I was 25 or so the first time I went to therapy as an adult. I was living in NYC, working full time, and lived with my partner of several years. The past was catching up with me in ways I did not have the capacity to handle on my own, and my partner thought…
“The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed, exactly as it is.” ~~~ One of the first things I was taught when I began my 40-hour training to become a certified Advocate for victim/survivors of sexual violence, was that our job was to “support and…
This post came across my Facebook recently, and it really struck me. Not only is this short story humanizing of young children, a plea for empathy and understanding, it is also incredibly effective at challenging a commonly accepted notion—the terrible 2s—demanding that we rethink what we believe we know about the behaviors of toddlers. The…
It should not come as a surprise that some of the best resources I have found for parents to discuss seemingly tough topics with their young children comes from Planned Parenthood. Discussing bodies and bodily autonomy is a topic covered in a variety of ways on The Bridges We Burn as we believe it is…
I have never been one for New Year’s resolutions, but for the past several years I take New Year’s Eve/Day as an opportunity to recommit myself to some variation of Dan Savage’s “Campsite Principle.” Last year it read: I will strive to leave my friends, family, partners, work, coworkers, lovers, acquaintances, communities, spaces in which…
This past August I had the pleasure of attending the 2018 National Sexual Assault Conference in Anaheim with frequent contributor and member of our Board of Directors, Brian Heilman (also representing his work with Promundo), along with Aapta Garg, Promundo Program Officer, and Elizabeth Miller, Director of the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine, Children’s…
If there ever was a time for men to shut their mouths and open their ears, minds, and hearts to the women in their lives, that time has to be now. To be fair, that time was actually a long damn time ago, but it’s (hopefully) never too late to do the right thing. Through…
Educating white people about white privilege (or convincing them its a real cultural phenomenon) can be a truly monumental task. By design, whiteness has been made invisible; whiteness has been normalized and naturalized to be the baseline of human existence in the United States. Specifically, white men are the model of average. Women are gendered…
