For more than thirty years, I have worked with a wide range of clients, including children, adolescents, and older adults, many of whom had endured severe trauma. Often labeled "treatment-resistant" before anyone bothered to ask exactly what they're resisting, they have taught me to appreciate the creativity and wisdom behind their resistance. They've taught me to value how it allowed them to survive truly horrendous treatment. What I learned sitting in rooms with them didn't fit neatly into either of the two languages I'd been trained to use.
Clinically, I had a vocabulary for symptoms, diagnoses, interventions. Philosophically — and this came later, almost by accident — I found a different vocabulary for these same clients: for what happens to a self when it's never been genuinely met, and what it actually takes for healing and growth to occur. For a long time I kept these two ways of knowing in separate rooms.
This blog is what happens when I stopped keeping them apart. (If you want the fuller story of why, Why I'm Writing This Book is the place to start.)
Two Kinds of Knowing
There's clinical knowledge, and there's philosophical knowledge, and most writing picks one register and stays there. Clinical writing that rarely pauses to ask what the self fundamentally is. Philosophy that's never had to sit across from a child who flinches when you reach for a tissue. I think both registers are circling the same truth, in different languages, and that something real gets lost every time we insist on speaking only one of them.
What This Blog Will Actually Be
Some posts here will lean philosophical — ideas from thinkers like Martin Buber, Heraclitus, contemporary physicists, who keep independently arriving at some version of the same claim. Other posts will lean clinical, drawn from work with clients who teach you, about as directly as a person can be taught, what happens when relational ground gets pulled out early in life. Most posts, honestly, will be both at once.
This isn't a self-help blog, and it isn't an academic one. It's closer to thinking out loud, in public, about a question that's mattered to me for several decades: what do we actually owe each other as human beings, and what does it cost when we don't pay it?
Go Deeper
- I and Thou by Martin Buber — the book that gave me a name for something I'd been circling clinically for years before I had language for it.
- A very accessible introduction to I and Thou is Kenneth Kramer's book Martin Buber's I and Thou: Practicing Living Dialogue.
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk — arguably the most influential book on trauma of the last decade, and one that has shaped much of my work.
- What Happened to You? by Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey — a clear, compassionate entry point into trauma-informed thinking, especially for readers new to the field.
- The book this blog is drawn from, Distracted by Difference, is still being written — I'm aiming to finish in late 2027. If something here resonates, the long-form version goes considerably deeper.
New posts land about every other week. This blog is free, and glad to have you here.