Notes on validation, adolescence, and the work of becoming for everyone

The childhood taunting rhyme—Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me—may have been well-intended to help toughen children’s skin in the face of playground name-calling, teasing, and just plain meanness. However, there could be no words more false, and, if taken as truth, more damaging. Words spoken and unspoken can break hearts, a sense of self, and sometimes even a life. Have you had clients who come into therapy claiming they’ve had no traumatic eve

January 21, 2026 — I found my way to being a therapist in a meandering way, much like many of my other pivotal life choices. I actually had set out to save the world after 9/11 happened in 2001. Though I wasn’t sure what it was I would do that was going to save it. I first considered going back to school to get my masters in creative writing with a specialization in poetry. But I couldn’t see my way to being a legendary poet that was going to change the world, much less save

January 7, 2026 — Life threw some heavy curve balls my way over the month of December, both professionally and personally. Life is like that sometimes. I’m not above throwing my temper tantrums at fate, destiny, or chance–whatever it is that we call those curveballs. I shed tears, ranted and raved a bit at the bureaucratic capitalistic entities that were responsible for a major setback at the beginning of the month. On the personal side, tears were shed as well, and old grief

December 24, 2025 — Allow me to meander in this post. Stay with me. We will arrive, I promise. Time is a funny thing, and at the Winter’s Solstice, this is where my mind goes. This weird way of marking the path from the birth bed to the death bed. I suppose it’s not that time is weird. It’s the way we play with it, cram it into little boxes labeled with numbers. What is a day? A week? An eon? What is a moment? If we pay attention we begin to realize that all of the moments of

December 11th 2025 - We should be talking about politics in our church youth groups, in the classroom, in therapy, and around the kitchen table. The Muskogee poet Joy Harjo writes in Perhaps the World Ends Here: It is here [at the kitchen table] that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women. . . . Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves

November 26, 2025— The summer just before I turned 13, I worked hard to earn money to go see a play at the local theatre, one that I had been waiting eagerly to see. I earned the last little bit I needed by washing the family station wagon. I can see the scene all these years later as clear as day. A hot summer’s day in Virginia, shorts and a tee shirt, my hair its usual mess, my just-adolescent body still thin and straight. The job complete and the money earned. I was so ear

November 12, 2025 — In the previous two posts (here and here), I shared stories from my own experiences with compassion fatigue. More precisely, it was empathy fatigue—the empathic overload that comes from caring deeply for my students’ suffering. I often found myself in empathic distress, overwhelmed by sadness for them, and with little emotional energy left for my family or my own children. Empathy fatigue is a kind of emotional depletion—the feeling that the heart has been

October 29, 2025—In my previous post, I wrote about how I finally learned to set down all that I carried while working with street-involved youth on Capitol Hill in Seattle. It was a long journey—from taking on the burdens of vulnerable young people in unstable, high-risk situations, to realizing how deeply that weight was affecting my health, to understanding that the healing lay not in letting it go but in letting it be. Today, I want to explore that a little more deeply: H

October 15, 2025—It was 2005. In the four years since 9/11, my whole life had changed—some of it by choice, some because life simply happened to me. That August, I began a journey that would alter everything. When we look back on the paths that brought us to where we are, we can often see the choice points—the pivots, the crossroads—and we can point to them and say, Here. Right here, my life changed. But we rarely know it at the time. That August, I started a new job at an al