Ruth Cohn MFT

The other morning, I learned a new word. I was elbow-deep in bagel dough in the wee hours. Admittedly I love those awesomely silent insomniac hours when everyone in their right mind is asleep. I do end up sleep-deprived, which I constantly struggle to regulate. But the night sky through our kitchen skylight and the gentle quiet is blessedly peaceful, and some of my most creative moments come out of the dark embrace of the night. And some of the best public radio programs aired at those times. This time, I caught an interview with Roxanne Gay.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Gerontocracy: Stepping Aside, Intergenerational Transmission, Mindfulness:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/gerontocracy-stepping-aside-intergenerational-transmission-mindfulness/

I remember the first book about anorexia I ever found in my desperate search for help. It was called Addiction to Perfection. It was useless like everything else, but it was slim pickings in those days (no pun intended of course!) It did get me thinking, however, about my perfectionism, not only about my body but about everything really. What is that? Where does that kind of arrogance, grandiosity, and delusion come from? In AA, they used to call it “an insult to god.”

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Perfectly Natural: Visibility, Failure, Winning and Losing:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/perfectly-natural-visibility-failure-winning-and-losing/

Sometimes I feel like the mythical cat who lives nine lives, as I think back on my various incarnations, that sometimes seem as if they were not me but someone else. Probably nine is not enough.

I remember way back to my ardent activist days when I traveled a good bit in Latin America, I was also very taken with the textiles of Indigenous people all over the continent. I had tried my hand at weaving but never got too good at it. But I loved collecting beautiful colorful, exquisitely patterned and textured treasures from all over the place. I still have the various pouches, sashes, scarves, table coverings, and even an occasional poncho that I have been carting around with me through the various lives for almost 50 years! Wow! What brought this to mind was a flash memory. Who knows from where these things pop up?

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Base Layer: Weaving, Warmth, Secure:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/base-layer-weaving-warmth-secure/

Perhaps you also get tired of my rhapsodizing about regulation. It is true; I can’t talk about it enough because it is so essential, and perhaps its failure is the essence of the legacy of every kind of trauma: the inability to restore or even ever experience a state of calm, peace, ease, comfort, after an upset of some kind, be it fear, anger, pain, simple startle, or any other disruption. Upset dysregulation is so unpleasant we will go to great lengths to quell or extinguish it, to make it go away.

Certainly, in my case, yet another default to the familiar template, I discovered anorexia. And something about the seeming mastery over hunger, overpowering the drive for nourishment, made me feel powerful and strong: a kind of euphoria, triumph, and numbing of pain. And yet, at the same time, it was a source of terror. I knew that the danger was there to take it too far. That the very state that made me feel strong and powerful, made me feel dizzy, weak, and terrified. What was I doing to myself? I relied on it to manage my pain, and it was simultaneously a well of more pain. Sound familiar?

It was a short hop to discover alcohol when I was 13. Same deal. It anesthetized me so effectively and enabled me to have some semblance of relationships and even have fun. But before long, it presented the familiar pattern: the other side.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, The Dilemma and the Diaspora. Refuge, Regulation… Again, Wisdom:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/the-dilemma-and-the-diaspora-refuge-regulation/

I remember best the inconsistent and ambiguous message and a big word I learned early: assimilate. We got the dual mandate to both blend in and slip under the radar, but not too much. Don’t lose our noble, even superior identity, our martyr’s heritage, and don’t forget what happened to us! I remember the militant Jewish Defense League (JDL) and their battle cry of “Never Again!” although that certainly was not quite my parents’ paradigm. “But don’t stand out either!” And god forbid you intermarry, which would be unforgivable.

The underlying paradox was that the rescuing host nation that received us was simultaneously suspect, dangerous, and threatening. It had both saved us, but the fear persisted, as had happened in their native country; its people could suddenly and dramatically turn on us at any moment. In effect, the source of refuge, safety and welcome, and fear, suspicion, and potential betrayal were in the same people, the same land. Reflecting on this core refugee contradiction, I thought, “Wow! That sounds identical to the familiar Dilemma Without Solution, the heart of neglect trauma. In this dilemma, the infant is faced with a similar insoluble contradiction: the longed-for, beloved other is the very same as the force of danger: loss, abandonment, erratic presence, and/or complete absence.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, The Dilemma and the Diaspora: Refuge, Regulation… Again, Wisdom:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/the-dilemma-and-the-diaspora-refuge-regulation/

Sometimes I wonder if you get tired of my invoking the Stone Age of psychotherapy or the trauma field. I find my mind so often drifting back in time to when I first started connecting dots and ideas. Maybe it comes with being at this as long as I have, or it is a simple fact of aging.

I recently found myself remembering the early days of family systems theory and the then new-to-me concept of patterns originating in the family, replicating themselves like colorful block prints across the fabric of our relationship lives. I have always loved color and pattern, so the image was appealing. I remember making colorful block prints with carved potatoes stamping multi-hued snowflake designs to make home-made wrapping paper. I loved the symmetrical repeating designs. However, it can be somewhat chilling how persistent and powerful the imprinting is of repetitive relationships and personality-dynamics and roles.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, The Dilemma and the Diaspora: Refuge, Regulation… Again, Wisdom:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/the-dilemma-and-the-diaspora-refuge-regulation/

Here in California and 16 other US states, Monday is Indigenous People’s Day. I want to acknowledge it, especially as I have recently been learning how shamefully ignorant I am about the First Nation people of my country. My not atypical public school education, even (mostly) in the highly reputed Palo Alto Unified School District, offered little to no history and culture about our national forbears. (That is of course no excuse for continuing the neglect in my own personal development, especially as one so impassioned about social justice.) Apart from the heinous mistreatment of native peoples, they have suffered the most unforgivable, godforsaken neglect of perhaps any of our minorities, although I am breaking my own rule by comparing worsts. Suffice it to say, unforgivable neglect on top of everything else.

I like the practice I have heard others doing lately of learning and acknowledging on whose native land I now stand and/or live. I am writing this in what is now my dearly loved home and was once Yelamu Ohlone land.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, One on Two Thousand. Outsides, Traumatic Memory, Cultural Neglect:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/one-on-two-thousand-outsides-traumatic-memory-cultural-neglect/

Recently, I heard on public radio that Joan Baez, now 82, had recently released a new documentary film called I Am Noise, and there would be an interview at 5:00 AM the following morning. I made myself a note so I would not miss it, and the following morning, coffee in hand I tuned in. The first thing I heard her say, in her now slightly scratchy voice, was, “The panic attack stuff started early, and then the anxieties just heightened and heightened.” Then she proceeded to gently blast all my idealized misconceptions of her, one by one.

Mimi Farina, Joan’s little sister, alongside her husband Richard was also a folk singer, if far lesser of a star. She died of cancer at age 56 in 2001. But before she did, she approached Joan to break a long family silence about their shared history. Mimi remembered what Joan did not.

Both of them had been sexually abused by their father. A highly respected physicist, philosopher, and educator, who would have thought it, let alone believed it? Joan had long “forgotten” or blocked it from memory, as do many of us with trauma too heinous to “know.” But as Bessel van der Kolk eloquently reminds us, the “Body Keeps the Score.”

In Joan’s case, the flashing scoreboard was certainly familiar to us: panic, anxiety, and relationship hell. At last, Joan found her way to the personal work that would both unlock the lost memory and relieve the misery of dysregulation and what she later recognized as fragmentation.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, One on Two Thousand. Outsides, Traumatic Memory, Cultural Neglect:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/one-on-two-thousand-outsides-traumatic-memory-cultural-neglect/

Although for years I could not make a go of relationships, I would not exactly say I was friendless. I had a cadre of not-exactly imaginary friends. Perhaps you would call them personal heroes, but they were/are real people and very much in my life.

When I was a lonely twelve-year-old, I had a much bigger-than-life poster of Joan Baez on my bedroom wall. Racked with the dysregulated system of my then-unknown trauma and struggling to get through the days, I was soothed looking at her calmly, serene, peaceful face. Most of my heroes were men, but she was an iconic female role model, someone to emulate, a beautiful, creative activist who even hooked up with Bob Dylan, not to mention her exquisite voice. I remember when I used to painfully pedal up Page Mill Road, one of the steepest and most highly regarded (no pun intended!) cycling hills, being comforted and spurred onward, knowing she lived up in those beautiful woods somewhere. I think she still does.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, One on Two Thousand: Outsides, Traumatic Memory, Cultural Neglect:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/one-on-two-thousand-outsides-traumatic-memory-cultural-neglect/

Those who are familiar with my work (and my quirks!) know that I dislike and avoid using the word “triggering.” I don’t like the association with gun violence, and to me it can sound blaming as well. But I wanted to make my point quickly. But additionally, this is an opportunity to clarify that neglect “triggering” or activations are like gunshots with silencers. Rather than a big, dramatic bang, they have a muted, muffled pop. And as with so much else about neglect, they can go unheard and/or misunderstood. Reactions being unobtrusive, the neglect survivor can yet again slip under the radar with their experience and their pain, unseen and unrecognized.

For those of us in any kind of relationship with survivors of neglect trauma, be they partner, client, loved one, and of course oneself, we must be ever reminded that the child of neglect can sniff rejection and abandonment readily under almost any rock, however “innocent” it might be in real-time, prefrontal, rational terms. We may be confronted with “disproportional” and seemingly “irrational” even “crazy” responses/reactions to what is to us misunderstood unintended slights.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Silencers, Lost Time, Quiet, Voice:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/trauma-and-neglect/silencers-lost-time-quiet-voice/

Absence is the perpetuity of loss, the ever-present ache of what is not there and likely never will be. Sometimes, it is, in fact abandonment by death, busyness, illness, too many siblings, simply leaving, or perhaps worst of all, parental withdrawal. Loss, as an experience or expectation, is one of the most potent and persistent features of neglect trauma. Admittedly, I have discovered that I harbored (and still somewhat do) embarrassing denial and avoidance around death, perhaps numbing or cutting off from my feelings when someone important has passed. I am aware that I desperately dreaded the loss of the most important people in my life and was frantic for a good two years when my sister was very sick. I guess I finally began to make some progress as I felt terrible sadness about the deaths of Charlie Watts, Pablo Milanes, and even our little dog Button, But only in the last couple of years. And those are certainly “practice” losses. Not like the most important, closest people in my life. I am aware I still have a ways to go, and I am hoping the timing will be kind.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Silencers, Lost Time, Quiet, Voice:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/trauma-and-neglect/silencers-lost-time-quiet-voice/

Last week I lost my watch. I hate losing things, and I rarely do, having ferocious OCD rituals of rigidly keeping things “always” in the same designated places.

But this first-world problem brought to mind literally and figuratively the recurring theme of lost time. We used to refer to sufferers from severe dissociative disorders as “losing time,” blocks of a day or more that simply could not be accounted for, blanked out. Lately, I hear about it much more in terms of mortality. So many survivors of trauma and neglect find themselves in their fifties and sixties and only newly coming out into the light of pleasure and joy in life. And even younger people grieve over what were supposed to be our “best years,” the mythical imagery of youth, theirs having passed with storms of traumatic activation, paralysis, loneliness, and endless therapy. So much time is seemingly lost. I do say I find that all my pain and loss serve me in some way, but that can be a very hard sell.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Silencers, Lost Time, Quiet, Voice:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/trauma-and-neglect/silencers-lost-time-quiet-voice/

I have had clients who survived their childhood dilemma by “performing.” The poverty of presence and attention meant there was a failure of mirroring, with no one present to reflect back to them who they were.

Rather than growing and exploring organically to what it means to “be me,” from the inside, they rather looked “out there.” Searching for cues and clues about how to garner approval at the least. Growing up and later showing up in our offices, they are frustrated and ashamed by how authenticity eludes them. “I have no idea what I feel and what I like. My husband tells me he grew up being a “fur coat.” He learned well how to be an elegant, even luxurious adornment until, with bitterness, he was old enough to get out.

Neglect is rife with complications of self. I must be ever mindful when I see a client feeling better one day or able to do things in a new way or in a way they have been aspiring to. I must not overshoot or excessively acknowledge or compliment them. They might wind up feeling unseen, or as if I don’t get it, that the terrified parts are still there, and may rear up again at any moment. The parts move and change; dominance and prominence may shift and drift. Disowned parts may not go away.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Earthquake Country. Tectonics, Magma, Shape Shifting:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/earthquake-country-tectonics-magma-shape-shifting/

Some struggling survivors of childhood neglect may berate themselves, complaining of what they might call “fear of intimacy.” Or they might not experience it as “fear” or call it anything, even.

They might not even notice that they simply act on reflex, fleeing from something resembling closeness. They may not recognize it themselves but hear the disgruntled refrain from partners or others attempting to be “loved ones” that they are avoidant in some way. They might be tortured or mystified by loneliness or mystifying relationship “sabotaging” behavior such as being “needlessly” antagonistic (although antagonism is probably rarely, if ever, “needed!) They may recoil from the connection in any number of conscious or unconscious ways. They may, like the old me, look behind them with shame and bafflement at the trail of litter, the detritus of wreckage of relationship tried and failed. The surgeon general in 2023 identified a national “epidemic” of loneliness in the US. I wonder how much of it is rooted in this dilemma.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Earthquake Country. Tectonics, Magma, Shape Shifting:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/earthquake-country-tectonics-magma-shape-shifting/

Living in an earthquake country, the imagery of seismic rumblings is a familiar part of daily life. I went through the “big one” in the Bay Area in 1989, and we all live with the knowledge that there will be another good-sized shaker sooner or later.

The wiser among us have their preparedness kits safely stowed in their basements. It was probably fourth grade when I first started learning about plate tectonics, the science of the shifting slabs of rock that divide the earth’s crust. Not far under a seemingly solid, perhaps placid earth’s surface resides this rocking and rolling, drifting landscape, moving constantly and reshaping the exterior of the land, occasionally in a dramatic, even violent way. I found myself thinking of this craggy lithosphere as I pondered the fragmentation of selves, which in some ways seems quite similar.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Earthquake Country: Tectonics, Magma, Shape Shifting:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/earthquake-country-tectonics-magma-shape-shifting/

I was always baffled (and sometimes admittedly dismayed,) by the way that my husband, the quintessential child of neglect, coped with the annoyances of all-too-common Bay Area bumper-to-bumper traffic. If we found ourselves mired in a jam, he would swiftly grab the nearest exit, jump off the freeway, and then follow a circuitous seemingly endless zigging and zagging route of surface streets, getting us to our destination probably no sooner, than had we continued to crawl with the glacial freeway traffic. But he always said, it was a phenomenal relief to simply be moving. Similarly, standing in lines was pretty out of the question for us. Go to a restaurant without a reservation? No way! Waiting and boredom are an agony for the child of neglect, and I began increasingly to observe this unbearable intolerance, the excruciating impatience and aversion to dead or empty time. Even if the alternative was pretty darn unpleasant.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Your Attention, Please: ADD? Waiting, Desolation:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/trauma-and-neglect/your-attention-please-add-waiting-desolation/

One of the first signature neglect “markers” I observed, back in the early days when my anecdotal research on neglect spontaneously began, was what I came to call the “Three P’s” of Neglect: Passivity, Procrastination and Paralysis.

Particularly in the interpersonal world, these people appeared slow to initiate, follow through, complete things, and they were prone to collapse, feeling powerless or defeated. I began to see how these difficulties seemed to coincide with challenges around focus and concentration.

Studying neurofeedback, I began to understand what was to me a whole new world of brain frequencies.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Your Attention, Please: ADD? Waiting, Desolation: https://ruthcohnmft.com/trauma-and-neglect/your-attention-please-add-waiting-desolation/

Not infrequently a (perhaps unwitting) survivor of neglect shows up in my office toting a hefty diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder, (ADD.) They may have been so labeled by a know-it-all partner, possibly the very one who dragged them into this therapy. Maybe they were tagged with it in childhood, along with the accompanying prescription for amphetamine drugs.

Never fond of diagnostic labels in general, (and particularly when assigned by one’s spouse or partner!) I listen with curiosity and perhaps some wariness. ADD and ADHD have seemed to be ready and convenient or “diagnoses du jour” in the last decade or two. They seem to me vague and ill defined, and frankly I shudder to think of all the kids growing up, often struggling on those speedy meds.

It was only when I started studying neurofeedback that I began to understand a little more about what is going on in the brain of the attention afflicted. I wondered about the possible correlation between attentional difficulties and early neglect. Certain patterns began increasingly to make sense to me, as I connected dots I have often seen.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Your Attention, Please: ADD? Waiting, Desolation: https://ruthcohnmft.com/trauma-and-neglect/your-attention-please-add-waiting-desolation/

As we head into mid-life, it is natural and typical to think about the passing of time, what is behind us and what lies ahead; what we have and have not achieved or accomplished; what we have treasured, and what we may have missed out on.

Looking ahead, we may contemplate what we want to make sure we do get to before it is too late. Some windows may close if we fail to get there in time.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, S*x Matters: Regulation, S*x-Ed, Voice:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/sex-matters-regulation-sex-ed-voice/

Surely my own parents had tragic, traumatic histories without the benefit of healing. Besides being traumatized by their childhood experiences, my parents then freshly dove into a traumatic immigrant life, with minimal money, post-Holocaust. How do I dare to feel aggression, anger, and even rage when they were simply trying to survive and drag their dysregulated nervous system into a new life? We might say, “They did the best they could,” and many believe saying that is “enough. So, anger about all the “nothing:” all the things that did not happen, feels “wrong,” unsympathetic, not only heartless but clueless. What audacity and meanness are being mad at them? Except that being mad at them makes all the sense in the world. The anger finds itself dragging behind it a mantle of weighty guilt.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Three D, Crowd, Strikes, Charm:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/trauma-and-neglect/crowd-strikes-charm/

I remember growing up, the old adage “Two is company, three is a crowd.” If there were three of us, someone always wound up as the odd one out, “ditched” we used to say. And usually, it would be me, or I would imagine or expect it to be me. As the middle child of three sisters, I was invisible. I have never been particularly taken with the birth order theories, but for whatever reason, I floated around ghostlike for years of my life, expecting to evaporate like smoke, if I ever existed at all. I certainly never expected to exist in anyone’s mind when not in their direct line of sight. It seemed, more than likely that any childhood friend lost interest in me very quickly when ”a better offer” came along. I came to assume that was simply my birthright, which, of course, works quite effectively to make it so.

I write this as I wrap up my stay in the historic town of Oxford, UK and my first European trauma conference.

Oxford is spectacularly beautiful and quaint with elaborately carved steeples and towers, tall, sculptured ancient walls and lavish picturesque, manicured, English gardens. For me it is an especially powerful wash of history as my grandmother walked these streets and her long silent voice echoes in these halls. I have always been proud to say she was one of the first women to graduate from this iconic, esteemed university.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Three D: Crowd, Strikes, Charm:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/trauma-and-neglect/crowd-strikes-charm/

What happens when the mother/caregiver is not able to provide either a consistent presence, or due to circumstance past or present, trauma past or present, is unable to calm and settle themselves, restore their own balance, let alone that of the dependent other? Or is not loving? The child then gazes into (or attempts to) a terrified, terrifying, angry, depressed, blank face. And god forbid, what if there is no face there at all? This is the beginning of the story of developmental trauma: the experience of being overwhelmed begins the agony of lonely dysregulation.

Attachment is a survival need like food, water, and oxygen. I might add that when the attachment is withdrawn, the child, and most of all the very young child experiences that withdrawal as a lethal threat to their very existence. Loss or withdrawal of attachment, whether it be through an ordinary life in a family, poverty, violence, intoxication, illness, death, or countless other possibilities, endangers survival and, ultimately, existence. It constitutes a traumatic shock, what Dr. Frank Corrigan has aptly named attachment shock.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Not Sloth: Blame, Freeze, Recovery:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/not-sloth-blame-freeze-recovery/

Painfully often, I hear laments from clients and occasionally from myself, about squandered time.

It may be the understandable and often enough blaming impatience about how unbearably, interminably slow it is, if possible at all, to feel better after childhood trauma and neglect.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Not Sloth: Blame, Freeze, Recovery:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/not-sloth-blame-freeze-recovery/

Although I was convinced that it “could never happen to me,” queen of endurance that I considered myself to be, when Figley offered his first compassion fatigue training workshop, my hubris did not stop me from hopping on the plane to Tallahassee, Florida in a hot minute. Admittedly, the prospect, even the slim possibility, perhaps scared me, as I heard and read about young, idealistic, inspired, and intelligent clinicians having careers, not to mention joie de vivre aborted or cut short, traumatized by their work.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, “The World Is Too Much With Us”: Work, Ancestry, Joy:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/the-world-is-too-much-with-us/

I have the good fortune of having an enlightened partner who insists on packing me off to Hawaii at least three times a year. Granted, the Hawaiian Islands are a locus of tragedy at the moment, but hopefully will not be for long. It is, for me, a happy place of such beauty: glorious flowers and plants, birds, fruit and fish, sky and sea, and great peace. I am grateful to have such a refuge to go back to again and again.

Miraculously, it is the one place where I can sleep. But it is also essential to strive to find my balance at home, to make sure and create enough time and space for beauty: art, music, time with loved ones, spiritual renewal, bread and cheese. To not let time for love and pleasure slip away.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, “The World Is Too Much With Us”: Work, Ancestry, Joy:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/the-world-is-too-much-with-us/

I remember in 1995 when trauma expert and himself a Viet Nam veteran, Charles Figley, published his then-new book, Compassion Fatigue. It was a novel concept to us then.

Some trauma therapists were calling the same phenomenon “vicarious traumatization:” essentially infecting one’s own heart and nervous system with perhaps “too much” horror and pain and too much empathy. I remember gobbling up that book.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, “The World Is Too Much With Us”: Work, Ancestry, Joy:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/on-my-mind/the-world-is-too-much-with-us/

As a trauma therapist, I have invariably found that the unbearable morass, challenge or chronic failure in the world of relationship was what most brought survivors to therapy. It seemed as if almost anything else was more bearable, but not being able to make a go of friendship, intimacy, parenthood, other family ties drove a kind of urgency that “forced the issue.”

It was simply too hard, or too hard to keep on trying in vain to figure it out. Not that I was any kind of expert myself, but I knew plenty about what did not work, I could certainly read and learn, and intuitively empathy made sense to me.

Although people seemed to think treating others as one would like to be treated oneself, was a good thing, which is certainly true, treating people as they would like to be treated is even better. Why wouldn’t that be obvious? Most likely because of the preoccupation with oneself.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Blind Spot, Memory, Therapy, “Oversight”:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/trauma-and-neglect/blind-spot-memory-therapy-oversight/

Sometimes, I am struck by the poverty of verbal language, how deficient it can seem in conveying its message. Such was the case when recently I was visited by a fleeting whiff, almost like a less than momentary blast of fragmentary memory. It was so lightning-quick, and then vanished, almost like a trick of perception. Except it was so searing and real as to be unmistakable. It carried the label, however deficient, of my timeless, signature and chronic childhood loneliness.

Although it has hardly been a secret or a mystery that I was a desperately and hopelessly isolated little flailing misfit, what was jarring now, was the unbearably wrenching sadness that I did not remember having felt quite this way before. Might that be the most weighty and devastating bequest of trauma and neglect? Perhaps. I found myself pondering that question.

✏️ Read more in my latest blog, Blind Spot, Memory, Therapy, “Oversight”:

https://ruthcohnmft.com/trauma-and-neglect/blind-spot-memory-therapy-oversight/