And speaking of AK Press, I just got the beautiful and inspiring book Visions and Interventions: Thirty Years of Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. and am literally brought to tears just digging into it. I feel really grateful that I grew up in an anarchist tradition that talked about strategy and saw the anarchist struggle as including things like developing bio-regional agriculture, doing community organizing, even running for local offices like city council and mayor as part of a direct-democracy strategy, rather than the anarchist tradition that is more focused on just reacting to whatever is right in front of you (although responding to what is in front of you is also powerful and often strategically important).

I am reading the first essay by Joel Olsen, about hitting global capitalism’s weak spots first, and the specifics around why the group he was part of chose the particular strategy of fighting to repeal all anti-immigration laws, and fighting for open borders “for all people to live, love, and work wherever they please.”

And then I’m skipping ahead to an essay on political theater about climate change built around personal, community level narratives.

I wish I could go back and do my life differently. I don’t understand people who say they don’t have regrets because they are glad for where they are. I have so many regrets, and I’m glad for where I am. But I would go back and do everything differently. I would listen more carefully to the elders who were pragmatic about revolutionary social change rather than the grandiose ones. I would get more involved in community art and theater, and learn to develop relationships around shared, hands on projects. I would be braver. I would rest more. I would practice talking to strangers. I would try to fit in less. I would stop settling so much. I would love myself better. I would learn to ask bigger questions.

It’s been so cool to be invited into the worlds of all the amazing interviewees—coming into this world that I only had my toe in back then. Or maybe more specifically, a mustache in. The Bearded Lady was the first place I found other inbetweeners growing out their facial hair. Miriam Klein Stahl recounts, “We were making space for non-binary existence even though we didn’t necessarily have that language—pushing boundaries of what it means to be a woman or a man.”

When I was in my late teens, I was deeply affected by Adrienne Rich’s essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. trying to untangle what happened in my life — from the transformation of my authentic desire for a gender that had no name yet (boys with makeup and long hair, girls with attitude and short hair) to training myself to “like” what my other friends and siblings liked — to the transformation from having mostly female friendships, to being very male focused (a shift that I related to having been sexually abused, and then dating and finding perceived safety in often older men). If heterosexuality was a political structure, “both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women,” then how could I get myself out from under it when my life was still so tenuous and society so violent? I remember getting so constantly sexually harassed on the street that I started wearing coveralls over my tank tops and tutus, and learning to walk “like a man,” just to avoid it all.

All the barriers against being free enough to be myself in the world, and all the ways I tried to push back and reclaim myself and my right to my body.

I love hearing the stories of all these people around The Bearded Lady scene—a scene that was spectacular in their creativity and the way they were playing with and exploring gender. And the ways people tried to make welcoming spaces, tried and succeeded and sometimes failed, and how they look back on those times with tenderness and love. I cannot wait for this book to come out into this world, and I will keep you posted!

paper cut by Miriam Klein Stahl based on a photo by Chloe Sherman

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When you’re ready, slowly let yourself come back up, at whatever pace feels right to you. Feel yourself in the chair—the parts of yourself that are supported by the chair (where your body is in space and time: proprioception). Then look around a little, a soft looking—seeing the colors and shapes.

Collapse can be a reset of the system. An ending of a threat response cycle. The signal to the body that it can begin anew.

I have been thinking of collapse a lot. Not making any metaphors about the collapse of the infrastructure, civil society, or any of that. I have been thinking about that type of collapse too. But that’s not what I mean here.

I mean momentary rest. Momentary signals to the physiological system, and how we are often trained just to power through everything and then try and rest, and how so many of us find rest illusive. I have been thinking of natural cycles. How when I try and plant my warm loving plants too early, it doesn’t benefit them. They have their own cycles. Their own ways of knowing when to thrive. I have been thinking about (as always) how out of tune we are, as a species almost, with our bodies, our natural world, and how little, really, it takes to become more attuned.

We often override the simple, natural ability to attune, with all kinds of spiritual overrides, self-care attempts, go-go-go/give-up cycles, and turning against those who we could align with.

But it just takes these small things. Not touching grass, but touching below the grass, to the dirt. getting dirt in the fingernails. Letting yourself love something in the natural world, and letting yourself really see it, the details of it. Letting yourself feel something in the body besides defeat or anxiety. Feeling the impulse for collapse and letting yourself lean into that. Recognizing it as a friend.

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I don’t want to shame anyone in to feeling like they’re not doing enough to usher in a new world, but also I want to say Do more, it will feel better if you’re doing more (unless you are already one of those martyring yourself to social change, in which case, do less).

My sister Caty reminded me of when she was a teen and first read Alexander Berkman’s the ABC’s of Anarchism and how it made sense of a world where nothing made sense. Me too. I don’t know where I would be in this life if I didn’t have this basic philosophy as my North Star. As Berkman states “I consider anarchism to be the most rational and practical conception of a social life in freedom and harmony.” Even Marx and Engels saw Socialism as a way to get to anarchism, not socialism as an end goal itself. When I was in my late teens and started studying anarchism, the daily obsessions/depressions of social life and self-hate became less important. There was a bigger focus, outside my tiny bubble. There was something to live for and work towards.

When I was in my late teens and started studying anarchism, the early 1900s (when a lot of what I was reading was written) seemed so long ago it might as well have been cave-man days. Now that I’m in my 50s, the early 1900s seemed like they happened practically yesterday, and that terrifies me. As we are seeing the rise of oligarchy and authoritarianism across the globe, and in the United States, we would be delusional to think that it will necessarily right itself somehow.

What is happening in the world and in the United States is terrifying. I say Do something, anything, form a reading group, strengthen your in-person friendships, and I mean, do something, anything, but also start to think strategically if you’re not already. And by strategy, I mean strategy for building collective power and building counter-structures that can replace the State or capitalism dependent structures that we all currently we rely on for survival.

Most of us are so alienated, myself included. But I feel more alive when I am doing things that orient me to a new world being fought for. Not going to protests and listening to the same old speakers, chanting the same old chants (although sometimes I do go to protests)—but doing things that feel strategically sound. To know what feels strategic, I need to know what we’re envisioning as a sustainable future.

The anarchism I grew into believed in bio-regional agriculture—that is creating a food system that is not dependent on exports and imports, and is not dependent on industrial scale farming, but rather focuses on crops adapted to each region, growing for the communities the farms are in.

We saw cities as a potentially beautiful part of human culture-sharing—a place for disparate peoples to come together geographically to share ideas, learning, art, crafts, cultures—but the modern city is more about profit and consumption. So how do we create cities that are realigned with an ethos of mutuality and cultural celebration.

The anarchism I grew up in believed in direct (not representative) democracy as a legitimate form of organizing, and so I like projects that help people get more skilled at collective, democratic decision making, although everyone seems to be so mentally and emotionally unskilled and reactive at this point, it is hard to sit through any meetings at all.

We believed mental health problems are largely social problems, and can not be solved individually, but rather need to be addressed both on an individual and larger social level.

I still believe all these things.

I was informed by the call to build movements rather than narrowly focused protest-sabotage type stuff. And sometimes I wish I had heeded my elders’ advice/critique and had just stayed in one place, one city, one town—because social movements are built with direct contact with real people in real geographical communities, and I have moved so much this kind of deep-rooted connection is hard to find. But not impossible.

This is when I come to the Social Change Now: A Guide for Reflection and Connection. Because when I moved to Pittsburgh, I thought I would plug right in to a group of people who were doing activism in a way that made sense to me. I had been so long in rural America, I just had this fantasy of what living in a city again would be like. Instead, I made a huge mess trying to rescue a building-based group of artists and organizers who had turned on each other like crabs in a barrel, and were eating each other alive, destroying what could have been a remarkable collective project. I thought as an “outsider” I would be a good middle-person. I was wrong.

So taking some time to reflect. In these urgent times, how can I “contend with the urgency…with effectiveness, sustainability and strong connections…(while also embodying) grace, joy and accountability even when the external forces of division and inequity are relentless?”

And same with you. What do you have? What do you need? What is your vision? Where does it lead you?

This is what I meant to say.

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link to the book

It talks about the various roles—-Frontline responders, visionaries, builders, caregivers, disrupters, healers, story tellers, guides, weavers, experimenters—and how identifying our role/s can help us in staying grounded, understanding ourselves, aligning with our values, and not just acting willy-nilly out of total crisis mode.

I mean, we are in a total crisis. What is going on in our country is totally out of control. And the years and years preceding this moment, where civic engagement has been thwarted through a consolidation of power—from school boards to mass incarceration—and everyone has to work so much just to survive and pay rent and take care of themselves and their own families or close-people, it has created a world where it’s hard to imagine finding time to do anything more.

I have been thinking a lot about the roles Deepa Iyers talks about, but also about the body’s needs. My body needs something to tune out to. I started playing video games a few years ago, which is weird and fine. But also doing data entry fills that same kind of body-need. So I look for organizations or projects that need data entry as something I can do to shut my brain off for a few hours.

And now that I sit all day for work, I need something that involves movement. I need social change work that involves me moving my body. So doing something physical labor oriented, like turning community gardens into more productive, functioning farms, fills that need. Digging, planting, watering, harvesting, building muscles that have begun to weaken with disuse.

I also really loved Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy and how the things he liked about community gardens—the visioning, meetings, potlucks, imagining what could be created—were what he loved about it. The opposite of what I like about it, which is the solitude and quiet. How every project can be different things for different people.

Today I was walking with Etta on the river path by my house—a place that is all Pittsburgh, giant abandon structures of steel mill industry, not yet torn up for the tech-future-nightmare that we’re living in. We were talking about anarchism and socialism and democracy, the need for more vision of where we’re going. And she told me about this really beautiful project One Million Experiments that brings together “snapshots of community-based projects that expand our ideas about what keeps us safe.”

I am loving this.

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One tool I’ve been suggesting a lot to people recently has been this relationship smorgasbord.

There are a few different versions you can look up online, (here’s another one that’s a bit more linear and has instructions and links) or you can make one yourself with your areas of interest, and go over it with your friends and people to get clear on where you are in mutual understanding of the bounds of your relationship, and where things are misaligned, and talk about what to do with the misalignment.

Part of it too, is knowing what you want, vs what you are likely to do and/or where your wants conflict. For example, if you want a non-attached relationship, and you want to co-sleep, but co-sleeping triggers your attachment, and if you co-sleep you are bound to want a more serious relationship, then … you need to be aware of those conflicting wants and likelihoods. (Co-sleeping, by the way, does almost always trigger attachment! Breathing in someone else’s pheromones for that many hours is a powerful drug!)

Also, here’s a cat purring if you need it.

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My therapist had me practice sitting with my body turned slightly to the side instead of facing my friends head on, leaning forward, intense eye contact, which was my usual stance. “Let yourself lean back when they’re talking” she said, “let some of your focus be on your own breath.”

We did a practice where we visualized a ball between us, like a beach ball hovering in the air. She would talk and I would imagine her words going into the ball, and then I could choose how much to take into me.

But also the world itself was too much. Too much, too fast. I was always spinning, which is not the most helpful place to be. She would talk about energetic boundaries, which seemed so cheesy to my young-anarchist sensibilities, but the practice of building these boundaries became so essential.

What you do is imagine a bubble surrounding you, above you, behind you, around you. Explore it with your arms and hands. How far or close is it? What’s the viscosity? Is it like thicker air, or a barely permeable shield? Is there a color to the air in boundaried space around you. I like to visualize a bright but soft color to make it visible in my mind.

Then continuing to explore it by moving your head, looking up, to each side, behind you, to your feet. And seeing if there is anywhere that feels more vulnerable, like the boundary needs a bit of shoring up. And then picturing the color or thickness or shield start to fill in there, slowly, until it feels right.

If the boundary feels too close, try and coax it to expand. If it feels too solid, softly whisper it to safety.

I’ll try and make an audio of this soon so you can listen to it when you need to. It’s nice to practice in various settings, like at the grocery store or when standing in line, or from the comfort of your bed or kitchen. See how it changes in different spaces. Invite it to shift and change as needed. Even if you don’t know what you need.

There’s also this older (2023) kind of funny post with some of my typical slightly unhinged video accompaniments.

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A word to mean I am delighted with you.

A word for that sex we just had was amazing.

A word for I am trying to heal my childhood wounds by reassuring myself that I am worthy of love. Will you reassure me?

A word for I feel a deep physiological pull toward you, my body is telling me to get closer.

A word for I am investing a lot of time and emotions into you—which makes me feel like you are important to my sense of self. This is cathexis but I am going to call it love.

A word for I am saying this to keep the peace.

A word for even though I have been irrevocably harmed by you, part of my heart is still with you, but I will forever keep a safe distance.

A word for I care deeply about you, and feel a secure level of commitment to our friendship.

A word for I see you and want to keep seeing you.

A word for I am at rest with you.

I’ve been thinking about bell hook's revolution inquiry into love, where she was trying to find a definition of love that would help us have health adult loving relationships. “"Love is an act of will," she said, “meaning love is not just a feeling, but a conscious choice and action that requires intention, care, commitment, and responsibility towards another person.”

If we use this definition to guide what we are seeking in our adult friendships and relationships, we’ll be a lot better off than if we are just going by a physiological pull to another person. Because half the time the physiology is just trying to get us to repeat something from the past to try and heal it. Or the pull is something that the body feels as familiarity and home, even when we are struggling to make a new vision of home.

So much confusion comes when we say or hear “love” and we don’t know what we mean by it, or what the other person means.

Take a moment to think about what you mean when you say love. When you say it to your beloveds, your friends, your family, your pets. Maybe write it down. Find clarity and acceptance and grace for yourself. If there are people who say “love” to you who you feel confused about, think about or write about what they mean when they say that word, and then start to hear that when they say it.

Even if we can’t create a culture where there are 100 words for love, we can hold the different meanings in our minds, and start to tease it all apart.

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I’m working on an oral history book about the SF queer / dyke / performance art / punk / political scene of the 90s. It was a scene I was sort of part of, sort of adjacent to. I am loving this theme that keeps arising, about welcoming. The fundamental drive for belonging. And how powerful it is for people when they find a scene where they can be themselves, with the freedom and encouragement to explore what that being of their own creative body could move into. And the hurt and damage when people feel a lack of belonging, and like they have to contort themselves to find temporary refuge in a place that is at least a little better than where they were coming from.

I love the way everyone, looking back, will at some point say “we were just kids.” We were in our 20s, we were making mistakes, we grant grace in retrospect. But at the same time the hurt and joy are so visceral, I can feel it coming through the phone.

I think one thing I, and so many people tend to forget, is how much power we have even when we feel powerless or scared. One of the reasons to learn about the brain and nervous system and the threat response system is not to perfect a ever calm and grounded state of being, but to be able to collect yourself when your physiology is telling you one thing. Collect yourself, breathe, and chose a path rather than being driven down it.

I appreciate someone’s advice about becoming more politically active for the times we are living in. “Now is not the time to invent something new,” they said, “get involved in something that already exists.” And I move from a grandiose visioning of the anarchist school I’ve been meaning to start for the past 35 years, and settle into what I’m already doing (a community garden that grows for a community run food bank) and what I can do to expand that (teaching my co-volunteers how to plan a garden for maximum, sustainable production, rather than just doing all the planning myself; connecting with the garden in my newer neighborhood; helping a mutual aid group that prepares food for homeless people connect with a punk tax person). Take a breath. Where can I grow into (deportation defense?) How can I start to gather the skills, relationships and strategies that I need for a sustained entry into another project. I collect myself. Take a breath. A month of breaths. and proceed.

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If we had a society where we were granted the time and support to form functional communities based on mutual aid, and didn’t have to work constantly to be able to meet basic needs while rich people hoard money, if we were taught in (free) schools how to communicate kindly and effectively, work in groups, work with tools, understand infrastructure, then sure, it would make sense for a climate-disaster to be met with groups of friends and political collectives providing the basic needs of their communities. But as it is, it doesn’t.

Every day since the climate disaster hit Western North Carolina, my friends have been filling up their truck with water pumped from their off-the-grid well, and bringing it to the assisted living facility and homes and trailer parks in their area. All day, every day, bringing water to people. They are exhausted. Everyone is overwhelmed and exhausted.

NPR and other media makes it seem like things are more or less ok. Lots of feel good stories, and little quotes from people in places that haven’t been as effected. Stories of pack mules, kayakers, helicopters, 2 gallons of water per person. Nothing that paints a picture of how truly awful everything is, and the epic proportions the recovery will take.

A friend who was there tells me of waking up to a tree hitting the house she was sleeping in. Going down the road to try to see what was happening, and seeing 500 gallon propane tanks floating down the torrent that was once a calm river. Seeing the tanks bob under when they approached the bridge, and then bob up, hit the bridge, and crack open. Gas fumes enveloping her as she ran the other direction. Another person writes about thinking she had poison ivy but it turns out it’s chemical burns.

I have felt very cynical these past handful of years about the ability of society to change in any kind of fundamental way. I hold on so hard to the mantra “We don’t need hope to survive or success to persevere, resistance to tyranny is a way of life.”

When people I work with don’t know what to do to be effective in their lives in this state-of-the-world nightmare, I sometimes ask them what they would imagine themselves doing in the post-apocalyptic utopia, and then using that as a guiding light. Find what is aligned to or parallel to that desire. Or I ask them what basic infrastructure skills feel the most interesting (whether it’s concrete things like gardening or health care, or less tangible skills like writing or theater), and then learning those skills, assuming they will someday be needed.

And if this is what it’s going to be, the world falling apart with absolutely no structure to catch it, then every structure we can make now, and put in place matters. It is the relationships that matter, having a group of people who you’ve known, who you’ve worked through things with, who you kind of understand. A band, a reading group, a gaming group that does occasional in-person political actions, a political collective, an advocacy group, a health care collective, an affinity group. Some people who you know well enough that when something catastrophic happens, you know you can work together on some project in response to it, even if you don’t know what that is yet

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Trigger identification is a big part of trauma healing. Triggers can feel a lot of different ways — like a spike in the heart rate, quick temperature fluctuation, sudden loss of language, sudden feeling of collapse, feeling distant from yourself, sudden anger or fear, a barrage of negative thoughts about yourself, plus a million other things. (of course, just regular hard things and negative emotions can feel these ways too, but I trust you to feel into the difference).

What I always am looking to do, as a therapist and as a person, is to create more space between the trigger and the action, so instead of feeling the spike in heart rate (or whatever it is for you) and thinking “I’m in danger,” you think “danger…no, I’m triggered,” and that leads to more possibility of action.

Becoming an outside observer is part of a path to healing. I don’ t mean outside in a dissociated way, but rather being able to sort of take a breath and observe what is happening. For example, I used to get really triggered by the fabric fleece. In my distant past, a person I hadn’t yet started dating talked about masterbating into someone elses fleece hat. This was the first red flag of what was to become a 2 year sexually, emotionally, and financially abusive relationship.

I had done a lot of productive and healing therapy focused on that relationship, but I mostly just avoided fleece because it was easy to avoid. I’m a natural fibers kind of girl, so it didn’t really come up. But then my beloved person happened to bring home a fleece blanket. My first instinct was to be like “that’s triggering to me, you can’t have it.” But I didn’t want to do that. This seemed like a trigger I could neutralize. It was surprisingly hard though. We would be sitting on the couch and they’d be wrapped up in the blanket. We’d be having a nice time, watching t.v. or reading on opposite sides of the couch, and over time I’d find myself getting really irritated, and since irritation is one of my trigger symptoms, my brain would start looking for a threat, and since my person was the only other person in the room, I would think the threat was them and I’d start to try to find things that were going wrong with our relationship.

The subconscious and the nervous system, left to their own devices, work like that, evil little destroyers trying their best to be protectors but getting it all wrong. This is where the development of becoming an outside observer comes in.

I would catch myself and take a breath and look at what was happening — my emotions, the benign scene, the caring person next to me, the blanket. And I’d realize “Oh, it’s the blanket. I’m triggered.”

It wasn’t until I had a month alone in the house where I could just sit every day with the blanket near me and do other things and constantly mindfully take breaths and regulate my nervous system, that the blanket became neutralized and no longer brings up any emotions or physiological reactions.

Avoidance is a coping strategy, and it can be helpful to identify what things you might accept as things you want to avoid, and what ones you want to work on. Like I have accepted that porn, anal sex, and most horror movies are triggers I don’t really have interest in working on and so will continue to avoid. But there are other triggers I’m continually working on: mostly interpersonal, hard to define moments where I feel suddenly unseen, unsupported, and a flood of flashback memories hit me. I’ve committed to taking to take a breath in these moments and staying in the present moment instead of diving into the flashbacks or running away or lashing out. It’s hard.

*The Courage to Heal is a real book of the 1980’s so it has that framework - very gendered, lots of graphic personal stories (because at the time these stories had never been told), controversial opinion on fantasy, but it’s also still one of the few books that walks people through a path of healing from childhood sexual abuse.

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I think about our brains and how hungry they are for thoughts, and how important it is to know how to feed our brains a balanced diet. I don’t know what people do who aren’t working on writing projects. Sometimes I think the main reason I take on writing projects is to give my brain something to really dig it’s teeth into so it’s not left up to it’s own devices. Because left up to its own devices it sounds like this:

“I don’t want to go to school. I can’t believe I said that thing. What if I just disappear and no one could ever find me again. The war, the genocide, the history of human suffering. That one time I saw a dog getting dragged by a truck. I need to fix my sink. All the bugs in my garden. That sad thing my client told me. Where did all these white people come from? Why am I such an idiot.”

Basically like that only more fleshed out. Our thoughts are generally not our friends. Our poor brains, they are not ready for this world. You need to consciously give your brain something savory to think about.

But when I’m working on a book it is like “What was the word Dyke about? How was it different from Lesbian? Remember that Tribe 8 show, where everyone was topless and the singer pulled a giant dildo out of her pants and cut it off? Where can I weave in that sentence ‘it’s basically a bunch of people getting to know each other in the first week of summer camp, where summer camp lasts for 8 years and summer camp is a town.’”

I try to be rigorous about my morning thought-replacements.

I step outside and say hello to the plants which is my own type of prayer. I look out as far as my eyes can see because the brain likes that, orienting to the far distance so it doesn’t feel trapped.

I don’t look at the phone for at least a 1/2 hour. There is nothing I’m going to find there that I will be able to act on first thing in the morning.

If a worry or negative thought comes up I tell it I will think about it later. Not shaming it, just telling it gently that there’s plenty of time but not now. When I start thinking about going to work, I refocus on the fact that this hour I’m in is all mine.

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Feel the place of tears origins, the heart, the belly, the solar plexus, where ever they start for you. Trace the way the move upward, toward the throat and the eyes.

Then take a breath and feel the place where they start again, the heart, the belly, the solar plexus. Trace the path upward, but instead of moving into the throat, look down at your hands. Imagine the tears moving through your shoulders, down the length of your arms, into your hands.

Imagine the bowl you are holding in your hands. Imagine the tears filling up the bowl from the bottom up.

This spell can help when you are needing to cry but can’t.

It can help when you are sobbing and can’t find an end.

You can use it when tears are coming out of your eyes but you don’t feel it in your body.

Imagine the tears in every cell of the body. There is space for it all.

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When I used to try and find a therapist, I was afraid of talking on the phone so even though people had told me it was ok to interview therapists, I would just go with the first therapist who I could find. Now that I’m a therapist, I really do encourage people to do a 15 min phone call to see if we seem right for each other. It gives me a chance to talk about how I like to do therapy, and to find out what they’re looking for in therapy, and see if it matches.

I love this flow chart my friend James made, although it might be kind of hard to read, especially on your phone. It gets into how to figure out what you’re looking for, things that people tend to have preferences about, making a catch phrase to say when you talk to a potential new therapist, figuring out what to ask. I’m going to also go over some of that in case you can’t read this, and also talk about the bureaucracy of it all.

Coming at it from a place of empowerment

Try and brainstorm and write down what are you looking for:

You might want a therapist with a particular identity (or not), someone who can meet in person (or you might prefer online), someone who can meet weekly (or however often works for you).

Then there’s the personality piece, which is one of the reasons it’s helpful to have a phone call to get a vibe for them. It can be hard to tell from a brief phone call what someone’s personality is like, but if it feels totally off, trust your gut on that.

Consider if you want a particular type of therapy. Do you want to learn skills, like how to be more assertive? Do you want to talk about and process your childhood? Do you want someone who will hold space for you to talk about and experience your emotions? Do you want to process trauma? Do you want someone to help you figure out why you keep repeating patterns? Do you want simply a safe space to be you, however that is, whatever comes up? Do you want something short-term (like you were in a car accident and are having sudden symptoms)? Or are you looking for more extended support (like you want to change the patterns in your life and build a therapeutic relationship that can support you in making these fundamental changes)?

Developing a catch phrase to say when you talk to a potential new therapist can help. Like “I’m looking for a somatic therapist who takes Medicaid and understands disability stuff. I want to process some long-term stuff.” or “I’m looking for someone who can help me with my intrusive thoughts, and has openings weekly on Mondays.”

Then when you schedule a talk with the therapist, try and ask them about their approach, and whatever other open ended questions you can come up with so you can get a sense for them.

Try to stay present enough with yourself to feel them out. The phone call isn’t a time to tell them everything that’s going on for you, or for you to convince them to see you, it’s for you to get a sense of them and if they seem like someone you’d be able to build trust with. Open ended questions like “How would you describe your approach to therapy?” “How do you work with trauma?” “What’s your experience working with trans people?” “How do you approach family estrangement?” I like these questions, even when these aren’t the topics you personally are looking for, because not only can they elicit really interesting information, but they can really quickly weed out crappy therapists.

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Boring stuff you can stop reading here if you know about navigating insurance and stuff like that already.

What are all the letters after therapists names?

There are so many letters! Mostly it doesn’t matter. To become a therapist you can go a number of routes, you can become a social worker with a therapist focus, a counselor, a psychologist, or a marriage and family therapist (which doesn’t mean you then see people who are married!). It’s all mostly the same. I used to get really stressed out about it when I was looking for a therapist, but now I know that most of what matters in the making of a good therapist has very little to do with what grad school program they went to and what initials that gave them after their name.

Deductibles, copays, coinsurance

The bureaucracies of this world are incredibly broken, and it can be intimidating to sort through all the logistics, like what’s covered by your insurance. It’s like the bureaucrats developed a new language and trained their minions to speak it and refuse to understand normal speech. Although these days I call insurance companies all the time, and about 1/2 the time the person on the other end of the line is another human, just trying to make it through their tedious job. Anyway, here’s what you do to find out what your insurance covers. On your insurance card, on the back there should be a phone number you can call and ask coverage questions. You want to ask what your coverage is for mental health - specifically outpatient mental health (or behavioral health). If they want a code, say 90837 (that’s the code for a 60 min session. They don’t usually ask for a code).

Deductible is how much money you have to pay up front before most things get covered. If you have a deductible of 1,000 then you generally have to pay out of pocket for most medical things until you’ve paid 1,000 and then coverage kicks in. HOWEVER; Some things are covered or partially covered by insurance even before you have met your deductible. Copay generally is the word they use for this. So if you have a $25 copay for therapy, that means that even if you haven’t met your deductible, you just owe $25 for therapy.

Coinsurance is a percentage and means that first you have to meet your deductible, and then after that, you’ll owe a percentage of the cost of therapy. So like, if you have a $500 deductible, you’d pay for the first 4-5 session out of pocket and then it would be covered except for the percentage of your copay.

What insurance pays therapists varies widely across the country, but tends to be in the $100 range from what I can tell. So if you have a 20% coinsurance, you’ll probably owe somewhere around $20 per session after you meet your deductible.

ANYWAY, it’s all stupid and therapy should be free for everyone and we should live in a world where we have functional, healing, vibrant communities. End capitalism. End war.

Like anything that makes it’s way into pop-psychology, the details get lost in the trend, so I want to ground us in what attachment is, and the importance of relationships on shaping our minds. I’m not a researcher or expert, but this is what I’m learning from a class I’m taking with Dan Siegel at the Mindsight Institute.

The Strange Situation Study

The research on attachment started with a study on children who were 1 year old. They brought the kid and the primary caregiver into a place the child had never been before. Just a room with a bunch of toys. The kid would start playing with toys and then the caregiver would leave for 3 minutes, and they’d see what happened when the caregiver returned. It was a study about reunion behaviors. Whether the kid was upset or how it responded to the caregiver leaving is a whole different thing that turns out is more correlated to temperament (which has more to do with genetics).

It showed what the attachment category was for that particular caregiver.

Kids who had a secure relationship with the caregiver would come to the caregiver when they reentered the room. If they were upset, they would be soothed by the caregiver. Then they would go back to playing with the fun toys.

The message the kid has internally about that particular caregiver is “I can rely on them. They keep me safe. They see me for who I am. I have them inside of me, so I can go explore and then return to the safe haven of their presence.”

Kids with avoidant attachment to that caregiver would not seek connection upon the caregiver’s return. They would just keep playing with the toys. However, on the inside they were feeling a lot of things, as noted by skin monitors that showed the kid’s temperature rising. The message they had internalized was “I am not seen. Emotional connection does not work, therefore it’s safer just to do everything myself.”

Kids with anxious attachment to that caregiver would run to them when they returned, and then cling to them and not let go, but they also showed distress of wanting to return to the toys but not wanting to. The message is “I better get all the connection I can. I risk not receiving care if I do things on my own.”

Kids with disorganized attachment to that caregiver would do all kinds of things. Wail without being able to be comforted. Run towards and then away. Bang their heads against the wall. There was no real pattern to this category. The message was “I am totally overwhelmed in every way. I have to get away from them, but they are my caregiver so I have to go toward them.” It is like fear without a solution. This could be because the caregiver is scary, or it could be the caregiver is often dissociated, altered, or inconsistent.

Adult attachment styles

Adult attachment styles can be affected by all kinds of things. Childhood and primary caregiver attachment styles is just one element.

Having an insecure (anxious, avoidant, disorganized) general style doesn’t necessarily mean anything terrible happened when you were a kid. If you’re trying to figure yourself out, it’s worth exploring childhood for sure to understand what happened there, but attachment trends can also be impacted later in childhood, middle school, and adulthood. There are all kinds of things that affect our brain’s organization around what social interactions mean. Exposure to dehumanizing media, bullying, relational power dynamics, high-control religion, parentification, family alienation to name a few.

As an exercise

Write down the most important relationships you’ve had in your life (try to include both positive and negative and mixed). Think about and write down the main messages you learned from these relationships about yourself and connecting to others. Which of these messages continue to impact you?

Dating

One thing I wonder about a lot is do we end up trying to date people who trigger our primary attachment wounds in order to try to heal them? I so often see people with opposite general attachment styles seek eachother out to date. I know a lot of people think they have no control over who they are attracted to, but I just don’t really believe that’s true. Maybe it’s true about who you’re immediately/instantly attracted to, but I don’t think it’s true about who you could really fall in love with.

I want to encourage people to have more intentionality about their attraction. Do you want to heal your attachment wounds by dating someone who riles them up (no shade if you do)? If so, how are you going to take responsibility and/or communicate effectively about that? Does having your attachment wounds riled up help you feel seen (by yourself or another)? Or is it just retraumatizing?

If you’d prefer not to have difficulty in the attachment realm in your intimate relationships, what are the things that help you to feel relatively secure

?

As an exercise

I like to have people make two lists:

One list of what they want in a relationship (if they are looking for a relationship, romantic or otherwise). This list will probably change over time as you start to hone in on what actually works for you.

Another list of what you want to know about a person before you let yourself attach.

Do you need to know what their arguing style is like? What their texting style is? If their sexuality is compatible with yours? How they relate to their family? What their support system is? Whether you have similar interests in activities or politics? How much they do or don’t like to be alone? Whether they are poly and/or how they deal with jealousy? If they want to live in the town they are in forever, or if they want to move someday? If they want kids? What class background they’re from? Are they able to give the particular kind of reassurance that works best for you?

And then start to orient to these lists. Not that you need to find a person or people who match all the things - but just keeping it all in mind. Bringing intentionality in a somewhat organized way.

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Growing up, one of the ways I coped with feeling lonely and unseen was escaping or connecting by creating stories. When I was little, I would create stories about the ants and their ant families. When I got older, I would sit in cafes and try and find the language to write about how people looked and moved and talked to each other, under the guise of becoming a writer. 

Because of my own disorganized attachment and moving around a lot, I was never able to make friendships that stuck. When I was 18, I read a pamphlet about the revolutionary imperative of friendship that declared friendships shouldn't be about pleasantly passing the time, but should instead utilize the platonic intimacy to constantly push each other to greater self-awareness, greater understandings of what are your defenses, how is egoism or passivity thwarting you, where do you feel unseen, what are your greatest fears, your greatest hopes. 

I fully believed the pamphlet. It gave me the policial certainty that it was great to trap new people I would meet into a manic attachment of deep inquiry, and then when it got too deep, I would find a reason to self-righteously walk away. 

One thing I like about being a therapist is the simple fact that I finally became healed enough to be a therapist and I’m not a disaster of a tornado tearing through my worlds any more. When I first started thinking about being a therapist I told my sister “I want to be a therapist, but I’d never be able to because I would just stay up all night every night worrying about my clients.” I was afraid if someone told me about being raped, I would go out and kill their rapist. I thought I would become a physical therapist instead. I love that through my own therapeutic growth, I no longer fear myself and my reactions. I love that I can hold all kinds of stories and traumas without them destroying or consuming me.

I love that the need for myself to differentiate between other people’s trauma and my own is so important, that I have to structure my life to make it possible. I have learned that I need to walk home after work to get that separation. I can care about and love the people I work with, but I don’t need to bring them all the way home. 

The hardest thing is when people move away and I can’t work with them anymore. The hardest thing is saying goodbye.

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My friend was like “remember the advice you gave to leave your house in the morning, every day, even just to go out on the front stoop and look around. And the ‘walk around’ advice ‘If you think of something that’s bothering you, write it down and then the next time you think of it you can say ‘I don’t have to think about that, I have it written down.’ I told someone about those just the other day. Those things remain so helpful.”

On Monday, M’s car broke down on the way to our bi-weekly thrift store excursion. I had something I had to get home for, so M stayed behind to wait for the tow truck, and I walked home. I thought about getting a bus or calling a friend or getting a ride, but it was only a 2 hour walk, and I haven’t walked like that since R left town.

I always thought it was strange how people will go to the gym and spend a couple hours there, but people tend not to walk places if they’re more than a few blocks away. I started from way up on the top of one of those Pittsburgh hills, in a neighborhood called Arlington, and headed down steep hillsides, decaying staircases, railroad tracks and bridges. The usual Pittsburgh topography. Looking at the ways people make beauty and meaning in their lives.

I’ve been thinking about our history, the history of me and my friends and our time, but also about the way history is told. I’m working on a book with 2 old friends of mine about this warehouse space I mentioned. I’ve only done a couple interviews so far, but it’s interesting. I think there’s a tendency in American culture to aggrandize activist history, but the people I talk to (and myself) are always like “I don’t know, that’s just what we did. That’s how we lived life. We created the spaces we wanted to see in the world.”

I was helping my friend L build shelves in her new apartment yesterday, and she was telling me about letting her garlic turn perennial, so it would grow back every year, and her plans to plant some nut trees, and what a sanctuary it could be for someone 100 years from now.

I was talking to C a few days ago, my friend who started doing boat rescue on the Mediterranean after listening to a NPR program about it, and, because he’s an electrician and the boats need electrician volunteers, was like “here is something I can do.” We were talking about how beautiful it is to raise bees, which is something he does now. Talking about how you have to really calm your nervous system down to approach bee hives, and how if you’re able to do that consistently for long enough, the bees start to know you and you will become a safe person in their lives. You don’t even have to put on equipment to reach into the hive. We were talking about whether he was going to go to Palestine, as he had planned, now that Rafah is being decimated and Israel is no longer allowing the minimal aid worker to coordinate aid. It is radio silence.

Last week, M brought home a fledgling they had found in the street, a big baby robin (not the ones above). We tried to put it up in the robin nest that is active in one of our trees, but the parents freaked out and the fledgling jumped down to the ground. They all yelled at each other for a while, the displaced fledgling and the adult robins, until after about 20 minutes, they reached some kind of understanding, and the adults started feeding the fledgling worms. All day, they just kept feeding and feeding him, and at nightfall we put him back up by the nest that holds their babies, and they let him stay. He was there in the morning, and by afternoon, he had his strength back and had been able to fly for the first time, take to his wings.

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You picture the object of your heartbreak off in the distance. Take a little time to feel how far or near they need to be. It could be across the room, down the street, across a field with a river between you, out on the horizon. Take as much of a breath as feels right to you, reach out your hands, cupped to receive. Say this to the object of your heartbreak “I am taking back the pieces of my heart that I entrusted to you.”

Imagine these pieces leaving them and coming into your hands. Take another breath in whatever way feels right to you and bring your hands to your heart. Rest your hands on your heart and imagine the pieces coming back into you, making your heart more whole. Warming, soothing, mending.

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Maybe because I almost died from asthma related asphyxiation as a baby, or maybe because so many types of trauma tend to code deep breathing as inappropriate to continued life. Trauma says “keep breathing quickly and shallowly, we need to be able to move fast, be prepared for fight or flight!”

I’m still not the best breather, but so many people I work with benefit from breathing exercises I thought I would describe some here. If you want to do them along with me you can follow the audio links.

Box Breathing

Breathe in slowly to a count of four. Hold your breath for another count of four. Breathe out slowly and steadily through your mouth, again counting to four, hold your breath again for another count of four. Repeat. Do it with me here

Pursed Lip breathing

This is kind of like my fake joint substack post, but opposite. It is supposed to be one of the quickest ways to slow down your breathing. This is something that might be familiar, you do it naturally when lifting and carrying heavy objects. If you do this type of breathing as a practice - like every day for 5-10 minutes, it can shift the way your lungs take in air, in a good way.

Relax your neck and shoulder muscles. Breathe in slowly through your nose with your mouth closed. You don’t need to take a deep breath; a normal breath is OK. Pucker your lips like you’re going to blow on something hot to cool it down. Breathe out slowly and gently through your puckered lips for four or more seconds. Try not to force the air out when you’re exhaling. It may feel kind of weird and uncomfortable, but over time gets easier. Do it along with me here.

Vooo breathing for coherence

This is the fist breathing exercise I ever was able to do. It’s less about the lungs and more about bringing coherence to all your organ systems in some magical way probably involving the vagus nerve.

 Pretend you are a lighthouse. Take a big breath in, then let it out and make a vooo type noise, using the deep end of your vocal register, sort of like a fog horn. See if you can feel it in your body, other than your lungs. Another deep breath in, another voooooo. This time open and close your jaw gently as you vooo so the vooo turns into a vooooawowwowwow. Another deep breath in. Do it again. It’s kind of hard to explain. You can listen or do it with me here: Vooo Breath.

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