When Dr. Richard Ash developed rheumatoid arthritis years ago, he began taking the standard therapy of steroids to suppress his immune system. But instead of finding relief from his symptoms over the course of long-term treatment, he incurred more suffering due to side effects from the medications. Dr. Ash felt there had to be a better way. So he looked…
I am empty. A hole as big as the moon inside of me. Bottomless, so I cannot fill it. Nothing in my realm of experience offers knowledge of how to replenish the void that swallowed my soul. I hurt. Each new injury either self-inflicted or by another—emotional or physical—stretches and extends the cavity. Like the tearing of skin and muscle…
In the late spring of 2001, back in the days of innocence, before the complete rupture of innocence, really, I flew down to visit a friend of mine who was renting a house in Charleston, South Carolina. It was my first time in the real South. The weather was perfect and I felt carefree. My friend had tickets to several…
I slouched my 5-foot-8-inch frame into Greg’s office weighing a mere 108 pounds. Power posture? Definitely not. But I had yet to learn about that. For the previous year I’d been battling an undiagnosable illness that had doctors all over Manhattan scratching their heads: An adverse reaction to an antibiotic had catapulted my body into a complete meltdown. With liver,…
We all know stress can be harmful, but to a trauma survivor it can be excruciating, even life-threatening. Not everyone who lives through an extreme emotional trauma develops post-traumatic stress disorder, but millions do. An estimated 8% of the U.S. population—about 24.4 million people—have PTSD at any given time. PTSD is difficult to diagnose, in large part because its symptoms…
I have an outdoorsy husband and two children between the ages of 9 and 12. I want to be as cool as possible, of course, so I try to engage in lots of outdoor sports with them. But I come from the concrete jungle of Manhattan and, although I love spending time in nature, I wouldn’t consider myself the daring…
I came into this life stuttering. My mother had three false alarms on three consecutive days. On the fourth trip to the hospital, my father said he wasn’t going back home again. Once admitted to the maternity ward, she was in labor for 36 hours. My starts and stops exhausted her. My mother was 40 years old. By the time…
As a child I was never fond of classical music or opera, though my father used to blare opera music throughout our home. He would sit on the floor with my sister beside him, singing and explaining what the arias were all about. I had no patience for it. In my early 20s a cousin took me to see Turandot,…
I think many of us find it difficult to get the support we need from our partners. When we hear from a distressed person, our instinct may be to protect or to fix, in addition to being kind. But men and women tend to respond differently when it comes to support. As a woman, I feel there are times when…
