendously validating and also reassuring. Not only to me, but to my clients, and I hope also to you. I am infinitely grateful to the researchers! I know I will never be one, and if you are, I hope you will join in studying neglect, as we must work together and also complement and exponentially strengthen the value of our respect and integrally related and interdependent work.

And what was also so strongly validated at the conference, is a coexistence of two essential and indivisible parts, two profoundly, often warring core parts of me, the clinical and the political. I say warring, because there is never enough time, and it seems that the need is ever growing. But I met others, as passionate as me about that integration, and it was also a proclamation of the conference, especially considering the sorry state of this world, that we must find a way to address both if we are to make any headway with either, and of course not destroy ourselves trying to do it all. Or all of it alone or at once! Oy vey! It is why more than ever, we need each other, and the gathering together, especially in person, so we can rub elbows and hug and share meals and meet people we might not otherwise. So, I am slowly metabolizing and integrating it all, and with the help of conference recordings, and conversations live and on screens with others, adding this conference to my autobiographical narrative and my clinical play book.

Intuitively I have always surmised and known, that to bathe in stress hormones has an impact on a developing fetus. It seems like a no brainer. As we explore the world of nothing, and try to reconstruct how it came about, or did not, that is often a ready piece of available information. What I learned listening to attachment researcher Karlen Lyons-Ruth (yes another “Ruth” kind of, I love it!) whose work I have been following for 30 years, when the pregnant mother is in an environment of high and/or chronic stress, and pumping quantities of stress hormones, umbrella term cortisol, that of course permeates the placenta which is what nourishes the developing fetus. What I did not know, was the impact of the cortisol bath is increased amygdala volume. The amygdala, which is the brain’s threat detection system and subsequent alarm bell, is enlarged. What does this mean?

Essential Threat

The infant with an enlarged amygdala is born sensitized to danger, coming into the world vigilant and scanning for threat. In effect that infant is born scared. I was born in 1955, roughly 10 years post holocaust trauma. My mother, whose terror and trauma were never really processed as far as I know, was young, and constantly rapidly adapting to what life threw in her way. And I was her second child, the first pregnancy being in 1951, my sister was born in 1952. So, I imagine for every imaginable and unimaginable reason, she was flooded with cortisol. Of course, we are born hypersensitized to a dangerous world, with a fear detection system poised and at ready alert at all times. Starting on day one. Before anything has or has not “happened.”

The withdrawal of the primary other on whom we are dependent for all things when we are born: food, warmth, shelter, protection from predators, all our means of survival, is accurately experienced as life threatening. So, the supercharged alarm bell is then faced with true life-threatening danger, and it is a bundle of nerves, of raw terror: many of our clients, and us, from day one.

Looking around the world we live in, all the babies gestating in a war-torn womb, in environments of war, climate emergency, racist-homophobic, otherist, poverty ridden chronic trauma. I know I needn’t go on and on. And my interest is not to demoralize or overwhelm further. More than anything I am heartbroken, even more than disbelieving, and hell bent on doing all we can. That is another reason it was heartening and certainly empowering to meet and hug and be in the presence of known and new comrades, colleagues and friends. As ever we cannot do it alone! Much as our neglect default tries to pull us back into, we must struggle to resist the impulse to do it all ourselves!

Connection

I have the good fortune to have several clients who are professionals in the area of delivering babies. How essential it is to educate parents to be, not only making sure that they get good prenatal care, but that they understand the essentials of attachment. The research shows that the infants most adversely affected by neglect trauma, are those with the disorganized-disoriented, in effect dissociated primary attachment figure. So, helping those parents, both with their own trauma and also with information about what their infants need. Of course, we cannot neutralize the poverty or bombs dropping around them. That is another task. And it is why I am so infinitely grateful to my new comrade, colleague and friend Sandy Jardine, who is bringing Neglect-Informed work to Ukrainian therapists. Thank you, Sandy!

And Allan Schore reminds us, we must train the barely, if at all regulated childcare workers, (certainly in the US) in childcare facilities, where children are too often parked too young, be it out of ignorance or economic necessity, and not taken care of. Often further neglected, or even maltreated. Regulation of day care, and parental family leave enabling parents to have more time to bond and acclimate, soothe the fearful brains of their infants, might be possible. Of course, things are going the opposite direction here in the US, with a new ”pro-natal” slogan and less choice about unwanted pregnancy. Perhaps other countries are ahead of us in these ways.

The good news is we are not alone, many of us are working in our own respective pockets in our own ways, and if we have the humility and generosity, and the good fortune to find each other and collaborate, we have our best chance. Meanwhile we have the science to learn more and more of what to do, and must take care of ourselves sufficiently to operationalize it.

Today’s song (A long favorite of mine, and now more than ever. For welcoming the newborn, and also the imperiled refugee a diasporic survivor, of wherever threat, and wherever they may be. It is now an old song, but timeless and essential as ever):

Caution: this blog contains references to sexual violence.

I have always loved clothes: color, textiles, buttons, lace, all of it. For as long as I can remember, I always felt like I had to compensate or justify my existence, by creating and giving objects of beauty. When I think about it, what I most treasure and appreciate about my mom, perhaps the greatest thing she ever did for me, was to teach me to sew at age 9. She wasn’t that good at it, but got me started. And my home economics teacher in 8^th grade was a pro and taught me the rest. Sewing became a source of regulation and even pleasure, and I made clothes for everyone. Somewhere I learned to crochet, and even when I was completely disabled and bed-ridden by my nearly fatal anorexia at age 12, I could not do much, but propped up with pillows, crocheted yards of colorful and elaborate lace that I would later use to trim the clothes I would make.

Not surprisingly it piqued my interest to hear the recent interview with high fashion designer Prabal Gurung about his new book, Walk Like a Girl (Penguin Random House 2025.) As it turned out, it was about much more than clothes. Prabal preferred to be called simply by his first name, rather than his full name, as he disliked the patriarchal tradition of carrying the father’s name. And he was hardly fond of his own father, who was deceitful, angry and beat his wife. He vanished and then turned out to be cheating with and later married Prabal’s aunt, his wife’s sister. Prabal, however was devoted and unquestionably securely attached to his beloved mother who remained his ground zero and inspiration throughout his life’s journey.

Born in 1979 in Singapore, Prabal grew up in Kathmandu, Nepal. Before reading his book (which of course I had to, after hearing the compelling interview,) all I knew of Nepal is that it is where people go to climb Mount Everest. I had never imagined life, or a childhood there. The youngest of three, Prabal recounts an early childhood story when he was three or four, and discovered his mother’s red lipstick. Having seen his mother put it on, he proceeded to try it himself. When his mother walked in on him playing with her lipstick, she said, “Oh Prabal no!” She gently took the lipstick from his little fist and said “Here, I will show you how to apply lipstick.” And she lovingly demonstrated how to correctly apply lipstick first to his bottom and then softly, gracefully to his top lip. Similarly, when he loved her, and his older sister’s brightly colored dresses and shoes, she let him play and wear them, which was certainly unique, I was to learn, in 1980’s Nepal.

Gender has been much on my mind lately as I have been studying some of the differences in brain development between genders, in preparation for my talk at the Oxford Trauma Conference. And because there is plenty of disinformation blowing about as if gender and gender non-conformists are a “fad” or a hoax, or some sort of sin. This surprising openness to Prabal’s early delight in what were clearly not the gender norms of his culture piqued my curiosity, and I was further to learn that Prabal’s is also a story of how a secure early attachment is the “base layer.” With that as a foundation, a child is somewhat inoculated against later incident trauma, of which as I would come to find, Prabal would have plenty. On reading the book, I was to find it raised further questions of great interest to me. Besides some of the more insidious variations of homophobia and intergenerational transmission; and pursuit of our dreams, or our apparent dreams, what might be our primary purpose, and even larger questions of identity.

Homophobia

Prabal’s school life was a wide departure from his accepting home life. His hostile father being largely absent, the loving environment with his mother and older brother and sister was accepting and encouraging of his being himself freely. In school he was teased and bullied mercilessly, and shamed for being effeminate, non-athletic, and not particularly scholarly.

In his adolescence, he was sent away to boarding school in Delhi, India, which was hardly better. There he began to have the confusing and infuriating experience of repeatedly being both bullied and raped or gang raped by the very boys who mocked him. Prabal rage and affront simmered and grew as he got older, although he kept the secret of the repeated sexual assaults, he did not attempt to hide his nature. He continued to love beauty: color, texture, fabric and clothes. He admired the traditional and cultural dress of Nepal and India, the deep silken hues of saris and other draped garments worn by his mother and other traditional women, and he took up drawing which gave him comfort in the brutal loneliness of his youth. When he wanted to pursue fashion design, his mother did not dissuade him, and when he was of college age, he departed for New York, USA, a young gay Asian alone in a big world with a big dream.

Meaning

New York was only slightly more accepting, he was to discover. There he encountered racism that garnered the slur “Gaysian,” which is I was to learn, the gay Asian equivalent of the “n” word. Buoyed undoubtedly by the foundation of secure attachment with his beloved mother, whom he never ceased to think of as his anchor and his fountain of hope, he pursued the seemingly impossible American dream of becoming a designer in the high-end fashion world.

My husband always faithfully saves me the thick glossy fashion magazine of the Sunday New York Times. The photography, the clothing, the mysterious and now decidedly androgynous models with their curious and hard to read expressions, and elaborate hair designs, leave him confusedly shaking his head. He used to flip through them and say “I don’t get it…” Now he quietly slides the magazine over to me. I, however have always curiously viewed the pictures with interest, and seeing them as some sort of modern art form, both the designs and the photography. I am fascinated. High fashion, Prabal was to discover, is a complex hybrid between art and business. One has to find a way to navigate both. As a young immigrant with scant resources, in a vicious and competitive world, not to mention the concrete jungle of New York City, USA. With the necessary combination of determination, perspiration and undeniable talent he soldiers on.

I will jump ahead to the good part. After phenomenal ups and downs, Prabal makes it big in that wild and crazy world of high fashion with its unimaginable price tags, designing and making gowns for Oprah (one of his first great inspirations,) Michele Obama, Madonna, Demi Moore…to name a few. Ultimately his is able to start his own label and truly made a big name for himself in a very exclusive world. It is a great story. But it gets better. Prabal begins to ask the larger questions, what matters really? What does it all mean? He realizes he wants to advance the culture and well-being of his own people, and to promote and support the traditions and well-being of people from the Developing World.

Such important self-inquiry, what really matters to me? Fame and fortune, and the competition that surround them are tantalizing, and ubiquitous, and too many can get lost in the weeds there, including us if we are not mindful. Interestingly, and frankly to my surprise, Prabal found his way into therapy, again unique for his culture and in that high profile world, at least as far as we know. So, all that being said, enjoy your pretty clothes! I love my Prada pants (that I paid almost nothing for!)

Today’s song (Although this song is a different race, and story, it captures the same essential and unifying theme):

It is hard to believe we are about to observe the fifth anniversary of the barbaric murder of George Floyd on May 25^th, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. I feel compelled to make sure we observe and remember him, even as he drifts further into a muddy haze of years. Admittedly I do think of him or am haunted by him fairly often throughout the year, an iconic reminder of the persistence and extremes of injustice, brutality and violence. I remember from my activist days, a ritual call and response as we honored fallen revolutionary heroes of Chile and Latin America. A speaker would ceremonially call out the name of the martyr, the crowd would roar back a united chorus of response “Presente!” as if to reassure them, “you are still with us!” The energy of all those voices in a powerful unison was a boost to our battered morale. “Your death was not in vain, your spirit, our struggle, continues.”

I do love call and response. It seems many cultures and religions seem to incorporate them. They are unifying, uplifting, perhaps hopeful. Yet somehow hope seems perhaps elusive these days. And how we do need it!

Neuroscience researchers Ruth Lanius and Frank Corrigan are busy studying the most primitive regions of the brainstem: The PAG (Periaqueductal gray) and the superior colliculus, which I know little about. Except that when they fail to develop, another missing capacity becomes the ability to predict. So, the failure to stimulate those regions in the earliest attachment experience (or missing experience!) affects the ability to predict. And thus, the ability to hope. Is there any wonder, therefore, as to why the child of neglect suffers bitterly, lacking the ability to hope? How could they? Lacking the stimulation of a present other to arouse growth and development in those regions, there is similarly no future. Dangling seemingly nowhere with an empty past, of course they are left to believe nothing matters. And events in the modern world don’t seem to help much with that. Have we learned anything at all since George Floyd gasped his last?

Past

On the plane to Boston, the WiFi was spotty to non-existent. I was pretty much unable to work. Oh well…I guess I had no choice but to watch movies, something I rarely do at home. Admittedly I am not too much of a movie person, much too stingy with my reading time. But I was tired, so I combed through the offerings. I had wanted to see the Bob Dylan movie, A Complete Unknown, being a child of the 60’s who grew up with and dearly loved his music. I can’t say I liked the movie too much. I did enjoy the music and there was a rich dose of it, but I suppose I objected to making a centerpiece of his mistreatment of two adoring women, swinging back and forth, cheating on both, and appearing indifferent to either of them, or their devotion. I guess I prefer not to see the steamy side of my cultural heroes and icons, preferring their idealized images. But somehow it seemed as if the film maker by seeming, at least to me, to put such a spotlight on that part of Dylan’s character, was exploiting or making some sort of unnecessary point. I suppose I did not want to come out disliking him.

I did love learning or being reminded of how profoundly Dylan’s work sprang from deep roots in the music of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. And where Dylan’s love was most palpable was in his grief and admiration for the dying Guthrie. And I did love how Pete Seeger was portrayed as the iconic, all-around good guy. I grew up with Pete have always loved him. I was visited by the memory of the one time I did see him in person. I had not thought of that in many years. I recently learned that the sense of hearing, of all the senses, is the most richly endowed with brain receptors associated with emotion. We feel more through hearing, than the senses of vision, smell, taste or touch. No surprise there for me – I who always have a song in my head.

However, I was surprised to emerge from the movie with hope from an unexpected direction. I had forgotten that the rich ferment of the nineteen sixties in the US sprang from the muddy soil of the 1950’s “Red scare.” Activists, artists, writers, actors, people of every stripe were being spied on, vilified, rounded up and locked up willy nilly for being spies or communists, or some other so called “subversive” element. Everyone was terrified, suspicious of everyone else, and fearing they would be thrown under the bus one way or another. Thinking of the current state of the world, and remembering that somehow, we emerged from that horror and swung into a generation of anti-war sentiment, free love, women’s liberation, drugs sex and rock and roll, I remembered the history of humankind is a story of pendulum swings from one pole to the other, endlessly through time.

I came out of the movie thinking I wanted to call not only “Presente” to George Floyd, but something more. Do we learn from experience at all? Or are these pendulum swings nature’s design? I guess the answer is blowing in the wind. Interestingly I also remembered my dad used to sing that song…

The movie ended and I still had a ways to go before landing in Boston. I found another documentary, called Becoming Madonna. Although never a great fan of Madonna’s music, I was always enthralled by her dancing and fascinated by her character. I was interested to learn that Madonna had started her dancing from a foundation of classical ballet. I was amazed to see the grainy old black and white footage of the little girl in a tutu, on toe, in that tightly circumscribed form, from there evolving into the later dynamo and sensation she became.

That movie was great. Again, I was reminded of the tides of history, and how the culture around sexuality has whipsawed back and forth through the epochs. Madonna through brazenness, chutzpa and a measure of shock value, woke the world up to the beginnings of non-binary awareness, AIDS education, research and prevention, as well as sexual outspokenness and pleasure for all. History does waddle along, not always at the pace or in the ways we had imagined or intended, but it seems never to stop, and is unlikely to now, although when we are deep in it, it can be devastating nonetheless, and many are lost along the way. Somehow, I was able to emerge from that movie with hope. I wanted to tell George Floyd, “take heart”. We will spawn something better from your ashes.

Future

Here at the trauma conference, I had another burst of hope. Dr. Karlen Lyons-Ruth from Harvard, is an attachment research rock star from way back. I have followed her work for three decades. Today she presented new research, that as I sat in the first row where I could see and hear everything, brought me to tears. She showed with hard data, absolutely everything I have been working hard to teach. It was as if she was providing the evidence basis in hard science, in effect putting the legitimizing legs under all that I had anecdotally put together over the years. I don’t know if I have ever felt so utterly validated. She was proving that early infancy attachment trauma is the most profoundly injurious of any trauma there is. And the inter-generational transmission of neglect trauma is insidious and must be treated and prevented. She talked about the dissociation, the scourge of nothing, the injury of nothing. Wow. So, I do feel a new wave of hope and conviction. Nothing matters, history advances. Like neglect trauma, invisible in plain sight, George Floyd, Presente! We can’t see you, but we know you are there.

Today’s song:

The internet as we know, is a wide world of “answers!” There is a definite answer, or three, or three thousand on any topic! It is dizzying and confusing for many who are looking for “true information.” All claim to be “it!” Truth! And stated as such. I recently read the quote from some erudite author, Nabokov or James Joyce, I could not find it, that stated authoritatively “cheese is the corpse of milk!” What?!! I was offended! Cheese is quite the opposite of a corpse, more like a re-birth that both extends and gloriously enhances milk’s lifespan! It was originally discovered simultaneously by many cultures as a nutritious way to prolong milk’s longevity. Clearly, wildly different points of view. Perhaps as jarring as the assertion was the insistent way it was expressed as truth. As a cheese lover and devoted home cheese maker I categorically object! But my real point is, in a world where every imaginable self-proclaimed pundit speaks with iron clad certainty on any question, how on earth do we know what to believe?

In my work with neglect, I have learned that because the child of neglect is so alone in finding their answers, they become profoundly attached to the ones they do land on. Self-reliance makes them fierce in rejecting the input of others, and often they insist and truly believe that they are “right.” Married for over thirty years to a child of neglect who was an engineer and a scientist, I was regularly regaled with long-winded detailed didactic “explanations” on any topic. In the bad old early days of our relationship before I knew about neglect, I would become deathly tired and impatient with his being the expert on absolutely everything. I have since come to recognize that this is a signature of neglect: survival in a lonely and confusing solitary universe. As a therapist I have come to recognize that when a neglect survivor actually wants to hear what I think or what I have to say, it is a blessed sign that we are making progress. It reveals a chink in the armor, a however miniscule expression of letting me in.

One of the first things I try to teach couples where one or both is a child of neglect is to speak in subjective rather than declarative terms (stated as iron clad fact,) although, teaching anything is often a challenge. I take pretty much as given that there are very few absolutes about anything! Almost everything is subjective, is our own experience/interpretation of the world. This can be a hard sell! John Gottman the marriage researcher pointedly asks: “Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be married?!” The power struggles can be endless. In the lonely world of neglect, however, there is only one point of view. There is simply no discussion.

The “Truth”

So, what is “the Truth?” Who in the world knows? It utterly depends whom you ask, who you read or listen to, and/or “choose” to believe! Or even one’s own construction. I had a client once who was deeply involved with a religion I knew little about. She colloquially referred to her faith as “The Truth.” They truly believed they “have it,” as do many researchers of every (and competing) stripe. We have Google and Wikipedia “know-it-alls” who refer to their web surfing as “research”. When clients or loved ones defer to the internet as their go-to for medical answers when they or someone close to them has an ailment, I think, “oh no….” Much as I feel when clients or others have the last word about something that I may have been studying painstakingly for almost 50 years. Oy vey. That is today’s world.

My own workaround with this problem, is that I have a handful of people whom I trust. I trust their intellectual, professional and ethical heads enough to consult, to ask for an opinion or a reference. I never want to teach something that has no evidence basis, no scientific legs under it, and I live in the same multicolored world as you and everyone else, a cacophony of viewpoints and competing interests. For many, being “right” is tied to power, money, privilege or some other additional advantage besides the immediate gratification of intellectual acknowledgement. My small cadre of “trustees” may or may not know I exist. Some are friends some colleagues, some are noteworthy others, dead or living, who one way or another won my esteem and confidence. I turn to them, and them only. The child of neglect, at least for a good long time, flails at sea without that. There was no one to ask, no one to tell. An ironic spin on “don’t ask, don’t tell!” If only there were someone! It is nature’s design that there should have been. There is only oneself. For that child, there is no other truth. It becomes a kind of life raft. I know what I know! 

Dualities

I remember when I was a child, and for a good long time, I had this odd sensation, especially when I heard the news or read something about distant places unimaginably far away. Looking at a globe of the world, or different colors and kinds of people in National Geographic Magazine, I would imagine none of it, none of them were “real.” Rather it was all background scenery, props or “extras” in the movie about me. I was all that was “real”, and all the rest was the soundtrack, backdrop and the only reality was me. Oddly, I felt very much the opposite in terms of how important I was to anyone else. I never quite figured out how to reconcile those two.

Simultaneously, and this is what I came to recognize as a signature of neglect, was an exquisite sensibility to all the nuanced shift in energy, affect, mood, attention, body language and communication of any kind, coming from important others, beginning and most importantly with the primary caregiver. This acute radar was a way both of minimizing doing something that would put one in more danger, real or imagine, or interrupt hope for likelihood of getting something “good,” or preventing something “bad”. I remember well the hyperawareness and vigilance about all the subtle or not so subtle shifts in my own mother’s energy, body language, voice or face. Like a hawk, I was poised to jump into pre-emptive service. I knew she was sensitive, even jumpy about clutter and “mess”. If I scurried around ahead of her, made sure to prevent counters or tabletops from devolving into what she called everyone’s “dumping ground”, perhaps she would be a little calmer, gentler. Perhaps she would be a little warmer toward me? Well, I could hope, I could try. And looking back I did an amazing amount of cleaning…probably more than I have ever done since.

So, it is an odd duality, one of the reliable markers of neglect, the “one person psychology,” whereby one is both hyper-attuned to the other, and a self-styled “expert” on that other, while similarly being siloed, alone, and existing in a solitary world. It can be profoundly confusing if not downright infuriating to those attempting to be in relationship with them (although admittedly and often without awareness we are the same way!) I remember being so activated and hurt by my husband’s long and detailed conversations with himself or the dog when I was right there with them. It definitely hit my invisibility nerve, until I began to understand about the loneliness of his early existence. Another of the ironies of neglect trauma. I know, I know…the healing journey seems endless.

Again, deepest apologies for the lateness of this blog. I do know that I am not so powerful that my blog not arriving on its schedule is a “big deal”. And yet, I am indelibly trained not to disappoint!

Today’s song:

I remember when the Pandemic began in March of 2020. London Breed, the then mayor of San Francisco, announced that we all had to “shelter in place” for two weeks. I had no idea what “shelter in place” meant, I had never heard that expression before. When I learned that it meant stay home, and she was saying we had to stay home for two weeks, I thought “You gotta be kidding! I am not doin’ it! And certainly not for two weeks!” I figured I was an essential worker, and there was no way. Little did I know that we would be locked down for more like two years. It seems like a distant dream now. Occasionally I see a faded set of footprints once painted on the side walk, that says “six feet.” It seems unreal even though it was only a few short years ago. I learned so much from it all.

It baffled me, then, that nature somehow continued as usual. Here in the Bay Area, USA, the flowering plum and cherry trees begin their pink spectacle about now, and city streets are awash with gentle color and scent. I have always loved it. I love the sweet rosy pink, and as if a massive impressionist paint brush has splashed through town, it is everywhere. Never fond of cold weather, (and “cold” San Francisco weather is what many of you would call downright balmy!) right about the time when I am getting truly tired of it, I am reminded of the promise of spring. Some of the neighboring yards even sprout bright yellow daffodils. And the wealth of city parks large and small which are generously scattered throughout the city, are beginning to light up with bright California poppies. It all admittedly resembles emerging from a particularly miserable trauma-triggering episode, into the longed-for calm. Although a few more straggler rain storms are on the horizon, spring at last is near. Perhaps these cycles, these trees and birds, piercing and emerging from the bleakness, are messengers of hope.

During the Pandemic years, it always rather amazed me that in spite of all the havoc going on around us humans, the flowers and birds did not seem disturbed. They seemed to go on oblivious to the whirlwind of havoc and confused terror, not to mention loss and death that permeated the wind around the world. I do remember feeling simultaneously a sort of strange gratification. The whole world was forced to be aware and mindful of the body. We were aware of things like proximity and breath, touch and its absence, energetic physical contact, as opposed to a “remote” version. The word remote itself took on a whole new meaning. We had to make do with a whole new way of attempting to stay connected, which we have not yet really emerged from (here in San Francisco, I continue to be startled by the frequent whizzing past of what I call the “ghost cars.” They are the driverless taxis that are beginning to dominate the rideshare economy here. Last night when we were out for dinner near the ball park we saw what seemed like a procession: five of them one after another, powering past. That has become fairly common here).

There was also something oddly connecting during the Pandemic years: knowing that all over the world, we were all, at least to some extent, going through, finding ways to cope with the same thing. It was a great unifier of sorts, although I was certainly daily aware of my own privilege, of being able to work remotely at home, with enough space and privacy to coexist with my husband and his doing the same, and our two dogs as well. And the moon continued to wax and wane as ever, the seasons went through their usual progression, the daylight lengthened and shortened. Pink trees bloomed; the birds returned. I don’t mean to minimize the climate disaster that we are embroiled in, but somehow in spite of it all, nature was doing its best to stay with the program. As it is continuing to make its best effort to do even in the throes of noisy violence of all kinds that we find ourselves in today, including the internal wars, storms, earthquakes and wild fires of trauma and neglect freshly experienced and processing from the past.

Freedom

In the western, Judeo-Christian world, there are major holidays celebrating spring. Symbols of birth and re-birth like eggs, baby animals and flowers accompany the more explicitly religious and spiritual stories. Similarly, Passover is a spring holiday that celebrates rebirth and renewal. And Passover is a celebration of freedom, freedom from slavery.

As with pretty much all the holidays, I annually approached Passover with dread. For an anorexic kid, being trapped at the table for a hefty four-hour meal, brought a whole new meaning to the “inescapable shock situation.” Until I got a little older and found my role as cook, waiter and bottle washer, it was excruciating. The one saving grace I came to discover, was the “Manischevitz:” the four cups of syrupy sweet wine that ritual dictated became a way to make it bearable. I guess that became my attempt at “freedom.”

As soon as I became old enough to make my own choices, I abandoned the whole endeavor. My sisters and their families have the grace and empathy to include me in the guest list, and to understand with compassion when I regularly decline. However, I do love the spring, the return of the flowers, new life: bunnies and baby chicks, and the reminder of the preciousness and privilege of freedom. This of course includes breaking the chains of bondage from a lonely, alienated and traumatic past, micro and macro. As well as interrupting its intergenerational transmission. I know I can never be truly free until everyone is free. Too many are still far from it.  

Conditioning

This morning I found myself actually mindful in the way that the mindfulness teachers people remind us to be, basking in the immense pleasure of a hot shower, of washing my hair. I have always enjoyed the whole process, start to finish – the smells, the bubbles, painstakingly keeping the shampoo from getting in my eyes, the pleasure of clean hair. As a curly haired child in the 1960’s, briefly when it was wet, my hair could pretend to be straight and perhaps even a little bit longer – at least momentarily. Today, however, I had a new awareness I had never had before. Washing the shampoo out, my hair was matty, disheveled, riled up and tangled all into itself from being lathered and softly hammered by warm water. I rubbed in the little blob of conditioner, and suddenly as if by magic, it was un-knotted, smooth and tangle free. And I thought “wow… I wish I could do that.” I wish I could apply a small creamy dab, a gentle massage and erase the ratty chaos that is so endemic, ubiquitous, sadly universal. Is it worse now? I don’t know.

In the depths of the Pandemic of 2019, when people were dying by the thousands every day, I feared “this one is different, this will never end.” Now the faded footprints on once again peopled sidewalks are like washed out old family photos of unremembered childhood. The depths of trauma and neglect healing can seem similarly dark, cold and unending. In my better moments I do know, even that will pass. The trees are pink again. The breeze is warming. Birds are coming back. May I be as conditioner! Lather, rinse, repeat.

Today’s song: