Is the story of your life saturated with the felt need for you to atone for something? All of us are thirsting for redemption in one way or another. All of us are constantly making mistakes and failing other people, out of ignorance and malevolence; we all do damage to…

We’re back to using writing to deal with a problem. You’ve defined the problem, and mapped its influence in your own life and in your relationships. You’ve done this by naming the problem, and using categorization to bring the impact of the problem into higher resolution across its whole range…

So you’ve decided you have a problem, and that it might be worth trying to externalize it. How do you separate a problem out of your sense of who you are, or who someone else is, and put it “outside” where you can deal with it in a different way? …

Problems exist. That’s just the way it is. Are there times when you’re the problem, in the sense that you as a person need to give way and transform? Absolutely. Are there times when, for various reasons, you’ve taken a problem deep into you and identified with the problem, and…

No one goes through trauma completely passively. What I mean by this is that people always react to trauma in some way, even if their reaction mainly takes the form of them being transfixed or paralyzed in the face of such an overwhelming and often malevolent experience. In response to…

Is it possible to survey and map the chaos of trauma? How can something as personal and particular as trauma be defined in any sort of general way? One perspective is that trauma is what happens when people experience, witness, or confront events that involve actual or threatened death or…