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"My first book, Turn This World Inside Out (AK Press 2019), which Vanity Fair called “slim but transfixing,” sold out its first print run in six months and has sold over 10,000 copies. My writing is listed on college syllabi at McGill, UBC, UC Berkeley, and universities across North America and Europe, and has appeared or been mentioned […]
Read more "Someplace Better"There is a variation on ‘Not All Men.’ It is called ‘I Feel Bad When You Say That.’ My godson Kyle is six. He is fairly emotionally perceptive for his age, as his grownups have been working with him to create an emotionally responsible and self-aware boy who we hope will grow into an emotionally […]
Read more "Own, Apologize, Repair: Coming Back to Integrity"I keep having the same conversation over and over. That thing where someone undermines your perception of reality, and says you’re crazy, or denies that something is happening that is in fact happening? When people we love and trust do that to us? It really messes with our minds. Over time, or when it is about important […]
Read more "On Gaslighting"