In the years from 2018 through 2022, I dealt with a tremendous amount of grief. Among other losses, a some-time partner and long-time friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer in late 2020. I spent a year flying back and forth from Arizona to Florida during the worst of the pandemic to be of what help I could and to spend time with him. Strangely, I know I will remember it
As the situation that is 2023 rages on, I think to myself, “This is what a digital civil war looks like.”Of course the war is not all digital. It has made its way into churches, mosques, schools, malls, nightclubs…even the nation’s Capitol. The reality of war has been present with us for several years, but it has perhaps not registered that way. We think of war as armies and guns
I watched the movie Jesus Revolution recently, and was struck by it. I was already thinking a lot recently about how many parallels the 2020's have with the 1960’s and 70’s, when so many movements began and several converged.The psychedelic movement seems to have re-emerged after an almost 40-year nap. Free love has reappeared in the mainstream in the shape of consensual non-monogamy. Disillusionment and distrust of authority is rampant,
Over and over again in the past couple of years I have been struck by the thought that if our culture were a marriage, we would be in the midst of divorce proceedings right now. This isn’t a new idea, there are plenty of others who have commented on it, but as a person trained in marriage and family therapy, my perspective is a little different. As an MFT there
I was in my third trimester of a respected Marriage and Family Therapy graduate program when a classmate of mine fired the question to the director of our division. “Where’s our sex class?” she asked. The answer was nowhere. We didn’t have one.We could take it as an elective, we were told. To do this, we had to compete with the division of counseling psychology for spots in the class
In the midst of our current world situation, I’ve been thinking about a lot about what I need to “get through” this, to endure this, to thrive, and to survive this plague. I’m not thinking so much of “what to do” as to how to be. What states do I need to invoke internally to thrive instead of merely existing?I started with the concept of endurance, and decided that I