Psychological Harm is Physical Harm 2: Why Survivors Lose Their Voice

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 […]

Psychological Harm is Physical Harm 1: Abuse Shapes the Brain

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 […]

Two Models of Nurturance (Which One Are You?)

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 […]

Connection In Practice: The Tricks of Shame and Hope

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 […]

For Men Who Desperately Need Autonomy

The attachment literature teaches us that autonomy is a paradox. Jordan and I are in the car about to drop him off at a weeklong arts program working with teens on a small gulf island off the British Columbia coast. In front of us through the windshield is a farmstand: berries, eggs, a hand painted […]

Nurturance is about more than ‘tasks’

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 […]

Out of the Attic: dissociation and social justice

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 […]

A Resource List

For additional reading: Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007) Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Indict the System: Indigenous and Black Resistance,” Briarpatch, November 24, 2014, https://briarpatchmagazine.com/blog/view/indict-the-system Charlene Carruthers, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and […]

We need some good news today: six more ‘Nurturance Culture’ entries

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 […]

Cipher

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 […]