My favorite scene of the whole 8 years was after his therapist, whom Tony was quite attached to, had been brutally raped in the parking structure of her therapy office building. She was understandably shaken, and massively traumatized by the assault, and her husband was painfully unresponsive and minimizing, which compounded her trauma. Much like the all too common sexually abused child who tries to tell someone and winds up blamed or further abandoned. This experience is often as traumatic as the actual event, or even more so, compounding the shock with betrayal. Especially if there is a prior history of abandonment and neglect.

The most poignant scene in that episode, is in Tony’s session. The therapist has returned following a brief hiatus after the rape. She of course had not told her patients what had happened to her. And you see her in the session, struggling with herself. She knows who the rapist was, and she knows that Tony would be that longed for bad-ass protector that like me, she had never had. That guy would have been a “mark,” Tony would have had his head in a bowling ball bag at the bottom of the ocean, in a hot minute. She knew that.

The therapist did not say anything, but that inner struggle of hers powerfully evoked the deep longing I had always had, for someone to have my back in that way. Instead, everything was “my fault.” For survivors of neglect, that longing and the blame, are anything but unique.

It continues to amaze me, the mysteries of memory: what sticks and what evaporates, simply fading away like smoke. Among the literally hundreds of books I have read, some leave a lasting mark – even the author’s name. Probably when they strike a historic an important personal chord. One of those was George Lakoff’ 2008 book The Political Mind. Lakoff was a linguistics professor at UC Berkeley. I have no idea what prompted me or even led me to a linguistics book, except perhaps that the mind and politics are both core passions of mine.

Lakoff’s theory about how it is that we end up choosing and following autocratic, powerful leaders, is because of how many of us have wished and longed for a protector who would stand up and fight on our behalf, who would insist: ”Leave my kid alone or I will destroy you!” Or, “My kid is the BEST! Don’t mess with my kid! Or else!” I don’t mean this literally of course, but how many of us have had a fantasy or wish that I might matter so much, that someone would actually go to the mat for me. Looking around at the world today, I wonder, does neglect, and the gaping void of anything even vaguely resembling protection, create a vulnerability or a gravitation toward charismatic, autocratic, powerful  “spiritual” or religious “influences” or political leaders? Certainly, it is not conscious. But I am curious about this.  

Maximum security

Another of my lingering literary memories was of a book by someone I heard speak at the Boston Trauma Conference, probably in the late 1990’s: James Gilligan. I have not seen or heard much from him since, although according to AI, he is still teaching, now at New York University, and still writing. His book, Violence: A National Epidemic was first published in 1996. It was probably around that time that I heard him in Boston. A truly remarkable human being, Gilligan worked with the most viciously violent convicted maximum-security criminals, and the “criminally insane,” in prison hospitals. These are individuals who have committed some of the most unimaginably heinous, brutally gory crimes. It amazes me that Gilligan has the courage, and the heart, let alone the interest, to be locked in with these men. He has some extremely valuable things to teach us, some of which are painfully related to our themes of trauma and neglect.

Because they feel so empty, so numb, so utterly dead, these men seek for something to feel a spark, to feel alive. I see it to a much lesser degree with some of my neglect survivor clients; what I have come to call “hand grenades,” provocative, often self-sabotaging but dramatic verbalizations or actions to awaken something, anything at all, to interrupt the excruciating boredom, the activating stimulus of nothing. It could be rousing a political argument at a family holiday meal, an enraging comment tossed out off-handedly in a couples’ session, even an insult to the therapist: anything might be better than nothing.

Gilligan adds that often the prisoners do unthinkable things to themselves, inflicting dramatic, even life-threatening injury and pain to their own bodies: as vicious as the crimes that landed them there. To many, literal death seems preferable to the seemingly endless living death they are enduring. It sounds frighteningly like the agony of disconnection, and agonizing emptiness of neglect trauma.

Injustice

Much of my life, I was painfully aware of who “got” what, and how much; most significantly with attention and affection, but everything really: a running tally of comparison. Of course, I anticipated and expected to come up short. Neglect is a universe of scarcity. There is categorically not enough to go around.

Says Gilligan, the extreme of violence correlates much less to actual poverty, than to relative poverty. The wider the disparity between “haves” and “have-nots,” the higher the incidence of violence. He cites that during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, when virtually everyone had nothing, the level of violence in the US was lower than ever, significantly lower in the US than in times, perhaps like now, when the gap is widening. His explanation for violence is it is a way to restore justice, to avenge violence suffered, and to alleviate shame. Being or having less, inspires shame and envy, which can readily inflame a vengeful rage, and a righteous urgency to reclaim what is rightfully “mine.”

Injustice, scarcity, shame, and the agony of nothing, are painfully familiar to us as we delve more and more deeply into the study of neglect trauma. I am ever chillingly reminded of the insidious feed-back loops that stimulate and perpetuate the violence that traumatizes and perpetuates more trauma and neglect and on and on and on. Again, my redundant rallying cry, we must work together to heal both: developmental dysregulation, and the out of balance larger world.

I Hope to see you in Boston!

Those were particularly lonely times for all of us, with forced isolation, people dying by the thousands of COVID every day, pervasive fear about the virus itself and all other ubiquitous uncertainties and unknowns.

Gurwitch, being a comedic actress, brought amazing humor and grace to the heart-wrenching story. To me that was particularly amazing as I grew up on a steady diet of bleakness and tragedy, and for the most part an absence of laughter and fun.

The exception was that our dad, occasionally would play entertainer. Being a cantor, he was a public figure of sorts and sometimes performed publicly in other capacities. For that purpose, he would practice carefully curated and honed jokes. I remember finding Jewish comic of the time, Henny Youngman’s Take My Wife, Please, lying around, usually in the bathroom, which was most likely where he went to “study”.

Dad had a quirky way of telling jokes at home. He would almost get to the punchline, and then he would start laughing, laughing so hard that he could almost not get to the punchline, but by then the punchline did not even matter. The contagion of his laughter had all of us in stitches. Then he finally got the punchline out, and we all laughed at that. Those moments of levity were precious and few and far between.

hope

When my sister had stage four ovarian cancer, now almost 10 years ago, I was beside myself. For two years we hovered, posed between fearing for the worst and hoping for the best. I changed my whole schedule so I could be at every single chemo appointment, I was baking and making packages of bread and cheese, doing all I could do to ward off my own devastating terror. The core of neglect trauma is loss and I was walking the delicate tight rope between grief and hope. A stage four designation is like a death knell. But I did not want to believe that, so I hovered, and spent as much time with her as I could.

Nowadays in the cancer world, all the metaphors about “fighting” cancer or being “warriors” in combat with the deadly foe, are being cast off by many cancer patients, in favor of something more on the order of restoration of health and balance. My sister lost all her hair, and first chose to wear scarves to hide it, then opted to simply wear her baldness publicly and own the cancer before the world. She wrote about it. She seemed to be staunchly positive and hopeful, and clearly did not want to talk about the possibility of dying. I remembered my childhood best friend who died of AIDS in 1992. He lamented that no one wanted to talk with him about death, which made him lonelier. But we did. I don’t remember how we talked about it, but I know it was candid and he was comforted by being free to talk about it. In his case, there was no cause for hope. I was glad I could do what no one else would, with him. My sister wanted none of that. She staunchly occupied the hope side of the scale, as did Gurwich for the most part, with a fair measure of often snarky humor. I worked hard to join my sister in her optimism. At least in her presence. But when not in her presence, it dissolved and I was steeped in existential grief. I could not seem to find equilibrium anywhere else. So much like the tug of war between grief and hope that so many survivors of neglect and abuse grapple with, in straddling the feelings about estrangement or impending death of parents or other perpetrators.

It seemed as if my sister was able to dwell on the positive side of the valence. We went on walks with her energetic dogs; we sat in her beautiful blooming yard and watched the birds. She and her husband nursed and bred Monarch butterflies. All I could do was change my whole schedule around so I could be there, and make bread and cheese, my idea of Jewish Penicillin. And follow her lead. Nearly ten years have passed, she lived to see not one but two grandchildren come into the world. Now her cancer seems, much like the Pandemic, to be a distant hazy dream. What is the role of hope and beauty? And laughter?

grief

Of course, we cannot side step grief, or like Pollyanna, wish away or deny it. Grief being the core experience of neglect trauma, it happened. We cannot change what happened, but grief enables us eventually to find a new equilibrium to live with the loss, to find some modicum of peace about what has undeniably happened: change or loss that has occurred. I was amazed when I went to hear Salman Rushdie speak not long ago. He survived a brutal knife attack that involved being stabbed 19 times and losing an eye, after a relatively long life of significant trauma. He looked pretty darn good, with a patch over the missing eye. Aged 78, about 18 months post knife attack trauma, he just published a new book. The memoir chronicling the year following his knife attack may have been the vessel for his grief. When I saw him, I was stunned by his humor, energy and creativity that refused to be extinguished. Certainly, part of what sustained him was the loving and ceaseless presence of his partner. And I am guessing, the same undying positive determination.

Not everyone makes it, of course. And those with the privilege of resources and accessibility of care, loving others and information have a better chance. Grief and hope are not binary either/or choices. We need to know how to have both, and wisdom and support in both knowing and understand the place for each. I am 99% healed from my agonizing hip injury, certainly not to be compared with a life- threatening illness, but a good opportunity to test the hypothesis about hope, determination, connection and of course time. Patience and time. I always. wondered why in English, sick people are called “patients,” because I have none when I am the patient. But it is also a requisite input for any kind of significant healing.

Gurwich received her diagnosis in 2020. She was very much alive on the interview I heard last week. I have not yet finished the book, but her elixir of humor, support and treatment have gotten her from the apparent kiss of death to here. As Angela Davis emphasized, we must generate hope. We can’t endeavor to “find” it, we must produce and disseminate it. Perhaps that is part of the therapist’s task. And she is quick to emphasize, without hope we can’t make change. And she of all people should know.

In 1962, two Mexican Americans, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, had the courage and the audacity to begin to organize the farm workers, and try to win collective bargaining power to gain fairer pay and humane living conditions. Chavez was born on March 31, which happens to be the day I am writing this, in 1927. His parents owned a small farm when he was small, but they lost everything in the great Depression of the 1930’s. Left first without their source of income and then without their home, Cesar, his parents and five siblings joined the ranks of migrant workers, trudging like vagabonds from one harvest to the next. Of course, education was hard to work into the laboring life of children. By the time Cesar dropped out of school, demoralized, after eighth grade, he had attended 35 different schools and was often bullied for his poor English as his family largely spoke in their native tongue. Poverty, racism, inaccessibility of education and a long life or hard labor were the defining qualities of his growing up. Organizing the United Farm Workers, which became national in 1966 was a monumental and heroic accomplishment.

Chavez was a hero, as was his collaborator, Dolores Huerta, and we admired and idealized them both. They were perhaps the first iconic Hispanic big names and iconic faces, until Carlos Santana came on the scene in 1969. Chavez’s picture and name have become part of our progressive and left-wing culture, ever since…well until now.

Sexual abuse

It was with shock and profound dismay, that I heard the news this week, that survivors had come forward and reported being sexually abused as children by Cesar Chavez.  Even Huerta herself reported having been raped by him. She never spoke of it until now, for fear of damaging the union. I was heartbroken. Being a long-time champion of survivors of childhood sexual abuse, I could not bear the thought that this seeming symbol of goodness, was a perpetrator. I simply had a hard time reconciling, holding those pieces, those parts together. How could this be? I remember being distressed in a similar way when I learned that Mahatma Gandhi, always a hero of my mother’s, was harsh and controlling of his wife. Not sexually abusive or overtly violent as far as I could tell, but extreme, controlling and harsh. Again, I found it unbearable, this gentle soul who taught the world about non-violence resistance and civil disobedience, could be so extreme and demanding of obedience, at home. How can it be that someone who seems so “good” can also be so “bad?

The recent story of Gisele Pelicot captured the news not long ago. The brave woman whose husband regularly drugged her and made her available to be raped by several hundred men while unconscious. It was shocking and painful news. In reading her memoir, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides (Penguin, 2026) Pelicot describes learning about what had happened to her, from a detective. In effect, she was informed that her 50-year marriage to the man she thought she knew, the father of her children, was completely other than what she knew. She describes the idyllic first years and decades of their life together. The shock was overwhelming, the shame, incredulity, confusion and immense loss. She describes her powerful journey of reconciling the incompatible pieces.

Many of us, and our survivor clients, to a greater or lesser extent wrangle with similar questions about our/their own parents and perpetrators? There may be great love, respect, admiration, and gratitude alongside pain and rage about trauma and neglect. Which is it? How do we hold it all?

I have come to call this fierce confluence of feelings, the Bermuda Triangle, named for a mysterious mythical spot in the Atlantic Ocean, where, as the stories go, ships and planes were mysteriously and dramatically crashed and wrecked, then vanishing without a trace. The violent feelings that collide irreconcilably, often about perpetrators and loved ones, is a similar, and similarly unhomogenized clash of rage, grief and guilt, that cannot seem to find a homeostatic balance. They roil around inside, refusing to harmonize for a long time. Ultimately through long and diligent trauma work, we make our peace with all being real and having their place. Not a smooth voyage by any means. 

Reconciliation

This day, Cesar Chavez’ birthday has been a holiday here in San Francisco. Its name was changed to United Farm Workers’ Day. But there are streets named after him, murals bearing his image, large and small monuments to his achievement and contribution to the plight of immigrant and migrant agricultural workers, a plight which is once again commanding our concern and attention. There is debate in town about how we handle this. Does the reality of his heinous abuse of children and women eclipse his good works? Does it erase them? I find I am painfully conflicted about this. Holding positive and negative in the same frame? Some of us have found a way to do this, or to co-exist with the contradictions in our own lives and families. Others continue to suffer the loss, or the battle simply refuses to be quieted.

For many with neglect trauma, comparing becomes an insidious habit. Never quite knowing where I stood, I was always scanning for who got what, and how much I got by comparison. Invisible, I tried to assess what the other had that I didn’t have that compelled attention when I couldn’t. Who has the “worst worst?” Even, “who is the thinnest in the room?” Comparing invariably makes us feel worse, more deficient, more less than. We always come up even shorter. I try to work with myself and others not to do it. So how do we work out this question? How do we measure or assess the valence? Or is there an answer? I guess I don’t know.

What do you think?

Of course, skeletal, the tragically undernourished vehicle of war, my body got injured at times. That was of course terrifying, throwing my whole defense system into jeopardy. Injury became a desperate secret. Once, not surprisingly I had a broken leg, a fatigue fracture from running on cement with those bamboo-like bones. It hurt like mad and I secretly limped around on it, until finally after about six weeks told my mom and got an X-ray. By then I had begun a ritualized swimming regimen which I did not like at all, but it was something…And it kept the enemy pounds at bay.

I had my first boyfriend when I was 13. He was 24. No one seemed to think that was weird. I was with him for seven years. He was old enough to introduce me to alcohol, although he himself was a pot smoker. Marijuana did not work well for me, it seemed to make me frighteningly paranoid, so I did not take to it. I also found him and his friends, all of whom were artists, intellectuals, and self-styled poets, to be excruciatingly boring when they were all high and I wasn’t. The wine was a solution to many things. Alcohol soon joined my eating disorder in the arsenal, in my undying quest for who knew what? My body was the battle ground, the vehicle, the container for what I now understand as the war on dysregulation.

In 9^th grade Advanced Placement English, we learned to write research papers. I remember I chose the topic of rape. At that time, my early sexual abuse a deeply hidden yet to be excavated dissociated part. I only remember the title of my paper: “An Inquiry into Forcible Rape.” What inspired me to choose that topic at the time? I did not know. I wish I could find that paper, I’d be interested to know what I wrote.

Emotion

I continued to be very busy, a rat on an eternally spinning wheel. As I got older and my desperation landed me in therapy, I found I had a fascination with the body: bafflement curiosity, wonder, even awe, and admittedly rage and resignation. It was the locus of my various compulsivity’s. As much as I feared and hated it, I also had a sense there was a something there to learn. My therapist recommended a friend of hers who practiced a body approach called Self-Acceptance Training (SAT), a combination of Gestalt Therapy and Bioenergetics, a body approach that emerged out of the theory and practice of Wilhelm Reich, author of The Function of the Orgasm, a book that fascinated me then and to be honest, still does. It was 1979, the world of somatic psychology was a marginal minority then. I don’t remember much about SAT. The group sat in a circle for three days and there was a lot of emotion and catharsis. The SAT teacher used to say to us, “You are a body with sensations, that’s all.” I didn’t really buy it, but I went to all the workshops I could.

My teacher’s son Kevin was an accomplished Rolfer, a method of body work, also called “Structural Integration,” developed in the 1940’s by biochemist, Dr. Ida Rolf. The idea was to manipulate the body’s fascia so as to improve posture and body alignment and harmonize with gravity, whatever that meant. In those days I was game to try most anything that might help me, I undertook the standard 10 session sequence with Kevin, where I made an unexpected discovery. Kevin worked the energy and I remember lying face down on the table, with Kevin barely touching my back. I guess I must have been talking about something emotional, that I don’t remember. I only remember Kevin softly saying to me, “come back…” I did not know what he was talking about. I had no idea that I was “going away,” leaving my body. But he could feel that I was gone and call me back. We began the practice of noticing when I in effect dissociated, which I had never been aware of before. What a discovery! The ghostlike child of neglect in her invisibility, got seen. And I had a visceral experience of how emotion, whatever it was, was the catalyst of the powerful sweep of numbing. I wonder what happened to Kevin. He was a gamechanger.

Attachment

Fast way forward to 2026, much history in between. By now I feel like the cat who has progressed through a sequence of lives, perhaps like the Rolfing protocol? No, much messier and less orderly. After 4 decades in the trauma field and a deep immersion into the study of attachment trauma and neglect, I was invited to the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium to speak. The Networker magazine had been in my life my entire professional career and it spanned the entire gamut of the psychotherapy field. What an opportunity to advance my mission, to a wider, more diverse professional community, my first time in effect, preaching to the non-choir. In my still somewhat OCD way, I have been wildly preparing and undeniably moving too fast. About a month before the conference, I had a freak accident in of all places, my own beloved kitchen, where I all too often try to do too many things at one time.

Carrying my laptop, I slipped on our beautiful but undeniably rock-hard tile floor, and fell. A year after a similarly freaky fall that ended up with a complex fracture in my right wrist that required surgery and a measure of pain and nuisance, I was careful to protect my arm and my computer. But I landed hard on my hip and my head banged on the cabinet. As a neurofeedback and brain-oriented person, I worried most about my head, with visions of traumatic brain injury that would wipe out my Networker presentation and leave me dissociated. Blessedly there was no bump, and no observable brain consequence. What I did silently notice however, was that a week later, my hip was still sore. And revisited by the compulsively driven running girl, who never told a soul about her various injuries, as if that would keep them from being real, I kept it to myself.

When a client told me about a friend of hers about my age who had a fall and broke her hip and required not only surgery but protracted rehab, I began to feel worried. It was not getting better. As it happens, I am in a process with a wonderful trauma informed yoga teacher, De West in Boulder, Colorado. I always hated yoga or any isotonic exercise, preferring the sweat and friction of all kinds of cardio. I can honestly say, although I still don’t much care for yoga, I love my teacher so much that I stay with it and reap the benefits. And I have had another major discovery: the fear made the pain and disability undeniably worse; and inversely the connection and the mutual love: feeling heard, understood, honored and helped by an attentive other, facilitated function and healing, as well as pain management. Not that it can magically remove any pathology or bodily disruption, but what a difference.

A colleague of mine, a super intelligent scientist and researcher, has been working through terrible grief from a precipitous and profound loss. I asked her how she was doing with her grief. Her answer really surprised me, well not the answer itself, but the fact that it was coming from her. Her un-hesitating response was “the greatest help for me has been body work.” She said grief work is best done on the table.

I write this on the plane to Washington DC for the Networker Conference, filled with excitement and passion. I am on a mission, even though I hobble a bit and slowly through the airport and have to arrange myself very carefully when I sit, stand or walk. I promise I will get an X-ray when I get home. I have not been to DC since probably 1990 to attend the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS). It was all we had back then, and I floated around there, what seemed like a tight club of white guys in suits with briefcases, scurrying around with no time for a little ghost like me. Everything has changed.

The last time I was in DC the biggest van Gogh exhibit ever in the US was at the National Gallery. Admittedly that is what I remember best. If you are at the conference, please introduce yourself! I would love to meet you!

The bubble burst in fifth grade, when my friend dropped me, preferring another girl, who was a tiny blond with her perfect hair in a “flip” and a super-fast runner: always picked first for the kickball team. She was an amazing kicker too. But more than that, she had a canopy bed, a pink princess phone and her own TV in her room. I could not begin to compete with that. I was heartbroken.

From there on my life was back to being a desert of emptiness, aloneness and feeling like another species, unsure whether I even existed at all, and if yes, what for? There was a popular song around that time about the end of the world: “it ended when I lost your love.”

Friendship for whatever reason, seems to be something of an underrated “stepchild.” When there is a death, everyone seems to have great sympathy and condolences for the parents and the intimate partner or spouse. I have noticed that when a parent dies, the majority of the time the children of the deceased are forgotten in the flood of empathy for the widow or widower. Friends seem to fall off the map completely. Only those who may be ejected or overtly rejected by the family they nominally grew up with seem to have a category for “chosen family.”

Friendship-Wreck

My friendship trajectory was one failure after another. Mostly because of what I call the profound interpersonal ambivalence that comes of the neglect experience. The deadly fear of abandonment, makes the longed-for intimacy too risky. The attempts to be both closely connected and safe invariably sank, with neither objective achieved. Oy vey. For me the most common mistake was “over-giving,” trying to earn value in the eyes of the other, by dazzling them with what I could offer or do for them, which was of course unsustainable, and they never signed up for it in the first place. When I found myself depleted, or did not receive reciprocity that had never been agreed to, I felt short-changed, used and resentful. I did not get it about consent, or making “deals” with people that they did not even know about. All this has become part of the “Neglect Profile,” which has evolved over many years, because it characteristically or often shows up in my neglect survivor clients.

I learned my lesson most graphically in 2000 when I was in my Sensorimotor Training in Boston. I had the privilege of being in a group taught by Pat Ogden herself. The assistant teachers were Deirdre Fay and Janina Fisher. Can you best that? It was worth commuting from San Francisco to Boston monthly for five years. It was one of the great experiences of my life to date. And I had a best friend in our group. One of our group members even referred to us as “the popular girls.” Unheard of in my experience. Fortunately, it was after the training ended and I was happily certified, that I blew that relationship up. But my friend was angry enough to say to me “It is not safe to receive from you!’ And I learned the hard way, “If I over-give and then resent, it is on me!” I try to teach this whenever I can.

Fast forward many years of hard work on my trauma and neglect. Many people have friends going back to early childhood. I don’t have that. But I have a best friend who dates back to 1983. We have had our storms, but found our way through together. Although we live on opposite sides of the Bay Bridge, we manage to get together without fail every month. I am so grateful. There is no substitute for an old friend, and it is also said there is no mirror like an old friend.

And now, janina

Back in the old Sensorimotor Training days, I never imagined that I would be close friends with Janina. And now I am. She is an extraordinary clinician, human being, long-time social justice activist, and friend. I feel again so privileged and grateful to enjoy her friendship. And she has embraced my husband as well, and he her, which is an additional plus.

It is with great pleasure that I celebrate with Janina the recent publication of her most recent book, Embracing Our Fragmented Selves. I am thrilled and excited to welcome her to our video series next week. Do watch your inbox for it! You can find the book, wherever you usually buy your books. Let’s blow her away with five-star reviews, which are well earned. And do keep doing the work on your trauma and neglect. It takes a while, but the rewards truly matter! It is worth it!

As a child I remember my father’s diatribes about what it was like for him being on the receiving end of hatred, and it was frightening and also made me feel guilty for my good fortune. My first strong compulsion was always in the direction of justice and sticking up for the “underdog” which both my parents taught us, although admittedly too much of the time I felt like one myself.

When my original life plan to make my life, (and probably death) about liberty and justice fell apart, and I got swept up in a world of dysregulation (eating disorder, alcoholism and depression), I found my way to work of healing, first through my own.  I have been deeply compelled by this work with trauma and neglect for four decades, and as is often the case, I am increasingly finding my way back to earlier iterations of myself. Or perhaps it is becoming increasingly impossible to view trauma and neglect apart from the macro levels of cruelty in the larger world. This large-scale feedback loop of inequality and injustice in the larger world, harming us all in ways that our next generation resonates to our dysregulated brains and then go on to act out of dysregulation that wreaks havoc on others, on a large or small scale, and on and on. We must address both!

Years ago, I remember hearing a speaker at the Trauma Conference named James Gilligan. He was one of these amazing humans who was able to compassionately work with the most frightening of perpetrators in a maximum-security prison somewhere. I remember going home from the conference and reading his book called Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. Published in 1997, Gilligan identified shame as being a key factor underlying impulse or the “habit,” the cool or oblivious numbness to the suffering of others. I have been trying to connect dots.

SHAME

Shame is a ready and understandable reaction to neglect trauma. For an infant, the primary caregiver(s) indeed are survival. This is not metaphor. The helpless infant relies on that other for everything: food, warmth, protection, shelter and regulation. Without those things we will die, and an infant, although they lack language and cognition, they do “know” this in their bodies and emotional experience. The loss, abandonment, rejection or simple absence of this source of everything needed to survive, is experienced first as life-threatening terror. Terror and the frantic attempt to “get them back” somehow, which often results in an exhausted collapse and freeze response. An under-stimulated brain, the result of being left alone too much, results in numbing, what I have come to call “nothing.” Because there is indeed nothing to remember. It is all about emptiness. And of course, if there is no feeling about oneself and one’s own pain, it is easy to imagine that one might be unmoved by the pain of another.

As the large scale trauma in Chile and Latin America are so much a part of my story, and I recently read a new book about long delayed fact finding about what really happened there, I attempted to find background information about the monstrous dictator, Augusto Pinochet. Not surprisingly he was the oldest of six children, born close together. The next sibling was born before he was one, and the others followed in rapid succession. His mother was described as strict and authoritarian, he attended military schools and his wife was described similarly, her parents tried to dissuade her from marrying him as they were convinced she was marrying “down,” and he was below their station.

MIRRORING

It has always irked me, that many believe, you cannot love another if you do not love yourself. As it took me years and decades to even like myself, I simply did not buy it. And attachment theory seems to be on my side. When the infant looks up into the eyes of the longed for and needed other and sees a loving and joyful reflection of “me!” that is where the positive self-regard begins to germinate. There is also a neurobiological component, where the most primitive part of the reptilian brain is stimulated. That is where the sense of self resides.

I remember in the bad old days when my husband and I first went to couple’s therapy. We finally after numerous failed attempts found a therapist who seemed to be able to help us. He practiced Imago Relationship Therapy which was what I later got trained in because it actually worked. The first step in the Imago dialog, was mirroring, where each partner had to reflect back the very words of the other. I remember how utterly dazzling it felt to have my very own words coming back to me, to be listened to that attentively. Experiencing that kind of presence was obviously a first for my famished brain. I can see how receiving it early in life, would sow the seeds of worthiness, and self, mind and heart. That is so much of what our trauma and neglect survivor clients come to us for, although it may take a while before they can take it in. That was certainly true for me.

DIGNITY

 Recently I had one of those “aha moments.” I was on the receiving end of the kind of hatred that I only remember my father talking about. Blessedly and gratefully, I can say I do not experience it often these days, at least as far as I know. Suddenly in one of those powerful moments, perhaps where we channel the presence of a needed and cherished other, I heard the echo of a voice saying the words “without a self, there is no other…” I was Ruth Lanius, the renowned trauma researcher, in one of the webinars that was a lifeline to me in the early days of the COVID pandemic. Before that I was not much of a webinar person. The Pandemic came and I was glued to the screen. Spending hours in my kitchen with colleagues far and wide, alone and isolated, unable to do our work as we ordinarily did. It is in the eyes of the beloved, longed for other, that we in fact come into existence, and that stimulates those deep, reptilian brain regions where the sense of self begins, develops and grows. Without that, and without the capacity to from there feel oneself, the ability to feel, and thus to feel for another fails to emerge. There can be no empathy. In effect there can be no other. The is nothing but the persistent raw need to be seen. The raw need to be seen, is that not the seed of limitless narcissism and perhaps thus a potential for blind cruelty?  In one of those vicious but blessed moments, important dots connected. “Dignity” says the Oxford English Dictionary, is the inherent, inviolable, and universal right of every human being to be valued, respected, and treated ethically, regardless of circumstances. Respect is to be earned. Dignity is our birthright, the birthright of all beings. Mirroring is a truly essential function. For therapists, for parents, for all.

Gung Hay Fat Choy! Happy Ramadan, a time of fasting to have more to give, and Mardi Gras! A time of Revelry. All marking a new lunar year.

Today’s Song: Caution, this video contains images that may be disturbing to some:

Although I preach about generating hope, lately I have to keep reminding myself to remember my own words and stay positive. The trauma/neglect brain can readily default to the old bleak view, those lonely old circuits never being completely extinguished. That is another reason why we need others, which is also unfortunately what is not remembered in such moments, when our tendency may be to hide out. Fortuitously however, my dysregulated sleep enables me to catch inspirational podcast stories that I might otherwise miss.

Times being as they are I also remember my grandmother’s quoting William Wordsworth “…the world is too much with us…” Certainly true for me if I am not careful these days. More than perhaps ever, I cannot afford to slide into the mire of despair. Just when I needed it most, I happened upon the story of a young artist named Bianca Rafaella. Her story compelled me out of the depths.

When Bianca’s mother was pregnant with her in 1992 in London, she contracted a parasite called toxoplasmosis which is of minimal consequence to most healthy adults, but a serious condition for those who may be pregnant. As a result, Bianca was born blind, or what is known as “registered blind.” She had a tiny bit of blurry, staticky vision that flickered and might momentarily hover and disappear. The right was different from the left, so her spatial perception and balance were skewed, and any vision at all was in the immediate range of about one meter or less. All her birth records and subsequent legal documents classified her as blind.  

Bianca’s parents despaired and went from specialist to specialist urgently consulting as to what if anything could be done for her. They finally encountered one doctor who was the gamechanger. He said the words that became the lifeline for the young parents and later Bianca. He said, “See what she can see, not what she can’t see.” Those words became their north star.

Art

In art, I was always fascinated with artists like M.C. Escher, and his seeming optical illusions of figure and ground. Their focusing on the positive or the seeming subject of the image, creates one picture and focusing on the negative or apparently “empty” space creates another entirely. The positive and the negative space combined to make a fascinating and sometimes quite beautiful whole. I liked his brain-twister drawing of a hand drawing itself drawing itself…When I learned the sensorimotor definition of “mindfulness,” it was quite similar: one part of the brain engaged in the sensory experience, and the other observing the experiencing brain and body. For me a, never a meditator, this was an important learned skill. And one of the ways we know that the brain is recovering from trauma, is because the observing, thinking prefrontal cortex goes offline during trauma, and again when a trauma state is activated or “triggered.”     

Similarly in Gestalt psychology and Imago Relationship Therapy, both loosely based on the 1935 writing of German philosopher Martin Buber, the focus is on the “space between.” Relationship is about navigating the opening between two beings, which in relationship is certainly not “empty space.” It is filled with meaning, form and substance. Like neglect trauma, it is not nothing! Anything but.

In reconstructing the narrative of childhood neglect, we are searching for and excavating missing experiences, not making something out of nothing, but starting with what we can see, and searching from there. That is what Bianca and her family endeavored to do. Bianca’s mother was a painter and she “always wanted to be like mommy,” although I don’t know much about her attachment story. 

At age 11, Bianca was sent to a special boarding school for blind kids. She became an accomplished braillist, learning to see much with her fingers. But she had a very hard time at school. She does not say why in the interviews I read, but much like myself at about the same age, she became severely anorexic. She had to go home, where the family went in search of treatment for that. It took a long, long time, she struggled with severe anorexia, off and on for some years. I felt an immediate affinity with her for that. And she began to paint.

Visibility

Much of Bianca’s language as she describes her work, reminds me of how I describe neglect trauma. She said she “hovered between visibility and disappearance.” Ghostlike, I always felt rather like that, wondering if I existed. Or was I a shadow, smoke, or nothing at all. Bianca’s minimal vision, being impressionistic, variable and often abstractly disconnected, fractured, reminded me of how dissociative memory can be. Although she does have some irregular and inconsistent sense of color and light, amidst what she called the “visual static,” primarily she works from “accessible sensory recall, supplemented with a vivid imagination.” Painting became an active pursuit, and her work is quite remarkable. (You can see it and find out more about her on Instagram, or at https://www.biancaraffaela.com). I especially love her paintings of flowers, which she knows intimately through touch, and exquisitely portrays their texture and shape.

Bianca studied in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, graduating with honors in 2007. In 2016 she graduated from Kingston University London, with a First-Class Honours degree in Visual Arts. She was the first registered blind student to graduate from Kingston. From there she tried her hand at fashion design, but found that the fashion world pitched her back into her anorexia which had continued to plague her off and on. She similarly made an attempt at architecture, but ultimately returned to painting, which like her mother, she has most loved.

There she has remained, Now happily married to a man who also is also her business partner, assistant and all-around champion, living in London. Interestingly, what finally healed her of the persistent anorexia, was her pregnancy with her first child. Losing control of her body and its shape bringing such an awe inspiring and joyful result, perhaps love, was apparently the “cure.”  

In 2025, Bianca Raffaella was awarded Overall Winner of the Women in Art Prize. She was also the recipient of Women in Art‘s Printing Prize. She continues to advocate for accessibility in the arts, has shared her insights as a speaker at the Goethe Institute’s Beyond Seeing project and as a panelist at the Tate Modern’s Please Touch the Art. She is a member of Layers of Vision and in 2025, participated in an All-Party Parliamentary Group for Eye Health and Visual Impairment, developing policy recommendations to guide the improvement of access and inclusion programs for BPS people in UK-based museums.

Reward

In last year’s Boston Trauma Conference, Harvard attachment research Karlen Lyons-Ruth gave an eloquent keynote lecture on attachment trauma and most specifically early childhood neglect. She talked about how exquisitely intergenerationally transmissible neglect trauma is. One of the conference attendees asked her, how do we begin to break the chain of intergenerational transmission of attachment trauma and neglect. Her first response, to the complex question, was to acknowledge everything they did “well!” Much like John Gottman’s advice to couples, “Catch you partner in the act of doing something right!” Like the Pavlovian concept of operant conditioning, when we reward the desired response, it is re-enforcing, it is likely to be repeated. We are hard wired for positive re-enforcement, and being pack animals, when we complete an act of altruism, we are rewarded with a dopamine hit.

So, what am I trying to say? Well, the negative space is very much part of the picture, no doubt. I am the last to ignore the agonies micro and macro that devastate us, our clients, and people near and far. Like Bianca and her family, we must start with what we can and see where that takes us. 

Many survivors of neglect are plagued by envy and jealousy, accompanied by shame. When someone suffers from jealousy, the first place I am inclined to look is in the sibling relationship(s). In some cases, the neglect, or the remembered part of the neglect, began with the birth of a sibling, or being the youngest in a great crowd of others, so there was never enough of anything to go around: attention, time, touch, and in many cases money and even food. All the necessary resources of surviving, thriving, and a sense of self and value.

I find the following story, (I heard it on the BBC podcast Outlook) heart-warming, because it is a story not only of jealousy, but of rupture and repair, and it is also normalizing, even universalizing of the experience of jealousy. Certainly, for me, being a jealous middle sister.

My younger sister was born when I was two and a half. My older sister, three years older than me, started talking when she was about 10 months old, and the story goes that she charmed shoppers, having whole conversations with them, as she sat in the front of grocery cart, while our mom shopped. She was lively and vivacious, and commanded a lot of attention.

My little sister was simply beautiful. She looked like our dad, who was classically handsome, which delighted him. And she had gorgeous big eyes. Passers-by would peer into the baby carriage, and she seemed to command endless admiration. I looked like my mom who was plain and rather nondescript. And by the time the “baby” came along, our mother seemed more at ease with being a mother, at least to me, so the little one was less of a challenge and less of a burden or strain, than I was or had been. Neglect being all about deficits, I was acutely aware from early on, of all that I was not. And the habit of looking around to see what others had, and what others got, began early for me.

Transitions

So now for our story, the story of Julia and Arturo. Julia was born in the US but when she was 8, her family moved to Guatemala where her father completed his graduate work in anthropology. An only child, it was a big transition for her, and her dad did not want her to be lonely, and brought home a yellow-naped Amazon parrot. Julia was instantly in love with the bird, whom she named Arturo. They became inseparable friends. Arturo spent much of his time on Julia’s shoulder, and was also “free-flying.” When not with Julia, he was free to fly outside at will and he always came home. He had perches around the house and only had a cage for sleeping which they covered, so he could sleep in darkness, which he preferred.

When it came time to return to the States, Arturo went in the car, with the rest of the family, and they embarked on the long drive north. Arriving at the Guatemala-Mexico border crossing the border agents asked Julia’s father for everyone’s papers, including Arturo. The man had no papers for the bird, having no idea that they would be required. And after a fruitless argument with the border guard, they were forced to let Arturo go. Julia was heartbroken. Until some time later as they continued driving, they saw that amazingly Arturo had followed the car, and alternated flying with sitting on the roof of the car or perching on the passenger side where he enjoyed looking at himself in the rear-view.

Some miles later, when they reached the US border, Julia’s father, preferring to take no chances, let Arturo go again, figuring they would wait for him to re-join them. Apparently, there was no “red tape” for entry into the US. This time, however, they waited over half a day for Arturo to catch up. Julia again was devastated, thinking her friend was gone. Just when she had given up hope, Arturo landed on the car. They arrived together in their new home in the rural state of Iowa. Everything was fine until Arturo ate something poisonous and tragically died. By now, Julia was 11 years old. Julia’s father was able to find another parrot of the same species, and brought him home. Julia named him Arturo, after his predecessor, and they similarly became fast friends. Julia learned to play the guitar, and Arturo would sit on the neck of the guitar, while she strummed and sang.

Fast forward and Julia is in college, now 20. There she met her husband to be, a Swedish man named Max. Max had grown up on a farm, and readily took to Arturo. The young couple married, and as he had always planned, returned to his home after graduation. So, the three packed up and moved to a little house on the farm, next door to Max’s parents. There was no problem bringing Arturo into Sweden.

Life in Sweden was idyllic, at least at first. Julia travelled on buses with Arturo on her shoulder, practiced her guitar, shared her meals with Arturo on her shoulder. Arturo also became fast friends and family with the in-laws next door, and continued his free-flying life, often visiting them as well. Everyone was happy and harmonious, and Julia became pregnant with her first child. As the family anticipated its new member, Julia talked to Arturo about it, as she did about everything.

When the couple arrived home with the new baby, everything abruptly changed. They walked in the door, and Arturo flew at Julia shrieking, and bit her. Shocked, Julia sheltered the baby. After 10 years of being best friends, she never imagined that the bird would be jealous. But it did not abate, and the couple soon saw, that they could not keep Arturo in the house and keep the baby safe. What were they going to do? Friends assumed they would simply “get rid of him.” Julia was adamant, “you don’t get rid of a family member, you certainly don’t put him down.” They ultimately opted to have him move next door to the in-laws. He continued to be free flying with their house as home base, and only Max and his father could get close to Arturo or pet him as they had all been accustomed to in the past. He did not warm up to Julia, who was broken-hearted even as she rejoiced with her new baby. Years passed, with Arturo continuing to be angry, hurt and distant. The couple had three more children and Arturo continued to live next door.

Repair

 

Years and decades passed. The couple’s four children had grown and moved on to start their own families. Max’s parents had passed away, and Arturo, now caged, came back to live with Julia and Max. Julia went through a time of immense grief. Her beloved mother with whom she had always been extremely close, was dying. Julia was making periodic journeys to the States to see her in her final year and days, and her father was failing as well. When they passed and Julia, now nearly 60, was orphaned and bereft, she withdrew into a deep grief depression and felt hopelessly mired there.

One bleak day, Max had the sudden idea to let Arturo out of his cage. When he emerged, they were at dinner, and the bird gingerly, gently approached Julia, and stole a few bites of pasta from her plate, before hopping up onto her shoulder. After 43 years of jealous rage, Arturo was back. Julia felt as if this were a message from her mother. And she steadily emerged from her grief into the light of repaired attachment rupture.

Arturo was now in his sixties as well. When they inquired, the veterinarian said that apart from a bit of arthritis, the bird was in excellent health and had another good twenty years in him. So that is my New Years’ story. It’s true! Jealousy is apparently quite natural, and not only for us.

Angela Davis, the now 82-year-old Black Power activist, said we can’t have change without hope. Hope is imperative. And we cannot be looking for hope and trying to “find it.” Davis adamantly proclaimed we have to generate hope.

Happy New Year!

Hope and health, and peace in 2026!