Reflections
Writing on therapy, relationships and being human.
Therapy often begins with the questions that are difficult to answer: Why do I keep repeating this? Why does this relationship affect me so deeply? Who am I becoming? What happens when the ways I learned to survive no longer serve me?
These reflections explore some of those questions through psychotherapy, relationships, identity, loss, culture and the complexity of being human.
Relationships & Attachment
Why Intimacy Can Feel More Frightening Than Loneliness
We often imagine loneliness as the absence of connection. On the longing to be known, the fear of being seen, and the courage to remain in relationship.
When Being Needed Becomes an Identity
There are people who become very good at being needed. On usefulness, belonging, and discovering who we are when nobody needs rescuing.
Why We Keep Having the Same Relationship with Different People
Different person, different relationship, different decade — and yet the same argument, the same disappointment, the same sense of abandonment. On the relationships we repeat, and the possibility of choosing differently.
The People We Become to Stay Loved
Long before we have the words to describe who we are, we are already learning who it is safe to be. From small and repeated encounters, we begin constructing a self designed not only to survive, but to stay loved.
Every Family Has an Emotional Job Description
Many of us are still living from an emotional job description we never applied for. Long before we decide who we want to become, we begin learning who we need to be.
The Love We Keep Waiting For
Before we learn to speak, we begin forming quiet conclusions about ourselves. They are not reached through reason, but through relationship. We discover who we are in the eyes of those who first hold us.
You Cannot Do Kindness Too Soon
“You cannot do kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson. There is a quiet irony in the age in which we live. Never before have we had access to so much information, yet so many of us struggle to feel truly understood.
What Love teaches us about impermanence…
“Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.” Alice Walker. There are some sentences that don’t ask to be understood so much as lived with. This is one of them. It lands quietly, then keeps unfolding over time.
My dog, Scotch: A Story of Love, Loyalty, and the Long Arc of Trust
Scotch arrived in my life in June 2015; he was 18–24 months old and already carried a lifetime of scars. A street rescue from Bulgaria, he came into my world bearing the unmistakable mark of trauma.