“We know more. You can’t fool us. You can’t pretend with us. We’ve gone through something that won’t allow you to do that because we’ll see right through you.” I was raised in Colorado, and I am thirty-eight. My mother is still alive. I have a younger brother by four years, and my father died …
I’ll be 37 in August. I’m a cosmetologist, and I work at a spa in Tucson. I’m originally from upstate Pennsylvania. I’m the youngest of three children. There was a boy, girl and then ten years between my sister and I. We moved here about 13 years ago, and I went to beauty school here. …
As I write, it is 4 am in Idaho, and the air remains hazy. Yesterday, I could not see the mountains that are right at the edge of town, and the edge of town is not far in a rural town of 2600. I wanted to go back to sleep a couple of minutes ago, …
Some choose to be unaware… I initially spoke with Loretta in the winter of 1994. I was essentially asking her help in finding people who would be willing to talk with me about their experiences of being the victims of human-inflicted trauma. Loretta did not know me at all. However, she very graciously agreed to …
For Barbara Chester, Joe Breck and Mr. H. One of the men turned to the window curtained in lace and said it reminded him of home. I thought at the time that I didn’t know that the Vietnamese liked lace. How little I knew. I thought maybe what reminded him of his home was the …
I have always demanded vistas, not consciously but the other day driving back from Pocatello I realized that the fields of alfalfa ending at the edge of mountains was familiar. When I lived in Arizona the view was similar although instead of alfalfa it was cotton or desert with the mountains on the horizon, cool …
This was the first of the interviews that I did. I speak with people in pain daily, but this situation was different. I am used to, as a therapist, having the either expressed or implied permission by my clients to intervene. I have permission to help them move into the pain and the experience to …