Welcome

If you are new to my work I want to tell you about what I do and why:

I’m Martha Crawford, a former psychotherapist who worked providing individual therapy and clinical supervision for a long time - I’m terrible with time and numbers - but probably for about twenty five years in NYC.

Although I respect their value, I mostly left traditional individual psychotherapeutic models behind in 2019

because I had no choice,

and I didn’t see how they work for us in times of global crisis as communities are breaking to pieces.

At that time I began to facilitate workshops

on death, dreams,

mysticism & contemplation

community resilience & group development

and psychologies of liberation.

I write essays. Sometimes they are published. Sometimes I share them myself.

I study and argue with Jung and other theorists and mystics,

(although I think of myself as a faithful agnostic and do not consider myself a Jungian)

I collect dreams, and pay close attention to the collective aspects of our dreaming to understand how collective archetypes and political myths impact our individual trajectories (and vice versa).

I counsel women religious of varying orders and faiths

I mentor people, help them formulate new questions to explore, examine new frames and refine their priorities

I support therapists who are questioning the individualism of their profession.

I support the development of healthy community and peer groups because therapists don’t own sitting in a circle.

Collective problems require collective responses.

I believe existential anxiety and death denial are much larger components of our cultural pathologies - including climate breakdown, all xenophobias and -isms, genocidal guilt, and the various forms of supremacy -

than most people care to think about.

I think palliation, harm reduction and alleviation of suffering are too quickly devalued in favor of notions of “cure.”

In simpler terms:

Sometimes what we need to end well is exactly what we need to live well.

I think the two most atrophied capacities in the cultures of the global north are:

1) acceptance and active relationship with uncertainty & humility

2) the ability to build and maintain healthy communities that allow for cooperation, individuation & self-regulation.

I think acknowledging our interdependence on each other, all living things, and the earth itself

requires opening beyond modern psychological models

into mythical, spiritual and mystical models

This does not require religious belief.

Capitalism and cultures of supremacy generate more damage than we can comprehend,

so I offer most of my services by donation.

All my work, every moment of it, revolves in some way, around these notions - sometimes all at once

Some people think I do

“a lot of different things”

but I think that I am doing only one thing several different ways:

I support folks, in groups, workshops, and individually, as they figure out what is theirs to do, and what is not,

and how we can aim our labors and our gifts toward negotiating the peripeteia,

the turning point that is now, and has been upon us.

We have been living through a transformative and dangerous era

I see my work as trying to marshal courage, compassion and collective resources to alleviate inevitable suffering -

and in my most idealistic moments, I can imagine we are seeding a new world.

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For more information about workshops - click here.

Or click here to see testimonials from workshop participants