This presidency has caused an enduring traumatic shock. I am a trauma therapist in New York City. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, both my patients and colleagues were in shock. Many of them told me they felt unsafe and vulnerable. “I feel like I did after 9/11,” one said. “People on the subways look like they are in […]
I am a compulsive memorizer. I am terrified of making a mistake, ever. Tonight I fucked up dinner. I was trying to make tahdig, the Persian dish where the rice at the bottom of the pot crisps up into a golden-brown layer of deliciousness that can be sliced into wedges and devoured. Instead, I got […]
The past year has been particularly brutal for parents, a year of dead children. The world is at least/ fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative/estimate, though I keep this from my children./For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird./For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,/ sunk in a lake.—Maggie Smith, […]
I fear that someday I will fail her as a parent and she will fail herself as a person and think that it is OK to hurt someone else to a grave extent, and with intent. It was summer. They were girls I had considered friends. A boy liked me, wanted to date me in the […]
Do not tell me I am “lucky.” “Oh, I can relate to that. I remember this one time when I was 11 years old and walking home from school, some older kids said something nasty to me.” This was a response I received from someone I care very deeply about, after I shared the myriad […]
Despite how counterintuitive it seems, leaning into trauma might be the very antidote to drowning in it. There is no one “right” way to feel after experiencing pregnancy loss. The trauma continuum is vast and varied. Every woman comes to this loss with different maternal hopes, reproductive histories, pregnancy fantasies, relationships with their bodies, interpersonal […]
She was a beautiful woman, long legs, lovely face, curvy figure—why couldn’t she see it? Why couldn’t she see beauty in me? My grandmother’s funeral was last week, in a small town in Illinois where a gaggle of sad looking geese huddled together for warmth on a frozen lake in front of a church on […]
Like many people who deal with anxiety, I’ve learned to live with it. And I’ve hidden it well from my daughter. Or so I thought. My own fear is traceable enough, its origins obvious, but my daughter’s fear is a mystery. She’s only 8, for one. She has suffered not at all, not more than the unconscious […]
A new study finds that many people would rather be in an unsatisfying relationship than no relationship at all. When you’re single and searching, couples can look like an interesting puzzle. What separates them from you? Are they more desirable? More mature? Just luckier? Possibly. But a new study has identified a less considered factor: Maybe they’re more […]
I shouldn’t live in a world where rape is not only a reality but a likely possibility. But I do. So I need to know how to defend myself. Following the shooting spree in Isla Vista, California that killed six people in May, an international conversation emerged on Twitter signaled by the hashtag #YesAllWomen. My contribution to […]
