Many of my clients and I identify as highly sensitive people. We experience the world with an intensity that the majority of the population does not. Elaine Aron, Ph.D, does a good job explaining the basics of people who are like this in her book The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You, but for many of us, we are so sensitive that we experience things that Aron doesn’t begin to touch on.

After a major tragedy, those of us who are sensitive become much more affected than the general population. That doesn’t mean that others aren’t compassionate, loving and helpful and that they aren’t empathetic to all that is happening. For people who are highly sensitive, however, they can experience genuine and very intense physical and emotional pain just by observing others suffering. The devastation currently going on around us from Hurricane Harvey is causing that kind of corporeal reaction for many who aren’t directly impacted. We know the hurt that those people are feeling, and we’re feeling their pain in our own hearts, too.

For those in Austin, where I live, I am also seeing survivor’s guilt beginning to crop up among clients. We know all too well that those who are suffering in Houston could be (or may actually be) family and friends. They also could be us. Austin is 3-4 hours from Houston and the Gulf Coast. It’s an easy drive. We got rain from Harvey in Austin, but nothing like the catastrophic levels on the coast. Had things been different, we could have been the ones dealing with horrendous damage. Many are beginning to ask the existential question of why them and not us when we live so close to each other.

So how does someone who is sensitive cope with the aftermath of a major tragedy or natural disaster like Harvey? It takes a lot of effort to keep one’s sanity, but it is possible to do it. One of the first things you should do is turn of the television news. All of it. There is not a single channel that is presenting news in a way that won’t impact a sensitive person in a negative fashion. The news is designed to be sensational and to grab your heartstrings. You don’t need that right now. That doesn’t mean you have to totally ignore the news. If you want to stay informed, read the headlines only on a non-sensational site such as APnews.com. Most other news sites are going to be using the same emotional manipulation that the tv news stations use to grab and keep your attention. This isn’t healthy for anyone, but it’s really not healthy for sensitive folks. Read only stories that you absolutely must read to get necessary information.

I also get a lot of info from headlines on Twitter. I have a feed set up that is limited to people who don’t post sensationalism. It lets me stay informed but not overwhelmed. When I do start to feel overwhelmed, I take at least a 24 hour break from social media. Sometimes it requires me to take several weeks away from social media, and that’s ok. It helps keep me sane. I also find my tolerance for Facebook is much lower than Twitter, probably because it’s hard to avoid reading negative comments because of how Facebook’s layout works. And for heaven’s sake, never read the comments on a journalistic site!

When you do look at news, try to focus on the positive aspects of humanity. There are many stories about heroes and helpers from Harvey circulating on the web right now. Those are the stories you should read. They will help keep you moving forward because they make you realize that one person can impact many other people through very small gestures. This story about a ten year old girl helping others in a shelter she is staying in is one such example.

Also, while being bombarded by so many negative stories and events right now, make your recreational viewing lighthearted and uplifting. I’ve been wanting to watch season 5 of House of Cards, but I can’t do it right now because the show is too dark and too realistic for the world we’re living in right now. I ended up binge watching The Good Place while we were inside during Harvey’s rains, and it’s a fun comedy that still deals with some pretty cerebral topics. Find whatever will make you smile or laugh, and indulge in that.

After keeping yourself protected, what can you actually do to help with Harvey and other devastating events? The first thing a sensitive has to do is accept that you can’t fix it all. You shouldn’t try. Many of us will see the big picture and realize that there are hundreds of thousands of people suffering. As we play out all the devastation that they are enduring in our minds, we overwhelm ourselves with too much information and too much to fix. Don’t go there. It doesn’t mean you’re being unsympathetic to all of the suffering around you. It means you are being realistic about what you can do, and it also means you are taking care of yourself. So rather than becoming overwhelmed trying to contemplate the entire tragedy, bring the big picture down to a more manageable size. Focus on what you can actually do to help and on doing your part of the solution. While what you do won’t solve every problem out there, if each of us does something, that will make a difference. All of the little things add up quickly. There are so many different ways to help, so your challenge is to figure out how best you can give.

One of the easiest ways for many who have reasonable or abundant income is to give money. Financial donations can be used to buy supplies in bulk and help with overhead costs for shelters and relief organizations. I’m not going to list any links because there are so many websites out there right now with various organizations you can help. I personally chose to split my donations between two groups, one which helps humans and one which helps animals. Most importantly, if you are giving money, please don’t take this donation from the non-profits you normally support. They are still going to need assistance, too. Instead, find a different place in your budget to make the sacrifice to help those in crisis.

If you worry about giving money to an organization and it not making it to the intended recipients, then there are many drives for items happening around Austin. Diapers, menstrual hygiene products, new underwear, cleaning supplies, and non-perishable food items are among some of the things being collected. If all you can afford to do is buy an extra bar of soap or can of beans and add it to a collection basket, that little bit still helps. You have given as much as you can, and that donation will be very much appreciated by someone on the receiving end of the line.

The next way you can help is by giving your time and labor, especially if you are in areas that are adjacent to the tragedy like Austin is. There are so many different ways to go about doing this. Figure out what special talents or skills you have and if any of those can assist those currently suffering. I have seen posts about midwives, aromatherapists, therapists, lawyers, musicians, ministers and more volunteering their professional services to those affected by the hurricane.

For those whose talents aren’t easily applied in the current situation, general labor is needed, too. The Red Cross is full with volunteers from what I’ve heard, but other groups need help as they hold fundraisers and drives. If your church, neighborhood school, business or other community association is helping out, join in with them. Foster families for animals who are displaced by the storm are very much needed in Austin, too. Givepulse.com is listing local ways to get involved in Texas.

Another way that you can assist with efforts is to help the helpers. For example, due to my current medical treatments, I am not physically strong enough to work at a shelter or a drive. I’m realistic about that. However, what I can do is take my kids for an extra evening so that my ex-husband, who is healthy and able-bodied, can go volunteer more of his time to the recovery effort. Aside from providing childcare, consider helping with driving if needed for volunteers or events. Offer to listen to those sharing the stories of their experiences helping during a tragedy because they will need emotional support. Make a meal for friends or neighbors working as volunteers so when they get home from a long day of being on their feet, their self-care cups will get a bit of replenishment.

If there is nothing else you can give because of your own difficult personal circumstances, then pray or send good thoughts out to those who are suffering and those who are helping. Studies have shown that prayer does make a difference for people who are ill, even if they don’t know that they are being prayed for. I truly believe we can impact our world through our thoughts, so send out positive ones to those who need them in this stressful and horrendous time.

Most of all throughout the recovery from this tragedy, if you are highly sensitive, don’t try take on others’ pain. This is a downfall that many sensitive healers often engage in. We want to help others so much that we metaphysically and emotionally take on the burdens of others when they aren’t ours to endure. It’s a hard lesson to learn that if you take on others’ pain, you will make yourself sick(er). During all of your efforts to help, you need to keep yourself well so you can continue to help in whatever ways you can. Taking on others’ pain for them will not truly help them or you.

©2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

A few weeks ago, I went to an appointment with a new pain specialist. The appointment, from start to finish, was a royal disaster. The receptionist was rude, the nurse who checked me in and took my vitals was demeaning, and the doctor spent three total minutes with me before telling me that he refused to accept me as a pain patient because… wait for it… I have chronic pain. You can’t make things like that up. As I left the office, I was devastated by how things had gone. I felt as though the world was rejecting me.

I had some time before my next appointment, so I decided to do some self-care by walking a labyrinth. The Westlake United Methodist Church was on my path to my next appointment, so I stopped there. It’s a labyrinth I’d walked several years previously, and I knew it was by the entrance and parking so I wouldn’t have to walk too far on a day when my pain levels were high (and rising due to stress).

When I got to the parking lot, I was greeted by a surprise that I didn’t remember being there the previous time I’d visited. In addition to the legally required disabled parking spots, there were also a large number of parking spots labeled “For The Less Mobile RESERVED.” I almost cried. While I have a disabled parking permit, there are often not enough disabled spots at large event venues. I’m guessing this church has an aging population that knows they need more disabled parking available. They also probably recognize that not everyone with limited mobility has a disabled parking permit. When I was eight months pregnant with twins, my mobility was very limited but I was not legally disabled at that point nor did I have a disabled parking permit. I definitely would have been grateful for a closer parking spot, though!

Since I was there on a weekday morning, the parking lot at Westlake UMC was almost completely empty, and I had my choice of parking spots. However, knowing that this church recognizes those with disabilities and physical limitations and not only accepts them but makes them feel welcome was incredibly powerful. I had just come from a medical office which shunned me for having the very medical condition they treat, yet this church welcomed me with open arms before I had even gone through the doors. The wording on the signs in their lot is compassionate and accepting to all those who might need a little extra assistance in the form of closer parking. If I were looking for a church, this is the type of thing that would let me know that my presence was very much wanted in their community.
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©2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Over a year ago, I managed to get my heart bruised, not for the first time in recent years. In fact, it felt like the 142nd time, though in reality, it hasn’t been quite that many. However, the pain of a bruised heart always seems to be magnified in the moment. As I was going through the pain of this deep hurt, I said to the other person involved that I would just add it to my long list of recent screwups. Yet the other person didn’t see me as having failed; rather, he saw me as having been brave.

For me, being called brave is a trigger to anger and frustration. It’s not much different to me than “you’re so strong,” another catchphrase that I find utterly exasperating. When people use these phrases with me, I always ask or tell them, “What other choice do I have? I can either surrender to the pain and misery of my life, or I can keep fighting.” To me, there really is no choice between those options.

As I began reading Brené Brown’s Rising Strong for a book group, her words began to help me pinpoint why I find being called brave so frustrating. She writes,

For me, the frustration comes from those who only want to see the sanitized version of my life. They aren’t interested in seeing the struggle and pain. By calling me brave, I fear that people are denying and demeaning the very real challenges I endure every single day. That fear may not be grounded in reality every time, but it's what the situations feel like to me based on past experiences.

Brown’s exploration of what it means to be brave in the face of what she calls “falls” (but what most would call failure) builds on the themes of her previous works on shame and vulnerability. It is a call for readers to live genuine lives that by definition must experience falls in order to move forward and grow.  Brown states, “To pretend that we can get to helping, generous, and brave without navigating through tough emotions like desperation, shame, and panic is a profoundly dangerous and misguided assumption.” Yet most people want life to be that easy. They want to believe that being strong and brave is uncomplicated. It's not. Strength and bravery often encompass a great deal of hidden pain.

Reading Brown’s Rising Strong helped me come to terms with what others see as brave in my behavior; before reading it, I truly didn’t understand what others were seeing in me. However, for me, this is simply how I live my life. I would rather fall flat on my face from having tried and failed than to have regrets about the things I might have done. To me, it doesn’t feel brave at all. It just feels like being me. It also feels horribly painful at times. 

For those who want to live their lives in a "braver" way, I highly recommend Brown's Rising Strong. It offers great insight about learning to face one's own stories that we tell ourselves to deceive ourselves and keep ourselves from living a more truthful life. The book details ways to be open and genuine with others. And most importantly, the book acknowledges the pain of falling flat on one's face when things don't go as planned. Brown truly understands all that it takes to live a genuine life, something few people in our society are strong enough to do.

​©2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

In October 2016, football player Earl Thomas was so excited about a scoring a touchdown that he expressed his joy by hugging a referee. In response, the referee flagged him. Many people felt this was an overreaction on the part of the referee, but was it? Did Thomas have a right to hug anyone in his exuberant moment?

This isn’t the only hugging incident in the media in recent months. Pop star Kesha had a hug refused by comedian Jerry Seinfeld who didn’t recognize her. According to CNN, “[Seinfeld] denied her three times and even stepped away from her when she tried to touch him.” In response, Seinfeld stated, “`I don't hug a total stranger. I have to meet someone, say hello. I gotta start somewhere.’” That seems like a more than reasonable position for anyone nonetheless a famous individual who has to deal with a lot of fans without appropriate boundaries.
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In my opinion, it’s very common for men to try to hug women without their consent. Recently Marco Rubio went to hug Ivanka Trump who stiffly refused his advances. Back during the preparation for debates for the 2016 Presidential election, Hillary Rodham Clinton actually practiced evading a hug from her stand-in for Donald Trump. The video of the rehearsal is actually quite funny. As amusing as the parody was, the reality behind it is not. A very high-power woman who has been one of our nation’s leaders was rehearsing an encounter with another now prominent politician. Part of that rehearsal was intentionally trying to make sure this man, one who has admitted on video to having sexually assaulted women, did not violate Clinton's boundaries by trying to hug her. Her aide got rather into the roleplaying and went a tad overboard creating the humor. Had he not been someone she was close to, this video wouldn’t be funny at all. However, the message behind it is powerful: Even women who are world leaders have to work hard to avoid being manhandled in hugs that they don’t want.
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It's not just women, though. James Comey admitted to trying to hide in the White House curtains to avoid encountering Donald Trump who then tried to hug Comey despite Comey making the first gesture towards a handshake only. Trump is someone who is very aware of the power of dictating physical boundaries with those around him. He shows this not only through his unwanted hugs but through his ridiculous handshake politics.

Hugging is a very strange thing in our culture. I grew up in a family where hugging was not a part of the family dynamics. I don’t remember my parents ever hugging me. When I was in high school, I joined a youth group where hugging was a part of the culture. We all hugged each other as a greeting just as most would say hello or goodbye. I discovered I really liked hugging my friends. As I have gone forward in life, I have raised my children in a home where hugging is a daily occurrence. Their parents hug them, and they hug each other. I am very comfortable with hugging among those I’m close to.

However, with strangers, I don’t always feel that comfort. Once I entered the dating world in my post-divorce life, I began experiencing what I dubbed as “the consolation hug.” After a date which was suboptimal, men would give me a hug after declining to have any further dates with me. To me, the consolation hug was unwanted and unwarranted. It felt like the men were implicitly saying to me, “I know I just hurt you, and I feel bad about it. However, I am not aware enough to think about how hugging you might feel to you. I’m just trying to console myself into thinking I’m a decent guy by hugging you to show there are no hard feelings. Whether you want to be hugged or not is irrelevant to my thought process. I just need to feel better about how I just treated you, and hugging you will make me feel better about myself.” I began loathing the consolation hug though I never got very good at evading it.

At one point I went to a Meetup where I ran into a man whom I had previous interactions with. He knew I was attracted to him, but he was not attracted to me. We were both clear on where things stood between us, and despite our history, we managed to have a great conversation together throughout the meal. When we walked out together, he very unexpectedly gave me what felt like another consolation hug. I fumed internally about that hug for quite a while, and then I finally sent an angry email to him very unjustly accusing him of doing something that was demeaning to me. He was understandably clueless as to why I was upset because he looked at that hug in a very different way than I did. He explained to me that he had been raised as a Southern gentleman, and the appropriate social custom was to shake men’s hands when saying goodbye and to hug women. He meant nothing beyond that.

When I took this new information about Southern social customs into consideration, I realized this man was right. Every single man who had given me a “consolation hug” was actually a Southerner. The men who did not were raised in the North. Suddenly a lot more made sense. Having lived in the South for 25 years now, though, I was clear that Southern culture very much dictates that women’s bodies are not their own. This social custom of hugging women without their consent was just one more sign of that mistreatment of women. It’s at the foundation of our rape culture. Men should not automatically have the right to hug women, yet in a culture that doesn’t respect women’s boundaries, a hug is seen as appropriate behavior for men towards women (but not towards other men). Once again, we’ve encountered a situation where we need the societal rule to be “yes means yes” rather than “no means no.” Unless people have indicated that it is ok to touch them, then it’s not ok to randomly hug them.

I recently went out to dinner with a man I had never met before. We spent a wonderful evening talking, and at the end he very respectfully asked me, “Do you hug?” These are just three simple words, but they raised my opinion of him even higher than it already was. It told me that he respected women and their boundaries. He knew that I might not want him touching me. However, I am a person who hugs when the situation feels right, and it definitely did feel right in this case. I walked away from this hug feeling appreciated rather than violated. It would be great if all hugs left people feeling the same way.

​©2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I’ve been having neck pain in the past few weeks that I knew was of an emotional, metaphysical or spiritual origin. I’ve been trying to figure out what is causing it so that I can heal the problem and relieve the pain. When I began meditating on it a few weeks ago, the first word I heard was “Cecilia.” I assumed this meant Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians, because there is no one named Cecilia currently in my life. I remember this tidbit of Catholic school information because there was a nun at my school who was Sister Cecilia. She had been given the name Cecilia when she entered the convent because she was a musician. (However, as an aside, everyone called her Sister Bonjour because she was French and greeted all the toddlers she was in charge of in the morning before school with a beautiful “bonjour.”)
 
I was initially very puzzled as to why I should call on St. Cecilia for help with my neck pain. I’m not a musician. I can’t sing. I can’t play an instrument. I am even terrible at remembering the names of songs or bands. St. Cecilia just isn’t someone I would think would be too relevant to me. I decided to break from my meditation and Google what else St. Cecilia was the patroness of. Some saints are patron saints of many people, places and things. St. Anne, the grandmother of Jesus, for example, is known as the patron saint of “Brittany, Canada, Detroit, carpenters, childless people, equestrians, grandparents, homemakers/housewives, lace makers, lost articles, Fasnia (Tenerife), Mainar, miners, mothers, moving house, old-clothes dealers, poverty, pregnancy, seamstresses, stablemen, sterility, and children.” But St. Cecilia? She’s just the patron saint of musicians and other music related things. That idea hit a rapid dead end, so I went back to meditating on my neck pain.
 
I continued seeing other symbols in my meditation that weren’t too helpful in understanding why I should call on St. Cecilia for help, but eventually it came to me. The neck is part of the fifth chakra. The fifth chakra is about communication and being heard. Music is often vocal and is a way of communicating. Hence, St. Cecilia suddenly made a lot more sense.

In order to help me understand this, my spirit guides relied on my combined knowledge of Catholicism and Hinduism. For my spirit guides, they don’t see any problem with mixing faiths together in a fusion spirituality. What matters to them is healing and serving the highest good. There is no one faith that has the market cornered on those things. The Other Side doesn’t care what religion claims what. In my visions, I see Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, Pagan, and Native American symbols. The healing work I do integrates all of them without judgment or prejudice. Some aspects of spirituality, such as holy water, mystics, pyramids, labyrinths, and animal guides, are found in different religious and spiritual traditions in very diverse cultures around the world.
 
When it all boils down, the phenomenon humans label as “God” is too intense, too immense, too pervasive, too all-powerful and too all-consuming to be contained by any one religious tradition. The Spirit of pure love, energy and light pervades all attempts to find it, and as humans, it is our job to access this Spirit however we can encounter it in our lives. Spirituality belongs to no one group, and we all have access to its gifts. We should actively use these gifts to help heal ourselves and our world.
 
As I was Googling for Creative Commons or public domain artworks of St. Cecilia for this blog post, I came upon the statue showing St. Cecilia’s three neck wounds. Further research found that, “The legend about Cecilia’s death says that after being struck three times on the neck with a sword, she lived for three days, and asked the pope to convert her home into a church.” Suddenly I had an additional understanding of why St. Cecilia might be able to help me with releasing the trauma in my neck that was causing me pain. The sword marks on the neck of this statue of St. Cecilia are fairly accurate for where my neck pain is. While many saints were beheaded over the centuries, I suspect that it is the combination of her fatal neck trauma and her work with the fifth chakra that led my spirit guides to instruct me to ask for St. Cecilia’s help with my healing. As I continue working on healing the emotional traumas and past-life traumas that created the metaphysically rooted pain in my neck, I ask for Saint Cecilia’s assistance in my efforts.
 
© 2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

The Japanese art of Kintsugi (also known as Kintsukuroi) involves the repair of broken pottery. Rather than discarding broken pieces, as most of us would probably do in our disposable culture, the pottery is repaired using a gold filling. The object is then regarded as perfect in its imperfection. The filled cracks give character to the pieces that they previously did not have.
 
The idea of people as objects of Kintsugi has been in my head a lot lately. I recently attended a continuing education seminar on trauma. During her presentation, the speaker gave the statistic that around 50% of people have faced trauma in their lives. She asked the group of predominantly psychotherapists, “Doesn’t that seem high to you?” Actually, to me, it seemed low.
 
In my opinion, by the time we reach midlife, almost all of us have faced trauma. Official statistics say one in four women have been sexually abused; I suspect that statistic is closer to one in two. Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. Car accidents happen on a daily basis leading to the deaths of 1.3 million deaths globally each year. Natural disasters kill tens of thousands (and some years, hundreds of thousands) each year. Then there is war, one of the most horrific human-made events that also kills thousands each year and leaves millions more scarred for life.
 
Those who survive these tragedies are left to face the trauma of having lost loved ones and having endured horrific events. It’s very rare for a person not to have been affected by one of these by the time they reach 40. By old age, the statistic has to be close to 100% of us. Every one of us has “baggage.” For some, the baggage can be stowed in the overhead bin and/or under the seat in front of us. For others, the baggage overflows into neighboring seats and clogs the aisle. It’s rare, though, that we travel through life without any baggage along the ride.
 
Yet despite all of these traumas, each of us is an amazing human being. Each of us is lovable, even if we are a person who has done atrocious things. It may be harder to find those redeeming qualities in some of the most damaged members of society, but they are there, buried under the trauma and injury that we both create and sustain from others.
 
All of these traumas we face break us into pieces just as the pottery cracks when it hits the floor. So, too, are we works of Kintsugi if we choose to be. We all have been broken, but we can be repaired. If we chose to work on our traumas and we chose to move forward in life, we can heal. We will never be the same as the innocent child who was born into the world so many years ago. However, we can fill our cracks with gold to create a new and beautiful person. While the process is slow and difficult, we can attain a new state of beauty. Our repaired damage can make us even more beautiful than we were before we faced the most difficult challenges of our lives.
 
© 2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(Trigger Warning: Infant Loss)

Eighteen years ago I held my firstborn daughter for the very first time. She didn’t move. She didn’t cry. Her spirit had left her body hours before.

Her labor had been typical until she was crowning (the very last stage before birth). Then, her heartbeat suddenly disappeared. When she was born, the midwife took her away and began working on her immediately, shouting for someone to call the paramedics. I couldn’t see my daughter. No one told me what was going on, but I was so exhausted that I didn’t actually understand what was happening anyway. My daughter hadn’t begun breathing, and CPR wasn’t working.

Her father rode with her in an ambulance to the children’s hospital. They continued working on my daughter at the hospital until an hour after her birth when they called it. She was gone. She had come so close to living and yet she hadn’t made it.

A few hours after her birth, the midwife drove me to the hospital to meet my daughter for the first and last time. As I held her in my arms, I was shocked to look on her face. I knew children looked like their parents, but I hadn’t realized my daughter was going to look like me. We spent a precious but far too short amount of time with her in the hospital until we needed to leave.

Eighteen years ago as the midwife drove us back to the birthing center to do an exam on me and then to send us home, I looked out over the rush hour traffic. It made no sense to me. How could all of these people be going on like nothing had happened? My daughter had died.

Eighteen years ago.

​© 2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(Contains very mild spoilers.)

When I was in the seventh grade, we had summer required reading for English class. One of those books was Anne of Green Gables. It quickly became a favorite of mine, and I have reread it and its first seven sequels more times than I can count. The Anne of Green Gables mini-series (1985) with Megan Follows, Colleen Dewhurst, and Richard Farnsworth also quickly became a beloved favorite. (More recently seeing Follows play the evil Queen Mary of France in Reign was mind-blowing. She definitely was no longer the sweet little Anne she once played!)

Now, more than thirty years later, Netflix has created a new version of the Anne of Green Gables story in Anne with an E. This series makes it clear from the start that it is not going to be a remake of the previous version. Its opening credits have a very modern song, “Ahead by a Century,” sung by the Tragically Hip, one that made me wonder if this wasn’t a mistake on my part to watch the series.

However, aside from the opening song, I was incredibly pleased by the new interpretation of a perennial classic in the first few episodes. Perhaps the most stunning thing to me was the idea that Anne Shirley actually had C-PTSD. Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a result of an ongoing traumatic situation such as child abuse rather than a one-time incident such as rape or a hurricane which still can easily cause PTSD. This presentation makes great sense because it is likely that Anne would have had C-PTSD. She lived in an orphanage on-and-off throughout her child, enduring several out-placements with homes where she was treated as slave. While the book mentions her previous misery, it doesn’t dwell on it. Instead, it focuses on the happiness of Green Gables.

In this new interpretation, though, Anne is prone to spacing out in flashbacks to the terrors of her previous life. Like so many with PTSD and C-PTSD, she dissociates from her current situation when triggered by things that seem unimportant or trivial. This new version makes the hell of her previous living situations explicitly clear and might be triggering for someone who has endured similar abuse. After seeing these flashbacks, Anne’s amazing stories and vivid imagination suddenly take on new meaning when she explains, “I like imagining better than remembering.” Who can blame her when the other option is living in a mental hell of a torturous past?

Anne with an E is much darker and more painful than the book or the previous mini-series, but it’s likely far more accurate. Not only is Anne’s past pain and ongoing suffering clear, but her stressful initial relationship with Marilla Cuthbert, her adoptive mother, is not softened in any way by rose-colored glasses. Marilla clearly is from an older generation which is not great at parenting, and it is her adoptive father Matthew’s love that makes Anne’s life tolerable as she adjusts to her new situation at Green Gables.

Anne also struggles with the taunts of area children (again, triggering traumatic memories from her life at the orphanage) and their parents as they judge her for her paltry looks, unknown origins, and strange behaviors. She doesn’t feel accepted and welcomed, and after being tormented at school, Anne falls into a major depression which includes flashbacks to her tortured past when she experienced similar situations. This change, too, is more likely the road Anne would have faced rather than the rosy version in Montgomery’s original work.

The series eventually strays greatly from the book. It starts simply by containing new scenes such as Anne signing the family Bible and becoming a Cuthbert; in the book, her name was never changed from Shirley. There’s also a fire at the Gillis family home wherein Anne becomes the hero for implausible reasons; I did object to that diversionary change in the story line. By the end of the seven episodes, the characters were still the same beloved ones from Montgomery’s books, but this new, more realistic perspective on their lives had taken the storyline in a very different direction from the original source.

Even though I tend to be a purist when it comes to movie adaptations of books, I really liked the changes in Anne with an E. They brought a touch of realism to a lifelong favorite of mine, and told a story that brought the original even closer to the path I’ve traveled in life. I suspect this new interpretation may help many people come to terms with their own abusive pasts, realizing that they don’t have to be completely happy and in denial about the hell that they have survived. What they have endured was truly traumatic, and it should have impacted them just as it did for Anne with an E.

©2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

​(I received a free copy of Unstrung from Netgalley in return for an honest review.)

On a whim, I previously purchased Laura Spinella’s Ghost Gifts because of its subject matter. I quickly became engrossed in a novel that embodied romance, mystery, and the metaphysical. Not only was the story of Ghost Gifts addictive to me, but Spinella’s words themselves rapidly became captivating. She is one of those authors whose prose is like poetry, flowing smoothly across the page and roping the readers in so that they stay up all night reading her work. Ghost Gifts is one of the best books I’ve read in recent years.

Upon finishing Ghost Gifts, I quickly turned to the internet and was delighted to find that Spinella had a new novel, Unstrung, about to release. As I began the story, the main character Livy (Olivia Klein) is reading and ridiculing Ghost Gifts as being a preposterous book. I love when an author (or anyone, really) can laugh at herself.

As I progressed into Unstrung, I found myself enjoying a much more intense read than I expected. I actually had to take break from reading the novel because it touched on some very deep topics that are close to my heart. The plot seemed simple and somewhat superficial at first: Livy, a first chair violinist, is having major marital problems with her second husband. Her best friend and lawyer helps her through legal troubles, and Livy is serving out community service time at a local school for students with life challenges.

However, once one gets into Unstrung, the powerful theme of loss appears as the overarching tie between the characters of the book. The theme of loss applies to so many parts of the characters’ lives: illness, death, miscarriage, money, love, adoption, abuse, addiction, tragedy, broken relationships, divorce, and dreams. As Livy and those around her struggle with these painful issues, their lives come together in unexpected ways.

As much as I loved the majority of the work and as much as it challenged me to examine issues around loss in my own life, the improbable ending was a let-down. These were not the directions I could have seen for the characters, and they were not ones that felt realistic to me. I would have chosen a very different ending had I written Unstrung. However, despite the ending, Unstrung is a fabulous novel. I look forward to reading more by Spinella.

©2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

The day after the 2017 Presidential inauguration, my 16 year old daughter came downstairs and asked me, “Is it true? Did they really get rid of the LGBT pages on the White House site?” Sadly, yes, it is true. I was amazed that she was puzzled by this happening. She continued asking me, “But who did that? How can they do that?” I let her know that the Republicans were in power now, and the new Presidential staff was more than legally allowed to remove any pages they wanted from the White House website. They want to make those in the LGBTQ+ community disappear. They want to restrict rights for those who are not heterosexual. They are going to try to repeal gay marriage. This is the way the next four years are going to be.

My daughter just sat there, looking dismayed. Her reaction made me realize on a deeper level what a privileged upbringing her life has been in terms of gay rights. She has grown up in a home where all people are seen as equal regardless of their sexual preferences, orientation or identity. Her grade school principal was an out lesbian who was partnered with one of the teachers at the school. Our nuclear family has friends and extended family members who are LGBTQ+. My daughter has been raised in a world where all of that is seen as so normal and acceptable it doesn’t even need comment. In her world, people are sexual beings, and any range of consensual sexual activity and identity is fine, most especially when it stems from love.

Yet back in the real world, members of the LGBTQ+ community still face daily discrimination. Not everyone is as accepting as our nuclear family. My daughter has never really known this except in the fact that gay marriage wasn’t legal until a few years ago. She doesn’t have the memories I have of being raised Catholic and being taught that homosexuality was a sin. She doesn’t remember the shock in a community when someone “came out.” She doesn’t realize the horrible stigma that HIV/AIDS initially had as a wrongly-perceived gay disease. She doesn’t understand the history of violence that was so prevalent and still continues in many places against those who are LGBTQ+.

I hate that my daughter’s innocence is being shattered, though I know she was privileged to be able to hold on to living in a utopia for as long as she did. Now, the issues of the LGBTQ+ community are personal to her. She is a proud ally. Her best friend is transgender. When my daughter’s friend announced his transition and his new name, she accepted him without question and knew her parents and siblings would, too. Now she is having to deal with the fact that the new order wants to make her best friend disappear, just like those webpages that were suddenly gone within hours of the inauguration. Yet she, like me and so many other allies, is not ok with that. They will not make those we love disappear just by removing a webpage. We will continue to fight to make all people visible and equal. In less than two years, she will be a registered voter, and she will be doing her part to make change happen in the mid-term elections as well.

​©2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Like many in this nation, I’ve been using denial as a coping technique over the past two months. I’ve been trying to believe that somehow, miraculously, the shift in power we were dreading would not happen. I was hoping that it was all a bad dream or a horrible joke. It’s not, though. Our lives are about to change drastically.

The night of the election in November 2016, my 16 year old daughter came downstairs to the family room at about 10 pm from doing homework. Her twin and I were watching the returns come in with dismay. She had just received a text from her boyfriend about the ominous news. Her only words were, “Tell me it’s not true.” I had to tell her it was. She then asked, “Can we move to Canada?” Given that we have family there, it’s not too outrageous of a request.

My daughter’s reaction left me thinking. Her boyfriend is a darker skinned racial minority whose parents were immigrants to the US. Her best friend is transgender. Her mother is disabled. She is almost a woman. Her world is going to be drastically impacted by the changes that result from the election.

My life is also going to be impacted as well; the obvious is that I am a woman and I am disabled. Both of those groups have been declared targets of hatred in the new era, and I personally have already experienced it. I fully expect large parts of the Americans with Disabilities Act to be repealed because the ADA costs money to businesses in order to make them fully accessible, and in the new order, corporate money is far more important than those with disabilities.

There are other places where the new dawn is going to impact me. Without the Affordable Care Act, I am no longer insurable due to the past 14 years of health issues. I face insurance companies refusing to cover my medical bills because of my pre-existing conditions. Healthcare is going to be the most obvious place where I will feel the change.

Other places are less obvious at first glance, but they are real threats. I have never had an abortion in this life, and I hope I never have to. However, Roe v. Wade has ensured that abortion has always been an option in my lifetime. Now I am at a point in my life where I would have to terminate any pregnancy I might unintentionally conceive because of health issues, yet I expect Roe v. Wade to either be eliminated or heavily restricted in the coming year. If that is the case, I will have to limit my sexual partners to men who have had vasectomies or are otherwise sterile. I’m a little more than angry about (primarily older white men) deciding whom I can have sex with.

There are bigger fears, too. I spent the first part of my life living with a narcissist, and having a narcissistic man who uses gaslighting as one of his primary methods of communication in national power is triggering for me and for many others. Watching someone so ill-qualified and so mentally ill about to assume command of so many life-or-death decisions is truly terrifying, especially if one knows how fickle and dangerous narcissists can be.

I’ve spoken with my spirit guides, and they have assured me that the new Narcissist in Chief will not be pushing the big red button. However, they have also affirmed my fears that we are facing an ugly uphill battle in the near future. As a friend of mine phrased it, we are facing at a decision where we as a nation have to decide if we will be governed by fear or governed by love. As things stand now, we are heading toward being a nation governed by fear.

I choose not to live my life in that way, though. For me, the first question to any decision is always “What is the healthy decision?” That question is always accompanied by other similar supporting questions: “What will bring the most love into my life and the world?” “What will bring the most compassion to me, to others, and to humanity?” “What is the right thing to do even if it is the hardest?” I will continue to strive to hold those values dear even when the world around me is leaning in the opposite direction.

So for me, January 20th, 2017 is a day of mourning. I’m dressing in black, the traditional color of mourning in our culture. I’m letting myself grieve as hard as I need to, but I also am holding my heart in a place of love rather than a place of fear. While I can’t change the national or the global situation, I can keep working to enact change around me, helping those who aren’t accepted by others. I can keep working to get compassion enacted in our society on personal and legal levels.

The final words from “Memories” from the musical Cats have been echoing my head all day, prompting me to write this post. We are facing the new day, the new dawn, but we must hold tight to the memories that bring us hope and love.

Daylight
I must wait for the sunrise
I must think of a new life 
And I mustn't give in
When the dawn comes
Tonight will be a memory, too
And a new day will begin
​
©2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Trigger Alert: This post is about sexual abuse. 

I have been sexually abused by at least three different men in this lifetime. This is unfortunately not unusual. I’ve seen statistics that suggest one in four women have been sexually abused, but I suspect the number is closer to one in two. Likewise, I’ve seen numbers ranging from one in five to one in eight men have been sexually abused. No matter what the actual statistics are, the number of victims is still way too high.

I was recently speaking with someone who has a very young daughter. He knows of my history of sexual abuse, and so as a concerned parent, he asked me how I thought we could prevent it from happening to our children. After a moment to think about it, my answer was one that I don’t like but which I think is ultimately true: We can’t. Sexual abuse is going to happen. We can do some small things to try to ward it off. We can teach our children not to abuse others in hopes of lessening rates for future generations. But like most traumas and tragedies, even with the best preparation for prevention, it will still happen.

So what can we do try to reduce the number of children who are sexually abused short of locking our children into padded cells? The biggest thing we can do is teach our children that their bodies are their own, and no one should touch their bodies without their consent. Then we need to respect what we teach them. That means ending corporal punishment. That means stopping the horrible social custom of making our children hug and kiss distant relatives and unknown adult friends whom they don’t know or care about. It means letting our children know that they are the ones who are in charge of their bodies and “no” is an appropriate response when someone wants to touch them in a way they don’t feel comfortable with.

There are books for helping talk to children about sexual abuse in ways that aren’t scary. One is called “Your Body Belongs to You” written by Cornelia Maude Spelman and illustrated by Teri Weidner. The book frames body safety in a positive manner. There are no scary strange men ready to jump out of white vans to abduct children. The problem with the book: The page that says “Some places on your body should never be touched by other people—except when you need help in the bathroom or getting dressed or when you go to the doctor.” Two of my abusers were medical doctors acting in their official capacity but greatly taking advantage of the situation. These were men I should have been able to trust, but they acted in unethical ways and violated my body. The third man who sexually abused me was a relative, one who was greatly trusted by my parents. We also need to teach our children that even those they should be able to trust will sometimes act inappropriately.

So how do we figure out whom we can trust? The biggest way is to learn how to follow your gut feelings. Listen to that voice inside you when it tells you no. That inner voice is something or someone trying to protect you. If you feel unsafe or uncomfortable with a situation, then don’t put your child into it and/or don’t put yourself into it. Furthermore, if your child tells you, “I don’t trust that person,” listen to them. Find out why your child doesn’t feel comfortable. If it’s an instinctive response, respect your child’s intuition. Children are often far more in tune with their intuition than adults because they haven’t learned to ignore it through society’s mandates. Teach your children to respect their gut feelings, too.

Another very important aspect of sexual trauma is that victims are often not believed. If your children ever tell you that someone has touched them inappropriately, believe them. Do not punish them for what has happened to them. They are children, and they did not know what was happening to them. They were unable to give consent. No older child or adult ever should be touching them inappropriately. Instead, once you have listened to their version of events, seek counseling for them and report the event to the proper authorities. Hiding sexual trauma only allows it to continue, and others will likely become victims to the same perpetrators.

One other way to help reduce sexual trauma (which is not a method all will find palpable) is through energetic work on our second chakras. I believe that many of those who are sexually abused as young children have been sexually abused in previous lives. They come into this life with already damaged second chakras, and that weakness energetically attracts those who will abuse them again. Healing any damage to our children’s second chakras and/or strengthening their second chakras will reduce sexual predators’ attraction to them. This work can be done with talented energy workers who have already healed any sexual trauma they might have endured. If they have not healed their own traumas, you don’t want to have them working on you or your children.

Sexual abuse is scary. It scars us deeply, even when it happens at a very young age. The damage it causes can become the roots for physical illness as it did in my case. Thus, it’s very important that sexual abuse of children be taken seriously so that it does not cause a lifetime of damage. Preventative education can help children stop sexual trauma from happening, but if they don’t know that what is happening is wrong, they won’t be able to stop it. Likewise, education can help victims learn to report what happened rather than living with a sense of shame that they caused the abuse to happen to them. While we can’t always prevent sexual abuse from happening, we can support victims appropriately and prevent perpetrators from acting again.

©2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Full Disclosure: I received a free digital copy in exchange for an honest review by NetGalley. However, I also bought a paperback copy to share with the many friends whom I’d lent my copy of How Not to Fall.

We’ve all heard the saying, “The sequel is never as good as the original.” More often than not, it’s unfortunately true. We build up our hopes for something even more amazing than the story or movie which stole our heart. Unfortunately, our fantasies are often too great, and the eventual reality is disappointing. For me, this phenomenon happened with How Not to Let Go by Emily Foster. While I adored its predecessor, How Not to Fall, I was nowhere near as enthralled with the sequel. That’s not to say that How Not to Let Go wasn’t a good book: It just wasn’t as amazing as the first in the series.

How Not to Let Go continues the story of Annabelle and Charles, two lovers who met while she was a student and he was her supervisor. After her graduation, they began a torrid one month affair, ending it when she left for medical school in Massachusetts and he stayed on at his position as a post-doctoral researcher in Indiana. In the sequel, we witness the two trying to cope with their breakup, and after a year has passed, we get to join their journey as they work toward reuniting.

The story jumps back and forth between the US and England where Charles’ family of origin lives. While attending a conference, Annabelle and Charles meet for coffee but choose not to give into sexual temptation. However, when an overly convenient plot device of potential terrorist activity leads to Charles’ brother shutting down the London airports for security reasons, the two lovers spend several days at Charles’ brother’s home having abundant sex once again. Eventually, the two both end up in Massachusetts, and they continue to work through the relationship, its issues, and their individual problems.

I struggled to figure out why this sequel wasn’t as exciting for me as the first book. The process of falling in love is a powerful and wonderful one, and that first love part of Annabelle and Charles’ relationship happened in the first book. There’s no way to recreate that initial passion and romance as a relationship continues. Reunions are hot, and the sex that follows them is also quite intense, but it’s never quite the same as the beginning of a relationship. However, the sex scenes between Annabelle and Charles were still very arousing.

The means that Foster uses to push along the plot of the novel were often a bit too over the top for me. Rich geniuses (more than one in a family!), a trust fund, a potential terrorist attack, a conveniently located gorgeous home… it all just felt less real than the first novel. The more honest parts of the novel, the ones that involved family dynamics or relationship growth, were too few and far between. While often difficult to read because of how toxic the relationships were, the family scenes were the ones that kept my attention and made me want to keep reading. Unfortunately, the great family scenes were surrounded by extensive and detailed rock climbing adventures which became tedious for me.

Foster definitely writes for sapiosexuals, readers who are turned on by intelligence. In How Not to Let Go, though, the use of imagery to describe Charles’ psychological struggles becomes burdensom. Perhaps it is the kind of language and conversation that would happen between two psychiatrists, but for most of us, we don’t create such elaborate illustrations for our personal struggles.

The hardest part for me about the book was probably not due to the author or the book itself but was due to my own life. In the novel, Charles struggles with having an avoidant attachment style due to the dysfunctional family he grew up in. He’s the kind of guy who is commitment phobic as a result of having been hurt too much in the past by those he loved. However, unlike any man I’ve ever known who has an avoidant attachment style, Charles enters intensive psychotherapy to work on healing his wounds. He regularly flies across states to continue seeing the same therapist in person. He is determined to break through the psychological struggles that hold him back from having a healthy and secure attachment to Annabelle. Perhaps I was jealous of Annabelle having found a man who was willing to do this healing work for both himself and for her, but another part of me found it very unrealistic. That left me wondering how one finds a partner who have successfully done this powerful and deep healing work, because the people who have are very rare. Thus, another part of the book felt unrealistic to me, just in a way that made me feel jealous rather than bemused.

I definitely enjoyed reading How Not to Let Go, but it was a less passionate enjoyment than I felt for its predecessor. I have already recommended How Not to Let Go to a friend with an avoidant attachment style, but I probably won’t recommend it to others whom I shared the first book with. That said, I hope Foster plans to continue writing other novels which cater to sapiosexuals, which teach healthy sexual relationships, and which portray realistic sex scenes. The world of romance definitely needs books that fit this niche!
 
© 2016 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Trigger warning: This post discusses sexual assault, rape, pedophilia and similar topics. There are no explicit depictions of any of the topics; the post is a discussion of issues around the topic of violation and consent.
 
We live in a nation where one of the major Presidential candidates has been caught on film advocating non-consensual sexual assault of women. Since this film was published in the media, many women have come forward to state that they’ve received such treatment from this candidate. Likewise, that same candidate is going to trial later in December for allegedly raping a 13 year old girl, a situation where consent can never be obtained due to the victim’s age. Despite these issues, that Presidential candidate is managing to hold a projected 40+% of the nation’s votes. What this tells us is that we live in a culture where women’s and children’s sexual rights are seen as irrelevant by far too many people.
 
Given that we live in such times, I don’t believe it is possible to discuss sexual boundaries without discussing the issue of sexual consent. In his book Sex Outside the Lines: Authentic Sexuality in a Sexually Dysfunctional Culture, Chris Donaghue attempts to do just that. The general premise of his book is that we need to break down the boundaries around sex, gender and sexuality. Donaghue doesn’t believe we should refer to ourselves as male or female, man or woman, straight or gay or even pansexual. Instead, he visualizes a utopic world where labels around sexuality are not used at all so that everyone’s sexuality is accepted.
 
As I read through beginning of the book, I kept asking myself repeatedly, “But what about consent?” By the end of the first chapter, I felt as though someone whose sexual pleasures included acting on pedophilia or rape would feel completely justified in their sexual activities and would see them as acceptable based on Donaghue’s rhetoric. By trying to break down *all* boundaries, Donaghue is doing just that: He’s getting rid of the good along with the bad. I believe that there are some very important boundaries which exist to protect us from trauma, violence, and abuse, and I believe those protective boundaries cannot ever be eliminated if our society is to become more sex positive as Donaghue hopes.
 
As I kept reading through Sex Outside the Lines, the word consent did not appear anywhere. I even stopped to look in the index to see if the word was there. It wasn’t. Finally, on page 166, Donaghue finally mentions consent in passing. He states, “As long as sex is consensual and no one is injured, then it’s all part of healthy sexual expression.” This statement, in an expanded form, needed to be at the very beginning of his book. To me, as a woman who has experienced sexual abuse and assault both as a child and as an adult, consent is an issue that cannot be ignored when discussing sexual boundaries. I wasn’t looking for an entire chapter or an entire section on consent. Instead, all I wanted was a paragraph early in the book devoted to the importance of consent as a boundary that can never be violated.
 
As my book group discussed this work, I hypothesized that Donaghue may not have had any peer readers of drafts who had endured sex abuse. Someone in the group who knows Donaghue told me that she knew for a fact that he did. Yet even under that kind of advice before publication, Donaghue still chose not to include any vital discussion of consent early in the book.
 
This issue of consent came up during Chris Donaghue’s presentation for the Southwest Sexual Health Alliance on October 8, 2016 in Austin. The SWSHA has a saying, “Don’t yuck somebody’s yum,” a phrase that was invoked before Donaghue’s presentation. In short, it means having respect for all sexual practices. What may disgust you may be the most arousing activity for someone else. We all should have respect for that difference between us. At one point, though, a therapist politely but obviously concerned asked Donaghue, “I don’t mean to yuck anybody’s yum. But what about pedophiles? What about the issue of consent?”
 
Donaghue stated that his easy-out answer is that he follows the law and advises others to do the same. He also said that healthy sex starts with compassion, and that this is the approach to work on boundaries with the clients. Donaghue noted that all of us have desires we’d never act upon, a true statement. He voiced his opinion that most people with pedophile desires know that such desires aren’t appropriate to act upon and are trying to refrain from engaging in them. I think that belief of his may be based on the population that he works with: Those who are actively working to stop from acting on non-consensual desires. I don’t believe that statement is actually true for all who violate consent, though. However, I’m viewing it from the place of a practitioner who helps those who have been violated, so my viewpoint is vastly different from his. An estimated 1 in 4 women has been sexually abused (though I believe that number is inaccurate), and an estimated 1 in 6 men (again, a number I believe is too low) have been sexually abused. Even if they are underestimates, those statistics indicate a lot of people who aren’t resisting their non-consensual urges and are harming others. Overall, the answer Donaghue gave in response to such important questions felt very unsatisfactory to me.
 
Additionally, Donaghue pounced on the therapist’s use of the word “pedophiles.” He doesn’t like the word because he believes it is a word laden with shame. He prefers to use the phrase “intergenerational sexual attraction.” On one hand, I see his point. I don’t believe in using shame the way our culture does as a disciplinary method. I’m a huge fan of Brené Brown whose work attempts to undo the damage of shame in our culture. I believe all people are capable of change though I also believe many are unwilling to do the work that is required to change and grow.
 
However, I also believe in calling a spade a spade. I’ve been in a sexual relationship with a man who is 14.5 years older than me. That is an intergenerational sexual relationship that included a lot of intergenerational sexual attraction. It was a wonderful experience for me. I’ve also been sexually abused by men who were 20-40+ years older than me when I was 3, 7 and 18 years old. Those were not intergenerational sexual relationships. Those were abuse, assault, and nonconsensual relations. They are vastly different experiences. By conflating attraction of two consenting adults to the same thing as a person attracted to and acting on pedophilia, Donaghue is helping support our culture that disregards sexual assault as a serious issue that isn’t being addressed properly. By Donaghue's logic, the term rapist should be changed to “a persuasive sexual practitioner.” However, it’s never ok to downgrade the severity of sexual abuse and assault. Language is powerful, and by rejecting language that actually names a toxic act, Donaghue is rejecting the pain and suffering of so many people whose bodies, spirits and minds have been violated.
 
I agree with Donaghue that our culture desperately needs to evolve to become a sex positive culture. In order to create that new openness towards sexuality, we must establish respect as one of the most important roots of sex positivity. We must have respect for others’ desires, for others’ bodies, and for others’ genetic predispositions, and for others’ choices. We must have respect for everything sexual about a person. Yet in order to achieve that broader respect, one must also have respect for the boundaries that are necessary to keep each person safe. Consent is a boundary that cannot ever be eliminated in a healthy sex positive culture. As we move toward a new paradigm for sexuality and gender in our lives, we must bring consent into that new culture. We need to create a world that respects everyone, especially each person’s right to say no.
 
© 2016 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Love is where compassion prevails and kindness rules. ~my tea bag’s inspirational message this morning

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the Southwest Sexual Health Alliance’s presentation of Chris Donaghue, Ph.D., who lectured on concepts from his book Sex Outside the Lines: Authentic Sexuality in a Sexually Dysfunctional Culture and an upcoming book. While I have yet to put up a book review of Sex Outside the Lines, the short version of my opinion of it is that I both loved it and hated it. It’s a work that asks readers to stretch their minds and ideas, sometimes outside the realm of reality and into a utopic society.
 
One of the things that Donaghue is very good about acknowledging is his own privilege: He knows he is a good looking, intelligent, well-educated, white male. He also recognized during the talk that he’s been recently alerted to the thin privilege he experiences. While I think his awareness of the privilege of being a fit and attractive person is a good start, I feel several of his more popular ideas continue to play directly into the overwhelming prejudice in our society against those who are not thin.

My own experience in the dating world as an obese woman is one which very much demonstrates the attitudes and prejudices in our society towards those of larger size. In the four years since I opened myself up to dating again after my separation and divorce, I’ve had very little success through either Meetups or numerous dating websites. My experience is not unique; almost every overweight person I’ve met who has tried online dating has given up because of the discrimination they faced. I can immediately name you a handful of friends and acquaintances who haven’t been on a date in years because they are seen as undateable by most of the population because of their weight. It’s not due to a lack of openness or effort on their parts.

Despite their desires that I not do it, I often call people on the difference between preference and prejudice. One of the most common things I see on dating profiles is men stating, “I don’t date fat women. I know that sounds rude, but it’s just a preference of mine.” The reality is that it’s a prejudice, not a preference. When we judge others before we even interact with them solely based on their appearances, we are discriminating. I ask people who say or write these words to replace them with a racial minority. Would they say, “I don’t date black women. I know that sounds rude, but it’s just a preference of mine”? The reality is that most of the people I interact with are aware enough to understand that to say such a thing would be incredibly rude and prejudiced. However, to them, it’s ok to have that same prejudice against those who are overweight and excuse it as “just a preference.” To say that you are not attracted to all fat people is blatant discrimination against an entire population of people without knowing them as individuals. It’s judgmental, uncompassionate, and unloving.

While Donaghue laudably argues that people should expand their boundaries and date outside of their comfort zones, he simultaneously argues both in his book and at the presentation yesterday that people should date those whom they are attracted to. Unfortunately, to most men (and probably to most people, though I don’t have the experience outside of my heterosexual experiences to verify that) that translates into being immediately attracted to others’ physical appearance. In her fabulous senior thesis Can She Really 'Play that Game Too'?, Leah Fessler describes the dating experience at Middlebury College in 2015 with a focus on the difference between men and women when it came to the “hook up culture.” One of her assertions is that a majority of men refuse to consider being with a woman if she is not immediately physically attractive to them:

I suspect a wider study of American society would find a similar pattern.   

My own experience has confirmed Fessler’s theory and expanded upon it. When I first got on dating sites, I put up professional quality pictures. When I messaged men, 95% of them did not respond. However, in my most recent round of online dating, I put up a profile with no picture; I noted at the bottom that if men had read that far, I was happy to send them a link to my picture if they were a good match for me. This time around when I messaged men, 95% of them DID respond. What I discovered is that I am very attractive on paper. Men see a woman who is highly educated, open-minded, compassionate, not looking to trap them into a marriage with babies, sex-positive, and more. I’ve had dozens of well-matched men interested me, many of them asking me out, some even providing phone numbers so we can arrange the dates. However, the moment they request and see a picture, the same men disappear into the woodwork. Only a few have the decency to send a final “thanks but no thanks” note. The overwhelming majority of men I approach have interest in me as a person until they discover I’m overweight. Suddenly the same very attractive woman is no longer appealing. That is the very definition of fat prejudice.

I also believe based on my personal experience that sexual and romantic attraction is rooted in much more than just physical appearance. Two of the three men I’ve been in love with in this life were friends before they were love interests. I was not incredibly physically attracted to either of them when we first met. Sexual attraction can develop over time once one has gotten to know the other person better. More often than not, that hot sexual attraction leads to relationships that are doomed to be short-lived. It’s nothing more than hormones speaking. While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having relationships like that, it’s also not wrong to open oneself to relationships that might develop from mutual interests rather than hormones. Sexual chemistry and connection can be very successful in a relationship even when there’s no immediate physical pull towards that person if one opens oneself up to the possibility.

Thus, when Chris Donaghue advocates that people should date those whom we are attracted to with no qualifiers attached, he’s perpetuating social dating dysfunction. Donaghue is very aware that people are highly influenced by the media and advertising. Study after study has shown how deeply advertising and media can influence our subconscious minds, changing what we think we want and what we think we are attracted to. Magazines, advertisements, tv shows, movies: They all tell us we “should” be attracted to slim people who fit a certain profile. Most people aren’t consciously aware enough to realize how media is warping their attractions in the dating world. It takes very rare and very strong people to step outside of those cultural ideals and date people who are attractive on the inside when their appearance is outside of that approved by social media. Most people don’t even recognize that their “types” are actually rooted in dysfunction, not genuine attraction.

One of Donaghue’s ideas that I’ve seen shared in numerous places is, “Experience a lot of sex/sexuality so you truly understand it.” This quote was directed towards a person who wanted to become a sex therapist and wanted Donaghue’s advice about it, but a statement like this also becomes shaming for those who daily fight fat prejudice in our society and who, despite their efforts, can’t find dates nonetheless sexual partners. Likewise, stating as he does in Sex Outside the Lines that “Working on oneself while solo is easy and lazy, and is an actual avoidance of doing the real work” also is a very shaming statement for those who are not single by choice  (101). It’s far better that individuals work on themselves when single rather than sitting around and feeling sorry for themselves. Just because they aren’t in a romantic relationship does not mean they are not in relationship with others, and just because they are working on themselves while solo doesn’t mean they are lazy.

Last weekend, I went on a generally enjoyable date with a man I’d met online. We messaged for a few days, discovering that we had a tremendous amount in common, so we decided to meet for dinner on the following weekend to see what the chemistry was like in real life. Despite having seen full-length pictures of me in advance, this man declined the opportunity to pursue anything else with me after that dinner because after seeing me in person he decided I was too fat. This is the reality of dating in modern America for those who are overweight. We aren’t fighting against attractions and preferences. We’re up against outright prejudice.

© 2016 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

When I rejoined the dating world, I quickly learned the term sapiosexual: One who is attracted to intelligence. The term is an apt descriptor for me and almost always for the men who are attracted to me. We are among those who find people who use their brains to be some of the sexiest lovers in the world. We want partners who can talk smart to us before they talk sexy to us. After all, the brain is the sexiest organ in the body.

While reading How Not to Fall by Emily Foster, I found the perfect romance for a sapiosexual. The novel is a work of erotic fiction custom designed for a nerd, especially an intellectual who has a fondness for psychology. A far cry from so many romances which are written for the lowest common denominator, How Not to Fall seamlessly integrates psychological theories and knowledge into its text and often into the sexual foreplay of its very smart characters. Despite its intellectual content, Foster writes in a conversational tone that is accessible to all potential readers.

Building on a taboo relationship of a post-doctoral supervisor and an undergraduate student falling for each other, the book explores the month-long relationship that the two of them consummate once she has finished school and they can legitimately be together. Charles, a post-doctoral researcher, is the slightly older, more sexually experienced man who brings Annabelle, the recently graduated virgin, into a new phase of her sexuality. Aside from many vivid sex scenes, the book contains a lot of conversation, dancing scenes, and rock climbing scenes. Foster weaves all of these together in a coherent novel that feels like an excerpt from two people’s lives, not just a bunch of sex scenes thrown together surrounded by weak dialog to sell a book.​

Most important to Foster’s objectives for this romance, the relationship between Charles and Annabelle is one built on equality and respect. From the beginning, Charles refuses to cross a line where he would be taking advantage of Annabelle because of his position of academic power over her. Once they are able to freely enter into the relationship, Charles still insists on taking the relationship slowly so that Annabelle gets to have the best introduction to sexual activity he can possibly give her. Even before they enter into slightly more kinky activities, Charles makes sure he has full consent from Annabelle and verifies that she knows and remembers their safewords (a term not used in the book) so that she can always stop whatever they are doing if it no longer feels right to her. It’s a relationship built on mutual understanding, respect and trust.

From one of the earliest conversations in the book, I began to wonder if Foster had been sitting in on an event in my life. Word for word, Charles and Annabelle said almost the same words as I had exchanged with a previous love in my life. As the novel progressed, I again saw scenes from my own life unfolding on the pages in front of me. While the novel is a fantasy, it was clear to me that this was a work grounded in reality. Much of what happens during the novel could be a part of its readers' lives.

I was hoping How Not to Fall would be a romance I could share with my teenage daughter, but I think it is still a bit too explicit for her at this point in her life. In a few years, I plan to give it to her so she can have a better understanding of what romance could and probably should look like. I also will insist that she should use condoms, something that Charles and Annabelle do not do because she is on hormonal birth control. However, even with frequent STI testing, many people carry strains of HPV that they are unaware of because they aren’t tested for them. I’ve also had a partner whose one set of STI testing did not include Herpes Simplex 1 and 2 because his doctor’s office told him that he’d know if he had them, a very erroneous idea in regard to viruses that can lie dormant for a while before manifesting. Hormonal birth control offers no protection against STIs, and thus, it is in people’s best interest to use condoms when they are not in a permanent monogamous relationship.

I breezed through this sexy intellectual novel in only an afternoon, unable to put it down for very long. How Not to Fall is a fabulous read, and I’m anxiously awaiting its sequel which is due to be published in 2017. I’ve already recommended it to several feminist sapiosexual friends whom I know will enjoy it as much as I did.

© 2016 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Last weekend, I decided to watch The Giver, a movie based on the dystopian novel by Lois Lowry which I’ve somehow never managed to read. In the film, civilization is controlled by The Elders who protect the people from pain and suffering. However, the removal of the negative emotions has also caused a cascade that likewise eliminates positive feelings as well. Characters receive a daily injection to help suppress their natural emotions and to keep society stable. Starring well known actors such as Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep, the film utilizes black and white filmography with occasional color to powerfully illustrate the blandness of a world without emotion.

The viewer can understand the instinct to want to remove pain, especially when one selected young boy is learning about those things which cause pain and upheaval in society. The images of war that are shown as he begins to understand negativity are truly painful for someone who is sensitive (like me) to watch. Likewise, the extinction of elephants was a horrid scene for me to watch and contemplate since they are one of my beloved spirit animals. At the same time, the viewer gets to watch the young boy joyfully discovering music and dance, practices removed from society because they possess too much emotion intrinsic to their existence. Likewise, love no longer exists in this world. People merely tolerate and appreciate those in their assigned family units.

As I watched The Giver, I felt synchronicity at play again in my life. I recently spent a lot of time with a man who was afraid of emotional pain. As a result, he was unwilling to take risks that would create pleasure because he didn’t want to feel the pain that was an inevitable result of that risk taking. Mind you, I’m not a crazy adrenaline junkie. You won’t likely ever find me bungee jumping or climbing Mount Everest. However, I am willing to try new activities and enter into relationships with new people who might not seem perfect for me from the start. I know that there’s as much potential for pleasure as there is for pain, and that risk is worth it for me.

We see this most often in our relationships with others around us, especially the relationships that involve love. We know when we enter into any relationship, it will eventually end. Most romantic relationships end with a break up. Others dissolve upon death. When we add pets to our family, we know from the start that we will most likely outlive those pets, yet the joy and love pets bring to our families and our lives is more than worth the pain that their deaths impart. Furthermore, as part of being human, any relationship we enter is bound to have some pain in it. We don’t mean to hurt each other, but we do. It’s part of our personal growth experience.

Since my relationship with the man who was afraid of emotional pain ended, I’m left wondering how many around me are also afraid of emotional pain. I question how many people shut down their lives in an attempt to avoid negative experiences, yet in reality, they are only depriving themselves of pleasure as a result of not trying to feel anything at all. I suspect it’s far more people than I want to believe.

What my experience with this man boiled down to is that living without pain is not how I choose to live my life. There’s no question that life is filled with emotional, physical and spiritual pain. Yet I choose to move forward, leaning into that pain so that I can experience the pleasure that is on the other side of it. Sometimes it’s hard to judge if the pain is worth the pleasure because pain can be truly horrendous. Yet at the same time, pleasure can be just as overwhelmingly powerful if we allow it to be. As the lead character of The Giver says so accurately, “If you can’t feel, what’s the point?”

© 2016 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Many of us and our clients have unfortunately experienced traumas in this life or past lives that may include but are not limited to natural disasters, rape, abuse, warfare, deaths, accidents, childbirth and health difficulties. Many conventional approaches to healing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) seem just as traumatizing as the original events because the techniques force us to face painful issues that our bodies, minds, and spirits are not ready to handle.

Join Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., to learn about holistic methods to be used in conjunction with traditional therapy that can help approach traumas in a way that will minimize the new trauma of healing. Topics to be discussed include the body-mind-spirit connection, chronic illness, depersonalization, anxiety, depression, past lives, energetic beings, tapping, energy medicine, intuitive healing, meditation, and more.

This seminar assumes a belief in a higher power outside of oneself which can be anything from qi to god(s). While the content will be directed at psychotherapists, healers in other fields are welcome to attend.

The seminar will be held:
Sunday, April 24, 2016
10:00 a.m to 1:15 pm
3400 Kerbey Lane (in the studio)
3 CEU credits available for LCSWs and LPCs
$50 through April 22; $75 at the door if space is available 

Parking is available on the street and across the street in the office complex or at the school. Lunch will not be provided, but you may bring your own food. Tea and coffee are available. Some of us may go out after the seminar for lunch at Taco Deli to continue the discussion. 

Please note that the studio has several steps to get into the room. If this obstacle makes the seminar inaccessible for you, please contact me, and we will work out arrangements to make sure you can attend. If you have other accommodation needs, please note them in the "comments" section of the registration.

Out of respect for those who are chemically sensitive (including Elizabeth Galen), please refrain from wearing perfume, cologne, aftershave, or other highly scented body products to this seminar. Essential oil products used in moderation are fine.

Registration closed.

(Potential spoilers about Parenthood, season 4, below)
 
As I watched Parenthood a few months ago, the Braverman family began dealing with major health issues in season four. Grandfather Zeek was diagnosed with heart trouble, and daughter-in-law Kristina was diagnosed with breast cancer. What these two family members had in common was that they began lying to their adult children about their health. Zeek didn’t want his adult children to know that he was having health issues since the problems might not lead any trouble. He didn’t want anyone fussing over him. He preferred to use denial to cope with his health issues. For reasons that are hard to define, Adam and Kristina didn’t want to tell the family that they were facing breast cancer; they outright lied to their college aged daughter because they didn’t want her to worry or get distracted from her education.
 
Unfortunately, this tactic of coping with stressful issues is all too familiar to me. My family of origin and my ex’s family of origin tend to take the same approach to health issues: Adult children are still seen as children, and parents try to “protect” the adult children from bad news.  Yet adult children are actually adults. They are, for the most part, capable of understanding and coping with issues about life and death.
 
In my own family, my father was not going to tell me when my uncle died of ALS until after the funeral. My widowed aunt made it clear that my father had to inform me. The death was not a surprise as ALS is horrible degenerative disease. My health was not going to allow me to travel to the funeral, yet it still was the right thing to tell me about the death. My father didn’t want me to tell my children (who were ages 10 to 13), but I insisted otherwise. They weren’t close to my uncle, but they needed to know that he had died. As my father finally came to terms with my decision, he said, “I guess it’s better than them coming to visit and him not being here.” While this attempt to protect us from the pain of death was well-intended, it also failed to respect our right to know and grieve about a loved one.
 
While they say we often marry our parents, I never believed that my ex-husband was that much like my father until after we separated. Soon thereafter, my ex’s aunt died. Even though I had been a part of his family for more than twenty years, I was very much not close to her. She was an odd bird, and that’s coming from someone who proudly identifies as weird. Her health had been declining, so to me, the death was not a surprise. However, my ex chose not to tell me or our kids about the aunt’s death for 48 hours after she died. When I asked him why he delayed the news, he told me that he didn’t want to upset me. In reality, I suspect he just didn’t want to face the reality of her death by speaking to me or our kids about it.
 
With my children, I’ve broken free of this dysfunctional model of hiding important information from younger family members. I treat my teenage children as human beings who deserve to be respected; I've always done so even when they were little. While I might filter information to frame it in a way that is age appropriate, I am honest with my children about big information even if it is painful. I believe that with children, both when they are young and when they are adults, honesty is the best policy. As a result, my children know that they can always trust me to be honest with them even when they ask difficult questions that other adults won't answer for them.
 
© 2016 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC