Dissociation: popular culture
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 …
Year: 2014
We Are Not Who We Think We Are
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 …
Grassroots
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, …
Stinger
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 …
Intergenerational trauma
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 …
Shift
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 …
Fundamentally
“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 …
Healing
I remember a meeting of the PICU Steering Committee in 2000 where I had a small talk to give the Attending doctors and nurse managers about Family Centered Care and the changes my little group was making in the culture …
I knew I had a book when…
In January 2001, more than a year before I began therapy with Dr. L, or thought I needed to, he gave an autobiographical assignment to our meditation group that exposed my lack of any glue to hold my story together, …