“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our…
Running toward and away from connection.
When I think of belonging, it is like two dogs tied together wanting to run in opposite directions. One dog wants so desperately to belong…
Words get in the way.
Before the pandemic, I had my first ritual psychedelic experiences in a shared, facilitated space. That first experience was intriguing—I had the sense of being…
The work is never finished and cannot be ignored.
You see litter on the ground. One day, you get it together to be part of the solution—to pick a part of the ground to…
The Pearl Pentacle and Relationships
If you have no idea what the Iron or Pearl Pentacles are, you might want to skip this chapter or buy my book Circling the…
On Changing Your Attitude
“When you commit to a change in attitude, you are probably not going to “feel” any different for a while. It is more like putting on a different mask at first. You might wake up as cranky, sore, and easily irritated as you did yesterday. But if you have resolved to meet this day with an attitude of patience or courage, then you will practice holding those experiences differently than you did yesterday when you flailed and complained. “
Reflections of a Gender Affirming Therapist
Thoughts from a twenty-year witness to the transgender culture wars.
A Dream of Power and Freedom from Control
“I see power and control as two ends of a spectrum. Power is the embodied knowing that I can influence my inner and outer worlds toward my safety and meeting my needs and desires. That when I know what I need, I can get it. That when I need something to stop, or to start, I can make it happen.
The efforts to exert control over another, and the acceptance of another’s control, both require the giving away of power. Controller and the controlled are hooked to each other, like the two Piscean fish, unable to swim without pulling the other along.
We may imagine that the control of abusers, dominators, and authoritarians gives them freedom, but in practice they are unable to tolerate dissent or the normal conflicts of adult relationships and engage in compulsive moves to reassert control. Similarly, we tend to imagine the passive controlled victim who utterly surrenders, but in practice even the most assaulted person has all manner of ways in which rebellion, resistance, undermining, and sabotage emerge. Humans are creatures who can never be fully tamed, even unto themselves.”
For Nice Guys Seeking Love and Lust
“The reason the Nice Guy strategy fails tends to come down to underlying shame about yourself, your passivity, and your inability to tolerate another person’s boundaries. The loneliness you’re trying to cure through romantic connection becomes your greatest hindrance. Loneliness is true suffering, it is incredibly painful, and makes us more sensitive to rejection from the people with whom we want to connect.”
Becoming Dissonant
“On a broader cultural level, I believe we are witnessing this unfolding in the polarization and fights over disinformation and who controls the story continues. We talk about it as right versus left, which is itself an attempt to reduce dissonance by making simple dichotomies, and it is also a reflection of the weakening of a cultural ego. Those former arbiters of culture—a shared religion, a shared valuation of certain sources of news, even trust in the government—seem to be struggling to find a unifying story to smooth out inconsistencies.
Perhaps it relates to the United States’s Pluto return, in which the wandering star Pluto has returned to the position it inhabited when the United States emerged as its own national entity. In Western modern astrology, Pluto draws out what has been psychologically repressed, particularly those uncivil energies of the will to power at the expense of harmony.
My sense is that Pluto’s movements demand a confrontation of dissonance and recognition that old ego stories no longer serve, but have become too restrictive, too much at odds with these buried drives, and those stories need to be shed so that we can grow large enough to encompass our multitudes and find a new story.
Or there might just be death. “