#060 - Dating with Disorganized Attachment

/
#060 - Dating with Disorganized Attachment

When I was in grad school a teacher asked the folks in the class to raise their hands to indicate which attachment style they most identified with. For most of us at the beginning of our grad school experience we were just starting to learn what “attachment style” meant. We “knew” that secure attachment was the best and anything else was bad. Beyond that, very few of us understood the nuances of attachment styles. So those who raised their hand as being securely attached were given the stink eye, because competitiveness in grad school extends to attachment styles too!

Read More

#059 - Trust your gut, or not?

/
#059 - Trust your gut, or not?

I know my own journey with gut trust has been fraught with lots of issues. I had an over active gut that saw danger in the subtlest of things: emotional intimacy, physical closeness, touch. To walk through the world knowing that these intimacies are vitally important for my overall health, and to know on another level that my gut was saying “Run away, defend, quickly!” brought about a lot of pain and grief.

Read More

#056 - Developmental trauma "acts of triumph"

/
#056 - Developmental trauma "acts of triumph"

Within the therapeutic relationship acts of relational triumph can occur which translate to the clients world outside the office. Witnessing the transformative power of literally going with, emotionally and somatically, my clients to the most terrifying places in the psychic realm humbles me. The places of overwhelm, panic, and dissociation are the places where these acts of triumph live, but we must go together.

Read More

#051 - It's not about transcending

/
#051 - It's not about transcending

A tact, which is useful, involves not transcending the problems of humanness but descending into the muck of life and welcoming it home. One way of thinking of this process is imagining that these painful experiences and parts of ourselves are things which need to be welcomed home, and not just welcomed home and shoved in the basement, but given a seat at the table of our life.

Read More

#048 - Shame: That bad feeling

/
#048 - Shame: That bad feeling

There is this feeling that at times can be hard to name, it often comes in the morning right when you wake up, before you begin to distract yourself. In the body it is a sinking or dropping feeling in the stomach, a lack of energy, difficulty in lifting the head and looking the world in the eye, or my personal fave: a deep self loathing that brings into question my very existence as a being on the earth. Fun!

Read More

#041 - Called into existence: Our trans and queer identities

/
#041 - Called into existence: Our trans and queer identities

In our popular culture, and in many of our families, there have been very few examples of trans and queer identities. My first exposure to anything non-heterosexual was reading “Rubyfruit Jungle,” by Rita Mae Brown, in the 1990s when I was a teenager. I can still recall the feeling of reading about this totally “other” culture: lesbianism. I simultaneously felt excited and ashamed. I knew I was like the lesbians Brown described, but I had no idea what to do with that information. Eventually I was able to come out to others and myself; first as lesbian, then gay, and finally the more fitting term of queer.

Read More