Author’s Note: If you’ve experienced sexual abuse or assault, the following post could be potentially triggering. You can contact The National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 1–800–656–4673.

Perhaps you’ve met him.

The stranger at the bar who buys you a drink — and throws a fit when you push away his groping hands and decline his invitation to come home with him.

Or your supervisor who offers you a promotion — and then revokes it when you turn down his inappropriate advances after office hours.

Maybe it’s the partner who buys you lavish gifts — expecting in exchange that you…

When he told me I’d “lost my mind,” I wouldn’t have been quick to disagree.

The last time someone called me “crazy”, I was indeed standing face-to-face with my inner madness. In yet another failed attempt at romantic love, years of traumatic memories had come crashing in over my head. I was lost in a savage sea of post-traumatic flashbacks, floundering like a panic-stricken child thrown overboard without a life jacket. …

As a teen, I was an avid reader. I had two or three bookcases in my bedroom — together they spanned nearly an entire wall — and a pile of a few current reads that would sit in my designated hangout corner of the room.

I still have my childhood copy of Alan Watts’ book “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, a book that I first read as a high schooler. Nearly two decades later, the well-worn book is ridden with dog-eared pages that have allowed me to return to its most poignant passages again and again throughout the years.

The book…

Editor’s Note: If you’ve experienced sexual abuse or assault, the following post could be potentially triggering. You can contact The National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 1–800–656–4673.

Just a moment ago, all of me was all here. Now a piece of me is somewhere else, gone missing.

Sometimes I can pinpoint what caused it. Sometimes I can’t.

All I know is this: In the place of the whole, integrated woman I was a moment ago, there’s now a part of my soul that feels like the black and white photo of a little girl on a milk carton. …

When I was a little girl I believed in three things: the power of prayer, the value of compassion, and my duty to service. So when my parents sprang the “eat your spinach because there are kids starving in Africa” argument, I felt a sense of compassion and duty surging through my veins. I went upstairs to my bedroom, kneeled on the hardwood floor, looked out the window, and began to pray.

“God,” I whispered, “It’s not fair that I have everything and those kids in Africa are suffering. It’s not fair and I want you to let me carry…

A few months back, a friend reached out to me confiding about some personal challenges he was facing. He was considering going into therapy, but as many do, he had reservations about the process. He knew I had been a long-time therapy client as a sexual trauma survivor, so when the time came to make the decision, he came to me.

“Did it work? Did it help?” he had asked. He confessed his biggest fear was that he would go to therapy, only to find that the therapist wasn’t able to solve his problems. He couldn’t bear that possibility —…

This year, I spent my New Year’s Eve in isolation. A possible COVID-19 exposure had turned into a fever, leading to a test, and culminating in a positive test result three days before New Year’s Eve. If I was to spend the holiday alone, I wanted it to be meaningful. New Year’s is a symbol of transition: it’s a time to release the past, to reground ourselves in our values and intentions, and to look ahead towards manifesting our future.

What better way to honor the holiday than to invite a new practice into my home that honors its essence…

The other day I was out for a drive with a friend when an innocuous song came on the radio. “She’s really good,” said my driver. “She was doing well” — he added — “you heard her on the radio quite a bit for awhile.” I agreed that I enjoyed the woman’s sound, though I didn’t know the story behind why she had fallen out of radio play.

“When the #MeToo movement came around, she came forward about how her tour manager had assaulted her,” he began to explain. …