The first debate of the nightmare (did I say nightmare? I meant November) 2020 election offers a useful metaphor. While I was watching the moderator last night pleading over and over again with 45 to just give the other dude his two minutes, to even try to take turns, I found myself thinking – were […]
Read more "First, Cut the mic"Happy to say that this little book Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture is scheduled for release on June 18, 2019. You can already pre-order! Early Bird Pre-order 25% off direct from AK Press I’m excited to share these essays and dialogues with wonderful contributors. Book includes dialogue pieces on themes: ‘Jon […]
Read more "Book release date!"Have you ever had that dream where something bad is happening to you, but when you try to ask for help, you can’t speak? You try to scream for help but you just can’t get the words out? This doesn’t only happen in dreams. It happens in real life as well. Survivors of gendered violence experience this […]
Read more "Psychological Harm is Physical Harm 2: Why Survivors Lose Their Voice"The presidential debates, horrific as their results were, provided survivors everywhere with a strange, backwards gift. A recent piece notes: “It’s remarkable how many female viewers report feeling physically ill.” Trout has not touched any of them, not directly. Yet what survivors are reporting, watching him enter their living rooms via their TV screens, is that this kind […]
Read more "Psychological Harm is Physical Harm 1: Abuse Shapes the Brain"Of soup-friends and token-exchangers. I’ve noticed a pattern. (surprise!) It seems to me that two very different models exist of what people in our culture think we are doing when we nurture one another. This makes sense given that any modern culture is a complex swirl of ancestral inheritances only recently jumbled together and barely […]
Read more "Two Models of Nurturance (Which One Are You?)"My regular readers will know that I give my posts to a panel of mostly-male early readers before they go public. One of these early readers read For Men Who Desperately Need Autonomy and asked me to add a section flippantly called How You Can Put This Into Practice Right Now If You Are Flipping Out Because […]
Read more "Connection In Practice: The Tricks of Shame and Hope"Attunement is not a ‘task’ that can be carried out. You can provide physical care in a connected or a disconnected way. The cues that tell the limbic brain ‘I’m with you; we are connected,’ are tremendously subtle. Connection isn’t forced through willpower or memorization; rather, it occurs when you allow your true self to […]
Read more "Nurturance is about more than ‘tasks’"Out of the Attic: dissociation and social justice This is a workshop created to help increase the general level of public knowledge about the spectrum of dissociative experiences and their connection to systemic oppression. Dissociative experiences are very common. Increasing awareness about how they feel and look, their causes, and how people can help or […]
Read more "Out of the Attic: dissociation and social justice"Because the beautiful responses keep coming in, and because we need some good words today: six more replies to ‘Nurturance Culture’: 1. Nurturance is the feel of your bristly beard on my forehead as I melt into your arms after you pick me up from a three day therapeutic retreat. It’s in your suggestion to fold the […]
Read more "We need some good news today: six more ‘Nurturance Culture’ entries"Gwen works at the Institute, the source of all knowledge production in the world. The Institute’s rectilinear stone columns and thin white cutstone steps fill her imagination, and her work fills her days. Slowly her orderly, linear world begins to crack at the edges. In the oldest part of the Institute, a woman in white stands in […]
Read more "Cipher"
Dating Tips for the Feminist Man 