Minta

Sometimes I wonder if you get tired of my invoking the Stone Age of psychotherapy or the trauma field. I find my mind so often drifting back in time to when I first started connecting dots and ideas. Maybe it comes with being at this as long as I have, or it is a simple […]

Last week I lost my watch. I hate losing things, and I rarely do, having ferocious OCD rituals of rigidly keeping things “always” in the same designated places. Usually, it is my husband’s difficulty, and more than once, we have frantically searched for his wallet in foreign countries. He is a little older, so it

Living in an earthquake country, the imagery of seismic rumblings is a familiar part of daily life. I went through the “big one” in the Bay Area in 1989, and we all live with the knowledge that there will be another good-sized shaker sooner or later. The wiser among us have their preparedness kits safely

I write this as I wrap up my stay in the historic town of Oxford, UK, and my first European trauma conference. Oxford is spectacularly beautiful and quaint with elaborately carved steeples and towers, tall, sculptured ancient walls, and lavish, picturesque, manicured English gardens. For me, it is an especially powerful wash of history as

Painfully often, I hear laments from clients and occasionally from myself, about squandered time. It may be the understandable and often enough blaming impatience about how unbearably, interminably slow it is, if possible at all, to feel better after childhood trauma and neglect. I have come to identify what I call the “Bermuda Triangle” of

I remember in 1995 when trauma expert and himself a Viet Nam veteran, Charles Figley, published his then-new book, Compassion Fatigue. It was a novel concept to us then. Some trauma therapists were calling the same phenomenon “vicarious traumatization:” essentially infecting one’s own heart and nervous system with perhaps “too much” horror and pain and

I am a great lover of words. It is hard to say whether I love words, color, or music more, of all the varied and vivid means of expression. I love them all. However, sometimes, I am struck by the poverty of verbal language and how deficient it can seem in conveying its message. Such

Trauma and neglect make for a strange sense of time for adults and, most certainly, for young children. Not only because the brain areas most affected and highjacked by overwhelming experience don’t register time. But also because something about pain and emptiness seems both endless and ephemeral. Also, when events are redundant or unchanging, memory