The Nature of Validation

Humans need the herd, the group, the tribe, the clan, or whatever you call your greater society, not only to survive but to live meaningful lives.

I’m Not Brave

Life tries to break you. And often it succeeds. But it’s the relationships we make, that allow us to pick up those shattered pieces and put them back together again.

No Cost Kindness

People are good and kindness is a thing, and so on and so forth, and I’m sure some people are getting tired of me saying stuff like this (fair warning - no plans to stop).

On Being Naked

To shed that particular brand of fear and shame, more easily done than you might think, has allowed me to work more diligently on the deep-seated ones, to use the limited energies I have on more positive things.

Of Privateers, Buccaneers, & Pirates

It refers to those of us out for their own aggrandisement, sometimes at the expense of others but not always, and using their own injuries and the resulting disorders that come from them as springboards, justification and earned street cred, to enterprises that are for profit, whether that fills their ego or their pocket.

Why I Say People Are Good

How can we explain the physical and emotional damage one person can do to another let alone to an entire people as we’ve done in our past as a species, and then still fit it into this framework of a preset nature imprinted into our genes?

Can You Have a Panic Attack In a Dream?

Once, in a group session, I made the distinction between a nightmare and a bad dream. The psychologist really appreciated that, because they are fairly different. I thought I might look a bit closer at how, and maybe add this new one to the mix while I’m at it.

The Core of You

Had the person I was been deleted and written over by this callous, often angry man, who hid in his house drinking too much when not wearing a uniform and being an asshole to the world at large?

War Stories

Nobody will ever be able to understand the specific stories you tell like you can, not even me, because none of us has seen it through your eyes, but those of us who’ve felt the same fear, the same moral injuries, or the same sudden losses and threats to our own mortality like you have don’t need to.