upDates to the Podcast

        I am working to gather professional interviews to support the personal testimonies collected from former patients. I’m deeply grateful to the brave souls who have opened their memories and hearts to me.
One of my own lifelong challenges has been memory. It’s a consequence of my traumatic childhood. Long ago, I discovered dissociation as a way to survive the emotional and physical violence I witnessed and endured. Dissociation worked—it allowed me to keep going—but at a cost. It made me seem remote, disorganized, even inept. Few recognized it for what it was: a defense.
We all have defenses. Trauma wears many disguises—depression, rage, narcissism, addiction. Each of us mixes our own survival elixir, swallowing it whenever we feel powerless or overwhelmed. 
The trauma specialist Janina Fisher created a chart that maps these survival strategies in a way that makes sense of them. Her work shows that true recovery from early trauma does not come from intellectual analysis alone. Neuroscience now helps us understand why: dissociation is the opposite of recovery. It numbs awareness, dulls perception, and can keep us from noticing what is happening to us in real time. In that state, we can go for years unable to truly take charge of our lives.
Learning about this gave me the missing link—why twenty-five years of misguided therapy only reinforced the patterns I had been raised with, the ones that taught me to fail as an artist, a friend, and a parent. It was all in plain sight, but I could not see it.
Group therapy, at its best, is meant to be a safe space. That safety is what allows genuine insight to emerge—because our fear state is no longer shutting down our capacity to think or observe. A group based on “hot seat” tactics, by contrast, is inherently destructive. It stirs fear, reinforces defenses, and ultimately works against change.