Like many women- and like many children of both genders who grew up in religious upbringings- I was raised to be a good, nice, accommodating, compliant, sweet girl who was pleasing to authority figures and didn’t cause any trouble for teachers, pastors, or my...
Right now, I’m sitting on the South Aegean Sea in Kos, Greece, where I was invited to help a group of German doctors renew their Hippocratic Oaths at the Asklepieion temple where Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, started a famous healing temple and his...
Art by Mira KleinI’m preparing to teach a class called Becoming Unfuckwithable: Finding Your Sacred “No” So Your Yes Is A “Hell Yeah,” and as part of creating curriculum for that class, I’ve been pondering what makes people “fuckwithable” in the first place. Part...
People with relational trauma often have trust issues, and they can be a beast to deal with if you're someone new in their life. People with a heavy trauma burden often have upside down compasses when it comes to knowing who to trust. Either they're paranoid and...
Today is Martin Luther King, Jr Day and the kids in California are off school. Today we remember one of our brave and imperfect Civil Rights heroes who had a dream that the ancestors of that generation are still fighting to fulfill. When George Floyd was murdered...
Why We Need Our Trauma Stories Validated (When Abusers So Often Minimize, Deny & Gaslight) In spite of every pretzeling attempt his child self made to be obedient to abusive fundamentalist parents growing up, my partner Jeff's family shunned him, making up a...
Since I'm gearing up to teach the Memoir As Medicine class with Nancy Aronie, I wanted to take a moment to write you all a love story. It's about my long term friend and now romantic partner, who you all may know from his work as the medical director of the...
I used to hate being asked "What do you do?" I learned that if I told people I was an OB/GYN, the next half hour would result in people telling me about how their vagina got ripped all the way open during childbirth or asking me for free medical advice. When people...