‘Group whisperer’ Martha Crawford aims to help Americans revive in-person engagement skills that have gone dormant.‍

Religion is just as good a psychology as our scientific psychology is a doctrine of the soul which it denies.  ~ Rank

Some human exchanges remain wordless:

I need to take a breath sometimes.

I need a birds-eye, angel-eye, cosmic-view sometimes.

Just for a moment, so I can keep going.

Then one by one they wake up and become birds. They manifest themselves as birds, beginning to sing. Presently they will be fully themselves and even fly.

~ Conjectures of a  Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton

Healthy community groups are circles of peers who (metaphorically) stand around a common center – a cause, a value, a belief system, an identity, a mission, a challenge, a shared story, or experience. The center is their shared concern, the deeper purposes of their gathering together.

The reverberations bring about a change of being.

~ Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Progenitors, creators and the earth have been too patient for far too long.

Beware a Mother’s Curse.

Not everyone is a dream geek.

We exalt the Explicit, we idolize the seemingly permanent.

We underestimate the power of the implicit.

One can try to think, feel, experience and communicate everything, but the moment such expressions see the light of day they are robbed of their significance and meaning and are thrown in the dump. - Dorothee Soelle

The virulent demons that are inhabiting you are not grotesque little monsters with thrashing tales. They are illusions, stories you are telling yourself that are utterly fallacious; bizarre and fantastic lies which you nevertheless believe, and which consequently are taking your life from you.

~ Martin Bell, The Way of the Wolf

Predicaments are unfolding processes that ask us move and compensate through oscillating cycles and seasons, adjusting our stance and calibrating our response to a living, shifting, transforming landscape on a daily basis.

The query I am sitting with focuses on the challenges of chronic conditions, about how/if psychotherapists can identify “progress” in such cases, how we assess if the lack of “progress” is a treatment failure, and how we manage our own responses to chronicity when we encounter it in our work lives.

Maybe this was the moment I could have helped her avoid some of the suffering that was to come. Maybe if we had done this work together, it would have been less terrifying for her to let go, and she wouldn’t have been trapped for so long.