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Many people who talk about distressing life experiences in therapy are never given the opportunity to work with the experience in the arena of their imagination. Please click on the link below for the complete article:

The Royal Road to Nervous System Regulation

Part One

Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them. –  Albert Einstein

What is now proved was once imagined.  – William Blake

The situation is so dire that we can’t afford the luxury of realism. – Caroline Casey

My book Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence first appeared in 2010. Since then I’ve taught several college-level courses, and I’ve done dozens of book talks and radio interviews. The two most common questions that people ask me –

Part One

Readers of this blog may recall that one of the basic aspects of the myth of American Innocence is what I have called the Paranoid Imagination. Previous essays on this subject include The Paranoid Imagination, Porn (Parts one and Two) and Sacrilicious! (Parts One and Two). Here, I’d like to review some of those thoughts and then show one of the ways the paranoid imagination expresses itself in our current political madness.

The paranoid imagination is rooted in the constant anxiety that o

The Truth in the Analytical Process by Solange Schneider

Part One

June 2019. Netflix releases When They See Us, Ava DuVerney’s superb miniseries on the Central Park Five case.

In the first two weeks of the month, the seventh African-American transgender woman is murdered this year. Another, Layleen Polanco, is found dead at Rikers Island Prison. A study reveals that twenty percent of cops post racist comments on Facebook. A Vallejo, California investigation concludes that cops who shot a black man 55 times in 3.5 seconds “acted reasonably.” A new book d

Ivanka Trump was widely panned for suggesting that busy mothers should get regular massages, because for many of us that’s just not realistic.

I myself, have never been into meditating. And if I don’t like something, I’m not going to end up doing it.

A friend says that people always tell her to slow down, but she’s a raging extrovert. Being around lots of people is what recharges her.

Self-care requires clarity about what we need. Not what others think, or what we’re “supposed” to do, or what exper

Part One

I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars. – Franklin D. Roosevelt, 10/30/1940

In spite of the risk involved, however, in letting the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that in order to have the full support of the American people it was desirable to make sure that the Japanese were the ones to do this so that there should remain no doubt in anyone’s mind as to who were the aggressors. – Henry Sti

 My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally. ― John Dominic Crossan

Where were you (or your parents) on October 12^th, 1944? If you were a teenage girl in the New York City area, you might have been in or, more likely, outside the Paramount Theater, where some thirty to thirty-five thousand adolescent girls made such a commot

Western culture emphasizes individualism and, therefore, being authentic and true to who we are. Who we are, of course, is influenced by others, who also may be influenced by us. Social neuroscientists have posited that humans evolved through interactions, as each person, each group, and each region shared their stories with others. And, human evolution is still occurring, and what we say and do is one of the many factors that direct its trajectory.

The “I” and the “we” involved in identity form

Becoming Our Own Protective Container

The Great Barrier Reef, one of the seven natural wonders of the world, is the largest single structure on earth built by living organisms. A 2012 report showed that thirty percent of  it had already been killed off by ocean warming. Another 20 percent was lost in 2018. Half of the chain has disappeared into bleached, skeletal form, and this entire 2,600 kilometre chain of reefs off the northeast of Australia will all be dead within a decade. Eventually, (at least within this century) at least 9

The thing about living is light. It surrounds us, breathes through us – not in us but through us. The force of it is subtle as the New Mexico breeze I hardly notice under the hot summer desert sun then suddenly become acutely grateful for when under the shade of a hundred-year-old cottonwood tree.

 Light informs my psychotherapeutic work with patients who’ve suffered from complex childhood trauma, a terrible pain stemming from years of chronic abuse. There are horrid memories deposited in mind an

In April 2011 a million people gathered in London. News reporters showed that many were apparently weeping with joy. Broadcast in over 180 countries to perhaps 160 million viewers, the wedding was one of the most watched events in TV history. With an additional 70 million live internet streams, the Guinness Book gave it the record of “Most Live Streams for a Single Event”, beating out 2009’s memorial service for Michael Jackson (see below).

Hundreds of journalists described every conceivable angl

The root of the White man’s hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. – James Baldwin

As I considered the dark anniversary that is approaching, after all the writing I’ve done about race in America, it came to me as a shock of insight. It was so obvious, yet I hadn’t noticed it before. I was talking with a friend about white privilege, when he interrupted me and asked, “You’re not going to bring up the race card

Every American president at least since Harry Truman, and arguably for much longer, has encountered a unique political dilemma created by two conditions. The first is a political reality. Capitalism and imperial expansion have dominated American politics since the beginning of the republic – and, if we are to properly understand the events of November 22nd, 1963 as a military coup – the end of the republic. In this context, all Presidents since Lyndon Johnson have been servants of the Deep State

Part One:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. – W.B. Yeats

All that is solid melts into air. – Karl Marx

In a previous blog series I discussed how the gatekeepers of our culture exclude and demonize much progressive thought by associating it in the reader’s mind with bizarre right-wing claims, thereby delegitimizing both:

…countless websites and books devoted to narratives that marginalize anyone who questions the dominant paradigms of the culture. They typically do this by identifying “loony

Part Three -- History and Myth

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. – Andre Gide

As both American history and American mythology have shown us, it is always easier to blame others – dark-skinned people or dark-web conspiracies – for our troubles than it is to admit our own complicity. Chapters seven and ten of my book discuss what I call the Paranoid Imagination, tracing it backwards to the roots of Christianity and forward to the very beginning of the American Republi

Psychologist, author (The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief) and ritual leader Francis Weller has evolved a useful psychological concept.

The Predator is a very common internal voice that means us no good. Sound familiar? It wants us to fail, setting impossibly high standards and then shaming us for not attaining them. Indeed, its message is that we never deserved peace, love, health or fulfillment, that the world is not interested in any gifts we might offer to