It’s not that everyone is someone important at IKAR, my synagogue; it’s that everyone is someone. At the end of February, I showed up for Shabbat services, mostly because honoring our friends’ fiftieth anniversary was important to me, even though …
The first group I belonged to, my family, taught me how unsafe they were and I’ve performed poorly in groups ever since, unless I’m leading them. Even then, I stifle so much fear. This has been true my whole life. …
WHAT IT WAS LIKE The world was always a place of silence, of congenital shame—even before those days in 1967, four years before you met your love. Your strength grew belatedly, fertilized as it was in the knowledge that you …
I watched a TV crime drama last week where the bad guy was portrayed as a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” kind of guy, with two distinct personalities. When the show’s guest therapist figured it out, he said, “Oh, he …
I just finished a most wonderful and surprising book about a woman who grew up in her early years believing the same-age chimpanzee her family was raising was her sister. It’s a complex story, as you can imagine. Her scientist …
It wasn’t that I had no compassion for the DID individual on the stage at the local grassroots mental health support presentation. He was incoherent and dissociating, true. He was no spokesman for healing or for integration, true. In fact, …
I think of all the defensive layers of protective armor I’ve contrived over the years, some of them quite ingenious, some of them as banal as antibiotics and cortisone cream, the bacterial warriors of someone who has forsaken her larger …
I’ve been reading the multi-generational stories that confirm the obvious: you cannot easily access intergenerational transmission of trauma in people where the generations stop, or where they may not have had the ability to openly tell their stories, or have …
My father listed the address of every house where he ever lived. He listed every company he ever worked for. He listed his religious affiliations, his schools, and his absence of anything else to list. He listed his life in …
“I’m fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It’s an odd feeling, though, writing against the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I …