Category: Therapy

  • Going private pay, politics, pickling and other reflections

    Going private pay, politics, pickling and other reflections

    On a personal level, the first quarter of this year was quite rocky. I’d restarted in-person sessions with a great deal of hope that it would help reinvigorate my practice, and it absolutely has. I deeply prefer in-person work to Telehealth. And in-person work meant spending a lot of up-front money to furnish a new office and pay the rent. That coincided with a significant surgery and then some sorrowful losses of pets at home. Not the biggest catastrophes in the world, but I felt heavier and more depleted than I would’ve liked, and I was also working harder to offset the money I’d spent.

    By the late spring, I was becoming aware that my business was not working as well as it could be. My revenue was not what I expected and needed it to be, though I was seeing more clients than I had been the previous year, and had raised my rates for 2024. Adding more clients was like a non-starter. I already felt my capacity was stretched thin. After work, I’d be drained most nights. My level of presence and attention in therapy suffered with the background stressors of money and holding space for so many clients. Parts of me grew impatient and frustrated with the therapeutic process, which is always an indicator that I need to make adjustments. 

    All of this has led to the decision to leave insurance panels and go private pay or out of network only. This writing is a reflection upon and explanation of that choice, along with my evolving perspective on therapy.

    The problems of insurance

    The only way to make more money doing therapy is to raise my rates, or find additional sources of income. But when it comes to insurance, you are only paid what they pay you. There is no raising of rates unless you are part of a larger group or corporation that can leverage your size to convince insurance to negotiate. When I have asked, I was denied and told there would be no negotiation.

    I find it unworkable to be a clinician with more than a decade of experience and more training and certification than when I started, getting paid the same reimbursement rate as my colleagues who are at the beginning of their careers. Everyone should get paid what they’re worth, of course, but my value as a clinician has increased while the reimbursement remains the same. Never getting anything beyond the occasional cost of living raise would be unsustainable at any other job.

    What some not in the field might not understand is how limited therapists are in accessing reimbursement for services. If I were a primary care physician and you came to see me, I could submit multiple codes for reimbursement. I would bill a code for the office visit, but also for the process of checking your heart, or giving you a vaccine, or drawing blood for a test. A fifteen to twenty minute session could include multiple billable procedures. But for psychotherapy, there is only one billable procedure, and the only variation is how long it is. You can bill for an intake session once, otherwise it’s for 55, 45, or 30 minute sessions. 

    Half my caseload has been in-network insurance, which pays about 60% of my rate. An hour of therapy costs me the same in time and energy whether I’m being paid my full rate or 60%. That means I cannot simply add more clients to make up the difference—there’s not the time in the day, nor the energetic capacity in my week. If my caseload were insurance-only, I would be unable to afford my own business, let alone living in Seattle. So it’s truly the private pay clients who subsidize the clients with insurance, and it no longer feels fair to continue to raise their burden of payment to offset those who are in-network.

    Martyrdom and resentment

    Making this choice brings up feelings of guilt and defensiveness, as evidenced by this long piece of writing. With clients, I set my own feelings aside to support them in however they process this news, because that is my job and a skill I’ve honed for years. I am glad to be of service. Outside of the therapy room, I find myself unexpectedly provoked. For the first time in a while let myself get into a dumb online argument with a stranger who said it was selfish and subjective for therapists to decide what their hour of time should be worth.

    As with many who get into this profession, my passion for caring and being of service comes with a willingness to compromise on my own well-being and then great guilt when I actually put my needs first. It is actually a slow process to recognize when my needs can no longer be set aside without cost to both myself and my clients, and the major indicators are when impatience and resentment begin to show up more consistently. I do not blame my clients for resentment or impatience; those feelings are about me and the boundaries that I need to set or protect. So if someone wants to tell me it’s selfish of me to set my own rates—that’s not a new thought I’ve never considered before. That’s a very ingrained story that has become harmful to my wellbeing that I’ve had to address in myself. 

    Earlier this summer, during some spiritual work, I got the message: “Sacrifice your ego on the altar of abundance.” Initially I mistrusted these words as evocative of the kind of materialistic manifestation culture that is so prevalent on social media. And it truly has been a sacrifice of ego to acknowledge my needs and boundaries, but instead it’s my ego story of being the self-sacrificing martyr who works hard and needs little in return. For most of my life, as a former Catholic, I’ve considered this a kind of holy way of being in the world, the way you’re supposed to be. Even having done a great deal of work on it, I’ve only made room within the story for some of my needs. This truly feels like putting that story on the altar.

    Resentment is the shadow twin of martyrdom. As much as my ego story was about how well I concealed my suffering behind stoic nobility, in truth I very much wanted people to see how much I suffered. Not so they’d relieve me of it. Instead so they could feel sorry for me and recognize how virtuous I was. Then I could have the compensatory comfort of self-righteousness, judging those who dared to prioritize their own needs and income. That movement only results in a heart closed by bitterness, resentment, and self-righteousness. That path does not lead to greater love. It is sacrificing that ego story, allowing myself to be a normal person with needs who is not supremely virtuous, that has renewed my heart and love in the therapy room and beyond.

    I do still provide free labor and volunteer service professionally and in other parts of my life. I offer mentorship to younger colleagues getting started in the work. I provide free letters of support for people seeking gender affirming care. I do volunteer work as a teacher and mentor in my spiritual community, and a substitute teacher for my aikido community. I believe in what therapy has to offer for mental and emotional wellness, but also it is only one component for a well person and a well society. These other parts of my life, being a partner and a member of communities, is also a huge component for the mental wellbeing of not just myself but all who participate in them. 

    Politicized therapy

    For the past several years of my professional life, I’ve publicly aligned with left-leaning groups of activists, writers, and therapists, particularly those who identify with offering “politicized” therapy. Along with this identification and belief in many left-wing principles has been an aversion to the idea of exploiting others financially and for their labor, which is one reason why I’ve avoided things like hiring employees, owning real estate, or taking this step of leaving insurance. Often I think of that lefty statement,“If it’s not accessible to the poor, then it’s neither radical nor revolutionary.” So this change is the outward expression of a larger change that has been happening within my sense of values, ideals, and principles.

    I am not saying that I am no longer aligned with left-wing values and ideas. What I have been asking myself lately, a lot, is: what actually works? I have been in many left-wing spaces of firebrands shouting their principles at each other and to my mind accomplishing very little in terms of building real community or effective collective action. I have seen amazing moments of cultural openness to new ideas be utterly reversed and erased with the passage of time. I have seen people I thought highly of seem to completely abandon their values when it came to their own self-interest. I have wrestled with the progressive neoliberal paradoxes of claiming to believe in certain left-wing ideals that are unworkable in this moment. 

    A better world is possible. And the burden of moral righteousness and purity complicates the choices that are necessary in the world that’s here right now. What I want most are groups who advocate the values of collective care and shared resources doing so in a way that is effective, that builds community, and leverages the power it has to make change. 

    When it comes to therapy, I have stepped back in some ways from my “brand” as a progressive, feminist therapist. Those values are absolutely still part of my work, but they are less explicit in practice. I feel less inclined to apply a label when we are telling a story that demonizes or misrepresents women or people of color, such as “This is white supremacist patriarchy.” What I do is notice, point out the demonization or misrepresentation, and invite us to be curious how that came to be the story. What function does this story serve in your system? How did this come to be in your psyche? How does it cause you or others harm? How does it separate you from connection?

    Sometimes the way we deploy political labels turns them into thought-terminating clichés. Everyone who comes into my therapy space knows that if you say something that is labeled patriarchal then it’s bad and you shouldn’t think it. But “knowing it’s bad and you shouldn’t think it” is not a therapeutically useful outcome. That is like trying to suppress an unwanted thought, which only makes it more charged and strongly fixed. People become so afraid to truly know themselves that they stop at the prescribed line and will go no further. If they sense there’s shame or judgment coming, they’re not going to open up. And a lot of us attach shame and judgment to those labels.

    These labels, of course, could also be catalysts that are healing or open up curiosity. For some in the dominant group, labeling a thought or action as coming from an oppressive bias invites reflection and exploration. If they’re in the targeted group, naming these actions as oppressive might be freeing and liberating, helping the individual to stop wasting energy trying to fix themself to solve a problem that isn’t theirs. You need to be able to have words for the things you’re discussing. 

    When the labeling does close down therapeutic opportunities, it becomes a barrier to the work of therapy and the work of liberation. We come into the therapy room to invite in curiosity and courage so that we can truly know, perceive, and accept ourselves. It is only those conditions that allow us to truly change—knowing, perception, and acceptance. When I understand this bias within me, there is a true opportunity to transform it. You need a space that is open and welcoming to parts of self that disagree with, fear, resist, or have completely different experiences to the values we want to hold. If they are not welcomed to be known, perceived, and accepted, they will never support our values.

    We want therapy to be a safe space for ourselves so we can be truly seen and loved, and we would love it if therapists for other people were psychological cops who sniff out dysfunction and abuse and get them under control. Other people are no different than you in this regard: if you don’t feel safe with, seen by, and accepted by your therapist, you’re not going to open up to them, and nothing therapeutic will happen. 

    Pickling and patience

    The last piece I want to name is that I love practicing with an Internal Family Systems approach, but in my impatience with therapy, I realized I was trying to IFS too hard. I was trying to teach clients how to IFS so we could do fidelity IFS. But clients don’t come to me to learn how to do IFS. They come because they need help exploring themselves. I was getting things backwards and unintentionally creating friction and moments when I missed people in our work. 

    I do not mean to put myself or my clients down, as we have also done profound and powerful work. But I have found it beneficial to let go of my attachment as to whether we “do” the IFS process in session or not. All I do is bring my presence and curiosity into the room and follow that, and follow the client where they want to go, and in that dance we may discover a part of self that is ready for work and the process. In truth, simply being present and curious without necessarily naming parts is still doing IFS.

    Part of the impatience I’ve named that surfaced this year came from not trusting the process and bringing in agendas that do not serve therapy or the client. This tension began with good intent during COVID. From 2020-2023, demand was so high, and suffering so great, that it became overwhelming. All that I loved about therapy—the spaciousness, the curiosity, the practice of love—began to feel like a luxury we couldn’t afford. I began to feel like we had to do triage, dealing with a few key issues and then making room for another client who needed urgent care.

    That urgency is counter-therapeutic and feeds those attitudes that I’ve named as a barrier to the work. And as the emergency energy began to relax, I had not the time or space to fully process and grieve how deeply I was impacted during that time. I kept plowing forward, trying to stave off burnout, and that urgency attached itself to the concerns about revenue, inflation, the cost of living, and whether I’d get to retire. Taking this step feels like it has restored agency to myself and freed me to return to the kind of therapy that I am good at, that works, that is not draining but quite joyful. It is a therapy that allows for slowness and surprises, and has no particular agenda yet paradoxically helps allow my clients to access the changes they have needed. 

    This past weekend, I spent time pickling a batch of cucumbers that will be ready in late October. By a strange coincidence, that will be the exact time when this change is complete and my insurance contracts will expire. Pickling is interesting because there is a very specific process to which one must humble themself, and part of that process is waiting. I won’t know how they turned out until the time comes when I open a jar and taste it. Perhaps it will be a bad harvest, or perhaps something delicious and exciting will emerge that I can enjoy and share for the winter and days to come.

  • Psychotherapeutic Access and the Contradictions of Progressive Neoliberalism

    Recently I saw comments in a discussion about therapists and insurance in which the commenter condemned therapists who go private pay for being financially inaccessible. Two of their statements stuck out. One was their statement that “you didn’t get into this career for the money.” The other is that healthcare is “supposed to be” free or low cost. These two statements embody the contradictions of Progressive Neoliberalism, and perhaps capitalism in general, that are frequently stated but rarely interrogated.

    Neoliberalism has been the decades-long governing philosophy to defund public services and depend upon private business to fill the gaps. Instead of having a national healthcare service that employs all health providers and pays us from taxes, we have this system of bureaucratic layers in which I as a private individual am providing the therapy and contracting with a private company who decides how much to pay me for my work on behalf of another private company that hired it to broker their employees’ healthcare needs. (That’s three layers of businesses that need to be paid, incidentally.)

    Progressivism is the movement to improve our conditions through reform and innovative technology and policy. It’s the idealism from which springs the statement that healthcare is supposed to be free. The contradiction that emerges when you put progressivism and neoliberalism together is saying healthcare should be free but having no infrastructure set up to pay for the labor and costs of that care. It is unworkable for a private individual to exist in that contradiction, providing cheap labor while trying to manage their own lives.

    This progressive-neoliberal contradiction extends to a lot of facets of life that we think “should” be public services. In Seattle, we say that housing is a human right, but housing is run by private individuals and companies. So the laws that we pass to protect renters do not come with any commensurate protections or supports for the landlords who are obligated to follow those laws even if it hurts their business. This has driven a number of smaller landlords to get out of the business or sell to larger corporations who can afford to absorb the cost of bad tenants or the costs of breaking laws to protect their bottom line. Perhaps inadvertently, these progressive policies end up strengthening large corporations.

    You can’t use capitalist methods to provide free or accessible public services. You need something like a co-op or government agency that is well-funded and exists to provide these services without the profit motive. The best private solution that I’m aware of is the Therapy Fund Foundation, a nonprofit that raises money to pay Black clinicians their market rate so that Black clients can access care at no cost to themselves. I’m happy this exists and I support it financially when I can, and I don’t know of any similar solutions that would include me as a white man. The Open Path Collective is a group of therapists committed to providing therapy at a deep sliding scale, which is another great option to expand access to low-income clients, but it requires the therapist to be willing and able to work far beneath their rate, which ends up coming back to this core problem.

    Therapists are supposed to provide a human right at accessible costs and I guess just shut the fuck up. But I can’t think of any other job or industry where you’d happily settle for not getting a raise beyond an occasional cost of living increase for the entirety of your career no matter how much you increase your skill. Being a therapist is my full-time job. My income comes from the client service I provide, and a couple royalties whose amounts afford me a couple extra beers a month. I pay for my own business costs, my own business taxes, my own housing, my own healthcare, my own food. I am also a human being who can only work so much in a week before the quality of my care degrades, and I want to do things like have vacations and enjoy the time I have on this earth with my loved ones. And I’m in a privileged position; many of my peers have student loans and kids on top of those costs. Were I to provide free or low-cost therapy, I would have to get a different full-time job so I could afford do therapy as a hobby on evenings or weekends.

    I can’t imagine other jobs where you would tell someone “well you didn’t get into this for the money” and think that is the end of the conversation. Actually, I can. I imagine teachers get this a lot, and people working in mission-driven nonprofits. Helping professions and nonprofits offer their own unique flavor of exploitation that’s wrapped in the language of passion. We’re told that simply doing this work is the privilege and we should be happy with the wages we’ve got. That we’re the selfish ones for wanting to be paid for all the energy and heart we expend. What’s the long-term product of that? Either burnt out martyrs or people who leave the profession and go into fields where they’re allowed to care about their paycheck. Neither of which results in good care.

    In summary, the Progressive-Neoliberal contradiction is the belief that public services should be accessible and free without advocating for government infrastructure set up to ensure it, instead placing the burden on private individuals and then blaming them for having human needs and limits. It’s wanting socialist outcomes using capitalist means, which in practice results in strengthening large corporations and squeezing out small businesses and individual providers. This does not improve access to quality therapy for clients in need of it.

  • Man vs. Bear

    Man vs. Bear

    Note: This was written with an audience of men in mind. Anyone is welcome to read it, but people who aren’t men might feel triggered by some of the content as it touches on themes of domination and violence, and has a compassionate tone that is sometimes triggering for people who have too often been compelled to set aside their own hurt and feelings and instead be compassionate toward men. If you are such a person, I am not asking you to do that, and I encourage you to take care of yourself.

    Once, I chased away a black bear. It was a bright dry day in the New Mexican mountains, a mixture of desert and pine, where I worked as a backpacking instructor for a Scouting camp. We taught participants to be meticulous in bear safety—never leave out anything unattended that might attract bears, and avoid getting involved with them. For staff, we were given the extra task—if you see a bear getting too close to your camp, chase it away.

    This was for the safety of both bear and human. Bears drawn to human encampments for food are naturally then more likely to have hostile encounters with humans. I’d heard stories of bears going into tents at night—I don’t know how true those were, but clearly that would be a problem. Bears that were too familiar, too drawn to humans, would therefore have to be put down by those monitoring the bear populations. 

    So it was a bright afternoon and I saw the black bear close to camp. I told my crew to stay together and ran toward the bear. It backed away several feet, but then it paused to look back at me, as though to see how committed I truly was. So I ran at it again, making my body big and shouting as I was taught, and the bear backed off several more feet, then paused. We did this three or four times before the bear finally wandered off, and I felt I’d done my due diligence.

    Few animals are interested in getting into an unnecessary fight. We have all kinds of signals to let potential predators and competitors know we’re going to be a problem for them if they keep encroaching on our territory. We can hiss, we can bare our claws and teeth, and we can do this kind of feinting aggression—a lot of creatures do it, appearing to aggress at you only to back off before making contact. It’s a way of negotiating space and making a contract. If we have to fight, we’re going to fight, but we’re both going to get hurt and many animals can’t afford unnecessary hurt. So they’re not going to actually fight unless they’re desperate, wounded, or you’re a threat to them or their young. You have to know what you’re dealing with, however—you can chase away a black bear, but doing that with a grizzly is going to get you into trouble.

    Chasing off a black bear is one of those stories I milked for a while. It was scary—I wasn’t sure if I would succeed or if I’d get in some bad trouble, but it felt amazing when the bear backed off and did what I hoped it would do. It felt so good to protect my crew, to keep the bear safe. There is so much pleasure in being a protector, especially when one is seen by others and feels their gratitude. So many men gravitate to this role, to this way of being valuable and of service to their community and loved ones, and take on so much hurt and damage in our efforts to protect. If we can feel in integrity and receive gratitude, it feels worth it. 

    But what about when we’re judged for our protectiveness? What about when we fail? What about when we’re told what we’re doing is unwelcome, though we still believe to our bones we need to keep them safe? What about when we’re told we’re not protectors, we’re actually harmers and abusers? That feeling is terrible. There is so much shame, and guilt, and resentment, and failure, that it’s almost inevitable we’d get defensive and bring everything we can to bear against that accusation. So many men don’t think of ourselves as the predator, we think of ourselves as the protector.


    When we are really young, all we really want is to belong, to be loved, to be safe, and to get to be ourselves. When our kid selves experience being hurt, cast out, ridiculed, humiliated, sometimes they hold onto the pain and shame of those experiences. To my mind, kids are just innocent, even when they’re acting like assholes. They need adults to love, protect, and understand them, and it is a sorrow of life how often even the most well-meaning adults are not able to do that to the extent kids need. 

    Those young needs stay with us all of our lives, along with the hurt and judgment those young parts take in when their needs go unmet. We are like trees who age by growing new rings around the old. All of those younger ages are still contained within the trunk, and when you look inside you can still see the wounds they suffered and how those affect the later growth of the tree. We grow new layers of safety and protection to hide, but not heal, those wounds, and those protections add much of the richness of life. They’re not intrinsically bad. They mean well. And they can be unbalanced, and cause harm. 

    Becoming a feminist, for me, was a ring I grew around a young part of me that saw the women in my life, whom I loved, being hurt by men. I felt their hurt so keenly that I wanted to protect them as much as I could. Yet I was actually much younger than them, and I needed protection itself, and no one knew this was happening and had the clarity to tell me it was not my responsibility.

    As a result, my continued growth took the shape of a person who feels much more protective of others than myself, much more concerned about their hurts and needs than my own. My story was, “I can handle anything, but I can’t believe they’d do that to you.” To my mind, it was noble to bear the suffering you would not allow for another person, so I developed the strange capacity to be able to speak up for others’ issues and problems with a lot of courage and yet remain terrified and anxious when it came to asking for something I needed. 

    This protectiveness was perhaps valuable, and yet it contained an inability to recognize the power and agency of those I decided to protect. In that protective state, I was unable to step back and ask—does this person want my protection? Are they asking me to speak on their behalf, or help them to advocate for themself? Are they truly confused and making bad choices, or are they dealing with their problems in a way that would totally make sense if I humbled myself enough to be curious? Do they even see this as a problem that needs protection? 

    When you get really fused with that way of being in the world, when you feel you are the protector and it’s all on you, then it’s easy to start to turn on the people you’re protecting. Here you are trying to keep them safe and somehow they just keep making the same stupid choices. They throw themself into the danger you just rescued them from. They seem ungrateful, ignorant, and heedless of your sacrifice. So then it starts to seem like a normal and comprehensible next step to start protecting them from themself—to control their movement, to limit their choices, to harangue and undermine them. And all the while, internally, you still feel that earnest desire to help. But from the outside view, your behavior is abusive.  

    When we’re really identified with our protector and we hear this—that others may see us as no different than the violent men we’d protect them from—it is devastating. Suddenly we feel all those little kid parts again who learned they were unworthy, they were embarrassing, they were unwanted. We are kids stuffed into adult suits. Emotionally we are acting as any kid would—wanting to be loved, wanting a hug, wanting reassurance and care, or pushing away what feels threatening and scary. But our little kids don’t know they’re in adult bodies, so they don’t realize those bodies have more power and impact. So they’re not pushing with the force of a toddler, but rather the force of a man.


    Being a man is the greatest risk factor for experiencing violence or homicide. Three in four homicide victims are male. Yet collectively we have not organized around that risk the way other targeted communities do. It’s possible this is in part because men are also most likely perpetrators of violence—almost 80% of murderers are male. Most of us grow up in worlds where the threat or experience of violence is normalized. 

    As a closeted gay kid, I thought I was uniquely attuned to this—once I heard my friends, guys my age, making comments about “bringing a baseball bat to prom” because an openly gay classmate was planning to go with his boyfriend. But now I think that threat of violence extended to all boys and men who fell out of the narrow and confusing lines of acceptable male behavior. So being gay was obviously gay, but sometimes recycling is gay, or wearing nail polish—unless you’re a mixed martial arts fighter. Even without violence, there is the threat of violence. 

    Protecting myself from violence is so ingrained in me that I almost forget how much I think about it. When walking alone at night through dark places, I’ve learned to walk with upright posture, open senses, hands out and ready to respond. I’ve avoid looking at my phone, wearing headphones, anything to suggest I’m inattentive to my surroundings. I walk like I know where I’m going because I know appearing lost and confused makes me a target for predation. This has been so much in my mind that the times I have been stolen from I usually blame myself before I feel angry at anyone else. It’s my own fault! I knew better than to leave my backpack in the backseat where anyone cold see it. I knew I should’ve taken that expensive headlight off my bike when I locked it outside.

    Confronting our own capacity for violence and relationship to force is a task I believe all men—really all humans—need to take on at some point in our lives, especially if we want to become powerful. Jordan Peterson, a Jungian-informed psychologist who offers guidance to young men and someone with whom I frequently and forcefully disagree, has said it thus: “[a man] should be a monster, and absolute monster, and then you should learn to control it.” When we disown our own violence, Peterson suggests, we may be naive and resentful of the ways others take advantage. Claiming and training our capacity for power and violence helps us to stand up for ourselves, set clear boundaries, and make moral choices. Instead of our capacity for violence leaking out in reactive ways—our little kids in adult suits lashing out—we know our power and use it on purpose.

    Peterson and I would wholeheartedly disagree about a number of things—he would want me imprisoned for supporting transgender people access medical care—but here he is speaking of what is broadly understood to be “shadow work” in Western spiritual communities, drawing upon Carl Jung’s insights into the shadow as the parts of us that get disowned. Until we can turn toward, witness, and accept our anger and capacity for violence and cruelty, we have no real control over it. We are either useless in our fear of power, or we act out our power covertly and avoid taking responsibility for the harm we cause. Doing this shadow work includes facing the guilt and shame we feel over our capacity for violence, and facing the impulse to avoid that guilt and shame through inflating ourselves with ego-flattering stories of being a hero and valorizing violence. 


    Once I was working at a community mental health agency with clients who were on probation, corrections supervision, or otherwise had criminal charges. I loved this work and the clients and rarely felt concerned for my own safety. Clients may have been frustrated and angry with me, and a couple made scary-sounding threats, but there was always a sense of a line between us that would never be crossed. 

    Except one time when someone did. It wasn’t my client but someone who’d been discharged and came in crisis. We sat down and I re-enrolled them in services and set them up with appointments to get care, but the client was very difficult to engage. He kept getting off-task or making weird inappropriate comments. At one moment, he leaned in, reached his hand out, and slapped me on the cheek. It wasn’t hard enough to hurt me, but it was enough to sting. It was a deliberate intrusion. It was a test.

    I leaned back and looked straight at him, soberly. “Do not touch me again.”

    He raised his pale hands in feigned shock, clearly making fun of me and pretending he was so surprised by my response. I decided we’d accomplished all we could that day and told him it was time to go. We stood to leave, but he disregarded my direction and walked the other way, toward a staff door.

    That’s when I felt scared, because I knew I was not in control of the situation. I had clients who had murdered people, and worst, but who respected my role and followed directions. This guy was unpredictable, clearly fed off my reactions, and I had no other moves. Fortunately another staff person was in that office, and together we guided the client to turn around and go out the clearly marked exit door, but I still had to go outside to give him his appointment card.

    I remember it was an overcast Seattle afternoon, not cold or rainy, but grim. I handed him the card, relieved he wasn’t my client, and told him the next steps with some distance between us. Then he raised his hand and punched toward me as a feint, stopping before it made contact. My body remained still and I held eye contact with him. Something in my sensed that he wasn’t going to hit me, but if I flinched then it would escalate him. I held my stance, and we both walked away safe that day.


    As a gay feminist, as a little kid growing up into an adult male suit, it didn’t really occur to me until my twenties that I might be part of the problem. I’d gone back to a high school friend’s wedding, feeling weird being around some of the jock guys I didn’t know in school. I’d viewed them suspiciously, as potential bullies and sources of violence, having not ever gotten the chance to get to know them and only going after my own fear, biases, and self-protection. I wanted to seem cool and together and not a loser anymore, but I was still making a mess out of my life and uncertain where to go with a career. But I ended up talking to some of those guys and started to really see that no one gave much of a shit about our old roles. They treated me like another guy, and it felt great.

    I said hello to a woman friend of mine from school who’d worn this beautiful dress that exposed her shoulders. I put both hands on her shoulders and squeezed them in a familiar way. Moments later, I had this thought—“Would I have touched her like that if she were a man?”

    The question hooked into my brain. What made me think that she wanted or appreciated that kind of touch? What did it mean that I would touch a woman in a friendly way that I’d never consider doing with a man? The only times I touched men were awkward hugs or sex. Friendly touch was not yet in my vocabulary of social connection. Mostly parts of me feared that a man would respond to that kind of touch with violence.

    I started to realize I was walking through the world in an adult white man suit, and from the outside a stranger would experience me with the protections of mistrust and caution through which I viewed most men. Casual touch could no longer be innocent and thoughtless, it needed to happen in a relationship of consent and care. Years and years later, in my martial arts community, I now have male friends who do share that kind of friendly touch. It was strange and confusing to me at first, but completely straight men seem totally okay giving and receiving affectionate touches on the shoulder, rubbing each other’s backs, and hugs. Perhaps it’s because we’re facing the monsters within and now we have nothing to prove.


    If we could sit together, and you were having your feelings that a woman would rather be in the woods with a bear than with a strange man, I would want to tell you I completely get it. I get how sincere is the desire to be a protector, how much we long to celebrate our good intentions, and how painful it is to be cast as a villain even if only by association. I get how those little kids inside of us only want to love and be loved and how painful it is to feel like we’re never enough, we’re never doing enough, or that we’re intrinsically monstrous. 

    I want us all to look in the mirror and invite every part of us to see the adult men we’ve become. I want those scared little kids to see that they now have an adult—they have you—whose job it is is to love and care for them, keep them safe, and help them find the places where they can belong and be loved. I want those wonderful fighters and fixers and figuring-out parts of us to see the strength and power of your body and mind, to cultivate those powers if it’s their will, and to know it’s not their job to fix the entire world. I want all of those parts to know it’s safe to allow others in your life to struggle, to make choices, to have feelings and opinions you dislike, but it’s not your job to make them different any more than it’s their job to make you different. 

    I want that permission to be okay exactly as you are, and to allow others to be okay as they are, to let you let yourself off the hook, so you can really listen to all the parts of you and make the choices that are right for the whole team. So you can know your heart and your own good intentions and you don’t have to change or fix the reality that some people will think you’re scary at first, or may be guarded around you because of your body. Letting their experiences be, without making yourself wrong, without making them wrong, is what allows them to trust you. Knowing you are capable of violence and not doing it is what makes you safe. 

  • The serpents of our lesser nature.

    The serpents of our lesser nature.

    The other night, I had a dream in which a group of us discussed a quote about “the serpents of our lesser nature.” The group hosted diverse viewpoints and one participant was a strident, cheerful Christian who spoke as though we were already in full agreement with her. I raised the point that the serpent was linked to both Jesus and Satan in the Christian tradition, and she laughed at me as though I was the most silly, ignorant person alive for coming to that notion.

    This sparked a fierce anger that followed me into my waking life, whereupon I got out of bed to google research and confirm that what I said was true before I brushed my teeth. Thus I was reminded that Jesus, in John 3:14, likens himself to the serpent statue Moses lifted up to heal the Israelites. This led me to reread the story told in Numbers, and it is intriguing: it begins with the Israelites wandering the desert, following the leadership of Moses and their god. The wanderers complain of their suffering, the bad food, the lack of water, and this is what spurs their god to send the venomous serpents who killed many with their bites. Then the Israelites repent and recognize they’ve sinned against their god. Moses prays on their behalf, and god gives him the instructions to create the brazen serpent so that whosoever is bitten will survive the bite.

    The serpent is thus venomous and medicinal. It kills and it heals. On its belly, it crawls on the surface of the earth engaged in the survival necessary for all animals with cunning and wisdom. Put on a pole and lifted up, it becomes a medicine, as in the staff of Asclepius. This is a common religious practice that shows up in all kinds of traditions: the figure who causes suffering turned into the protector against, and healer of, that suffering. Who better? In its original sense, a “hierarchy” is the arrangement of qualities by their proximity to divine. Our earthly survival would be lower, or perhaps lesser, than what is more connected to the divine source of things.

    In the story from Numbers, I see so many serpents of lesser nature. The text suggests that the Israelites recognized their complaining and bitterness as a sin that incurred this punishment. If Moses had called me in to do therapeutic mediation between God and the Israelites, I would likely point out that it makes sense for a group that just escaped slavery to feel ambivalent about these conditions. After taking great risks and sacrificing much to escape, it might feel like things are worse in the desert with bad food and little water. I might encourage God to explore what about their complaints bothered him so much, and see if he could communicate his needs with a boundary instead of venomous snakes.

    Yet it makes more sense to read this story like it is itself a dream, with the snakes a manifestation of the wanderers’ discontent. The venom might be akin to the emotional poison they inject into each other with their frustrations and resentments about an admittedly harsh and painful fight for bare survival. What’s intriguing is that when the Israelites repent, they ask Moses to pray for the removal of the snakes, but God does not fulfill that request. Instead, Moses is given instructions to make a medicine that instead heals those bitten by the snakes. There is no undoing, only transmutation. The poison itself may be part of the medicine.

    A Jungian reading would see this at this as the mythological enactment of a psychological process by which the lesser serpent becomes the greater serpent. First we must witness the harm done from reactivity—when we lashed out because we felt scared, or weak, or small, or vulnerable. Then we transform that lashing out into the symbol of its healing, lifting it up to be witnessed and offered to those who offended us. We let everyone know that we see what happened, what transmitted the harm, and what can restore us back into health.

    Yet this does not complete the process the dream is trying to enact in me. Dreams do not tell you what you already know, they point to what you need to recognize. In my own soul, I begrudgingly must wonder if the serpent of my lesser nature might the anger that motivated me to google Bible stories before my morning coffee, then wish I could go back to sleep to tell off that lady in my dream. As hard as it may be to believe, I think some folks might question whether that is a reasonable use of one’s precious life force. Being belittled, mocked, or thought stupid has been a big button in my life—it riles up all my protectors in a fruitless battle to demand to be taken seriously.

    Which suggests that chipper, mocking Christian woman was herself another serpent of my lesser nature. For I can see her venom within me at my lowest points in life, when self-righteousness and sneering intellectual superiority sneak out to give my wounded ego a band-aid. Even when I think I’m calmly rising above a disagreement, the fangs come out. “I’m not going to argue about this,” I’ll say like an exhausted reasonable adult, immediately following it with a parting jab or argument that shows I am arguing about it. It’s dishonest. To name these vulnerabilities feels like giving a weapon to those who now know how to rile me up. Yet now here they are, woven to this pole, so I can lift them up as medicine.

  • 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 to a pack it would run toward whatever looks welcoming. The other is so suspicious of groups that it mistrusts and wants to flee anyone whose agenda seems suspect—and to this dog, most agendas are suspect. Yet in running away from each other, the tether binding them both ties tight, and they falter in their missions, and they turn and attack each other in their longings to be free to seek what they desire.

    Two little dogs jumping on each other, both leashed to the same human.

    In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben talks about the difference between trees deeply rooted in an established forest versus the “city kids.” In the forest, the trees connect with each other through root, leaf, and an extensive mycelial network that helps them to know about the other trees. Trees rich in resources can send nutrients and support to those having a rougher season. But urban trees are unsupported and unconstrained. They grow too quickly and die sooner. They cannot help each other because their roots do not connect.

    One of the manifestations of the war of belonging within me was intense anxiety and social pressure. When interacting with people I didn’t know, I was afraid to take any risks because I didn’t know the rules and expectations. I was afraid of alienating them by crossing a line I didn’t know about, so I learned to be quiet and fade into the background until I had a sense of the culture. If people were too warm, I backed away. When making small-talk, I would shut down and get overwhelmed with self-critique about how stupid I sounded, or how I didn’t know what next to say.

    The isolation of COVID enacted a strange alchemy. One thing I learned was how much I needed human connection, though I deeply enjoy my alone time. When I re-emerged into making small talk with other people, I realized it was so much easier than I’d thought. All you do is talk about stuff. If they’re not interested in that stuff you talk about other stuff. It doesn’t even matter what stuff you talk about because the whole point is just to connect and build rapport. I thought I had to be interesting, or witty, or profound, and that made it much harder to connect and probably pushed people away who read my hesitation as aloofness rather than a desperate desire to figure out how to connect.

    The other side of that, was realizing that when I felt the conversation was boring or foundering, it wasn’t all on me. That’s a two way problem. The other person isn’t showing up with presence or authenticity. They’re not investing energy into the connection, perhaps mirroring the lack of energy on my side, or perhaps for other reasons. I you take the risk to be honest and connect, and they choose to hide and obfuscate, there’s not much else you can do about them. The real question becomes how much you want to invest in this connection.

    Along with this liberating new perspective on small-talk came the extension toward belonging. What if I just belonged because I’m here? What if belonging wasn’t something to run toward or away from but something just to be in and cultivate in the connections that really work for me?

    Focusing on those connections has been deeply restorative and important, and after a time I find myself ready to expand again. I start to see that when you only surround yourself with people who validate and love you, the rest of the world looks really scary. That begins to have diminishing returns. We lose some of our hardiness and practice in the face of adversity. Supportive relationships should feel like a safe harbor that will always be there to welcome us as we return from our adventures, to regroup and relax. But if we never leave, it starts to feel stale. We perhaps begin to find little faults in the harbor or fixate on the little moments of invalidation and unsafety that are inevitable in human communication.

    But that’s what belonging brings us. A harbor. A safety net. A crew that has our back. A place we can tend and nurture, and a place from which we can launch and return. And it’s made of these little moments of connecting, of feeling our ruptures and risking reconnection, or finding the people and places safe enough for us to risk vulnerability. For so long I thought community was something that had to be made through laborious work with just the right people, just the right rules, the right shared values. But rules and work are the head. Connection comes from the heart. The most perfect guidelines and group agreements fail when the heart is not engaged. It’s worth, for a time, dropping the expectations and finding how the heart wants to connect today.

  • An Inventory of Dead and Living Language

    An Inventory of Dead and Living Language

    Lately I have been taking inventory of my beliefs, my ideals, and my guiding philosophies. One focus of reflection is language that once felt vital and inspiring but now feels dead, or at least murky. Words like “health,” “liberation,” and “manifestation,” once felt so vibrant. After years of repetition, mission creep, and marketing campaigns, I no longer know what they mean to me.

    An image of pink flowers, some blossoming and some rotting.

    All of these leaves grow from a living tree, and my hope is to find the vitality at the source of the tree. At times I doubt there is a tree at all. At other times, I feel the tree with such vitality and urgency that it sends me back out into the world fighting and laughing. But I can confuse the leaves with the tree, which becomes problematic when the leaves grow dry. Are they shriveled dry leaves ready to be shed, or are they simply needing more light and water to be renewed?

    Health and Wellness

    These words feel increasingly like knives, like “shoulds.” They are judgment words pointed to promote a political or marketing agenda. There’s no coherent philosophy or objective measure to use in assessing health. A culture war, rather, rages around definitions of health. Is it healthy to take pills or supplements? To be vaccinated or to drink your own urine? What attitudes and behaviors are healthy? Is it healthy to eat a high-fat diet or a carb-heavy diet?

    The etymological root of “health” is wholeness, making it a synonym for integrity. These days I think “health” is measurable by our values, goals, and behavior. We can be healthy with chronic disease, if we accept the disease and what must be done to live as close as possible to the life we want. We can be healthy in accepting our limitations and giving up the life we thought we wanted. We can be healthy in working to be less limited. But that’s a very psychotherapist-y view of health.

    Manifestation

    Once this word conveyed a world of magic: to manifest something that before did not exist. We could manifest spirits, books, special objects, relationships. These days, I mostly see the word on social media advertisements about manifesting lots of money or markers of success and status. It’s implicitly I-centered, as though the one who makes manifest is the elevated one who does things to the world to get manifestations. In that realm of thinking, the elevated individual, lies this increasingly disturbing rhetoric about other people being “bots” or “NPCs” with no subjectivity of their own.

    What feels vibrant in the term is the sense of participating in the world and being in relationship with larger forces. I’ve never loved the term “co-create” though the concept is useful—it’s just a word that doesn’t feel flowing to say or write. Yet it’s approaching what I think is true. Whatever is manifested arises from a field of relationships in which you are only one ingredient. To make a beautiful wooden sculpture manifest, I could have the money to buy it—that’s the easy way—or the blade and the skills to carve one from good wood. But I don’t create the sturdy branch from which I carve the sculpture—that was manifested by the tree. And I don’t possess the spirit that inspired me to discover the sculpture within the branch, that emerges in a flash from beyond, or from the dance of skill, blade, and wood.

    Liberation

    When I first learned about liberation theology movements in high school, the word “liberation” had so much edge and potency. Using the teachings of Jesus Christ to validate direct action and the resistance of political violence, disenfranchisement, and oppression. It’s become a central word in my spiritual practice, comparable to “enlightenment” in its expression of a state of spiritual realization that comes from diligent work.

    Yet these days the word feels not so much dead as murky and conflicted. What warrants the word? Is it middle class white liberal self-serving to use the word “liberation” for my own spiritual and therapeutic practice? Does it diminish those fiercer forms of liberation?

    When I think of liberation, I think of consciousness and agency. We are laden with cultural conditioning, habit, political oppression, and economic exploitation. All of these, to very different intensities, encourage us to live quiet, unconsidered, asleep lives of bare survival. Bringing the light of awareness into this domains, waking up to their realities, and seeing the potential within that has been compromised by these forces makes the work of liberation possible. What feels liberatory is having more power, more choice, the will and capacity to influence the conditions of our lives according to our personal and collective wills.

    Quitting nicotine use could be a smaller liberatory act. It requires looking at my conditioning and habit and creating a space of awareness that makes choice possible. It divests my energy and money from the people who profit off my actions and makes it available for whatever else I wish to do. Going on strike seems a bigger liberatory act in demonstrating the power of the group and using it to set the terms of your labor. The work of creating autonomous spaces within oppressive regimes would be a much larger kind of liberation.

    Aliveness and Vitality

    These words feel the most fresh and intriguing. Aliveness and vitality convey a subjective feeling of being in the world that is a step beyond awareness. For a long time, my work on awareness and consciousness was in the employ of scared parts of me that resisted aliveness. One of my counseling mentors used the word “aliveness” for one of her consult groups, and then I began practicing Aikido, where we occasionally speak of the aliveness in our practice. The word kindled a fire within me and scared me. Being alive is quite vulnerable. You have so much at stake and so much to lose that’s not hidden behind veils of distraction and numbness.

    But also it makes life so much sweeter, so much more satisfying, and in a paradoxical way it makes life easier to lose. What I notice is those who are most afraid of death also tend to avoid aliveness. The fear of losing everything is so great that they avoid having anything worth losing. Yet the people who seem most alive to me take in more nourishment, and seem to have an easier time accepting the little and larger deaths that come with living. Losing is less scary because there’s a confidence that they can get more of what they need. Losing is less scary because they’ve delighted in eating as much of the apple as they could, and the rest is a gift to the earth.

  • The Three Centers: The Head Center

    Over the past several years, my spiritual and personal practice has become more organized around the energetic structure of the three centers in the body—belly, heart, and head.
    In this video, I continue with the discussion of the head center that supports watery, intuitive, receptive listening connection when supported by a connected heart and strong belly. I also discuss concerns about holding critical thinking with intuitive practice.

  • The Three Centers: The Heart Center

    Over the past several years, my spiritual and personal practice has become more organized around the energetic structure of the three centers in the body—belly, heart, and head.
    In this video, I continue with the discussion of the heart center that supports airy, spacious connection when supported by a strong, energized belly. I contrast this with watery, possessive, intense connection.

  • The Smartest Guy in the Room

    There’s not a single gift that doesn’t come with consequences. Being smart is absolutely one of those—revered, honored, and despised all at once. We love smart people when they agree with us and uphold our beliefs, and we hate them when we feel belittled and condescended to by them.

    There’s a particular expression of this, the Smartest Guy in the Room. This person could be any gender, but he’s usually a guy. Not because guys are smarter—in fact, the Smartest Guy in the Room is sometimes very ill-informed and utterly lacking in self-awareness. More because guys tend to be the ones who confidently put forth their views, right or wrong. It’s socialization, it’s how testosterone increases confidence, it’s whatever.

    Smart men, smart people, are lovely. Intelligence is one path toward humble awe of the complexity of the world. The more we learn, the more we realize it’s impossible to learn everything. The more deeply you understand a subject, the more you understand its limits.

    So many smart people get ignored because they offer their views with a well-earned humility, unwilling to pretend to know more than they know. This is one of the reasons why reporting on science and medicine tends to be so misleading and awful. Disciplined scientists would never come out and say “This drug will cure cancer” after research. They’d at best say “99.9% of all cancer patients who took this drug completely recovered with no signs of cancer.”

    The discipline is to stay with what you can observe and prove. To only say what you know for sure, and leave space for future growth of knowledge, and the possibility of being proven wrong. That’s when science is a living discipline.

    But pop science is awash in certitude and grandiose statements. And the Smartest Guy in the Room is the one who lives in that world. They’re more certain than everyone else, even if only to be certain that everyone is wrong. They’re the contrarians. They see which way the wind is blowing and find a way to move against it.

    There’s a wisdom in contrarianism. Contrarians are good tests of tolerance and safety in a group. Often contrarians grew up in places where dissent was punished or harmful certitudes put forward without question. When they experience a space where they feel there is too much harmony and agreement, it’s almost instinctive. They have to test it. “You can’t really be as enlightened as you pretend to be.” “There’s always a flaw in the argument.”

    And there is! There is always a vulnerability in any argument. There’s always an exceptional case not accounted for in one’s generality. There’s always something left out.

    Where the Smartest Guy gets annoying is when they act like nobody else has ever considered this before, and they’re in a room of people who could calmly explain why they’ve considered the contrary perspective and find it not compelling.

    As they grow in influence, the Rebel becomes the Tyrant without even noticing it, because parts of them still experience the world as the marginalized child they once were. Now people calling them out or genuinely critiquing their perspectives are examples of those oppressive forces that wanted to shut down dissent, without the Smartest Guy realizing he’s now the one shutting down dissent and unwilling to engage in honest, humble dialogue.

    An image of a person in a full suit of armor with a shield and sword.

    Smartest Guy in the Room is a posture of disconnection. It’s a suit of armor draped over the body of a child who really needs to be seen, needs to know they belong and that they’re safe. But people on the outside can only see the armor, not the child within.

    When someone comes to your party in a suit of armor, it’s hard to be soft and welcoming. It’s a moment of tension. It’s like police coming to a peaceful protest in riot gear. The implicit message is We’re not together, I do not trust you. When we’re not trusted, we’re not safe.

    When we see someone show up to our party in a suit of armor, we’re going to get a little aggressive. What’s the armor about? What are you planning here?

    And the child within feel justified in wearing the armor, clings more tightly to the armor, because who would be vulnerable with people like this around? Good thing I showed up prepared!

    The older I get, the less I feel the need for others to know how smart I am. This has opened up a space for more curiosity and connection. I realize I still have much to offer, and I am still loved, even if I’m not the know-it-all pointing out the contradictions in the room.

    It’s a relief, too, to not have to be the smartest guy in the room. We can feel is the value within our words and perspective without anxiously proving how we arrived at that space. We can hear the beautiful echoes of all the ways other people came to the same kinds of knowing without feeling diminished. We can unshoulder the burden of that armor and that sense of mission.