As I wrote in Navigating The Space Between Stories, many of us are experiencing more change, more quickly, with more uncertainty, than we’re used to. To meet this need for support during times of change, Dr. Jeffrey Rediger and I are hosting a live, in person healing retreat for health care providers and therapists TRANSITIONS & TRANSFORMATION in Mill Valley, CA. (Please join us if you’re a health care provider or therapist in a time of transition!)  When we’re facing times of transition, it can be tempting to bury our heads in the sand, busy ourselves so we don’t have to think ..read more

Ever since things started opening back up again after the pandemic, I’m very aware of how much change we’re all facing. We are definitely in the “space between stories,” when one story is definitely in its death throes, and the next story has not yet made itself crystal clear. This space between, the liminal space of not knowing, is a tender time, a time to treat with kid gloves, a time for self compassion. Personally, I’m dealing with quite a few transitions of my own. I have very newly acquired empty nest, so new that it still makes me tear up a bit when I write those words- “empty nest.” A ..read more

  In Understanding Attachment Styles: A Key to Trauma-Informed Dating & Relating, we talked about how understanding your attachment style (and learning to spot the attachment signals of someone else’s attachment style) can make dating easier. We also talked about secure attachment, and why it’s the jackpot of the attachment world (which can feel super unfair to those of us who didn’t win that random lottery.) Then we dove into the styles of insecure attachment- anxious/ambivalent and avoidant. In today’s post, we’ll explore the doozy of attachment styles- disorganized attac ..read more

In Understanding Attachment Styles: A Key to Trauma-Informed Dating, Part 1, we talked about how understanding your attachment style (and learning to spot the attachment signals of someone else’s attachment style) can make dating easier. We also talked about secure attachment, and why it’s the jackpot of the attachment world (which can feel super unfair to those of us who didn’t win that random lottery.) In this post, we’ll dive into the styles of insecure attachment- anxious/ambivalent, avoidant, and disorganized. As you read these, try to put judgment aside. I know it’s painful to inte ..read more

The post Revisiting Summer 2020 & Black Lives Matter- For Juneteenth first appeared on Lissa Rankin ..read more

Considering what a risky, potentially activating, possibly fun experience dating can be, I wanted to take some time to discuss how understanding attachment styles might make dating easier, more fruitful, less consuming of time spent on the wrong compatibilities, and less painful, because you’ll take certain behaviors less personally. Sometimes, it’s really not that “he’s just not that into you.” It’s someone’s attachment trauma. My 2021 Online Dating Experiment In December of 2020, when I read for the second time Jeffrey Rediger’s book Cured, written by a Harvard psychiatrist a ..read more

*Photo credit Monique Feil “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.” ―William James Many people walk through the world mired in the mud of material reality, unilluminated by the mysteries of the sacred.  When our orientation to the world revolves only around a cold, hard, scientific materialism, stripped of the holy spark of all creation,  life can feel pointless, meaningless, and hard to bear. Everyday life can feel like drudgery and grunt work, like the only point to ..read more

Heartbreak is one of the most painful kinds of traumas. When we risk letting our hearts open, we also risk getting our hearts broken. The vulnerability of the open heart, the tenderness of attachment and heart connection, makes us especially raw when someone else betrays our connection or abandons the connection or otherwise leaves the heart frayed. The tragedy of relational trauma in early childhood, usually with our caregivers, is that we’re then set up to repeat the heartbreak of childhood in adult relationships. If our caregivers were not safe to attach to, or if we had to earn approval a ..read more

  We can’t read the news these days without reflecting on power and how those who shamelessly abuse power are destroying the world we know. The way I see it when I enter meditative states and vision a future I’d want to leave to my daughter, humans have been playing power games for as long as we’ve existed. With the exception of perhaps a few uncorrupted Indigenous communities that did not get contaminated and traumatized by colonization and genocide, humans, at least those descended from colonizers and those who enslaved people and committed genocide, seem to think that the way to “win ..read more

Although we have a ways to go, the zeitgeist is catching up to the idea that 85-90% of medical conditions are caused by or exacerbated by psychological trauma, and we all have been traumatized to some degree. Science now understands the physiology of how disease-inducing dysregulation caused by the impact of trauma on our nervous systems, immune systems, hormonal systems, inflammatory systems, and epigenetic influences on our DNA expression lies behind most hard to treat medical conditions.  We now know that the body is a repository for trauma, and its symptoms may betray the secrets we ..read more