Browse Topics
Psychology
Finding George
Michael and I had a daughter, two years old, and I was pregnant with our second child. I was supposed to be happy, but I didn’t like my husband to touch me; in fact, I didn’t like my husband. I’d gone from the cage of my parents’ home to a cage of my own making. I could hardly breathe.
June 2004Telling You
The worst thing that could possibly have happened was that I fell in love with my therapist, a man whose hand I’d held briefly and anonymously in the spring, not knowing that by August I’d be in therapy with him.
November 2003
What Was Hidden: Looking Deeper Into Christianity
An Interview With Richard Smoley
The inner Christian path, as I understand it, involves walking a fine line between the two extremes. You face all your inner issues rigorously and impartially; you want to see everything there is inside the teeming ocean of the psyche. But — and this is an important but — you are not identified with it. At the back of your mind there must always be an awareness that you are not your “passions” (to use the traditional Christian term), that there is something in you that is awake and alive and, incidentally, immortal. This is the true “I,” the pure consciousness, the “light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” It sees everything in you impartially and objectively — but also with profound compassion.
September 2003
A Phenomenology Of Panic
Part of the problem with panics, Gene taught me, is the very sense that there is a problem. This creates a bogus responsibility for either oneself or someone else to solve it. If the patient can’t solve it, he is not only panicking; he is a failure. If he passes the responsibility to a clinician, he loses power and gives up the right to direct his own life.
April 2003
Stigmata
I can’t dismiss religion and the girl with the stigmata with a sweep of my hand, for I feel a soul pushing at the walls of my breast. I believe in enlightenment and that our paths are divine. There’s no proof of it, but energy descends on me, and I feel like one raindrop amid thousands, all refracting light.
August 2002
Sunbeams
May 2001The first mystery is simply that there is a mystery, a mystery that can never be explained or understood, only encountered from time to time. Nothing is obvious. Everything conceals something else.
A Hell Of Mercy
Some Thoughts On Clinical Depression And The Dark Night Of The Soul
And still I persisted in the belief that my condition was manageable, that I was, more or less, steering the careening vehicle of my life. That is, until my mother died, terribly, of stomach cancer, in the winter of my forty-first year. That was when the wheels came off.
March 2001Body Language
A Conversation With Marc Ian Barasch On Illness And Healing
In the dream, there was a sacred, intelligent starfish that represented — that was — my thyroid. That was the exact language of the dream: “sacred, intelligent starfish.” And in the way that these healing dreams — sometimes called “big” or “numinous” dreams — seem to work, this one had a dimension of synchronicity with waking reality: The next day, on the spur of the moment, I went with my daughter to the Boston Science Museum, where I’d never been before. They happened to have an exhibit on starfish, and someone there put a starfish in my hand and said to me, “They can regenerate.”
January 2000The End Of The Line
A jumper on the Bay Bridge, a last Christmas present, a drink of water
October 1999
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