One of my favorite opinion writers is David Brooks from the New York Times, offering thoughtful and psychologically well informed responses to life. Recently he wrote The Heart Grows Smarter an exploration of the Grant Study which was a longitudinal research tracking 268 Harvard students from 1938 throughout their lives. [...]
Over the past years I’ve stumbled, almost by accident, across a missing ingredient in healing trauma and attachment wounding. Underneath the trauma reactivity and physiological arousal, underneath repairing the attachment wounds, there’s a doorway into building a positive self-structure. As therapists we tend to overlook this, bypassing it, focusing more on the obviously distracting physiological [...]
Wanting to see the natural, native experience of attachment bonding? This lovely trailer (I’m anticipating the movie/documentary) that director Alastair Fathergill and DisneyNature did on chimpanzees and three years in the life of little Oscar one of the chimpanzees in the forests of the Ivory Coast and West Africa. Here’s a link to hear Jane [...]
When people have had a difficult life they get used to shortening and contracting their breath. The breath can get tangled up in the whole slew of thoughts and feelings and reactions to others that are going on almost constantly. It can be hard to turn the attention inside to notice the breath – right [...]
I explore this Inside/Outside split with people I work with inviting them to explore something with me instead of staying with it alone inside. I ask them, “Can you tolerate me visiting you in the deepest reaches of your pain?” “Can you tolerate seeing and knowing and feeling how life has shaped you?” “Can you send [...]